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A great life

“It seemed difficult at first to grasp that we’d really got there,” wrote Sir Edmund Hillary of that morning when he became the first man to stand on the highest point on our planet. This man of courage and compassion will always be remembered, along with Tenzing Norgay, for the moment on May 29, 1953 when humans first stood on the summit of Mount Everest. His more abiding legacy is a life that teaches us that the impossible is achievable. Sir Edmund, who insisted on being addressed as plain-and-simple ‘Ed’, was an improbable candidate for greatness. Born in 1919 in the family of an Auckland journalist-turned-beekeeper, he dropped out of university to help his father’s business. He was invalided out of the New Zealand Air Force, which he served during World War II as a navigator, with severe burn injuries. Undaunted, he soon built a formidable reputation as a mountaineer, breaking into a climbing world dominated by a closed circle of public school-educated elites by scaling 11 Himalayan peaks of over 6,000 metres. Success did not breed arrogance. At a time when hierarchies of race and class defined the relationship between sahib and sherpa — few mountaineering accounts even bothered to name the Nepali porters who were critical to their success — Sir Edmund saw fellow climbers as equals. “I held out my hand,” he recorded famously of the moment he stood at the summit of Everest with Tenzing, “and in silence we shook in good Anglo-Saxon fashion. But this was not enough for Tenzing, and impulsively he threw his arm around my shoulders and we thumped each other on the back in mutual congratulations.” Until his comrade’s death in 1986, Sir Edmund refused to settle the debate on who first set foot on the summit of Everest.

His life as an explorer did not of course end with his Everest triumph. He participated in expeditions to Antarctica, the South Pole, and the sources of the Yangtse and Ganga — and even in a search for the fabled Yeti. In the 1980s, he served as New Zealand’s High Commissioner in India, an assignment he was to describe as the only “nine to five job” he did in his life. Sir Edmund was not seduced by the prospect of personal profit and used his fame to raise funds for a welter of education, health, sanitation, and environmental projects that have improved the lives of the desperately poor mountain communities who inhabit the Solu-Khumbu region of Nepal. His commitment to humanitarian work, shared by his first wife, Louise, did not flag even after her tragic death, along with their youngest daughter, Belinda, in a 1975 air crash at Kathmandu. Nor did his knowledge of the great risks of mountaineering lead him to discourage his son, Peter, from making a successful 1990 attempt to summit Everest. “In climbing, as in many other aspects of life,” wrote the historian of Everest, Walt Unsworth, “the risks are weighed against the goal.” Sir Edmund dared to live an exceptional life — and triumphed.

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