IT was reported this week that climbers had found mummified bodies on a mountain in Mexico.

The preserved corpses are believed to be those of two men who went missing in 1959.

Why had they not been discovered until now?

The report reminded me of a talk about Mount Everest I heard given many years ago by renowned mountaineer Sir Chris Bonington.

I found it fascinating and a little surprising to learn that the world’s highest mountain was not as pristine as one might think.

Indeed, Sir Chris explained there was so much detritus up there that it was like a rubbish tip. He showed slides of discarded oxygen tanks, wrecked camping equipment and food and drink packaging despoiling the blinding whiteness of the snow.

Everest, he noted chillingly, was pockmarked with dead bodies.

This fact is well known now, of course, but I remember being shocked 20 years ago to learn that when climbers fell to their deaths they were left exactly where they were.

It’s logical of course, why would it be otherwise? Who on earth was going to bring down the bodies? In the two decades since that talk there has been a drive to clean up Everest.

One of the bodies discovered on Everest in the late 1990s was that of George Mallory, the famed Cheshire mountaineer. He and Andrew Irvine had last been seen 800 feet vertically below the summit ascending into cloud on their bid to be the first men to reach the top of the world as part of the 1924 British expedition.

I interviewed the man who eventually found Mallory’s sun-bleached corpse not long before he and his expedition set off for Everest in the spring of 1999. His goal had been to find a camera Mallory had borrowed before leaving on that fateful final ascent.

My journalistic interest in the expedition, as a reporter on a newspaper in the Lake District, was that the Vest Pocket Kodak camera had belonged to Howard Somervell, part of the 1924 expedition, who hailed from Kendal and was part of the family that founded K Shoes.

I remember writing the story along the lines of ‘Everest history could be rewritten if the camera of a Kendal man is found’.

The expedition leaders hoped that if the camera were to be located it could reveal grainy black and white images of Mallory and Irvine standing proudly on the summit of Everest. Imagine that. It would have knocked Hillary and Tensing into second place.

Sadly, neither the camera nor the body of Andrew Irvine were found, even if the question of what became of Mallory had been answered.

The mystery of whether they were the first to the top still remains, however, the answer perhaps locked inside a Kodak camera lying somewhere on the snowy wastes of the world’s highest mountain.