Free The Lost Explorer by Conrad Anker, David Roberts

kind of journalism.
    My collaborator, David Roberts, told me about his own experience a couple of years back in Ethiopia, where he made the first descent of a major river with a bunch of rafting guides from Sobek. He was writing dispatches every night for the Microsoft online adventure magazine,
Mungo Park
.
    Early in the expedition, the team doctor got terribly sick. He lay there puking and moaning, and his temperature went over 105º F. It was truly a life-or-death predicament. The expedition ground to a halt while its leaders debated whether to try to arrange a helicopter rescue, which would have been a perilous operation. This was Roberts’s dilemma: should he report in real time what was happening to the doctor? Was that the proper way for his wife to learn what was going on? Nothing else was happening on the river, and the team was in the middle of a genuinely dramatic crisis. But Roberts had to ponder the possibility that if he sent out the news, he might launch a rescue effort even without the team leaders calling for one. In the end, he chose to write the truth. Fortunately, the doctor’s fever broke and he was able to finish the expedition.
    On May 1, what was Liesl supposed to do, except report what she saw and heard on what had turned out to be the most dramatic day so far, on this expedition that hundreds of thousands of Web users were following online?
    In any event, once Simo learned from Erin that
NOVA
had already put out some kind of hot news on the Internet, he and Dave stayed up late into the night writing their own dispatch. It went up on the morning of May 3, and it was the definitive story. Eric wrote, “I have some huge news to announce, so I hope everyone is sitting down and ready for this one…. I’m pleased to announce that the 1999 Mallory & Irvine Research Expedition has found the remains of George Mallory, lost on Mount Everest on June 8th, 1924.” Dave went on to describe the discovery, and to offer a rationale for partially excavating the body: “We didn’t want to disturb him, he’d been lying there for 75 years, but at the same time we thought what better tribute to the man than to try and find out if he had summitted Mt. Everest in 1924.”
    For the first time, MountainZone ran a special caveat at the head of the dispatch: “This copyrighted content is exclusive to MountainZone.com and may not be used on any other website or news media.”
    As if to make up for being scooped, MountainZone now flooded the Web with news. By May 4, they had posted phoned-in dispatches not only from Dave and Eric, but from Jake, Tap, Andy, and me, each giving our side of the discovery story. At the site, Dave had shot a lot of pictures with a digital camera. Now at ABC he downloaded and digitally transmitted the images via satellite phone to Seattle. Eventually, MountainZone had on its site a dramatic photo of Mallory’s body from the waist up, his bare, alabaster back looming in the center, the powerful muscles flexed, his fingers planted in the scree. At the time, we just thought of the photo as an important aid in documenting our find. We had no idea how controversial that picture would prove to be.
    On the morning of May 3, at ABC, an Italian-American climber, Fabrizio Zangrilli, walked over to our camp and said, “Hey, you guys found Mallory. I just heard it on the BBC.” That was our first inkling just how big the news was playing around the world. We went into Fabrizio’s radio tent and got the BBC on the shortwave. The story came up on the hour. There was Erin’s voice, talking about the discovery, and suddenly Sir Edmund Hillary with a short comment. It was amazing how fast the media had moved.
    At noon we started down to Base Camp, at 17,200 feet. We got there about dusk. Everyone was ecstatic, giving us big hugs. Jochen came over and served me tea and some little Snickers bars, while the camera rolled. That evening we celebrated with a liberal dram of Scotch for all.
    The same evening, we