I have pondered May 1, 1999 and our finding of George Mallory's body quite a few times, obviously. I've thought of it, spoken of it, filmed it, written of it in climbing terms, in ethical terms, in historical terms, in terms of friendship, beauty, strength, cold, altitude, loyalty, money and politics. Money and politics? Oh sure, they hover around significant things in modern life. There are always controversies and headaches manufactured to accompany any news that reaches a worldwide audience. But I certainly would never wish that I hadn't been involved in the discovery on Everest's North Face.

Conrad Anker had his spectacular personal moment of discovery, of course, when he found the body that five of us thought we were looking for that morning. But my moment came a few minutes after Rad's. I' ll never forget that magically confusing, adrenaline-surging, astonishment-dawning instant of recognition when Jake Norton flipped over a clothing label, looked into my camera and said, "This says George Mallory."

I was filming him, thinking that the revelation would be the identity of a clothing manufacturer from the early 1900's. That moment of surprise was the kind I'd dreamed of since childhood. In a sense, such moments and the pursuit of them have kept me childlike for decades.

Not that, as a kid, I had any inkling that I'd be all choked up over findings at 27,000 feet. But I do remember how excited I always was to search for things, anything. And I remember pretty clearly every "discovery" I ever made. Some came easy, like at age eight when on a surreptitious trip to the candy store, I was given an odd coin in my change. "Hey. you gave me an 1841 dime." Which elicited a shrug from the merchant and a grumble that it was still good enough to give out as change. And I remember when I first came to Mount Rainier, finding a 1920's vintage camera out on the Nisqually glacier long before I went looking for almost exactly the same make and model on Mount Everest. And how I marveled at the stories it might have told (were it not filled with water and gravel).

I was thinking of that camera, yet again, at the museum exhibit when I saw a few of the old film cartridges we'd gathered from the rocks near Camp VI in 2001, and how astonished I was to see that they'd been developed and were running as a film clip to reveal French climbers in 1981. And right there in Tacoma I had that marvelous feeling of discovery and riddle-solving and wonderment again. It didn't matter to me that 1981 wasn't all that long ago, just that what had been lost and forgotten was now visible and knowable.

— Dave Hahn, MountainZone.com Columnist