Sir Edmund Hillary, first to conquer Everest, dies

Sir Edmund Hillary, a former beekeeper who, with his Sherpa guide, became the first man known to conquer the world's tallest peak, died of a heart attack early today. He was 88.

Sir Edmund's 29,035-foot climb up Mount Everest in 1953 was achieved amid subzero temperatures, unpredictable winds and daunting crevasses, and with a grade of equipment now considered primitive. The ascent ended a decades-long quest undertaken by countless people to test human endurance. In the 1920s, English adventurer George Mallory memorably quipped that he wanted to climb Everest "because it's there" — and perished trying.

On May 29, 1953, the successful ascent and return by Sir Edmund and Tenzing Norgay in a team led by British army Col. John Hunt made them instant celebrities.

The climbers were heralded as pioneers in the tradition of explorer Roald Amundsen, who reached the South Pole in 1911, and transatlantic aviator Charles Lindbergh.

The newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II knighted the explorer. His triumph over Everest also came to symbolize for many Britons a postwar era of prosperity, even as its empire was shrinking.

Despite his heroics, Sir Edmund had a reputation for humbleness and spent most of his life working to aid the impoverished people of Nepal. He founded the Himalayan Trust in 1961, saying his mission was to prevent the native Sherpas, a yak-herding people, from "becoming peons" catering to Western tourists.

In more than five decades since the first successful assault on what climbers call the top of the world, more than 3,000 people, including Sir Edmund's son, Peter, and Norgay's son, Jamling, have reached the summit. More than 200 have died in the attempt, eight of them in a 1996 expedition that was savaged by a blizzard and chronicled in Jon Krakauer's best-seller, "Into Thin Air."

Today, Everest expeditions are almost commonplace. On a single day in 2003, 118 people were reported to have made it. That year, Sir Edmund added his voice to veteran climbers who have criticized the "commercialism" and "circus atmosphere" surrounding the climb.

Port Townsend mountaineer Jim Whittaker, an Everest icon himself, still remembers the first time he met "Sir Ed." It was in 1963, after Whittaker became the first American to reach the summit.

"When we came down he was down there, just below base camp, off the trail. He'd been working in the next valley, starting a school," Whittaker said. "I knew what he looked like; he didn't need to introduce himself, but he still did. He came rambling up, stuck out his hand and said, 'Nice going, you guys.' He was a great, modest, gracious guy with no ego — whether you had never climbed before, or were a fellow mountaineer and jealous as hell."

When Seattle-area mountaineer Ed Viesturs, the first American to reach the summit of all 14 of the world's 8,000-meter peaks without bottled oxygen, was growing up in Illinois, he idolized the "golden era" of Himalayan mountaineering. He read and reread accounts of Sir Edmund's climb, and had a poster of Whittaker on his wall.

Viesturs, who has climbed Everest six times, said Sir Edmund set the ethic and the tone for those who followed.

"He didn't thump his chest. He just said, 'I was in the right place at the right time,' and 'It was because of my team.' Then, for the remainder of his career, he took all that fame and notoriety and turned it into this altruistic endeavor, to give back to the people of Nepal," Viesturs said.

Viesturs met Sir Edmund through the American Himalayan Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to helping the people and landscape of the Everest region. Whittaker, who served with Sir Edmund as a board member and last saw him about 18 months ago, had been thinking of paying him a visit in New Zealand.

"What a beautiful human being," he said.

Though the Everest climb brought Sir Edmund his most enduring fame, he went on to adventures in India and Antarctica and became a globe-trotting advocate of environmentalism and conservation.

In 1958, via snow tractor, he led the first overland team to reach the South Pole in generations. Two years later, his fruitless yeti-searching excursion in Tibet led him to declare the Abominable Snowman a "mythological creature, probably based on rare sightings of the Tibetan blue bear."

Born Edmund Percival Hillary in Auckland, New Zealand, on July 20, 1919, he was raised south of the city in Tuakau. His father, a journalist-turned-beekeeper, brought his family into a fringe Christian movement called Radiant Living.

Sir Edmund described a strict upbringing that led to a lonely childhood and fostered a desire for escape. Mountain climbing, which he discovered at 16 on a school trip to New Zealand's Mount Ruapehu volcano, provided the freedom he sought.

During World War II, he served as a navigator in the Royal New Zealand Air Force. After seeing combat in the Solomon Islands, he returned to beekeeping with his brother, a trade he continued until 1970. He began to formalize his mountain-hiking skills in the off-season to combat his dread of complacency.

He scaled New Zealand's peaks before trying the Swiss Alps in 1950. The next year, he teamed with Eric Shipton, a revered English climber, to help plan a route atop Everest via Nepal after communist China had invaded Tibet.

"We were the first to realize there was a potential route up Everest from the south side," Hillary later said of the reconnaissance mission.

Hillary and Norgay led a team that found a path over treacherous crevasses, notably the Khumbu Icefall, using nylon ropes, oxygen cylinders, metal-spiked climbing irons for their boots and ice axes minus the curve added in later years to aid climbing.

At 29,000 feet, they encountered a 40-foot wall of rock, which Hillary surmounted when a large ice cornice broke away and he spotted a narrow crack running upward.

Norgay followed, and it was a relatively easy route from there to the summit.

Sir Edmund left a cross in the snow, at the urging of a priest he had met, and Norgay left some candy as an offering to the gods.

"The whole world around us lay spread out like a giant relief map," Sir Edmund later said. "I am a lucky man. I have had a dream and it has come true, and that is not a thing that happens often to men."

In later years, a debate emerged about whether Sir Edmund or Norgay, who died in 1986, was the first to reach the summit.

Sir Edmund told People magazine in 1999: "We agreed we would say we reached it 'almost together,' when in fact I reached it a few paces ahead of him."

Sir Edmund wrote many books about his travels, including "High Adventure" (1955), about the scaling of Everest, and "Nothing Venture, Nothing Win" (1975), a memoir.

In the late 1980s, he served as his country's ambassador to India, Nepal and Bangladesh.

His first wife, Louise Rose Hillary, and their teenage daughter, Belinda, died in a plane crash near Katmandu, Nepal, in 1975.

He is survived by his second wife, June Mulgrew, and two children from his first marriage, Peter and Sarah.

Seattle Times staff reporter Craig Welch contributed to this report. Material from The New York Times and The Associated Press is included.

The information in this article, originally published January 11, 2008, was corrected January 12, 2008. Sir Edmund Hillary, who with his Sherpa guide was the first climber known to conquer Mount Everest, died Jan. 11, 2008. A previous version of the story gave the wrong year.