Hillary Talks Everest…: Just cruising the web I came across a fascinating interview Outside did with Edmund Hillary in 1999, shortly after the body of George Mallory was discovered on the mountain. Click here to read the full interview, which is entirely refreshing for its modesty, its sanity, and its perspective. Here’s some of the best stuff, though:

A self-described “average bloke,” Sir Edmund Hillary made one of the century’s landmark feats seem properly human and straightforward. His most famous quotation after summiting Mount Everest with Tenzing Norgay on May 29, 1953, isn’t anything pretentious or enigmatic but rather a simple aside to expedition mate George Lowe: “Well, George, we knocked the bastard off.”

He went on to knock off another half-dozen Himalayan peaks, drove a tractor to the South Pole, took jet-boats up the Ganges, and launched the Himalayan Trust, which has built 30 schools, two hospitals, and 12 medical clinics in Nepal’s Khumbu region, and gave proper honors to his climbing partner, Tenzing Norgay, right up until Norgay died 13 years ago….

OUTSIDE:

With the recent discovery of George Leigh Mallory’s body, the burning issue is, once again: Who got to the top of Everest first? Do you mind tackling that question?

SIR EDMUND HILLARY:

No. I don’t find it very hard to answer, to tell you the truth. I have two replies really. One is that I regarded Mallory as a heroic figure in my younger days, and if he had succeeded in getting to the top I think it would be fantastic. However, I have always felt that you haven’t completed the job on the mountain until you get safely to the bottom again, so even if they had discovered that Mallory had been first to the top, I could at least claim I had been the first person to get to the top and then safely down. [Laughs]…

It must have seemed daunting to make an attempt after other great climbers had failed to return. What did you encounter as you approached the summit, and were you and Tenzing confident that you would make it?

When Tenzing and I were climbing the long steep slope to the South Summit, the snow was very soft. It seemed on the dangerous side for a potential avalanche, so I turned to Tenzing and said, “What do you think of it?” He said that he didn’t like it very much, and I said, “Will we carry on by this route?” Tenzing looked for a moment and said, “Just as you like.” So we carried on. [Laughs] There was never any question that we wouldn’t push on, and we found that the conditions did improve, and we finally reached the South Summit.

We looked along the summit ridge to the top of the mountain, and it was quite impressive. In those days, we used our ice axes to cut steps. Nowadays nobody cuts steps because they have much better equipment. But I led down onto the ridge, and I cut steps all the way along it, until about halfway, when we came upon an abrupt section, a rock step. At 29,000 feet, nearly, this looked rather formidable.

But on the right-hand side, I noticed a narrow crack where the ice was breaking away from the rock. It looked just large enough for me to crawl inside, so I wriggled and jammed my way up and reached the top of the step—the one now called the Hillary Step.

It was then for the first time that I knew that we were going to get to the top. Earlier in the expedition, I was never absolutely confident that we would be successful. All I knew was that if we gave it everything we had, then we might have a good chance. But I did have a sort of a sneaking feeling that if anyone got to the top, it could well be me…

What were you feelings when you summited?

I didn’t jump around and throw my arms in the air. My feeling was essentially one of considerable satisfaction.

In many ways, Tenzing was more emotional than I was. In a sort of Western fashion, I reached out my hand to shake his, but that wasn’t good enough for him. He threw his arms around my shoulders and gave me a hug. And I gave him a hug, too.

When we got back to Base Camp, one of the members of the expedition brought out a bottle of rum. We weren’t great drinkers on this trip, but he poured some into our various mugs and we drank it down. Because of the altitude, we were quite affected by it. Someone turned on a radio and picked up the BBC in London just as they were announcing that our British expedition had succeeded in reaching the summit. And for the first time, it struck me. We got to the top. If the BBC announces it, it must be right.

Many journalists at the time asked whether you or Tenzing reached the top first. Did it matter to either of you who first set foot on the summit?

The question of who reaches the top of a mountain first is completely unimportant to the climbers involved. It was only afterwards that the media in Nepal and in India brought up this question. It was a very uncomfortable period for us. The media were constantly harassing us. I knew the answer, of course, as did Tenzing, but we did not regard it as being very important. We finally agreed that we would say that we reached the summit almost together. In actual fact, as I wrote in my book and as Tenzing has written in his book, I was leading at the particular time and did actually set foot on the summit a few meters ahead of Tenzing. But as far as we were concerned, we had reached the summit together.

How did you feel about all of the attention you received after summiting?

I regarded it all as a bit of a joke, to tell you the honest truth. I realized that we had done quite well, but we just climbed a mountain. It didn’t warrant all the reaction that there had been from the world. I’ve tried to maintain that attitude ever since. These challenges are great, and they are very satisfying, but they are certainly not the beginning or end of the world.

Ahh, an era when men were modest…



Hillary and Tenzing: “Okay, what’s next…?”