First Person to Summit Mount Everest Dies

Filed in archive Mountain Climbing on January 10, 2008

Sir Edward Hillary, the first man to successfully summit Mount Everest, died today at the age of 88 years old. Hillary suffered a heart attacked and was pronounced died at the Auckland Hospital in New Zealand. "Ed" as the mountain people of nepal called him accomplished his Everest feat on May 29, 1953 with his climbing partner, Tenzing Norgay.

"In reality, he was a colossus," Clark said in a statement. "He was an heroic figure who not only 'knocked off' Everest but lived a life of determination, humility, and generosity."

Hillary's life was marked by grand achievements, high adventure, discovery, excitement - and by his personal humility. He only admitted being the first man atop Everest long after the death of climbing companion Tenzing Norgay.

He had pride in his feat, yet he irreverently referred to it as he returned to base camp as the man who took the first step onto the top of the world's highest peak: "We knocked the bastard off."

The accomplishment as part of a British climbing expedition even added luster to the coronation of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II four days later, and she knighted Hillary as one of her first acts.

But he was more proud of his decades-long campaign to set up schools and health clinics in Nepal, the homeland of Tenzing Norgay, the mountain guide with whom he stood arm in arm on the summit of Everest on May 29, 1953.

He wrote of the pair's final steps to the top of the world: "Another few weary steps and there was nothing above us but the sky. There was no false cornice, no final pinnacle. We were standing together on the summit. There was enough space for about six people. We had conquered Everest.

"Awe, wonder, humility, pride, exaltation - these surely ought to be the confused emotions of the first men to stand on the highest peak on Earth, after so many others had failed," Hillary noted.