RIP Edmund Hillary

the urge to botw that article was enormous

;_;

he's on our five dollar bill

Fuck fuck fuck :( :( :(

Spent a good part of my childhood reading his climbing stories and articles.

Hero.

There's a great bit in all the various Lord of the Rings film publications and documentaries talking about how Hillary visited a day of filming with Peter Jackson and various others, and how Andy Serkis was completely dumbstruck and nervous as he's a mountain climber himself, and like Elvis had Hillary as one of his childhood heroes. He said one of his best moments was being able to ask Hillary about the best way to go around climbing Mt. Cook -- I always liked that. RIP.

From the end of the NY Times piece:

“I’ve always hated the danger part of climbing, and it’s great to come down again because it’s safe,” he said in 1977. “But there is something about building up a comradeship — that I still believe is the greatest of all feats — and sharing in the dangers with your company of peers. It’s the intense effort, the giving of everything you’ve got. It’s really a very pleasant sensation.”

All you really need to know to judge what kind of man he was, is that he insisted that he and Tenzing Norgay ascend the last few paces to the summit of Everest holding hands, in order to share equally in the fame of being "the first man to climb Everest". He was a good'un.

Sir Edmund became the first person to stand on Mt Everest, the world's highest peak...

BTW, as you can see how well the western press has honored his equal status with Tenzing Norgay.

Times got it right

I like this bit from the Telegraph obit

Hillary remained determinedly low-key. "Having paid my respects to the highest mountain in the world," he recalled 46 years later in his autobiography View from the Summit (1999), "I had no choice but to urinate on it." Though he took Tenzing's photograph he did not bother to organise one of himself. And when he met Lowe at Camp VIII on the way down, he delivered the great news in a laconic fashion deemed too shocking for publication at that epoch: "Well, George, we knocked the bastard off."