Staff Contributors
Guest Contributors
Gristmill

The other Hillary

Everest climber dead at 88

Posted by Katharine Wroth at 1:32 PM on 11 Jan 2008

Read more about: heroes

Things I did not know about Sir Edmund Hillary:

  1. He was still alive.
  2. He was only 88 when he died.
  3. Which means when he became the first person to reach the top of Everest, he was just a year older than I am now. Better get cracking.
  4. He once won an honor from Queen Elizabeth known as the Order of the Garter. Oh Liz, you saucy thing!

May he rest in peace.

his most impressive accomplishment:

Being a world-famous adventurer, and yet dying of old age.

Another thing...

...Hillary reached the summit of Everest the same day that Queen Elizabeth was coronated.  Don't have a reference for this, but heard it on CBC.

Andrew Eisenberg
The gateway project is wrong---http://www.livableregion.ca
and also...

His day job was as a bee keeper in New Zealand, where he also participated in efforts to preserve the country's endemic species and biodiversity.  Great guy, all in all- will be missed by the climbing and mountaineering world.

a very sweet man

Hillary was a great humanitarian.  He loved the Sherpas, and all the people of Nepal, and did a great deal for them by promoting the construction of schools and medical facilities.

He is said to have protested bitterly the commercialization of alpinism on Everest.  Whether that had more to do with disgust at the pollution, or with a sense of violation of a mountainclimber's idealism, I do not know.

I think it was E.O. Wilson who recently shared an amusing memory with Bill Moyers of a visit to Edmund Hillary, not many years ago, at his home in a neighborhood high on a hill overlooking Wellington.  Wilson's driver drove him up the road to the house, and Hillary, on greeting him, kept exclaiming how frightfully high that hill was, and how he could never drive on that road without trembling.

The moral of which is, Everything is relative, even within one and the same person.  Or, after Heracleitus, You cannot step into the same river twice.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

Conquest & coronation

Hillary was a very humble man.   IIRC, Neither he or his Sherpa climbing partner Tenzing would say who reached the summit first.  Only that they walked up together and that neither one noticed at the time.  Nice.  

The Everest expedition included a newspaperman.  He realized the goal might be achieved in time for Elizabeth's coronation.  The two men reached the summit on May 29 but it took time for word of it to get off the mountain and out.  The reporter hired runners and a driver to speed to Katmandu.  A telegram with a code phrase was sent to Britain.  His paper scooped the story and portrayed it as a coronation gift to Elizabeth.

According to wiki, there was a 2nd climb team that came within 300 feet of the summit two days earlier, but turned back due to exhaustion.  

You are not logged in. Thus, you cannot post a comment. If you have an account, log in. If you don't have an account, well, by all means go make one! Meet you back here in five.
sign in
Search Gristmill
Subscribe
  • subscribe via RSSStay updated with the Gristmill RSS feed.
  • Add to My Yahoo!
  • Subscribe with Bloglines
  • Subscribe in NewsGator Online
  • Subscribe in Netvibes
  • Subscribe in Google
Using Gristmill
  • What is Gristmill?
  • Posting rules
The comments of Gristmill users reflect the opinions of those individuals only, and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoints of Grist, its staff, its board members, their psychotherapists, or their aestheticians. Got it?

Gristmill is powered by Scoop.

ADVERTISING POLICY


About Grist | Support Grist | Job Board | Archives | Grist by Email | RSS | Podcast
Gristmill Blog | In the News | Ask Umbra | Muckraker | Victual Reality | 'Tis the Season | The Grist List | The Bottom Line



Grist: Environmental News and Commentary
a beacon in the smog (tm) ©2008. Grist Magazine, Inc. All rights reserved. Gloom and doom with a sense of humor®.
Webmaster | Sitemap | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Trademarks