Conquered Everest, Advocated for Planet

Hillary's chief task was to arrange supply depots for the Fuchs team, but he chafed at this subservient role as well as what he characterized as Fuchs's conservative leadership and lack of momentum.

When Hillary realized that his last supply base was only 400 miles from the pole, he unilaterally decided to reach the pole with his small team despite bad weather and unstable snow bridges. He navigated through to the pole Jan. 4, 1958, more than two weeks ahead of Fuchs.

Hillary became the first explorer to reach the pole by land in 46 years.

He then sent a radio transmission to London recommending that because of poor weather, Fuchs should turn back and let him -- Hillary -- cross the rest of the continent. Fuchs refused, and the two men proceeded together to McMurdo Sound and arrived early that March.

Fuchs, who was knighted for his work, told an interviewer in 1990: "I have never blamed him for what he did. It would have been like turning back from the south summit of Everest."

Hillary continued to make his way around the world's remote places, often at great peril. A journey up the Ganges River from the Bay of Bengal to locate its source in the Himalayas left him with a pulmonary edema at one high-altitude camp.

His most shattering experience was the loss of his wife, Louise Rose Hillary, and their teenage daughter, Belinda, in a plane crash near Kathmandu, Nepal, in 1975. They were flying to meet Hillary at a Nepalese outpost called Phaphlu, where he was helping build a hospital.

In desperation, he said, he turned to whiskey and sleeping pills, and only gradually was he able to return to his work.

In 1989, he married June Mulgrew, the widow of Hillary's climbing partner Peter Mulgrew, who had died in a plane crash in Antarctica's Mount Erebus a decade earlier. Hillary was supposed to have been on the flight but canceled at the last minute.

Besides his second wife, survivors include two children from his first marriage: Peter, who has also climbed Everest, and Sarah.

Hillary wrote many books about his travels, including "High Adventure" (1955), about the scaling of Everest, and "Nothing Venture, Nothing Win" (1975), a memoir.

In 1961, he founded the Himalayan Trust to champion educational and infrastructure needs in the remote Everest region. He said his mission was to prevent the native Sherpas, a yak-herding people, from "becoming peons" catering to Western tourists. In the late 1980s, he served as his country's ambassador to India, Nepal and Bangladesh.

Hillary told the Chicago Tribune in 1989 that although so many people identified him with his more extreme treks, "My life is not so much stepping on top of a peak that has never been stepped on before, or traveling to the South Pole, but, rather more, the building of schools and medical clinics for the very worthy people of the Himalayas."