By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 11, 2008
Edmund Hillary, 88, a beekeeper-turned-mountaineer from New Zealand who with his Sherpa guide in 1953 became the first men known to conquer Mount Everest, the world's tallest peak, died early today at Auckland City Hospital. No cause of death was reported.
Hillary's 29,035-foot climb up the Himalayan mountain was achieved amid subzero temperatures, unpredictable winds and daunting crevasses, and with a grade of equipment now considered primitive. The ascent ended a decades-long quest undertaken by countless men to test human endurance. In the 1920s, English adventurer George Mallory memorably quipped that he wanted to climb Everest "because it's there" and perished trying.
On May 29, 1953, the successful ascent and return by Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in a team led by British army Col. John Hunt made them instant international celebrities.
"Well, we've knocked the bastard off," an exhausted Hillary famously said upon his return from the apex.
The climbers were heralded as pioneers in the tradition of transatlantic aviator Charles Lindbergh in 1927 and moonwalker Neil Armstrong in 1969.
The newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II knighted Hillary. His triumph over Everest also came to symbolize for many Britons a postwar era of prosperity, even as the British empire was shrinking.
The Everest climb brought Hillary his most enduring fame, and he went on to adventures in India and Antarctica and became a globe-trotting advocate of environmentalism and conservation.
In 1958, via snow tractor, he led the first overland team to reach the South Pole in generations. Two years later, his fruitless yeti-searching excursion in Tibet led him to declare the Abominable Snowman a "mythological creature, probably based on rare sightings of the Tibetan blue bear."
Edmund Percival Hillary was born in Auckland on July 20, 1919, and was raised south of the city in Tuakau. His father, a journalist-turned-beekeeper, brought his family into a fringe Christian movement called Radiant Living.
Hillary described a strict upbringing that led to a lonely childhood and fostered a desire for escape. Mountain climbing, which he discovered at 16 on a school trip to New Zealand's Mount Ruapehu, provided the freedom he sought.
It was especially rewarding to him that, despite his shyness and frail body, he could outpace his peers on the hike. As a young adult, Hillary grew to resemble a mountain himself -- craggy, sinewy, almost 6-foot-5.
During World War II, he served as a navigator in the Royal New Zealand Air Force. After seeing combat in the Solomon Islands, he returned to beekeeping with his brother, a trade he maintained until 1970. He began to formalize his mountain-hiking skills in the offseason to combat his dread of complacency.
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.
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."