Noel Odell

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Noel Ewart Odell (25 December 1890 – 21 February 1987) was an English geologist and mountaineer. In 1924 he was an oxygen officer on the Everest expedition in which George Mallory and Andrew Irvine famously perished during their summit attempt. Somewhat impressively, Odell spent two weeks living above 23,000 feet (7,000m) without any supplemental oxygen.

On 8 June 1924 George Mallory and Andrew Irvine attempted to climb to the top of Mount Everest via the North Col route. The keen-sighted Odell reported seeing them at 12.50 p.m. ascending one of the major "steps" on the North-East ridge and "going strongly for the top" but no evidence thus far has proved conclusively that they reached the summit. They never returned and died somewhere high on the mountain. Odell was the last person to see the pair alive and his confidence in their success, along with his own longetivity, led to much of the legend surrounding the 1924 expedition.

Following their disappearance, Odell climbed from the North Col up to almost 28,000 feet (8,500 m) searching for the two climbers.

In 1936 Noel Odell with Bill Tilman successfully reached the summit of Nanda Devi which at the time, and until 1950, was the highest mountain climbed. Odell returned to Everest with the expedition led by Tilman in 1938.

Noel Odell had a colourful career outside mountaineering as well, serving with the Royal Engineers in both the World Wars, as a consultant in the petroleum and mining industries, and teaching geology at a number of universities around the world, including Harvard and Cambridge.

He was of course also an accomplished rock climber, famous for his solo first ascent in 1919 of Tennis Shoe on the Idwal Slabs, in Snowdonia. Odell Gully in the Huntington Ravine of New Hampshire’s Mount Washington is named after Odell, who was the first to demonstrate its ascent in winter.^[1]