“It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.”

News today: Sir Edmund Hillary, the gangly New Zealand beekeeper turned mountaineer and adventurer and the first man to scale Mount Everest, has died at the age of 88.

Hillary gained everlasting fame in 1953, when he joined a nine member British team attempting to summit the then-unclimbed Everest, at 29,028 ft the highest peak in the world. The north face of Everest lay in Chinese-controlled Tibet, so the expedition approached via the now-popular southeast ridge via Nepal. Hillary was actually not part of the initial summit team, who turned back from the south summit, a mere 100 m below the top, due to oxygen equipment failure. Hillary and his teammate, the Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, were then directed to attempt the summit. After an overnight bivy at 27,900 ft, Hillary and Tenzing summited the next day after negotiating the infamous Hilary Step, a 40 ft high vertical rock and snow band that is the last obstacle barring access to the gentle angling summit slopes above.

Afterwards, he continued his adventures, which included many other peaks in the Himalayas as well as the first overland crossing of Antarctica (the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition). Hillary was extremely generous to the Sherpa community, and played a large role in raising money to build schools, establish hospitals, rebuild monasteries, and better conditions in the Khumbu region via his Himalayan Trust. In more recent years, he was outspokenly critical about commercial expeditions and what he saw as the decline in the alpinist ethos (particularly after the 1996 diasaster chronicled by David Krakauer in Into Thin Air and the 2006 incident where David Sharp was left to die on Everest by ascending climbers).

"People do not decide to become extraordinary. They decide to accomplish extraordinary things."
- Sir Edmund Hillary

Additional info:
Supertopo thread
Time 100 Heroes and Icon profile (Hillary and Tenzing)
BBC report



Tenzing Norgay at the summit of Mount Everest, 1953


Climbers ascending and above the Hillary Step