Mark Synnott | Climber, Writer, The North Face Athlete

The Third Pole

MYSTERY, OBSESSION, AND DEATH ON MOUNT EVEREST
By MARK SYNNOTT

Veteran climber Mark Synnott never planned on climbing Mount Everest, but a hundred-year mystery lured him into an expedition–and an awesome history of passionate adventure, chilling tragedy, and human aspiration unfolded.

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On June 8, 1924, George Mallory and “Sandy” Irvine set out to stand on the roof of the world, where no one had stood before. They were last seen eight hundred feet shy of Everest’s summit. A century later, we still don’t know whether they achieved their goal, decades before Sir Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay did, in 1953. Irvine carried a Kodak camera with him to record their attempt, but it, along with his body, had never been found. Did Mallory and Irvine reach the summit and take a photograph before they fell to their deaths?

Mark Synnott made his own ascent up the infamous North Face along with a filmmaker using drone technology higher than any had previously flown. His goal: to find Irvine’s body and the camera he carried that might have held a summit photo on its still-viable film. Synnott’s quest led him from oxygen-deprivation training to archives and museums in England, to Kathmandu, the Tibetan High Plateau, and up the North Face into a storm during a season described as the one that broke Everest. An awful traffic jam of climbers at the very summit resulted in tragic deaths. Sherpas revolted. Chinese government agents turned adversarial. An Indian woman crawled her way to safety and survival. Synnott himself went off the safety rope–if he had slipped, no one would have been able to save him–desperate to solve the mystery.

A magnificent story a la The Lost City of Z, The Third Pole conveys the miracle of a mountain the world wants to own, and the first explorers who may have done so.

The Impossible Climb

ALEX HONNOLD, EL CAPITAN, AND THE CLIMBING LIFE
By MARK SYNNOTT

The Impossible Climb climaxes with Alex Honnold’s unprecedented, almost unimaginable feat: a 3,000-foot vertical climb up El Capitan in Yosemite, without a rope. Mark Synnott tells the story in the context of a deeply reported account of his ten-year friendship with Honnold, multiple climbing expeditions, and the climbing ethos they share.

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“With the possible exception of the lunar landings, free-soloing El Capitan may rank as one of the most audacious—and terrifying—things a human being has ever done. Synnott’s narrative plasters you a 3,000-foot granite cliff and doesn’t let you go until the climb is done. It is one of the most compelling accounts of a climb and the climbing ethos that I’ve ever read.”
—Sebastian Junger, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Tribe, War, and The Perfect Storm

“Yes, The Impossible Climb is the gripping story of the most perilous rock ascent of all time – but it’s much more than that. In seamlessly fusing memoir, reporting, social history, climbing lore, technical expertise and intimate glimpses of his tribe, Mark Synnott has given us a kind of epic of life on the edge. Even readers who have never set toe to rock are going to find themselves glued to this insanely brilliant account of extreme athletic ambition and endurance.”
—David Laskin, author of The Children’s Blizzard

“Mark Synnott’s The Impossible Climb is to climbing what William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days is to surfing.”
—John Long, writer, producer, and pioneer of “free solo” rock climbing

“Immensely enjoyable. Tapping his own impressive mountaineering resume, Mark Synnott dives deep into the rebellious counterculture of extreme climbing to get inside the head of Alex Honnold, the planet’s foremost rock climber. What motivated Honnold to free climb El Capitan without a rope? ‘Because it’s there’ doesn’t come close to explaining it. Synnott’s The Impossible Climb does.”
—Andy Hall, author of Denali’s Howl