Sir Edmund Hillary

By Dick Dorworth

July 20, 1919-January 10, 2008

There has been no more iconic mountaineer/adventurer/friend to people of the mountains than New Zealand’s Sir Edmund Hillary, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth of England after he became the first person to climb Mt. Everest in 1953, a few steps ahead of his friend and climbing partner Sherpa Tenzing Norgay. When he died in New Zealand last month at the age of 88, the world lost one of the great explorers and humanitarians of the 20th Century.

Until May 29, 1953 when he reached the summit of Everest, Hillary was, outside the small world of mountain climbers, a relatively unknown beekeeper with a solid resume of mountaineering achievements in New Zealand, the Alps and the Himalayas. Everest and knighthood made Hillary an overnight world figure, a notoriety and status he rose to and used well, both in the worlds of exploration/adventure and the more significant ones of humanitarian/environmental activism. His inspiration and influence on mountaineering, exploration and humanitarian/environmental activism is incalculable.

After Everest, he climbed 10 other Himalayan peaks over 20,000 feet high. In 1958 he commanded the first party to reach the South Pole since Amundsen in 1911 and Scott in 1912, and the first to use motorized vehicles to get there. In 1985, he flew with astronaut Neil Armstrong in a twin-engine plane to the North Pole, landed, and became the first person to stand on the highest point on earth and both its poles. Hillary famously remarked to his good friend and climbing partner George Lowe when he and Norgay returned from the summit, “Well, George, we finally knocked the bastard off.”

Note the accent on “we.” Hillary made it to the summit, and it was he who led the expedition to the South Pole and who became the best known hero and explorer of his time, but he was always just one of the many who made it happen, and he never pretended or claimed otherwise. The 1953 British Everest expedition, led by John Hunt, was successful because of the efforts of 362 porters and 20 Sherpa guides (including Norgay), not to mention the other British members of the climbing team. Hillary once said, “In some ways I believe I epitomize the average New Zealander: I have modest abilities, I combine these with a good deal of determination, and I rather like to succeed.” And he decried the entire self-glorification that pervades many of the modern Everest expeditions, particularly those climbers who have passed by other climbers in trouble without helping them. “I think the whole attitude towards climbing Mount Everest has become rather horrifying,” The New Zealand Herald quoted Hillary as saying. “The people just want to get to the top. They don’t give a damn for anybody else who may be in distress.” Hillary said that heading for the summit and letting people lie dying is not pleasant and he hopes it is not repeated.

He founded the Himalayan Trust and through it devoted most of his life to helping the Sherpa people of Nepal through building schools and hospitals in a remote part of the world that previously had neither. He was honorary President of the San Francisco based American Himalayan Foundation, which helps improve the ecology and living conditions of the people of the Himalayas.

Less than three months after climbing Everest, Hillary married Louise Mary Rose in New Zealand. They had three children, Peter, Sarah and Belinda. In 1975, Louise Mary and Belinda were killed in a small plane crash in Nepal while en route to join Edmund in a village where he was helping build a hospital. In 1989 he married June Mulgrew, the widow of his close friend and climbing partner, Peter Mulgrew who had died in a plane crash in Antarctica ten years earlier.

Sir Edmund is survived by his wife, June, children Peter and Sarah, and six grandchildren.