Sir Edmund Hillary: Top of the World

Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay stood on top of the world. Around them spread the snow-covered ridges and peaks of the Himalayas: frozen crests of huge, earth-driven waves. Far below chasms and streams wound like muddy veins, cut occasionally by ice blue glaciers. In the east hulked Lhotse, Makalu and the formidable Kangchenjunga. To the west was Cho Oyu and a rumpled horizon of unexplored ranges.

Atop Everest, the highest of them all, a crisp wind blew. Hillary pulled out his camera and snapped Tenzing holding aloft his ice ax strung with the flags of Britain, India, Nepal and the United Nations. Tenzing dug a hollow in the snow and filled it with Buddhist offerings: a few lollies, a chocolate bar and some biscuits. Hillary dug a second hole and buried a crucifix. The two nibbled on some mint cake and, aware that their oxygen supplies were limited, began their descent 15 minutes after reaching their goal.

The descent was as arduous as the climb. Their path had been erased by strong winds, so they repacked every step. Finally, after more than four exhausting hours, they saw fellow team member George Lowe, who had climbed up to meet them. Lowe asked Hillary how the attempt had gone. “Well,” replied the unassuming conquerer. “We knocked the bastard off.”

Sir Edmund Percival Hillary died today at the age of 88, almost 55 years after the ascent that made him and Tenzing two of the great heroes of the 20th century. For one who had reached such lofty heights he was a strange mix of confidence and modesty; bravado and reticence. A beekeeper and amateur mountaineer from New Zealand, he figured in one of this century’s defining moments: the conquest of Everest on May 29, 1953. His adventures in the Himalayas and Antarctica and his work for the sherpas of Nepal continued for more than four decades, but he will be remembered always for his victory that Spring morning.

His beginnings were more humble. Hillary grew up in Tuakau, a small town 50 km (about 30 miles) south of Auckland. His father, Percival, a strict man, edited the local newspaper. His mother, Gertrude, was a school teacher. Hillary excelled at the local primary school and finished two years early. But at his next school, Auckland Grammar, he was surrounded by boys two years his senior and, overwhelmed, managed only average marks.

There was another frustration. The long daily train trips to Auckland ruled out sports and outdoor activities, at least during the week. Then, at 16, a love affair with mountains began. On a final-year excursion to the North Island’s Tongariro National Park, Hillary sighted Mount Ruapehu, a 2,797m (about 9,000 ft tall) active volcano. “There was snow everywhere,” he recalled over 50 years later. “It was a bright moonlit night, a brilliant, marvelous sight to me.”

After school Hillary studied law for two years but dropped out to begin working full-time with his father as a beekeeper. Except for the last two years of World War II, when he served as a navigator in Catalina Flying Boats over the Pacific, Hillary was to remain an apiarist, in name at least, until 1970. He skied whenever he could and began hiking in the hills outside Auckland on weekends. As his climbing skills improved he visited the New Zealand Alps in the South Island, an impressive mountain range that reaches 3755m (more than 12,300 ft) on the summit of Mt Cook. “I didn’t visualize myself becoming a renowned mountaineer,” he explained later. “It happened gradually. Very few [people] suddenly decide they’re going to be a world champion at something.”

After the war the lure of the mountains grew stronger. In 1950 Hillary climbed in the Swiss and Austrian Alps and a year later joined a New Zealand expedition to the Himalayas. “I was very impressed,” he recalled of his first view of the towering mountain range. “But the peaks didn’t look all that different from what I’d been climbing in the Southern Alps [in New Zealand].” Though the expedition lacked funds, its climbers did well, conquering previously unclimbed 20,000-footers (6,000m plus). Hillary was quickly becoming known as a talented and aggressive climber. “I don’t believe I was unpleasantly aggressive,” he said later. “But I think I rather enjoyed grinding my companions into the ground on a big hill.”

At the end of 1951 Hillary joined a British Everest Reconnaissance expedition and a year later was invited on another British expedition, this time to Cho Oyu, also in Nepal. The tall, gangling New Zealander, now 32, was reaching his peak as a mountaineer. “When you’re younger you’re probably faster, but when you’re older you have incredible endurance,” Hillary told Sports Illustrated 40 years later. “You also have a good deal more experience — especially of being uncomfortable and miserable, whereas the younger person who is all go, go, really hasn’t been all that miserable in his life. When you’re climbing at high altitudes, life can get pretty miserable. An older person is able to put up with this more easily.”

Still, no team had managed to fuse the stamina and pace needed to conquer Everest. Many had tried. Between 1921 and 1953 eight major expeditions had attempted the climb, mostly from the north through Tibet. All had failed, with some 16 deaths. After World War II, several factors combined to make the climber’s job slightly easier. With Tibet now locked behind Communist China, approaches from the north were impossible. To the south Nepal opened its doors to fee-paying Western expeditions, which discovered new, more accessible routes. Improvements in clothing and equipment, especially oxygen apparatus, helped dull the freezing temperatures and assisted breathing at altitude. And by the early 1950s Nepalese Sherpas — now experienced high-altitude climbers — had become essential to any successful Himalayan expedition.

Step by step, the summit grew closer. In 1952 Swiss climber Raymond Lambert and Nepalese sherpa Tenzing Norgay reached around 8,550m (about 27,100 ft) on Everest, the highest anyone had ever climbed. The following year a British expedition led by Col. John Hunt planned another assault on the mountain the Nepalese know as Sagarmatha — “head touching the sky” — and the Tibetans call Qomolangma — “the mother goddess of the earth.” Hillary signed on. The 15-man team was one of the most professional assembled and, besides Hunt and Hillary, included Kiwi climber and Hillary’s close friend George Lowe, Tenzing Norgay, known in Nepal as the “Tiger of the Snows,” eight other British climbers, a cameraman, doctor and James Morris, a reporter from the London Times now better known as travel writer Jan Morris.

After preparations in England and Wales in late 1952 the expedition traveled to India and then on to Nepal. By early April 1953 they had begun establishing a succession of camps up Everest. In May they were ready for an attempt. Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans made the first assault on May 26, and got within 100m (about 300 ft) of their goal before being forced back after Evans’ oxygen failed. Three days later Hillary and Tenzing set out in fine weather from their ridge camp at 8,500m (about 27,900 ft). At 11:30 a.m., after a five-hour climb, they reached the summit: 8,848 meters (29,028 ft) above sea level. “My initial feelings were of relief,” wrote Hillary in Hunt’s 1953 book The Ascent of Everest. “Relief that there were no more steps to cut — no more ridges to traverse and no more humps to tantalize us with hopes of success.”

Success was theirs. Even before the expedition had reached base camp, news of their feat had made it to London — in time for Elizabeth II’s coronation. Hillary, who had never approved of titles, learned to his horror that he had been knighted and could not demur as the title had been accepted on his behalf by the New Zealand Prime Minister. The euphoria of coronation and conquest combined as a symbol of a new Elizabethan era. In reality it was more an ending. Hillary and Tenzing’s accomplishment was the last major earthly adventure and also the last great symbol of Empire. The next great exploratory leap came with a push into space by the new superpowers: the Soviet Union and the United States.

For New Zealand, with a population of less than two million, the achievement confirmed its proud place in the British Empire and marked an important step in its own course. “Everest A Crown Jewel” read the headline in Auckland’s New Zealand Herald, “New Zealander Reaches Peak.”

Hillary’s passion for adventure remained undiminished. In 1958, as the leader of a support team to Vivian Fuch’s planned crossing of Antarctica, he made a controversial dash by Massey Ferguson tractor to the South Pole, becoming the first person ever to reach it in a motorized vehicle. Hillary denied that he had raced Fuchs, arguing that once he was so close he felt he had to make an attempt. In 1968 he took a jetboat through the wild rivers of Nepal and in 1977 travelled up the Ganges, again in a jetboat.

Beginning in 1962 he began working with the Nepalese sherpas who had so often helped him. Raising funds through his Himalayan Trust, he helped install bridges and pipes, built nearly 30 schools, two hospitals, 12 medical clinics and two mountaineering clinics, restored monasteries, and planted more than a million seedlings in and around the towns of the rugged and poor Solu-Khumbu region of Nepal. Much of the last years of his life were dedicated to the work of the Trust, which opened offices in New Zealand, the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Germany. Even into his 70s Hillary spent an average of five months away from New Zealand every year raising money through lectures and visiting the projects in Nepal. He still felt uncomfortable with his knighthood and fame but realized their advantages and the obligations they brought. “I would like to see myself not going [to Nepal] quite so often,” he told TIME in 1996. “But at the moment… the responsibility is there. It has to be done.” Determined to create a financial reserve for the Trust’s future he was realistic about his role. “The worry is, What happens after Ed?” he said.

Involved in many of these projects were his family. He married New Zealander Louise Rose — a classical musician and the daughter of a past president of the New Zealand Alpine Club — in Auckland three months after returning from his Everest climb. A keen mountaineer herself she and Hillary regularly took their children Peter, Belinda and Sarah trekking in New Zealand as well as making family trips to Nepal, Australia and North America. Louise was as practical and down-to-earth as her husband. “[She] is an extraordinarily good sort of camping sort of wife,” Hillary noted in Louise’s 1973 book High Times of a family trek through Nepal.

In 1975, though, tragedy struck. Louise and Belinda were killed in an plane crash outside Kathmandu. “My life disappeared…,” Hillary said. “I didn’t believe that time would heal the loss.” Life would always be different, he remembered later, but very slowly it began to mend. In 1985 Hillary became New Zealand’s High Commissioner to India, Bangladesh and Ambassador to Nepal based in Delhi for four years. In 1989 he married June Mulgrew.

A conservationist before it was fashionable, Hillary became increasingly critical of the numbers allowed to attempt his famous climb — and the rubbish they left behind. “Everest, unfortunately, is largely becoming a money-making concern,” he told a reporter in 1992, a month after 32 people had stood on Everest’s summit on the same day. “If you are reasonably fit and have $35,000, you can be conducted to the top of the world.” From the mid-1990s, expeditions and the Nepalese government heeded these criticisms and improved their efforts to clean up the mountains.

The famed Hillary stamina for high altitudes faded over the last few years. In Nepal he began catching helicopters to visit the higher projects, staying a few hours and then returning to base camp. Still, his sense of humor remained as dry and quick as ever. When asked, in 1996, if catching helicopters was frustrating after all his adventures, the answer came quickly and with a laugh. “No, no,” he replied. “It’s extremely comfortable.” Not an overly religious man — the crucifix atop Everest was a favor for team leader John Hunt — Hillary struggled with various philosophies as a teenager before deciding that most religion was an escape from life.

He knew that Everest was the pivotal point in his life but was philosophical about its personal importance. “For me the most rewarding moments have not always been the great moments,” he wrote in his 1975 autobiography Nothing Venture, Nothing Win, “for what can surpass a tear on your departure, joy on your return, or a trusting hand in yours?” Other things, he often said, had given him just as much pleasure.

Much of that came from his children. In May 1990 Sir Edmund — sitting in his study in the Auckland suburb of Remuera surrounded by shelves heaving with books and Indian and Nepalese statues and wall hangings — answered the phone to find his son Peter, on an expedition in the Himalayas, calling on a mobile phone. “Where are you?,” the old man had asked. “Everest,” came the reply. “The top of Everest.” It was the sort of private moment Hillary enjoyed. He maintained that his image was largely a media creation. “I never deny the fact that I think I did pretty well on Everest,” he told a reporter in 1992. “But I was not the heroic figure the media and the public made me out to be.”

Once, while resting on a rock during a short trek in Nepal with friend and film director Michael Dillon, an American walker stopped and showed Hillary how to hold an ice-axe. “Hillary listened and thanked him, but said nothing else,” remembers Dillon. “The American went away without any idea whom he had spoken to.” The first man to stand on top of the world didn’t see himself as a hero. Others always will.