100 Years Later, George Mallory’s Primitive Everest Gear Gets a Second Chance

At dawn on October 17, two genetically identical men trudged to the top of Mera Peak (6,476m/21,247ft). Though they were very much indistinguishable, their climbing equipment was a century apart. One twin donned the brightly colored, ultralight synthetics of a modern Everest hopeful. The other wore the muted wools, cottons, and leathers of an early 20th-century mountaineer. One had ultralight double boots with crampons. The other wore essentially George Mallory’s Everest gear—no crampons, just leather boots, studded with hobnails to grip the snow and ice.

These identical British twins, Hugo and Ross Turner, were conducting a high-altitude apparel test. Some 101 years after the mountaineers George Mallory and Andrew “Sandy” Irvine disappeared during a bid for the summit of Everest, the Turners wanted to see how much modern apparel had changed.

While Ross wore modern equipment, Hugo wore a kit painstakingly crafted to be an almost exact replica of Mallory’s—down to his custom-made boots. British shoemaker Crockett & Jones spent over two years designing the pair. Both men attached wearable sensors to their hands, feet, chest, and legs that constantly recorded their skin temperature. They also measured their stress levels, oxygen levels, and cognitive function throughout the climb.

The results were surprising.

Mountaineering apparel has certainly improved in the last 100 years, the twins told me. But not, perhaps, by the margins we think. “Even back then, they had a really brilliant kit,” Hugo said. “If you understand the limitations of those natural materials, they can serve you quite well.”

The enduring mystery of Everest’s “possible” first ascent

Mallory and Irvine disappeared on Everest’s Northeast Ridge on June 8, 1924. The two men were last seen moving upwards roughly 800 vertical feet below the summit.

The top of the world’s highest mountain would not be reached for nearly three more decades. Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay finally summited in 1953. But for the last century, speculators—largely armchair enthusiasts, but some experienced climbers, too—have hypothesized that Mallory and Irvine may have actually made it to the summit, and only died on the way down.

The Turners aren’t the first to try to glean a better understanding of what Mallory and Irvine could have accomplished back in 1924. Conrad Anker, who discovered Mallory’s body on Everest in 1999, embarked on a very similar project. In 2007, he took on the Altitude Everest Expedition with Leo Houlding, attempting to retrace Mallory and Irvine’s progress on the mountain. They focused on the route, specifically the technical difficulty of the Second Step, a rock band near the summit, which goes at somewhere between 5.8 and 5.9. At points in their trip, they donned mock replica gear from the 1920s. Ultimately, they switched to modern equipment, deeming the vintage kit too risky for the Death Zone.

The Turner Twins designed a very different project. For one, unlike Houlding and Anker, the Turners didn’t actually climb Everest. At least compared to the likes of Houlding and Anker, they also aren’t really climbers. They’re more like adventurer-scientists. (The first time I interviewed the 37-year-olds, they’d flown a tandem electric paraglider over the French Alps.)

The mountain they climbed, Mera Peak, is also worlds apart from Everest. It’s nearly 8,000 feet lower, and has no steep fixed ropes to avoid technical terrain. The brothers admitted that Mera wasn’t their ideal goal—they hoped to ascend Cho Oyu (8,188m/26,864ft) or failing that, Himlung Himal (7,126m/23,379ft). But tariff chaos early in 2025 caused many of their largest sponsors to bail. “Everyone froze their budgets, and then we had to reduce the cost of the project considerably,” Ross explained.

Still, they believe the conditions and temperatures encountered on Mera, which dropped to as low as -4℉, gave some insight into how Mallory’s gear may have performed in the cold. Unlike Anker and Houlding, the twins also really did put their antique gear to the test. Hugo wore his Mallory kit, which was based on a replica created by the Royal Geographical Society, throughout the entire 10-day trek up Mera Peak.

So what does 100-year-old mountaineering apparel look like? In short, a hell of a lot of layers.

Silk, wool, leather, and hobnails

On his feet, Hugo wore three pairs of wool socks and hobnailed boots made of yurt felt, wool, and leather. Three pairs of long johns covered his legs: a base layer of cotton, then two of wool. On top of these, suspenders held up a pair of trousers made from gabardine, a durable, tightly woven wool twill. Wool puttees (think: gaiters) also wrapped his lower legs.

On his upper body, Hugo layered a blended silk/wool shirt, followed by a silk shirt, a wool sweater, and a gabardine (a woven wool) outer jacket. He also triple-layered his hands with a pair of thumbless wool mittens, then a traditional wool mitten, and finally a leather mitten.

He protected his head with a felt sun hat, an insulated wool hat, and a third hat made from rabbit fur and leather, along with a pair of goggles. A wool scarf wrapped around his neck. And he also carried a canvas rucksack as well as 20 meters of hemp rope.

Proper use of this gear, Hugo explained, relies entirely on understanding how each piece of apparel performs.

“It’s all about the layering system,” he said. “As you’re increasing in elevation, from the foothills up to three, four, five thousand meters and higher, you’re changing that layering constantly. You’re taking stuff off, putting stuff on, mixing and matching.”

Wearable thermometer patches attached to each man’s head, chest, hands, feet, and legs recorded body temperature at five-minute intervals, nonstop, for the entire 10 days of the expedition. The 100-year-old apparel wasn’t as warm as his brother’s modern clothing, provided by sponsor Montane, but the margins weren’t large. Their legs showed no significant difference in temperature. And Hugo’s feet, while wearing the Mallory replica boots, averaged only 3.6℉ colder than Ross’s. Hugo’s hands in the old-school gloves, meanwhile, were 6.3℉ colder than Ross’s in the modern gloves.

Many of us probably think of old-school apparel as heavy and cumbersome, but Mallory’s clothes weren’t as heavy as you might expect. The antique kit weighed 17 pounds total, while the modern kit came in at 15 pounds.

Hugo admitted that although he was impressed by the overall performance of the 1920s-era equipment, this performance depended on constant movement. “This gear works best when you’re moving fast and light,” he said. “It’s not designed for hanging around.”

This seems evident in the performance of the Mallory replica boots. Although Hugo’s feet were only a few degrees colder than his brother’s during the summit push, when the two rested on the summit, the leather boots lost warmth quickly. Eventually, they became nearly 11℉ colder than the modern boots.

The implication? Climbers from Mallory and Irvine’s era were capable of surviving some pretty cold conditions… if they kept moving. If they had to bivy, trouble set in.

The brain game

During their climb, the twins also took something called a Stroop test to measure their cognitive function. When I asked them to explain what that was, Hugo put it bluntly: “It was bloody annoying, that’s what it was.”

During a Stroop test, the name of a color appears on screen. But the color of the text often won’t match the word itself. For example, the word “blue” might appear, but in a green font. In this case, the answer would be “green,” and the subject must select it as quickly as possible, then move onto the next question. “You’ve got to say what color the word is, not what color it reads,” explained Hugo. (You can take a free online Stroop test here.)

Stroop tests are designed to measure attention and cognitive flexibility. They test how well you can focus when your brain is pulled in two directions at once. In this case, that’s trying to recognize the meaning of a word, while also analyzing its color. “It’s singling out each side of your brain,” Hugo said.

The twins took these tests thrice daily during their climb, as well as on the summit. The idea behind this, they told me, was to try to understand how Mallory and Irvine’s equipment may have affected their cognition. “If Mallory’s kit was considerably worse than the modern kit, that could have an impact in his decision-making on the mountain,” Hugo said. “So we were trying to track how our cognition was impaired by altitude, and see if there was any difference in our cognition and brain function as we climbed, based on our equipment.” The results came in pretty close. Ross, wearing the modern gear, scored, on average, just one second faster on his tests compared to Hugo.

In addition to the Stroop test, the men regularly took saliva tests to measure their levels of cortisol (a stress hormone). This, too, indicated that both men experienced a similar level of stress on their bodies, despite Hugo wearing 100-year-old gear.

Still, the twins said it’s important to remember that while their findings suggest certain truths, their experiment was extremely limited in scope. “This project involved just us two twins comparing our data,” Ross said. “For a deeper dive of scientific research and data collection, we’d really want to get 5,000 sets of twins all doing the same thing,” he joked.

They told me the experiment led to two key takeaways. First, old-school mountaineering gear probably isn’t as bad as you might think. Second, having an intimate understanding of the way your gear and apparel performs, even if said gear is outdated, is probably far more important than owning cutting-edge products.

All told, the project left the brothers with a newfound respect for the past.

“There’s been a loss in knowledge over the last hundred years,” Ross said. “Scientific innovation, fancy materials and technology, flashy branding, low price points—these things can attract us to amazing new products. Of course, the modern Montane kit we used was fantastic. But natural materials like wool, silk, and cotton… our research shows how good these materials can be. You just have to understand their limitations.”

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