Sir Edmund Hillary would be horrified by today’s crowded Everest
The intrepid was not prepared for the worldwide excitement when he and Tenzing Norgay made it to the summit of Mount Everest
Climbing Mount Everest is now a marketable tourist experience. A photograph showing hundreds of people forming a Himalayan checkout queue to take a selfie on the roof of the world went viral last month.
But at 11.30am on May 29, 1953 when New Zealand beekeeper Edmund Hillary and the Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first two people to officially reach the Everest summit, they had only each other as witnesses.
Hillary, born on this day 100 years ago, noticed Norgay appeared to be much more excited about their success than he was himself. Norgay thanked the gods of the mountain by burying some chocolate and other food in the snow of the summit.
Hillary, remembering a promise just in time, pressed a crucifix into the snow. The cross belonged to another member of the expedition team, John Hunt, who had asked Hillary to leave the votive object at the top of Everest if he were successful in reaching it.
Hillary took a photograph of Norgay on the summit, not thinking to ask Norgay to take one of him as well.
Hillary then took pictures of all
the main ridges leading away from Everest, to prove the pair had actually got to the top.
What happened next was not at all like the romance that gathers like clouds around the exploits of adventurers.
Hillary and Norgay had been warned by the expedition doctor that the biggest threat they faced on the mountain was dehydration.
“To compensate for this, Tenzing and I had spent a good part of the previous night quaffing copious quantities of hot lemon drink and as a consequence we arrived on top with full bladders,” Hillary wrote in his autobiography, View From The Summit.
“Having just paid our respects to the highest mountain in the world, I then had no choice but to urinate on it.”
Descending from the summit with Norgay, Hillary saw his fellow expedition member George Lowe waiting at camp, and sent out a hearty greeting: “Well, George, we knocked the bastard off”, Hillary called out.
He then drank the hot tomato soup Lowe had prepared for the triumphant summiteers.
Laconic and modest in his ways, Hillary had thought his and Norgay’s successful ascent would be of interest only in the mountaineering world. But he did not expect the worldwide excitement the feat actually generated.
“We were halfway to Kathmandu when still another runner met us on a high track and handed over his bag to George Lowe,” Hillary wrote.
“George quickly sorted through the mail and then, with a bit of a grin, handed me a letter addressed to ‘Sir Edmund Hillary, KBE’. The Queen had indeed made me a Knight of the British Empire.”
Hillary wondered how his beekeeping business back home could possibly provide a lavish enough lifestyle for a knight.
“My God, I told myself, I’ll have to buy a new pair of overalls,” he wrote.
“George thought it was incredibly funny and couldn’t stop laughing for the next half-hour.”
Before leaving the mountain and rejoining society, Hillary, John Hunt and Tenzing had a “little discussion about the actual reaching of the summit”.
“I had certainly never regarded it as being important and we agreed that as a team, sharing the tasks on the mountain, we would say we had reached the summit together,” Hillary wrote in View From The Summit.
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But sections of the Nepalese community began pressuring Norgay to say he had been first to set foot on the summit.
In a letter Hillary wrote to his
future wife Louise, he made his position clear: “As you know it matters little who actually gets to the top first — it’s so unimportant we never think of it. Actually as I think I may have told you I did all the leading for the last two and a half hours and did in actual fact reach the summit a rope length ahead of Tenzing.”
Hillary and Louise were married just a few months after the ascent of Everest, and went on to have three children. But tragedy struck in 1975 when Louise and 16-year-old daughter Belinda were killed when their light plane crashed on takeoff at Kathmandu airport.
Louise and Belinda had been
en route to join Hillary in the village of Phaphlu, where he was helping to build a hospital.
Hillary took his loss hard, and for a long time struggled to find meaning in the philanthropic work which had absorbed him after Everest.
In 1989 he married June, widow of his close friend Peter Mulgrew who had died on an Air New Zealand flight in 1979.
Hillary continued to help the Nepalese people all his life. He set up the Himalayan Trust in 1960, wanting to help the Sherpa people who had been so instrumental in his Everest success.
He led the trust until his death in 2008. The trust constructed many schools and hospitals, and Hillary
was also the honorary president of
the American Himalayan Foundation, a US non-profit body that helps improve the ecology and living conditions in the Himalayas.
Hillary had many other adventures. He reached the South Pole by tractor on January 4, 1958, and in 1977 he led a group of explorers to trace the route of the Ganges River from the Himalayas to the mouth of the river.
Hillary was a big man, but had been quite small as a boy and inclined to partake of adventures only by reading about them. But he become a tough-minded and athletic adventurer who would no doubt be appalled by the disgraceful state of the once-pristine Everest, now a dumping ground for literally tonnes of discarded camping gear and other waste by tourists who simply want to tick the summit off their bucket list.
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