natural fibres better for everest

replica clothes pass everest test

climbers George Mallory and Sandy Irvine died while attempting to scale everest in 1924. it has long been assumed that their 'amateurish' clothing was at least partly to blame. but the discovery of mallory's body on everest in 1999 enabled researchers to create replica clothes. over the last few weeks these have been tested by climbers on mount everest - and have turned out to be superior to modern synthetic-based garments!

the ultimate intention of the research is to find out if mallory and irvine actually reached the summit in 1924, long before the first 'official' conquest by norgay and hillary in 1953. if it turns out that they died on the way down, history will have been rewritten as a result of fabric technology.

the superiority of natural fabrics for extreme conditions is a pet subject of howies, so i tipped them off and they blogged it. i find the whole thing fascinating - it seems we have to relearn what our ancestors knew [but didn't know that they knew]. like proper bread instead of wonderloaf.

Comments

[Mark Berry]

Great Stuff... personally I don't think they made it, there is too much circumstantial evidence against, I guess until the camera is found then we'll never know. On a similar experiment. Tim Severin replicated St Brendan's voyage in the 70's for National Geographic(the book is called 'Brendan's voyage) and found that the materials used in the saga, though they had long been sited as a reason the story couldn't be true, were actually the best materials possible and way better than modern equivalents. One example is that the saga sas that Brendan used Oak Bark Tanned Leather for the boats skin. Severin got the guild of tanners to conduct experiments using different solutions to tan the hide and found that the ONLY one which would work was Oak Bark! Well' worth a read (for the spiritual challenge too!)

[Lorna]

I expect that history books will continue to recognise Hillary ... because he survived.