With the possible exception of his summit companion, Tenzing Norgay, Edmund Hillary was the first – and only – mountaineer to achieve true global fame. From the age of 33, he was irrevocably, inescapably branded as The Man Who Climbed Everest.

To fellow mountaineers, that label probably diminished, rather than enhanced, Hillary’s standing as a climber: Mount Everest, after all, isn’t the most difficult or beautiful climb in the world, and the quasi-military nature of its first ascent goes against the grain of traditional mountaineering. However, look closely at Hillary’s career, and you quickly discover that, as well as being a justly praised philanthropist, he was also a fine explorer who enjoyed a glorious decade of pioneering adventure.

For him, Everest was a step on the journey – not just a one-off ticket to fame. It was a serendipitous reward for a tough, canny, highly practical man who knew how to make the most of life’s opportunities, and who continued to explore and to grow – and, when necessary, to reinvent himself – coping courageously with disappointment and tragedy.

In common with many other mountaineers, Hillary described himself as ‘a bit of a loner’ who never excelled on the school games field. Growing up in the sticks, spending four hours every day travelling by train to and from grammar school in Auckland, he developed an independent resourcefulness.

In his most recent and frank autobiography, View from the Summit, he described his father as a man with ‘a mixture of moral conservatism and fierce independence’ who paid him and
his brother a pittance for working in the family bee-keeping business after they graduated.

As for the mountains, his entrée to wilderness adventure was school ski trips, with ‘crummy equipment’ and minimal teacher interference, far removed from today’s pernicious ‘health
and safety’ culture.

First climbs
The Southern Alps of New Zealand, with their fickle oceanic climate, huge glaciers and long bushwhacking approaches, have always instilled a pioneering spirit. Hillary was first smitten by Mount Cook in 1939, but his mountaineering career really took off after war service with the air force, when he started climbing seriously under the tutelage of New Zealand’s most famous mountain guide, Harry Ayres. Later, he made friends with a young schoolteacher called George Lowe, who remarked one day in 1950, as they were walking down the Tasman Glacier after a
climb: ‘Have you ever thought of going to the Himalayas, Ed?’

And so, like scores of young climbers before and since, they decided to organise an expedition. With advice from the Everest veteran Noel Odell, they chose a mountain called Mukut Parbat in northern Garhwal. For this unclimbed 7,000-metre peak, they took just standard alpine equipment. Interviewed many years later for Mountain magazine, Hillary recalled: ‘I had a pair of boots that should have been in a museum, but I managed to get one-and-a-half pairs of socks into them.’

Although Hillary himself didn’t reach the summit of Mukut Parbat in 1951, he did climb six peaks over 6,000 metres. Noticing an Indian newspaper announcement that the famous English explorer Eric Shipton was about to leave on a reconnaissance expedition to the south side of Everest, Hillary wrote to Shipton asking whether the great man could use the services of some well-acclimatised Kiwi climbers. Unknown to Hillary, the president of the New Zealand Alpine Club had also sent a similar request.

Shipton had a soft spot for New Zealanders, and a telegram arrived in Garhwal saying that two climbers could join the expedition. After an acrimonious discussion, it was agreed that the self-appointed leader, Earle Riddiford, should go, along with Hillary, who had just enough money left to last until Nepal. Ed Cotter and George Lowe returned to New Zealand.

Hillary knew that he should really have returned too, to rejoin his family in the apiary. But he was the sort of person who knew when selfishness – or at least self-interest – was
the right course. As he said in his Mountain interview, ‘Eric Shipton was the great hero of New Zealand mountaineering’: you just didn’t turn down that kind of opportunity. And so,
a week or two later, in a smoky room beside the Arun river in eastern Nepal, Hillary and Riddiford met the legendary explorer and his fellow British expeditioners – Tom Bourdillon, Bill Murray and the young surgeon who had initiated the expedition, Michael Ward.



Himalayan heights
Apart from the British–American party led by Oscar Houston, which had visited Sola Khumbu the previous year, Shipton’s was the first foreign expedition allowed into the Sherpas’ homeland. From the slopes of Pumori, they had a good view of the infamous Khumbu Icefall. Hillary, the ice man, ‘never had any doubts about that’; even though the ascent through its 600 metres of tortured chaos proved quite risky, it was climbable.

Reconnaissance complete, the team then indulged in glorious odyssey, exploring eastward towards Makalu, assuming that they would be returning the following year for a full-scale attempt on Everest. However, the Swiss got in first, so, instead, Shipton’s men went to the world’s sixth-highest mountain, Cho Oyu.

‘The Cho Oyu expedition was one of the prime cock-ups of all time,’ was Hillary’s blunt antipodean assessment of his 1952 summer holidays. The problem, he felt, was that Shipton was ‘too soft-hearted.’ The route up the mountain lay over the border in Tibet, and, having recently witnessed the Red Army in action in Kunming, Shipton was terrified of having his climbers arrested by Chinese Communists.

There were also logistical problems and a general lack of will – all anathema to Hillary’s forceful drive. By way of consolation, the team did gain valuable experience for Everest and achieved a huge amount of exploration. With his friend George Lowe, Hillary made a bold dash over the Nup La to Rongbuk, trespassing all the way up the East Rongbuk Glacier to the old pre-war Camp Three beneath Everest’s North Col – the ultimate mountain sightseeing trip for a man reared on the saga of the early Everest attempts. Later that year, when the second Swiss attempt on the new Nepalese route up Everest failed, it was assumed that Hillary would be a prominent member of the British attempt planned for 1953.

In fact, the new leader, John Hunt, was at first reluctant to include New Zealanders. He refused to accept Harry Ayres, but on the advice of his deputy, Charles Evans, he did invite George Lowe and Edmund Hillary to join the team.

Much has been written about the way in which the Everest committee ousted the ambivalent Shipton from the leadership and replaced him with a military man. For his part, Hillary was always scrupulously diplomatic, insisting that it was the correct decision, but carried out badly. As for the new leader: ‘John was masterly at dealing with people like me – bloody-minded colonial types. We met in the British embassy, and John thrust out his hand and said, “Hello, Ed. I’ve always wanted to meet you.” That’s pretty hard to resist.’

Bloody-mindedness is a very useful attribute on a mountain. Where the English gentlemen were perhaps a touch reticent, reluctant to thrust themselves forward, Hillary made no bones about his ambition and made a point of cultivating a partnership with Tenzing Norgay, rather than Lowe, realising that Hunt would be unlikely to choose two Kiwis for the summit. More to the point, he obviously had enormous drive and, approaching his 34th birthday, he was at the peak of fitness.

Like any good explorer, he was also good at detail, checking and repairing equipment, keeping busy while others might succumb more easily to the sapping effects of altitude. After Evans’s and Bourdillon’s near miss of summit success on 26 May, when the big chance finally came three days later, it was Hillary’s meticulous attention to detail – as much as his willingness to accept an element of risk – that assured success for him and Tenzing on that final unknown ridge to the top of the world.

After everest
What distinguished Hillary from mere trophy-hunters was the fact that, looking east from the summit of Everest, he was already eyeing up the more shapely pyramid of Makalu, the world’s fifth-highest mountain. Despite the knighthood and the fortnight he spent in London ‘living off smoked salmon and champagne’, he remained an explorer. As it turned out, Makalu nearly proved his nemesis. In 1954, he suffered a mild stroke on the mountain. Attempting it again in 1961, he nearly died from a ‘cerebral vascular accident’, and after that, he never again ventured much above 5,000 metres.

Between the two Makalu attempts, Hillary’s life was dominated by the Commonwealth Transantarctic Expedition. His co-leader, Vivian ‘Bunny’ Fuchs, had Sno Cats for his part of the traverse, but none were available for Hillary. Ever resourceful, he persuaded Massey Ferguson to adapt some tractors for laying the depots between the new Scott Base and the plateau.

As a mountaineer with a long experience of falling into crevasses, he took rope with an eight-tonne breaking strain and insisted on linking all of the tractors together. During the course of the journey, they broke through hundreds, if not thousands, of concealed crevasses, some of them 30 metres wide, but they never lost a tractor.

Returning to Nepal for the winter of 1960–61, Hillary co-led the innovative Silver Hut expedition, which carried out an extended programme of medical research at well over 5,000 metres on the glacier beneath Ama Dablam, which was climbed for the first time – illegally – by four members of the team, including Michael Ward.

The team then crossed three 5,000-metre passes to set up a new base beneath Makalu. Pete Mulgrew developed pulmonary oedema near the summit of Makalu and suffered severe frostbite in a desperate retreat, later losing both of his feet. Ward and Hillary both also came close to death, demonstrating graphically that after too long a stay above 5,000 metres, the body doesn’t acclimatise – it deteriorates.

Undaunted by his narrow escape on Makalu, Hillary and his US colleagues concluded the expedition by building a new school at Khumjung – the first of many aid projects in Sola Khumbu. Critics might argue that the Sherpas have always been highly resourceful entrepreneurs: do they really need foreign help? The answer is that modern healthcare and education are difficult to initiate internally in a remote community of subsistence farmers and traders with no road or air link to the outside world. Foreign assistance has helped the Sherpas benefit more equitably than they might otherwise have done from the huge explosion of tourism in their homeland. It’s good to see Doug Scott now doing similar work with some of the other Himalayan tribes of Nepal, while Reinhold Messner has built a school beneath Nanga Parbat.

For Hillary, ‘giving something back’ was a way of harnessing his fame and finding a purpose once high-altitude exploration was no longer possible. It was also, by his own admission, the one thing that kept him going after his first wife, Louise, and one of his daughters, Belinda, were killed in a plane crash at Kathmandu.

In View from the Summit, he briefly abandoned his habitual bluff persona to describe movingly his grief and despair after this tragedy. Here was a man who suffered deeply, yet managed to keep going, later accepting the new challenge of becoming New Zealand’s ambassador to India and Nepal. By that stage, he had married again, to June, the widow of his old friend Pete Mulgrew, who had also been killed in an air crash.

The last time I saw Sir Edmund and Lady Hillary together was at a fundraising dinner celebrating the 45th Everest anniversary, in 1998. He must have attended thousands of similar events, but he still managed to rise to the occasion, cracking the jokes that were expected of him, charming the crowd. It may just have been a well-rehearsed act, but behind it was clearly a man who had led a fulfilled and adventurous life of exploration, and was still determined to make the very most of that lucky break on the world’s highest mountain.

‘An inspirational man’
I first met Ed in 1971, when I was attending a mountaineering conference in Darjeeling, organised by Mohan Kohli. It was a wonderful event attended by some of the world’s most outstanding mountaineers.

I shall always remember an evening that stretched into a long and enjoyable night at the bar of the Planters Club, talking with Ed about climbing, politics and 100 other topics over quite a few glasses of cool Indian beer. I was immensely impressed by the breadth of his interests, his humanity, sound common sense and rich sense of humour.

We later met up on quite a few occasions, usually at functions, one of which was the celebration in Chamonix in 1970 of the 20th anniversary of the first ascent of Annapurna (the first 8,000-metre peak to be climbed). One memorable experience for me was when Maurice Herzog, Ed and myself were taken by helicopter to the summit of Mont Blanc for a photo opportunity. We expected to be there for just a few minutes and had therefore not dressed in particularly warm or windproof clothing. The helicopter landed us and the cameraman took off, assuring us he’d be back shortly, but apparently was called away for a rescue and we were left there for several hours, with the wind rising and the temperature falling. Ed and Maurice were both stoical and humorous as we awaited the return of the helicopter.

He was a big man in every way, tall shaggy, slightly untidy with no kind of affectation, essentially modest and yet stated what he believed in no uncertain terms. He was indeed a great and inspirational man.

Sir Christian Bonington, mountaineer

‘He spoke his mind’
I first met him in 1953. He and George Lowe gave a lecture at Birmingham University, where I was a medical student at the time, and one of the organisers invited some members of the university mountaineering club to meet them afterwards. I think what struck me then was that he was very much one of the lads, and the idea that he was a knight, ‘Sir Edmund’, was almost a joke.

I met him again in 1960, when we were preparing for the Silver Hut expedition. He’d changed quite a bit, sort of matured, grown in stature with the responsibilities he had taken on. But he was still – and remained this way all his life – quite brusque: he spoke his mind, sometimes without too much inhibition.

It was on that expedition that he had a stroke on Makalu. He was paralysed down one side, his face was lopsided, he couldn’t speak. But he recovered quickly, and the next morning he could speak, and was able to walk down to Base Camp. I then spent about two weeks walking with him down to a lower altitude. It was an incredibly tough trek, because the weather wasn’t very good, it was raining and misty quite a bit of the time.

When we got back to the first village, and dropped below 4,000 metres, our appetites came right back. We had the most wonderful feast: we demolished a whole chicken each, as well as a pile of potatoes and greens, all beautifully cooked by our Sherpa cook. It’s a meal I shall never forget!

Dr James Milledge, high-altitude physiologist

‘Sir Ed lives there’
The one thing that struck me most when meeting Ed and June Hillary a few years ago at their Auckland home was the attitude of a Maori youth, slouching and surly, loitering at the top of the Hillarys’ road. I tentatively asked for direction and immediately his face lit up; his shoulders were drawn back and his chest puffed out and he swaggered off, telling me to follow, pointing down the road saying proudly: ‘Sir Ed lives there.’ I thanked him profusely. ‘No worries mate, glad to help,’ he said, with a satisfied smile at a job well done.

Doug Scott, first Briton to climb Everest and founder of Community Action Nepal

‘He didn’t go in for small talk’
I first met Ed after disembarking from a passenger ship (we couldn’t all afford to fly, in those days) before starting on the tedious journey by train, truck, on foot, and finally by ambassadorial car, to Kathmandu. Ed was needed there by John Hunt to help, so he left Bombay by air, and we didn’t see him for a few days.

Ed had a formidable reputation as a very strong climber, and those of us who didn’t already know him were keen to make his acquaintance – which wasn’t too easy, as he didn’t go in for small talk. George Lowe, who we also didn’t know, broke the ice by taking out his false teeth and playing the fool, and we all relaxed.

Members of the expedition really got to know each other during the two-week trek from Kathmandu to Khumbu. However, I didn’t find it too easy to talk to Ed on the march. His long, easy stride was difficult enough to match without trying to talk at the same time and getting out of breath.

Later on, when he and I were by ourselves working on the route through the upper section of the Khumbu Icefall, I had much the same trouble. But in camp, relaxed after a good day’s work, it was a different matter. He was a great companion, not talkative, but unfailingly good-tempered and ready to chat until we slept. And he was also ready to get out of the tent into the freezing night and tighten the guy ropes if there had been a wind.

For two or three days we cut steps and fixed ropes for the Sherpas and the rest of the party while Base Camp was properly established and the lower section of the icefall equipped. As it happened, I wasn’t on the same rope with Ed after that. I spent a lot of time in that icefall, going up and down it with Sherpas, remaking the route, which was constantly being broken by the collapse of seracs and the opening of brand new crevasses.

Luckily, I happened to be up at ‘advanced base’, Camp IV, when Ed and Tenzing came down from the summit. It was a great moment when we realised that they had made it. I can still picture Ed, somewhat stiff-legged, striding down with Tenzing and George Lowe behind him. I dashed forward and, in true British style, shook hands with the two summiters. John Hunt wasn’t so restrained, and embraced them both. None of us will ever forget that day.

Mike Westmacott, climber, responsible for structural equipment and tents during the 1953 Everest expedition