Because it’s there.

The most famous three words in the history of mountain climbing date to a 1923 New York Times interview with the celebrated British climber George Mallory, shortly before his third attempt to do that which no climber had ever done. The reporter had asked him, flatly, “Why do you want to climb Mount Everest?”

Mallory’s line always had a lot going for it. Pleasing to the ear. Crackling with anti-intellectualism. That Mallory ended up dying during his Everest climb, in 1924, only sealed the legend—to the point that his terse phrase entered the vernacular as a catchall philosophical reply.

Climbers hate this line. To repeat Mallory’s three words to seasoned climbers is to invite the rolling of eyes, or even outright contempt. They are sick of hearing it from every weekend warrior who straps on crampons. But mostly they hate it because it’s the wrong answer.

“IF YOU HAVE A DREAM, NEVER, EVER PUT IT BY THE WAYSIDE,” ROB WOULD SAY. HE SOUNDED LIKE A WIDE-EYED KID.

Which brings us to the events of January 9, 2009, in the icy Alpine climes of Mont Blanc, the tallest mountain in Western Europe. The date and place marked the abrupt end of an ascent by four young British climbers: Rob Gauntlett, 21; James Hooper, 21; Richard Lebon, 22; and James Atkinson, 21.

The tragedy that befell the group was neither more nor less ghastly than the many others that regularly occur on Mont Blanc, the world’s deadliest mountain; it kills by way of avalanche, flying glacial shards, hidden crevasses, or plain old slip-and-falls. In the preceding year, the mountain had claimed more than 50 lives. But whereas the media largely processed the victims in bulk—the missing Austrians, the dead Japanese—not so the young Brits. Fresh-faced young lads. Friends since childhood. Cultivated in classic English public-school style.

The focus remained largely on Gauntlett, the group’s charismatic leader. Along with James Hooper, his main climbing partner and closest friend, Gauntlett had gained a measure of fame three years earlier, when the pair became the youngest Britons to climb Mount Everest. They were 19. Their follow-up expedition, a grueling pole-to-pole journey, landed the pair in Adidas commercials and won them *National Geographic Adventure’*s Adventurers of the Year award.

But now, less than a year later, choppers were airlifting two dead bodies off an icy Alpine ridge. The victims had suffered a brutal end, plummeting as much as 2,700 feet. But there were as many questions as answers. Certain details, the rescue teams said, were simply unanswerable.

Their names are ingrained in every English schoolboy: the many climbers and adventurers born of British extraction. There were Mallory’s three epic assaults on Everest. There was Alfred Wills, one of the first to summit the Wetterhorn. Also Aleister Crowley, Edward Whymper, and Albert Mummery, who led the first ascents of K2, the Matterhorn, and Nanga Parbat, respectively. The end-all would be Edmund Hillary, whose 1953 British team was the first to summit Everest.

As a teenager, James Hooper was well versed in all of the above, but he was particularly keen on the polar explorers Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott. What drew him was their adventurism—their eagerness to push themselves way out there. This revered history went with the territory at Christ’s Hospital, a boarding and day school whose 19th-century brick buildings and bucolic campus seem straight out of Masterpiece Theatre. Located an hour south of London, in the lush countryside of West Sussex, it is called by locals “the Bluecoat School,” owing to the Tudor-style uniform still required of every student: long blue coat and knee breeches, white neckband, knee-high yellow socks.