Everest’s first confirmed summit—then both poles as well
On 29 May 1953 New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were the first climbers known for certain to stand atop Mount Everest, on John Hunt’s ninth British expedition. Hillary later reached the South Pole overland in 1958 and the North Pole too—first person to claim both poles plus Everest.
Born in Auckland on 20 July 1919, he grew up in Tuakau, where his father, a Gallipoli veteran, had been granted eight acres and edited the local weekly while keeping bees. Shy and small at first, Ed spent years commuting by train to Auckland Grammar, later shot up to 188 centimetres and found confidence in boxing. A school trip to Ruapehu at sixteen hooked him on the hills; two poor years of university mathematics and science ended in 1938, and he joined the family honey business, tending some 1,600 hives and enduring dozens of stings a day.
He climbed in winter and kept bees in summer. Mount Ollivier in 1939 was his first big summit, and there he gained his first close friends, Harry Ayres and George Lowe. Religious scruples made him withdraw an early air force application, but in 1943 he signed up as an air force navigator. In 1948 he climbed Aoraki’s south ridge. On Eric Shipton’s 1951 reconnaissance he glimpsed the whole Western Cwm from Pumori, spotting what became the normal Nepalese route, and after the 1952 Cho Oyu attempt stalled he slipped into Tibet to see Everest’s north side.
Hunt’s 1953 party numbered more than 400, including 362 porters. Hillary pushed the route through the Khumbu Icefall. After Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans turned back at the South Summit when an oxygen set failed, Hillary and Tenzing camped at about 8,500 metres, thawed frozen boots, and stood on top at 11:30 am, staying roughly fifteen minutes. Hillary photographed Tenzing but declined a picture himself. The news reached Britain on coronation day, and a knighthood was waiting in Kathmandu.
From 1960 his Himalayan Trust built schools and hospitals for Sherpa communities. He served as High Commissioner to India from 1985 to 1988, entered the Order of the Garter in 1995, and received a state funeral after dying on 11 January 2008.
Source: Edmund Hillary
