Edmund Hillary

Edmund Percival Hillary was born on July 20, 1919, in Auckland, New Zealand, and grew up in the small town of Tuakau, south of the city, where his father Percival edited the local newspaper and kept bees ^[1]. The family lived modestly. Edmund was a shy, bookish child, smaller than his classmates when he began at Auckland Grammar School, which required a long daily train commute of several hours ^[2].

He grew quickly in his teens and discovered that his long frame carried him well over rough country. A school trip to Mount Ruapehu in 1935 gave him his first sight of snow in quantity, and the experience left a lasting mark ^[1]. After brief and unenthusiastic study at Auckland University College, he joined the family beekeeping business, work that built the endurance and practical resourcefulness he would rely on for the rest of his life ^[2].

During the Second World War Hillary served in the Royal New Zealand Air Force as a navigator on Catalina flying boats in the Pacific, until burns from an accident ended his service ^[1]. By then he had already begun serious climbing in New Zealand's Southern Alps, making his first major ascent, Mount Ollivier, in 1939 ^[2].

The Southern Alps trained Hillary in ice work, weather judgment, and self-reliance. Through the late 1940s he climbed with New Zealand's strongest mountaineers, including Harry Ayres, and in 1948 he took part in the first ascent of the difficult south ridge of Aoraki, Mount Cook, the country's highest peak ^[2].

His performance on a 1951 New Zealand expedition to the Garhwal Himalaya brought an invitation to join Eric Shipton's British reconnaissance of Everest later that year. That trip explored the Khumbu Icefall approach from Nepal, the route that would prove decisive ^[3]. In 1952 Hillary climbed with Shipton again on Cho Oyu, further sharpening his high-altitude experience while a Swiss team came close to Everest's summit from the south ^[3].

When the British mounted their full attempt in 1953 under Colonel John Hunt, Hillary was among the fittest members of a large, methodically organized team. He formed a strong working partnership with Tenzing Norgay, the experienced Sherpa climber who had been high on the mountain with the Swiss the year before ^[4].

On May 29, 1953, Hillary and Tenzing left their high camp on the southeast ridge and worked upward through deep snow and technical ground. The final obstacle was a steep rock step of about 40 feet just below the top, later named the Hillary Step, which Hillary led by jamming himself into a crack between the rock and a fringe of ice ^[4]. At 11:30 in the morning the two men stood on the 29,035 foot summit, the first climbers confirmed to have reached the highest point on Earth ^[3].

They spent roughly fifteen minutes on top. Hillary photographed Tenzing holding his ice axe with flags attached, and, since Tenzing had never used a camera, no summit photograph of Hillary exists ^[4]. News of the ascent reached London on June 2, 1953, the morning of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, and the story broke around the world with extraordinary force ^[3].

Hillary was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire almost immediately, a decision made before he had even descended to Kathmandu ^[1]. He and Tenzing always declined for decades to say which of them had physically stepped onto the summit first, insisting the achievement belonged to the whole team; Tenzing eventually confirmed in his autobiography that Hillary had led the final steps ^[4].

Everest did not end Hillary's exploring career. In 1955 he joined the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition led by Vivian Fuchs, taking charge of the New Zealand support party. His assignment was to lay supply depots from the Ross Sea side, but on January 4, 1958, Hillary and his team drove their modified Ferguson farm tractors all the way to the South Pole itself ^[5]. They were the first party to reach the Pole overland since Robert Falcon Scott in 1912, and the first ever to do so in motor vehicles ^[5].

In 1960 he led an expedition to the Everest region that combined high-altitude physiology research with a much-publicized search for evidence of the yeti; the search found nothing that survived scientific scrutiny, and Hillary concluded the creature was legend ^[1]. He returned repeatedly to the Himalaya through the 1960s, though doctors eventually warned him off extreme altitude after several bouts of cerebral edema.

One more first came in 1977, when he led a jet boat expedition, called Ocean to Sky, up the Ganges River from its mouth toward its Himalayan source ^[2]. Among the many Edmund Hillary facts that surprise people, his 1985 flight to the North Pole in a small aircraft alongside astronaut Neil Armstrong made him the first person to have stood at both poles and on the summit of Everest ^[1].

Hillary married Louise Rose in September 1953, only weeks after returning from Everest. By his own account he was too nervous to propose and asked his future mother-in-law to do it on his behalf ^[2]. The couple had three children: Peter, Sarah, and Belinda. Peter Hillary became a noted mountaineer in his own right and climbed Everest himself, first in 1990 ^[1].

Tragedy struck in March 1975, when Louise and sixteen-year-old Belinda were killed in a plane crash shortly after takeoff from Kathmandu while flying to join him in Nepal, where he was building a hospital ^[2]. Hillary later wrote openly about the depression that followed and about work as the thing that carried him through it. In 1989 he married June Mulgrew, the widow of his close friend and fellow adventurer Peter Mulgrew, who had died in the 1979 Mount Erebus air disaster ^[1].

Despite worldwide fame, Hillary kept his home telephone number listed in the Auckland directory for decades and answered calls from strangers. New Zealanders came to regard his plainness and honesty as inseparable from the achievements themselves ^[6].

The center of Hillary's later life was not climbing but the Himalayan Trust, which he founded in 1960 after Sherpa friends told him what their villages needed most was a school. The first, at Khumjung, opened in 1961, and over the following decades the Trust built more than two dozen schools, two hospitals, many clinics, bridges, water systems, and the airstrip at Lukla that remains the gateway to the Everest region ^[7]. Hillary raised the money largely himself, lecturing tirelessly across North America and elsewhere, and he worked on the building sites in person.

He also became an outspoken advocate for the mountain environment, criticizing the accumulation of rubbish on Everest and pressing for reforestation programs in the Khumbu. He helped persuade the Nepalese government to protect the area around Everest as Sagarmatha National Park, established in 1976 ^[7].

From 1985 to 1988 Hillary served as New Zealand's High Commissioner to India, concurrently accredited to Bangladesh and Nepal, a diplomatic role he filled with characteristic informality ^[1]. Honors continued to arrive: he was made a member of the Order of New Zealand in 1987 and, in 1995, a Knight of the Garter, the oldest British order of chivalry ^[1]. Since 1992 his portrait has appeared on the New Zealand five dollar note, making him one of very few people ever depicted on their national currency during their lifetime ^[6].

Edmund Hillary died of heart failure in Auckland on January 11, 2008, at the age of 88. New Zealand gave him a state funeral, and some of his ashes were scattered on Auckland's Hauraki Gulf as he had wished ^[6].

Any Edmund Hillary biography has to reckon with two intertwined legacies: the climb and the schools. The 1953 ascent closed one of the last great unclaimed goals of terrestrial exploration and made Everest a permanent part of popular imagination. Yet Hillary consistently said that his work in Nepal mattered more to him than the summit, and Sherpa communities honored him in life with the title Burra Sahib, and continue to maintain the institutions he built ^[7].

His achievements reshaped how his country saw itself. In New Zealand he became the closest thing to a national embodiment of modesty and grit, and his death in 2008 prompted mourning on a scale rarely seen there ^[6]. Schools, streets, a mountaineering institute in Darjeeling fellowship, the Hillary Step on Everest itself, and Antarctica's Hillary Coast all carry his name.

For readers weighing Edmund Hillary achievements against those of other explorers, the range is what stands out: first up Everest, first overland to the South Pole by vehicle, first up the Ganges by jet boat, first to combine both poles with the world's highest summit ^[5]. He described himself, to the end, as an ordinary beekeeper who had been given extraordinary opportunities, and the record suggests he made more of them than almost anyone of his century ^[2].