It was a popular mountaineering season on Mount Everest this year with over 500 people climbing the historic mountain. However, mystery remains on who actually scaled the mountain first, George Mallory or Sir Edmund Hillary.

Last week, Conrad Anker - who discovered Mallory's body - climbed Everest (in 1920's gear) to recreate the Mallory attempt. It is believed Mallory could have been the first.

Mallory and his colleague Andrew Irvine, who also disappeared in the mountains, did not have access to the kind of special ladder required to overcome the 100-foot (30-metre) vertical rock formation.

On Wednesday, Anker and Houlding said their ascent showed it was "technically possible" for Mallory and Irvine to climb the mountain without the fixed ladder.

But they could not establish it conclusively, they added.

"It is still a mystery. It is good to have mysteries," Anker, 44, said after returning to the Nepali capital.

If Mallory and Irvine did make it they would be the first humans to stand atop Mount Everest, 29 years before New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay Sherpa who climbed from a different route in Nepal in 1953.

But even if they did, Hillary and Tenzing were the first to climb it and return safely, Anker said.

"You have to get to the top and then return safe and sound," he said. "It is a very simple rule of climbing."

"We need mysteries in life," said Houlding, 27, speaking from outside their hotel in Kathmandu. "If we knew the answer or if they had made it in 1924 and we knew that then it would not be the story that it is."

"The reason that it is such a huge international story is because it is a perfect mystery," he said.

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