A team of British and the United States mountaineers is set to climb Mt. Qomolangma using 1920's style gear to see if an ill-fated expedition could have reached the summit 30 years before Edmund Hillary, The Himalayan Times reported on Wednesday.

A pair of British climbers, George Mallory and Sandy Irvine, led an expedition last spotted close to the summit in 1924, nearly 30 years before Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay made history by becoming the first people to scale Qomolangma in 1953.

Colleagues last saw Mallory and Irvine about 800 meters below the summit and it remains a mystery whether they made it to the top.

"Using 1920's style equipment, this team is trying to find out whether the British climbers on their 1924 expedition were able to reach the summit," said Ang Tsering Sherpa, the president of the Nepal Mountaineering Association (NMA).

"This team is climbing from the northern route via China's Tibet and what they plan is very dangerous," Sherpa was quoted by the daily as saying.

They will be wearing period clothes made of cotton, silk and wool rather than modern day water and windproof gear.

Just a few hundred meters from the summit is the Second Step, a35-meter sheer rock face that is usually tackled using aluminium ladders.

"They plan to remove them (the ladders) and try and climb without them," Sherpa said.

Conrad Anker, the American climber leading an expedition, discovered Mallory's corpse in 1999 and this year's attempt to recreate the tragic route will be filmed for a documentary.

The spring season for scaling Mt. Qomolangma is drawing to a close, and Anker's team has left for their summit bid as late as possible, to ensure that the footage they film is not crammed with modern climbers and their equipment.