Conquered Everest, Advocated for Planet

He scaled New Zealand's peaks before trying the Swiss Alps in 1950. The next year, he teamed with Eric Shipton, a revered English climber, to help plan a route atop Everest via Nepal after communist China had invaded Tibet.

"We were the first to realize there was a potential route up Everest from the south side," Hillary later said of the reconnaissance mission.

After a change of personnel, John Hunt replaced Shipton as leader. He broke the group in teams, pairing Hillary with Norgay, a porter on earlier expeditions who became one of the world's most experienced climbers. Norgay previously came within 800 feet of the summit.

The Hillary-Norgay team found a path over treacherous crevasses, notably the Khumbu Icefall. Their equipment included nylon ropes, oxygen cylinders, metal-spiked climbing irons for their boots and ice axes minus the curve added in later years to aid climbing.

At 29,000 feet, they encountered a 40-foot wall of rock, which Hillary surmounted when a large ice cornice broke away and he spotted a narrow crack running upward.

Norgay followed, and it was a relatively easy route from there 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 his 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.

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."

Hillary was a notoriously aggressive and competitive adventurer. That trait emerged more conclusively when he united in the mid-1950s with British explorer Vivian Fuchs to trek more than 2,100 miles across Antarctica, from the Weddell Sea coast to McMurdo Sound.

The expedition, part of the 1957 International Geophysical Year celebrations, would complete what Ernest Shackleton couldn't in the early 1900s: crossing the continent via the South Pole.