Ravings of a Nomadic Mind

Sir Edmund Percival Hillary, KG, ONZ, KBE (July 20, 1919 – January 11, 2008) was a New Zealand mountaineer and explorer. On May 29, 1953, Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay of Nepal became the first human beings to conquer Mount Everest--Chomolungma, to its people — at 29,028 ft. the highest place on earth.

The names of Hillary and Tenzing went instantly into all languages as the names of heroes, partly because they really were men of heroic mold but chiefly because they represented so compellingly the spirit of their time. The world of the early 1950s was still a little punch-drunk from World War II, which had ended less than a decade before. Everything was changing. Great old powers were falling, virile new ones were rising, and the huge, poor mass of Asia and Africa was stirring into self-awareness. Hillary and Tenzing went to the Himalayas under the auspices of the British Empire, then recognizably in terminal decline. The expedition was the British Everest Expedition, 1953, and it was led by Colonel John Hunt, the truest of true English gentlemen. It was proper to the historical moment that one of the two climbers immortalized by the event came from a remote former colony of the Crown and the other from a nation that had long served as a buffer state of the imperial Raj.

Climbing Mt. Everest is the supreme symbol of man's personal struggle to achieve. As a metaphor; Everest is simple and pure, man versus nature, it approaches a universal understanding of our primal desire to conquer and will eternally stand as a symbol for triumph and failure. As long as Everest and man exist, it will draw adventurers without mercy, leaving no culture nor people untouched. Those who have summitted the mountain seem unable to forget it for a moment, as if the mountain has seeped into their genetic fiber. Others who attempt or merely visit Everest are often equally affected.

Shrouded in mythos and legend, certain peaks reign over a landscape with such dominance they become inseparable from the land and people. While Denali is inseparable from Native Alaskan lore, Everest has dominated the cultures of Tibet and Nepal, long before it was 'discovered' to be the world's highest mountain. Tibetans call it Chomolungma, Mother Goddess of the Universe and to the Sherpa people of Nepal it is Sagarmatha, The Churning Stick in the Sea of Existence. These reverences, add to the magnetic nature of the Everest and the Himalayan Range.

There is something about Everest and its neighboring cultures that intensify our desire to better understand it. The more we learn, the more we need to know. Its profound presence, geography, glaciology, Sherpa tradition, Buddhism, the mighty Yak and even legend of the Yeti draw us deeper into Everest's mystique. By the time most people attempt to climb or visit base camp, they are so obsessed with Everest, the physical challenges are almost forgotten, until of course they reach the Himalayas. It is truly the stuff dreams are made of.

George Mallory responded "Because it is there" to the 'Why climb Everest question', he passed on a sort of permanent approval to those who wished to risk their lives climbing. by most accounts it is not a difficult mountain to climb there are other mountains, which though not as high are far more challenging to climb.

So when the expedition of 1953 set out it was more with an Attitude to do some thing that no one had ever done before, the expedition's was not a tragic one like all the previous expeditions that went before them they did not loose any member of their team and they made it to the top and came back down without too much drama though Hillary and Tenzing were held up at the south col for two days due to snow and wind. And a previous attempted climb by Bourdillon and Evans had to be aborted when Evans' oxygen system failed. The pair had reached the South Summit, coming within 100 metres (330 ft) of the summit. Hunt then directed Hillary and Tenzing to go for the summit.

Mountaineering as with any extreme sport is a voluntary test of human spirit and endurance, against some seriously humongous odds, with out any returns tangible enough to mention. what drives people to climbing is to test themselves against Nature, the weather, physics and their own fragility. For the most part, its heroism is of a subjective kind. It was the fate of Hillary and Tenzing, though, to become very public heroes indeed, and it was a measure of the men that over the years they truly grew into the condition. Perhaps they thought that just being the first to climb a hill was hardly qualification for immortality; perhaps they instinctively realized destiny had another place for them. For they both became, in the course of time, representatives not merely of their particular nations but of half of humanity. Astronauts might justly claim that they were envoys of all humanity; Hillary and Tenzing, in a less spectacular kind, came to stand for the small nations of the world, the young ones, the tucked-away and the up-and-coming.

Both, of course, were showered with worldly honors, and accepted them with aplomb. Both became the most celebrated citizens of their respective countries and went around the world on their behalf. But both devoted much of their lives to the happiness of an archetypically unprivileged segment of mankind: the Sherpas, Tenzing's people, true natives of the Everest region. Tenzing, who died in 1986, became their charismatic champion and a living model of their potential. Grand old Ed Hillary, who is still robustly with us, has spent years in their country supervising the building of airfields, schools and hospitals and making the Sherpas' existence better known to the world. Thus the two of them rose above celebrity to stand up for the unluckier third of humanity, who generally cannot spare the time or energy, let alone the money, to mess around in mountains.

This much was admitted by the great man himself when on Nov. 5, 1998. Sir Edmund surrounded by mountain climbers and social climbers in the posh ballroom of the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. The now 78-year-old man has grown a bit of a paunch in the intervening years; his unruly hair and bushy eyebrows are snowdrift-white, his shoulders are slightly stooped and he walks with the hint of a limp. Dressed in a dark blue suit, his tie askew, he looks rumpled and professorial -- but he still has the mountaineer's gleam in his eye.

The occasion is the annual dinner of the American Himalayan Foundation, and on this night more than 900 people have gathered from around the world to honor Hillary and the extraordinary work accomplished by the foundation he established, the Himalayan Trust. Sir Edmund is reflecting, once again, on the climb that changed his life: "I was just an enthusiastic mountaineer of modest abilities who was willing to work quite hard and had the necessary imagination and determination. I was just an average bloke; it was the media that transformed me into a heroic figure. And try as I did, there was no way to destroy my heroic image. But as I learned through the years, as long as you didn't believe all that rubbish about yourself, you wouldn't come to much harm."

To say that Hillary is held in awe by the world would be a monumental understatement. They were not, though, heroes of the old epic kind, dedicated to colossal purposes, tight of jaw and stiff of upper lip. That was George Mallory, who said most famously in 1924 that he was climbing Mount Everest "because it is there." But if he ever reached the summit, he never lived to tell the tale. Hillary and Tenzing were two cheerful and courageous fellows doing what they liked doing, and did, best, and they made an oddly assorted pair. Hillary was tall, lanky, big-boned and long-faced, and he moved with an incongruous grace, rather like a giraffe. He habitually wore on his head a homemade cap with a cotton flap behind, as seen in old movies of the French Foreign Legion. Tenzing was by comparison a Himalayan fashion model: small, neat, rather delicate, brown as a berry, with the confident movements of a cat. Hillary grinned; Tenzing smiled. Hillary guffawed; Tenzing chuckled. Neither of them seemed particularly perturbed by anything; on the other hand, neither went in for unnecessary bravado.

I am sure they felt no Zeitgeist in them when they labored up the last snow slope to the summit. They were both very straightforward men. Tenzing was a professional mountaineer from the Sherpa community of the Everest foothills. After several expeditions to the mountain, he certainly wanted to get to the top for vocational reasons, but he also planned to deposit in the highest of all snows some offerings to the divinities that had long made Chomolungma sacred to his people. Hillary was by profession a beekeeper, and he would have been less than human if he had not occasionally thought, buckling his crampons, that reaching the summit would make him famous. Those who have climbed everest or even visited it are always left with the memory. They must have realised what they had achieved when they stood on the summit and they must have anticipated the worlds reaction but i dont think they really understood what it would mean to them in the years to come. thousands have climbed the Everest after them, some at a great loss and there have been other pioneers who have done other great things like sail across the world solo, but no one was as revered as these two were and i guess the reason was simply because, even though the world simply focused on their achievement at first they must have realised that for them it was some thing to be done and not some thing heroic and hence in the later years they worked to bring about a level of awareness and their whole personae even after the climb was coated in a reputation for decency, kindness and stylish simplicity. Hillary and Tenzing fixed it when they knocked the bastard off.

"Ed pointed the way for the rest of us. It was just such a thrill to follow him."
David Breashears, director of cinematography for the acclaimed new IMAX film "Everest"

"Well George, we finally knocked the bastard off."

– Hillary's first words, to lifelong friend George Lowe, on returning from Everest's summit

"Quite simply, Edmund Hillary shaped the course of my life."

Then Jon Krakauer, author of "Into Thin Air"