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Hillary Was First To Beat Mount Everest

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By ADAM BERNSTEIN, The Washington Post

Published: January 11, 2008

Sir Edmund Hillary, a beekeeper-turned-mountaineer from New Zealand who with his Sherpa guide became the first known men to reach the summit of Mount Everest, died Friday at Auckland Hospital. He was 88.

Hillary's 29,035-foot climb up the Himalayan mountain was achieved amid subzero temperatures, unpredictable winds and daunting crevasses, and with a grade of equipment now considered primitive.

The climbers were heralded as pioneers in the tradition of transatlantic aviator Charles Lindbergh in 1927 and moonwalker Neil Armstrong in 1969.

The ascent ended a decades-long quest undertaken by countless adventurers to test human endurance.

In the 1920s, English adventurer George Mallory memorably quipped that he wanted to climb Everest "because it's there" and perished trying.

Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were part of a Royal Geographical Society-Alpine Club expedition led by Col. John Hunt - a siege group that included a dozen climbers, 35 Sherpa guides and 350 porters carrying 18 tons of food and equipment.

Their route was the treacherous South Tor, facing Nepal.

After a series of climbs by coordinated teams to establish ever-higher camps on the icy slopes and perilous rock ledges, Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans were the first team to attempt the summit, but gave up at 28,720 feet - 315 feet from the top - beaten back by exhaustion, a storm that shrouded them in ice, and oxygen-tank failures.

Hillary, then 33, and Norgay, 39, made the next assault.

They first established a bivouac at 27,900 feet on a rock ledge 6 feet wide and canted at a 30-degree angle.

There, holding their tent against a howling gale as the temperatures plunged to 30 degrees below zero, they spent the night.

At 6:30 a.m. on May 29, 1953, cheered by clearing skies, they began the final attack.

Knocking Off Everest

Carrying enough oxygen for seven hours and counting on picking up two partly filled tanks left by Evans and Bourdillon, they moved out.

Roped together, cutting toeholds with their ice axes, first one man leading and then the other, they inched up a steep, knife-edged ridge to the summit.

Once there, "I put out my hand, in sort of stuffy old Anglo-Saxon fashion, to shake his hand, but that wasn't enough for him," Hillary later said of Norgay. "He threw him arms around my shoulders, and I threw my arms around him."

Hillary left a cross in the snow, at the urging of a priest he had met, and Norgay left some candy as an offering to the gods.

"Well, we've knocked the bastard off," an exhausted Hillary famously said upon his return from the summit.

In later years, a debate emerged about whether Hillary or Norgay, who died in 1986, was the first to reach the summit.

Hillary told People magazine in 1999: "We agreed we would say we reached it 'almost together,' when in fact I reached it a few paces ahead of him. I've decided now I'm going to tell it like it was and not worry about whether it's going to hurt anyone's feelings."

The newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II knighted Hillary.

His triumph over Everest also came to symbolize for many Britons a postwar era of prosperity, even as its empire was shrinking.

Hillary's Adventures Continued

Conquering Everest wasn't the last of Hillary's epic adventures.

He climbed other peaks in the Himalayas on return visits and, in 1958, he led a team of New Zealanders who beat a British team in a race to the South Pole in large snow tractors across 1,200 miles of glaciers and heavily crevassed snow fields.

In 1960, he was back in the Himalayas attempting to track down the legendary Yeti, the Abominable Snowman, with animal expert Marlin Perkins.

In 1977, he led a jet-boat expedition up the Ganges River from the Bay of Bengal to as close to the river's source in the Himalayas as they could go - a 1,500 mile journey.

But along with the triumphs came tragedy.

In 1975, Hillary's first wife, Louise, and their 16-year-old daughter, Belinda, were killed when the single-engine plane they were flying in crashed at the airport in Katmandu, Nepal.

In 1989, he married June Mulgrew, a family friend and widow of fellow mountaineer Peter Mulgrew, who had taken Hillary's place as a commentator on a 1979 Antarctic sightseeing flight and died when the plane crashed.

Over the years, Hillary served as a camping equipment adviser for Sears Roebuck, lectured widely and wrote books, including "High Adventure" and "View From the Summit."

Hillary spent much of his time raising money for the Himalayan Trust.

He founded the nonprofit organization in 1961 as a way to give back to the Sherpas, who served as guides for Western expeditions in the Himalayas.

Since Hillary's ascent, more than 3,000 people have reached the summit of Everest, and more than 200 have died in the attempt.

Information from the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times was used in this report.

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