When Eric Simonson led a team of nine explorers near the summit of Mount Everest in 1999 to uncover the truth about the 1924 expedition of British explorers George Leigh Mallory and Andrew Irvine, the team used Eureka! tents to shelter themselves at the base camp. Simonson's team found Mallory's preserved body but was unable to determine whether he had died before or after reaching the Everest summit. After the first expedition, Simonson told Kurt Heisler, then-senior tent designer for Eureka!, that the Eureka! tents had been great and that he and his team of explorers could have used these tents much higher on the mountain. Heisler offered to design tents for Simonson's next exhibition in 2001, the goal of which was to find Irvine's body and to determine whether Mallory had been the first man to reach the Everest summit, nearly three decades prior to Sir Edmund Hillary's historic expedition. Eureka! donated sixty tents to the expedition, from their largest style of military tents to their lightest and smallest backpacking tents, and designed several custom tents, working closely with the explorers to balance stability and strength. Said one explorer, Andy Politz, Eureka! generously offered to build us the tent of our dreams. Simonson stated that companies like Eureka! that donated to the expedition took a risk, believed, and saved lives doing it. [They] essentially... are directly responsible for our strength on the mountain and our ability to work miracles. Eureka! later produced a consumer version of the Fifth Season tent, a tent originally designed for this expedition.