Edmund Hillary

Sir Edmund Percival Hillary — known simply as "Ed" to everyone who loved him — was one of the most extraordinary men of the twentieth century, yet he spent a lifetime insisting he was nothing more than an ordinary beekeeper from New Zealand. Born on 20 July 1919 in Auckland to Percy and Gertrude Hillary, he grew up in the small rural settlement of Tuakau, a self-described "small and rather lonely child" who found his place in the world the moment he first set eyes on snow-covered mountains during a school ski trip to Mount Ruapehu at age sixteen. After two years at Auckland University College, Hillary joined his father and brother Rex in the family beekeeping business in 1938 — a partnership that would endure for years and that he never abandoned in spirit. He served with distinction as a navigator with the Royal New Zealand Air Force during World War II, flying Catalina flying boats in the Pacific Theatre from 1943 to 1945. A serious boating accident left him with significant burns, but it did not diminish his ambition. He returned from the war hungry for peaks. His ascent through the climbing world was swift. In 1951 and 1952, he joined British reconnaissance expeditions to the Himalayas, testing himself against the roof of the world. Then, on 29 May 1953, at 11:30 in the morning, Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay stepped onto the summit of Mount Everest — 8,848 metres above the sea — and changed history forever. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II within days. Rather than rest on the pinnacle of fame, Hillary kept pushing. In 1958, he reached the South Pole overland by tractor, leading the New Zealand arm of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition and becoming the first person to stand at both poles and Everest's summit. In 1977, he explored the Ganges from source to sea by jet boat. But the work that mattered most to him was quieter and warmer than any summit. Troubled by the poverty he witnessed in Nepal's Khumbu region, he founded the Himalayan Trust in 1960 and spent the next fifty years building schools, hospitals, clinics, airstrips, and bridges for the Sherpa people — over twenty-six schools and two hospitals among them. "I think the most worthwhile things I've done," he once said, "have not been on the mountains or in the Antarctic, but doing projects with my friends, the Sherpa people." He served as New Zealand's High Commissioner to India, Nepal, and Bangladesh from 1985 to 1988, and in 1992 became the first living New Zealander to appear on currency — the five-dollar note. Time magazine counted him among the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. He kept his number in the Auckland phone book until the end. Sir Edmund Hillary died of heart failure on 11 January 2008 at Auckland City Hospital, aged 88, and was given a state funeral on 22 January. His ashes were scattered on the Hauraki Gulf. He is remembered not only for conquering the world's highest mountain, but for choosing, again and again, to lift others up.