The monument: Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Everest, the first man to stand on the highest point on earth. May 29, 1953. The photograph — oxygen mask, goggles, ice axe raised — is one of the most famous images of the 20th century. Except it’s not him. It’s Tenzing Norgay. Hillary took the photo of Tenzing at the summit but didn’t ask Tenzing to photograph him. “I didn’t think of it,” he said later. The first man on Everest has no summit photograph because he was too busy taking one of the second man.
He was a beekeeper from Auckland. Not metaphorically — literally a beekeeper. He kept bees before Everest, during his climbing career, and after. When reporters asked him about the summit for the thousandth time, he’d redirect the conversation to beekeeping with the patience of a man who’d discovered that the most famous thing he’d ever done was also the least important.
The Human Underneath
The real Hillary was funnier, messier, and more self-doubting than the monument suggests. He described himself as “a modest man with much to be modest about” — borrowing Churchill’s insult about Attlee and applying it to himself without irony. He was tall, lanky, ungraceful. He climbed with a technique that professional mountaineers described as “agricultural” — brute force and determination rather than elegance.
He was also competitive in a way the modest public image concealed. He and Tenzing were in a race — not against each other, but against a Swiss team that had come within 800 feet of the summit the previous year. The British expedition’s leader, John Hunt, selected Hillary and Tenzing for the summit attempt over other climbers. Hillary understood the politics: a New Zealander and a Sherpa, representing the Commonwealth rather than England. He didn’t mind being useful. He minded being reduced to a symbol.
He and Tenzing were asked, for years, who reached the summit first. They agreed never to answer. “We stepped onto the summit together,” they said, and maintained the story for the rest of their lives. Whether it was true is unknowable. That they both agreed to say it was tells you something about both men.
Why the Human Version Is Better
After Everest, Hillary could have spent the rest of his life giving lectures and accepting honorary degrees. He did some of that. He hated it. What he did instead was spend forty years building schools, hospitals, and bridges in the Khumbu region of Nepal, the homeland of the Sherpa people who had made every Himalayan expedition possible.
He founded the Himalayan Trust in 1960. It built over 30 schools and two hospitals in remote Nepali villages. Hillary raised the money himself, managed the projects himself, and returned to Nepal nearly every year for four decades. He learned Nepali. He considered the Sherpa communities his second home. When asked what he was proudest of, he said the schools. Not the summit. The schools.
The schools were the correction. Everest had been a colonial enterprise — British expedition, Commonwealth climbers, Sherpa labor. The labor was essential and the laborers were invisible. Hillary spent forty years making them visible: educating their children, building infrastructure in their villages, arguing that the people who carried the loads deserved more than wages.
Where Legend and Reality Collide
He was knighted by the Queen and put on the New Zealand five-dollar note. He led an expedition to the South Pole. He was made New Zealand’s High Commissioner to India. He was, by any measure, one of the most honored people in the country’s history.
He also failed spectacularly. His 1977 expedition to jet-boat up the Ganges River was considered a fiasco. His marriage suffered during his long absences in Nepal. His first wife Louise and their daughter Belinda died in a plane crash near Kathmandu in 1975 — on their way to meet him at one of his projects. He carried the guilt of that geography for the rest of his life.
He remarried. He kept building schools. He kept going back to Nepal. The persistence wasn’t heroism. It was something quieter and harder to name: the conviction that the most famous thing he’d done — standing on top of a mountain — was less valuable than the least famous thing he was doing — building a classroom in a village nobody outside Nepal had heard of.
He stood on the summit of Everest and spent the rest of his life trying to make the summit matter less than the schools. The schools won.
Talk to Edmund Hillary — skip Everest. He’d rather talk about the classroom he built last year.