Veteran climber Mark Synnott never planned on climbing Mount Everest. But a hundred-year mystery lured him into an expedition where a history of passionate adventure, chilling tragedy, and human aspiration unfolded. George Mallory and Sandy Irvine were last seen in 1924, eight hundred feet shy of Everest´s summit. A century later, we still don´t know whether they achieved their goal of being first to reach the top, decades before Hillary and Norgay in 1953. Irvine carried a 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 to try and find Irvine´s body and the camera. But during a season described as ´the one that broke Everest´, an awful traffic jam of climbers at the summit resulted in tragic deaths. Synnott´s quest became something bigger than the original mystery that drew him there - an attempt to understand the madness of the mountain and why it continues to have a magnetic draw on explorers. Exploring how science, business and politics have changed who climbs Everest, The Third Pole is a thrilling portrait of the mountain spanning a century.