Sir Edmund Hillary
The Ordinary Chap Who Did Something Extraordinary
“You don’t have to be a fantastic hero to do certain things — to compete. You can be just an ordinary chap, sufficiently motivated…” — Sir Edmund Hillary
Part I: Before Anyone Knew His Name
During the Second World War, Allied pilots ferrying supplies into China had to cross a patch of sky so brutal they gave it a name: the Hump — pilot slang for the Himalayas. Meaning throttle up, climb like hell, pray and hope God was listening.
From the cockpit, the mountain range wasn’t postcard material. It looked like a row of busted teeth stretching from the Indian border into the thin air above Tibet. To clear the lofty peaks, the danger wasn’t just enemy fire or crashing. It was the weather. “Half the time,” one pilot said, “you didn’t know if you were icing up, stalling out, or flying straight into a mountain.”
The other half, they went spiraling down.
If those minor problems didn't get you, altitude did. Oxygen thinned. Hypoxia crept in. Vision blurred. Hands on the throttle turned to rubber. Nitrogen bubbles twisted in the blood, shredding nerves — the same agony divers call the bends. Below, the mountains waited, cold and patient, a reptile with its mouth open. The wreckage of planes littered the valleys below in a long, gleaming path.The pilots had a name for that, too. The Aluminum Trail.
They didn’t mean it as a joke. Between June and December 1943 alone, 509 Air Transport Command aircraft were lost over the Hump — a death toll higher than any five-year stretch in modern aviation history.
Even after the war ended, as they crossed the Himalayas, pilots still glanced warily to the East. What they glimpsed made stomachs churn and hands sweat: one giant slope rising higher than twenty Empire State Buildings stacked end to end. Where winds screamed at seventy miles an hour — strong enough to rip a man from the cockpit and hurl him into the abyss. Above 26,000 feet, the oxygen thinned to a third, scoured by storms that could drop the temperature to minus forty. As Hemingway might have said, a place where death came gradually… then suddenly.
At 29,029 feet, Everest rose like a great white shark, piercing the clouds — a forbidden predator too deadly for dreams. From the air, the world’s tallest mountain gleamed like a death trap — beautiful, lethal, and wholly indifferent to courage.
On a ground map, it looked different, a prize waiting to be claimed — and for a few, that glimpse made Everest irresistible. One of them a lanky, soft-spoken beekeeper from New Zealand, had no reason to believe he belonged anywhere near the icy crown of the Earth.
He didn’t yet know it, but the mountain was already calling his name.
The First Ghosts
Every myth breeds a generation who choose to become firsters. They go by other names: founders, rebels, iconoclasts, those whose dream, as Steve Jobs said, to leave a dent in the universe. This exploration gene has been passed down from ancient times leading to the discovery of countries, companies, and in some cases, mountains.
By the 1920s, Britain’s empire, spanning a quarter of the earth, was fraying. The Great War had bled out an entire generation; its remote colonies stirred the far-flung empire with rebellion. The nation lost the North and South Poles — Robert Falcon Scott’s 1912 South Pole race ended in death, his team frozen in tents, notebooks filled with duty and sacrifice. Ernest Shackleton’s 1915 bid to cross Antarctica saw his ship Endurance trapped, “frozen like an almond in a chocolate bar,” wrote crewman Thomas Orde-Lees.
For ten months, it drifted, crushed by ice. The men ate penguin meat, shot their sled dogs, yet Shackleton brought them home alive. Britain hailed their endurance as triumph, stitching these failures into a national myth: suffering nobly was victory. That was when Everest, untouched, became a lifeboat for fading pride — a final proving ground that Britain still mattered.
But who would prove it?
The rallying cry for the “third pole” — Mount Everest — was irresistible, at least to a Cambridge man, Alps veteran, George Mallory, a World War I survivor. He had mapped the northern route in 1921 and lived through a 1922 avalanche that killed seven Sherpas. Alongside him stood Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, a 22-year-old Oxford rower and mechanical prodigy, with lungs like bellows and a knack for fixing the expedition’s crude oxygen sets.
On paper, they were a perfect match: Mallory’s charisma and experience, Irvine’s strength and skill, carrying the nation’s hope in their rucksacks. There was even a touch of romance. Mallory had vowed to leave a photograph of his wife, Ruth, on the summit. They had the credentials, the moxie, the money. They had that magnetism peculiar to the English upper class. Nothing could go wrong. The plan left nothing to chance.
Timing was another matter.
Nepal’s southern route was sealed, forcing the 1924 expedition to tackle Tibet’s brutal northern face. Their team — a cavalry of climbers, porters, horses, and yaks — trekked Sikkim’s snow-choked passes, wound through the Arun River valley, and reached the Rongbuk Glacier. With just six weeks before the monsoon, they fought to acclimatize, battling failing gear: cotton clothing froze stiff, hobnailed boots slipped on blue ice, heavy oxygen tanks cracked in the cold. Every tool hid a flaw, magnified by fatigue. On June 8, 1924, they dismissed their fears, strapped on oxygen, and made a final push up the Northeast Ridge.
A geologist spotted them through field glasses — tiny specks on the snow, higher than any human had ever climbed. He noted ominously: “Clouds swirled, and the mountain swallowed them whole.” The next day, a cable arrived that clarified the view.
“Mallory and Irvine killed on last attempt. Rest of party… all well.”
British hopes vanished in the same storm. The middle classes went back to their butcher shops, packed away their dreams, poured themselves a cup of Yorkshire tea or a stiff gin and tonic, and waited for another generation foolish enough to try again.
(In 1999, Mallory’s body was found at 26,760 feet, frozen, one arm outstretched toward the summit, rope scars still etched into his waist. Ruth Mallory’s photograph was missing — a romantic vow lost to the storm. In 2024, a National Geographic expedition found a worn sock, labeled “A.C. IRVINE,” inside a lone boot on a glacier.)
An Ordinary Chap
“You don’t have to be a fantastic hero to compete. You can be just an ordinary chap, sufficiently motivated to reach challenging goals. The giving of everything you’ve got is a very pleasant bonus.” — Sir Edmund Hillary
Born in 1919, Edmund Hillary wasn’t bred for fame. A shy, unpedigreed dreamer from New Zealand, he was slight of build, socially awkward, with average grades. His mother, Gertrude — a queen bee breeder — saw something more. Mothers do that. She enrolled him in a “good school,” ninety minutes away by train.
For three and a half years, Hillary cycled to the station at dawn, rode four hours round trip to Auckland, and returned after dark. No rugby. No clubs. His sport was books. His extracurricular activity? Adventure.
“I was regarded as a quiet, nervous boy who didn’t mix easily,” he admitted later. Mix no. Grow? Yes. He shot up to 6'2", took up boxing to punch back against self-doubt, and at sixteen, on a school trip to Mount Ruapehu, everything shifted. The silence. The scale. The air.
“I wanted to see the world,” he said. “From the top.”
While Bees Slept
After high school, Hillary joined the family business: beekeeping. He became an apiarist, managing 1,600 hives, lifting thousands of 90-pound honeycombs, enduring up to 100 stings a day. The stings hurt.
Pain became routine. You learned. You prepared. You bullied through. You knew that honey was the reward. In winter, when bees slept, he climbed.
In 1939, he summited Mount Ollivier near Aoraki/Mount Cook, where he met Harry Ayres and George Lowe — “the first real friends I’d ever had.” Climbing became more than activity; it was clarity.
“It wasn’t so much the technical climbing,” he said, “It was the feeling of isolation, of the great simplicity, of the strength and silence of the mountains.”
Trial by Fire
World War II arrived. Torn by conscience, Hillary joined the Royal New Zealand Air Force. He navigated Catalina flying boats through weather and war — lessons in maps, instinct, and survival that would come in handy later on.
In 1945, he crashed near the Solomon Islands and suffered severe burns. Another test. He recovered, climbed again. His friend Harry Ayres saw something more: “enormous willpower, rugged purpose.”
His resilience would be handy, too.
By 1948, Hillary was back to climbing and had summited the 12,000-foot South Ridge of Aoraki. He was no longer a weekend mountaineer.
He had altitude in his veins — and attitude in his heart.
Pivot to Everest
In 1951, British explorer Eric Shipton invited Hillary to scout Everest — the Oxbridge preserve of upper-crust colonels. A beekeeper among aristocrats. But Shipton saw promise, not polish. This was a scouting party for one of the last great feats in human endurance. No one had managed to scale the great mountain. And now Hillary, a shy beekeeper with no aristocratic pedigree, had just been chosen to walk among them, to get close to heaven, if not to reach it.
The mission wasn’t about the summit. It was to study the terrain: test the Khumbu Icefall, assess Nepal’s newly opened southern route. It was not conquest. It was calibration. Hillary had no thoughts of reaching the peak. His mind was on the mission.
“Terrain trumps temperament,” Hillary later said.
In 1953, Shipton was replaced by Colonel John Hunt — a strategist. Hunt named Hillary to the core team of the new expedition: “Exceptionally strong,” he wrote, “a thrusting mind.” Like many of the extraordinary lives we studied, sudden changes in circumstance, like Everest’s weather or the expedition’s leadership, open up a path that we never imagined.
View from the Top: May 29, 1953
The 1953 British expedition was not a casual affair. It was a city in motion: ten climbers, twenty Sherpas, 362 porters, and ten thousand pounds of gear. Colonel John Hunt led it like a military campaign because the stakes demanded it.
The climb to the top of Everest didn’t begin at base camp. Extraordinary moments have long tails. The summit attempt began three decades earlier — ten British expeditions, ten failures, and the growing suspicion that Everest would remain unconquered. The mountain had swallowed climbers whole. It had become a tomb of frozen ambition.
His strategy was unorthodox but brilliant. Unlike earlier expeditions that named summit teams in advance, Hunt delayed his final decision. It would have earned accolades from management guru Peter Drucker. Plan then improvise.
Hunt observed who acclimated. Who endured hardship without drama? Who could lead under oxygen deprivation and push without fraying? During a crisis, special talents rise to the surface that are not always so apparent at ground level.
“The leader designates the summit pairs quite late,” George Band, the youngest member of the 1953 British Mount Everest expedition, noted, “When he sees how everybody is performing.”
Hunt was playing cards close to his vest. Hillary didn’t make the first summit team. Hunt decided the honor would go to the more experienced Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans. They made their push on May 26, reaching the South Summit, coming within only 300 vertical feet of the top of Everest. But just as they neared the goal, they had to turn back because the closed-circuit oxygen system failed. They were exhausted. Forced to retreat.
“It was a decision Tom always regretted,” teammate Michael Westmacott later said.
SIDEBAR: The Almost Men
They reached 28,700 feet — just 100 vertical meters from the summit.
Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans, the lead team on John Hunt’s 1953 expedition, were the first to make a serious bid. On May 26, they climbed higher than any humans had ever gone. From the South Summit, they could see the goal: Everest’s final ridge. But their oxygen systems began to fail. Exhaustion overtook them. They made the hardest call in mountaineering: they turned back. Bourdillon and Evans cleared the path — but vanished from the story.
Tom Bourdillon was more than a climber. A physicist by training, he’d helped design the closed-circuit oxygen system used on the climb. His father, Robert, was a pioneering medical researcher, discovering the properties of Vitamin D.
Tom died young — killed in 1956 while climbing the Jägihorn in Switzerland. He was 32.
Charles Evans lived longer. He returned to Wales, became a school principal, and passed away in 1995 at the age of 78. He never sought recognition.
They were brave. They were brilliant. They were one oxygen failure away from becoming legends. They had to turn back. Not failure — just misfortune. No drama. The team absorbed the blow, shifted gears.
Narrow Window
Despite his lack of Himalayan experience, Hunt saw what he called “summit potential” in Hillary. He had prepared patiently, not even expecting his turn would come. The lanky, quiet, a Kiwi from modest stock, with no title and no university degree had earned the team’s respect. He had led the route-finding through the Khumbu Icefall. He had the additional quality that Hunt respected: Hillary could handle suffering — wihtout complaint.
Tenzing Norgay wasn’t a British subject. He had no Oxbridge polish.
But he was the most experienced high-altitude climber on the team — by 1953, he had already attempted Everest six times. In 1952, with Swiss partner Raymond Lambert, he had reached 28,210 feet — closer to the summit than any human in history.
Hunt understood what the moment demanded. He paired the Kiwi and the Sherpa — two outsiders — to take the final shot.
After decades of Western climbers relying on Sherpas while hoarding the glory, Hunt wanted the summit to be a shared triumph — for the pair, for the Nepalese, the expedition team, the world. As George Band later said, “It had always been his intention to include a Sherpa.”
Random luck for the 33-year-old Hillary and 38 year old Norgay? Maybe not. Luck alone doesn’t explain who seizes the moment when it comes. Luck is what we make of chance opportunity, isn’t it?
Life offers windows like that all the time. At the right moment, we find ourselves in the right place. Yet too often, we aren’t ready to climb through. Something gets in the way. Other matters distract. The risk feels too great.
Hunt, often the unsung hero of Everest, saw things differently. He wasn’t just planning to win. He was building something bigger. His decisions became not just tactical — but transformational.
Morning Tea
On May 28, at Everest Base Camp, dawn broke quietly under the bitter smoke of yak dung fires. A Sherpa, bronze from the sun, pulled a slab of yak butter out of his rucksack, thick enough to sole a shoe, and a brick of smoky caravan tea. He set a battered pot onto the flame. The butter bubbled with small bubbles that rose slowly to the surface. He smelled the rich fragrance, then poured tea over the pale yellow broth. He folded in a pinch of Himalayan pink salt. Smoke rose, whetting appetites. Tea was passed. It was a mountain story, one that happens every day. Richness — energy, camaraderie, water. He took a sip. It tasted, improbably, delicious — a grace in the cold.
In the first light of day, waking campers saw frost-heavy logs sagging the tents. Boots had frozen stiff overnight. Clenched fingers barely able to tie laces brought winces of pain. Sleep-deprived mountaineers stumbled into the blinding sunlight, breath sharp in the thinning sky. Hardship was better served cold — warmed by laughter floating across the tent openings, light and warm.
The other thing, surprisingly at least to the Englishmen: no shouting, no orders barked, no scrambling urgency, as a Western office manager might demand. Only a steady rhythm of people who knew the mountain: patience, trust, a stubborn calm.
George Lowe, the cheerful New Zealander, cracked a joke, handed out hot tin mugs of butter tea. The Sherpas smiled — Zag boktahn, a heartier good morning — and moved easily through camp, tightening knots, inspecting fifty-pound loads. No one barked orders. Everyone knew: one man’s burden was everyone’s. If one failed, all fell.
The Sherpas brought more than muscle. They brought a deep, infectious sense of inner happiness. Even after hauling fifty-pound packs over knife-edged passes, they teased and laughed easily. Hardship didn’t harden them. It wove them closer — their spirit no performance, but a truth lived in the work. They were trees planted in the ground that bred them.
The British team watched, sensed something rare: A willingness to carry not just gear, but each other’s hopes a little higher each dawn. Before a boot touched the summit ridge, the climb’s true work had already begun — laughter, shared burdens, tea stronger than a command. It was the secret to a kind of existential success that doesn’t happen by accident. It happens in special places — a culture of camaraderie — that happens in places that understand the deepest laws of human nature.
John Hunt busied himself pacing the glacier paths, listening and watching with battle-tested senses. His eyes marked who kept cool under strain, who frayed in the grinding isolation. The summit team wasn’t set by rank or résumé, but by what hardship revealed. His style was textbook Peter Drucker: improvise, discern, challenge, decide.
Hillary and Tenzing stepped forward, without ceremony, no pep talks from the boss. Everyone shared the fear of daring. Boots tightened. Oxygen loaded. They walked slow, breathless, into the death zone. Each climber knew, victory wasn’t seized. It was passed — hand to hand, step by frozen step.
Summit Potential
Just below the Khumbu Icefall. Ropes stiff with frost. Prayer flags snapped in the wind. Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay stood gazing at Mount Everest before the final trek began.
Norgay adjusted his oxygen mask and turned to Hillary. “You think you’re ready?” he asked.
“I’ve climbed Aoraki. Ice walls. Crevasses. South Ridge,” Hillary said.
Tenzing gave a half-smile. “Aoraki is a mountain. Everest is something else.”
He pointed up the slope toward Camp I.
“On Aoraki, 12,000 feet is the summit. On Everest, that’s where we pitch base camp and boil tea. Past 26,000 feet? That’s the death zone. You don’t get stronger. You decay. If you get a runny nose, it could strip the skin off your face as it freezes in seconds. You can’t even spit because your saliva turns to ice.”
They stepped over a ladder spanning a crevasse. “There are three things you must always remember.”
“Air. Misjudge your oxygen tank? You hallucinate. Miscalculate your rate? You black out before you even know you’re tired.”
Another bend. A line of Sherpas, roped together, hauled loads toward Camp II. “Time. Aoraki takes days. Everest takes six to eight weeks. Not to climb — to acclimate. Your blood must reinvent itself.”
Tenzing paused near a tent platform carved from ice. “Terrain. This isn’t just ice. It’s a living enemy. The Icefall shifts. Seracs fall. Yesterday’s solid ground might be today’s hole.”
He looked at Hillary, his voice quiet but certain. Air. Time. Terrain. Metaphors for life. “You’re not climbing a mountain. You’re entering a world with ungodly rules.”
SIDEBAR: Sherpas — Clan Above the Clouds
High in the Himalayas, a Sherpa guide named Pemba pauses on a snow-dusted trail, his weathered hands tracing the name of his clan — Lama Ru — spoken with pride.
Sherpas, mountain-dwellers of eastern Nepal, are not a single family in the Western sense, but their clans, called Ru, weave a tapestry of shared identity, as vital as the peaks they call home. Each clan — from Thakto to Chumbu — carries a name and lineage, passed from father to son, like a surname etched into the soul of a community.
This patrilineal thread binds Sherpas across generations, forging a collective heritage where clanmates, even distant, feel kin. A Sherpa of the Lama Ru, like Pemba, sees brothers in others of his clan — their bond deeper than blood, rooted in stories of ancestral migrations.
DNA whispers the same tale: Sherpas within a clan share similar Y-chromosome markers — genetic echoes of a shared past. These markers trace their roots to Tibetans, a recent sub-lineage splitting centuries ago, knitting Sherpas into a broader Himalayan family.
In this clan system, Sherpas find belonging. Their Ru is a beacon of unity amid Everest’s harsh slopes. It’s no mere structure — it’s the pulse of a people, guiding Pemba and his kin as they carve paths for climbers, their heritage as enduring as the mountains themselves.
Big Step
That night, they bivouacked at 27,900 feet, on a ledge barely wider than a cot — carved into the South Col. The temperature dropped to minus 30°F. The wind knifed through down and wool. The air held less than a third of the oxygen found at sea level.
Hillary’s boots froze solid. He spent two hours thawing them over a sputtering stove while Tenzing melted snow for tea.
This was no longer myth. This was mission — and a damned dangerous one.
At first light on May 29th, they stepped into the death zone with 30-pound loads — oxygen tanks, climbing tools, a few essentials. Their breath hissed through rubber valves. Frost had sealed their faces into the masks. Their progress was measured in feet per hour. At sea level, a man might walk four miles in sixty minutes. Here they were snails in a footrace, maybe a hundred yards.
Other problems.
Rocks were glazed in rime. Ice cracked underfoot. At that altitude, blood retreats from fingers to preserve the core. That’s frostbite. It is also a survival mechanism: kill yourself one finger at a time. Hypothermia follows — shivering, confusion, speech failure. And then stillness.
“It’s a pleasant way to go,” the storytellers say — from the comfort of the Adventurer’s Club.
Then the slope steepened. Only to rise like a guillotine — the final obstacle: a forty-foot vertical wall of rock and ice. It had no name. Not yet.
“I crawled inside,” Hillary later wrote. “Wriggled and jammed my way to the top.” He chimneyed between ice and air, cutting steps with his ax, anchoring himself in narrow cracks. No heroics. Just brute momentum. Tenzing followed close behind. The crevice would come to be known as the Hillary Step.
Above the wall, the slope eased. Beyond it — nothing. No more ridges. Only sky.
Summit Meeting
At 11:30 a.m., Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay stood on the summit of Mount Everest. Twenty-nine thousand and twenty-nine feet above sea level. The roof of the world. His “Anglo-Saxon” handshake with Tenzing Norgay melted into an exuberant embrace, Tenzing pounding his back.
Tenzing left chocolates as an offering to the gods. Hillary placed a small crucifix from Colonel Hunt. There is no photo of Hillary on the summit — only one of Tenzing, standing proud.
They stayed just fifteen minutes. Hillary scanned the snow for any sign of George Mallory or Andrew Irvine, who had vanished on the north face in 1924.
“With little hope,” he later wrote, “I looked around — but could see nothing.”
Everest refused to reveal its secret.
Then they turned and began their descent. The wind was rising. The monsoon was coming. The first person they met was George Lowe.
“Well, George,” Hillary said, grinning through cracked lips, “we knocked the bastard off.”
The World Erupted
Headlines flashed across continents. Crowds gathered in London and Kathmandu. Queen Elizabeth knighted Hillary. Tenzing met the Dalai Lama.
But politics soon followed.
Indian and Nepalese newspapers demanded that Tenzing be recognized as the first man on the summit. Hunt, Hillary, and Tenzing agreed to obscure the order of ascent to the top.
“There was a very strong political feeling,” Hillary later recalled.
Years later, in his autobiography, Tenzing confirmed what many suspected: Hillary had stepped up first. He was a mountaineer, not a politician. He dismissed the question with grace. “To a mountaineer,” he wrote, “it is of no great consequence who sets foot first.”
And that’s the tell.
The Everest expedition wasn’t just a triumph of bravery or a race to the finish. It was a Thrive Zone — a place where people grew, prospered, and pushed together to achieve what no one else thought possible.
A place where ordinary souls, aligned by good fellowship and trust, rise to extraordinary heights.
After the expedition, Hillary founded the Himalayan Trust in 1960 — to build the practical scaffolding of life for the Sherpa: Children in Phaplu chanting lessons under tin roofs. A rough airstrip at Lukla, bringing doctors where once it took weeks by foot. Bridges swinging over rivers that had once cut off whole villages. Vaccinations delivered across valleys where disease had claimed generations. He sat with villagers under yak-wool blankets by firelight, not as a savior, but as a friend. Listening. Building. Protecting.
Everest had not just forged him. It called him to forge a better life for others. Success, Hillary showed us, isn’t just about chasing your own dream. It’s about where you stand — the place that lifts you.
Afterword: The ghosts Keep Climbing
In 1996, Tenzing Norgay’s son, Jamling, returned to Everest. He stood where his father and Edmund Hillary once triumphed in 1953, a second-generation dreamer chasing a legacy written in ice and wind. But the mountain hadn’t grown kinder.
But as a blizzard roared on May 11, eight climbers, including guide Rob Hall — the first non-Sherpa to summit five times — perished, trapped in the death zone. Above 8,000 meters, where oxygen dips below 356 millibars, the human body falters, consuming air faster than it can replenish. Consciousness fades, decisions falter, and death creeps — avalanches, falls, frostbite, or serac collapse claiming lives. Jamling survived, but Everest’s platea, a public square from the Latin, is no joyous Thrive Zone. It’s a crucible where ambition meets peril.
Before Edmund and Tenzing’s 1953 ascent, at least 10 died chasing the summit: seven porters in a 1922 avalanche, Maurice Wilson from exposure in 1934. Since, over 340 have perished — Earth’s highest peak, at 8,848.86 meters, the deadliest, though not with the highest death rate. In 2014, 16 Sherpas died in a Khumbu Icefall avalanche; in 2015, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake triggered an avalanche, killing 19 at base camp, the most in a single day. The 2023 season claimed 17, from falls to exhaustion. Only 1977, with two summits, and 2020, when Nepal halted permits for COVID-19, saw no deaths.
Babu Chiri Sherpa, who summited 10 times and held a 1999 record of 20 hours atop, fell near Camp II in 2001. In 2019, 11 died in queues, climbers bottlenecked on narrow ridges. Bodies linger, frozen in snow — Hannelore Schmatz’s 1984 recovery cost two Nepalese lives; George Mallory’s 1924 remains surfaced in 1999. Melting glaciers now reveal more, with Nepal recovering four unidentified bodies in 2019, five in 2024, alongside trash.
Everest’s death zone tests even Thrive Zones like Edmund’s 1953 team, where mentors, mates, and metrics defied the odds. Without such a platea, ambition turns deadly, a stark reminder: place shapes triumph, but peril shadows the unprepared.
