Thig Lyfe
01-10-2008, 05:47 PM
I'm in absolute shock.
This has to change things.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/world/asia/11cnd-hillary.html?hp
Sir Edmund Hillary, the lanky New Zealand mountaineer and explorer who with Tenzing Norgay, his Sherpa guide, won worldwide acclaim in 1953 by becoming the first to scale the 29,035-foot summit of Mount Everest, the world’s tallest peak, has died, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark announced Friday in Wellington.
He was 88.
In the annals of great heroic exploits, the conquest of Mount Everest by Sir Edmund and Mr. Torgay ranks with the first trek to the South Pole by Roald Amundsen in 1911 and the first nonstop trans-Atlantic flight by Charles A. Lindbergh in 1927.
By 1953, nearly a century after British surveyors had established that the Himalayan peak on the Nepal-Tibet border was the highest point on earth, many climbers considered the mountain all but unconquerable. The summit was 5 ½ vertical miles above sea level (up where today’s jets fly): an otherworldly place of yawning crevasses and 100-mile-an-hour winds, of perpetual cold and air so thin that the human brain and lungs do not function properly.
Numerous Everest expeditions had failed, and dozens of experienced mountaineers, including many Sherpas, the Nepalese people famed as climbers, had been killed — buried in avalanches or lost and frozen in sudden storms that roared over the dizzying escarpments. One who vanished, in 1924, was George Leigh Mallory, known for snapping when asked why climb Everest, “Because it is there!” His body was found in the ice 75 years later, in 1999, about 2,000 feet below the summit.
Sir Edmund and Mr. Norgay were part of a Royal Geographical Society-Alpine Club expedition led by Col. Henry Cecil John Hunt — a siege group that included a dozen climbers, 35 Sherpa guides and 350 porters carrying 18 tons of food and equipment. Their route was the treacherous South Tor, facing toward Nepal.
After a series of climbs by coordinated teams to establish ever-higher camps on the icy slopes and perilous rock ledges, Tom Bourdillon and Dr. Charles Evans were the first team to attempt the summit, but gave up at 28,720 feet — 315 feet from the top — beaten back by exhaustion, a storm that shrouded them in ice and oxygen-tank failures.
Sir Edmund, then 33, and Mr. Norgay, 39, made the next assault. They first established a bivouac at 27,900 feet on a rock ledge six feet wide and canted at a 30-degree angle. There, holding their tent against a howling gale as the temperatures plunged to 30 degrees below zero, they spent the night.
At 6:30 A.M. on May 29, 1953, cheered by clearing skies, they began the final attack. Carrying enough oxygen for seven hours and counting on picking up two partly filled tanks left by Dr. Evans and Mr. Bourdillon, they moved out. Roped together, cutting toe-holds with their ice axes, first one man leading and then the other, they inched up a steep, knife-edged ridge southeast of the summit.
Halfway up, Sir Edmund recalled in “High Adventure” (1955, Oxford University Press), they discovered soft snow under them. “Immediately I realized we were on dangerous ground,” he said. “Suddenly, with a dull breaking noise, an area of crust all around me about six feet in diameter broke off.” He slid backward 20 or 30 feet before regaining a hold. “It was a nasty shock,” he said. “I could look down 10,000 feet between my legs.”
Farther up, they encountered what was later named the Hillary Step — a sheer face of rock and ice 40 feet high that Sir Edmund called “the most formidable obstacle on the ridge.” But they found a vertical crack and managed to climb it by bracing feet against one side and backs against the other. The last few yards to the summit were relatively easy.
“As I chipped steps, I wondered how long we could keep it up,” Sir Edmund said. “Then I realized that the ridge, instead of rising ahead, now dropped sharply away. I looked upward to see a narrow ridge running up to a sharp point. A few more whacks of the ice axe and we stood on the summit.”
The vast panorama of the Himalayas lay before them: fleecy clouds and the pastel shades of Tibet to the north, and in all directions sweeping ranks of jagged mountains, cloud-filled valleys, great natural amphitheaters of snow and rock, and the glittering Kangshung Glacier 10,000 feet below. It was a scene Sir Hillary would recollect many times in lectures and quiet conversations.
“The whole world around us lay spread out like a giant relief map,” he told one interviewer. “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.”
There was a modest celebration. “We shook hands and then, casting Anglo-Saxon formalities aside, we thumped each other on the back until forced to stop from lack of breath,” Sir Edmund remembered. They took photographs of one another holding flags, and of the surrounding ridges and the wide views.
They left a crucifix for Colonel Hunt, the expedition leader, and Mr. Norgay, a devout Buddhist, buried some biscuits and chocolate as an offering to the gods of Everest. Then they ate a mint cake, strapped on their oxygen tanks and began the climb down.
Four days later, the news was flashed around the world as a coronation gift of sorts to Queen Elizabeth II, who was crowned in Westminster Abbey on June 2.
“We tuned into the BBC for a description of the Queen’s Coronation, and to our great excitement heard the announcement that Everest had been climbed,” Sir Edmund recalled in his autobiography, “Nothing Venture, Nothing Win” (1975, Hodder & Stoughton).
The Queen promptly made Edmund Hillary a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, while Mr. Norgay received the George Medal of Britain, the Star of Nepal from King Tribhuvan and other honors from India, France, Italy, the Soviet Union and the United States.
Worldwide heroes overnight, they were greeted by huge crowds in India and London. Their stories were told and retold. A controversy over whether Sir Edmund or Mr. Norgay had been first to stand on the summit threatened briefly to mar the celebrations, but Colonel Hunt settled the issue by declaring: “They reached it together, as a team.” Foreshadowed everywhere by the triumph, Sir Edmund continued his life of adventure for many years, climbing mountains and once crossing the Antarctic Continent, lecturing and making public appearances, serving as New Zealand’s High Commissioner, or ambassador, to India, Bangladesh and Nepal from 1985 to 1988.
Like Sir Edmund, Mr. Norgay, whose name was sometimes rendered Norkay, never again attempted to climb Everest. Mr. Norgay became an adviser to the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute of India and an inspiration to generations of climbers. Though often sought by visitors, he lived quietly in a three-story villa with his wife and six children in Darjeeling, where he died in 1986.
In 2003, on the 50th anniversary of the historic ascent, an occasion marked by banquets and other festivities, Sir Edmund recalled: “After the expedition, Tenzing and I spent quite a lot of time together, but we never, ever, talked about the climb up Everest. I don’t know why. We talked about our families; talked about the world and its problems; talked about just about everything. But we never ever once talked about Everest.”
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 Mr. Torgay’s son, Jamling, have reached the summit of Everest, while more than 200 have died in the attempt, 8 of them in a 1996 expedition that was savaged by a blizzard and chronicled in Jon Krakauer’s best-selling book “Into Thin Air” (Villard Books, 1997).
Over the years, some veteran climbers have criticized the “commercialism” and “circus atmosphere” surrounding Everest climbing. Sir Edmund added his voice to the lament in 2003 as crowds gathered for the 50th anniversary celebrations in Katmandu, Nepal.
“I’m not very happy about the future of Everest,” he said in an interview. “Yesterday there were 1,000 people there and some 500 tents. There was a booze place for drinks. Sitting around in a big base camp and knocking back cans of beer — I do not particularly view that as mountaineering.” Like Lindbergh, Sir Edmund was a gangling, unpretentious and improbable hero, uncomfortable at first with the abrupt passage from obscurity to dazzling fame. Tough, rawboned, 6 feet 5 inches tall, with a long leathery and wrinkled face, he was an intelligent but unsophisticated man with tigerish confidence on a mountain but little taste for formal social doings.
For many years after the Everest climb, he continued to list his occupation as beekeeper — his father’s pursuit — and he preferred to be known as Ed. But as a mountaineer and adventurer, his exploits were impressive. He led several expeditions into the Himalayas, scaling many peaks around Everest in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
He also led a highly publicized but unsuccessful search for the Abominable Snowman in 1960. “I am inclined to think that the realm of mythology is where the Yeti rightly belongs,” Sir Edmund wrote after weeks of trekking and investigation showed that footprints and sightings all had mundane explanations and relics of supposed Yeti skin and scalp actually came from bears and antelopes.
During the Southern Hemisphere summer of 1957-58 a British Commonwealth team that included Sir Edmund crossed the Antarctic Continent on an overland route that traversed the South Pole. No one had attained the South Pole since Amundsen in 1911, and no one had ever crossed Antarctica.
The expedition, using tractors, was led by Sir Vivian Fuchs, but Sir Edmund and a party of New Zealanders — ostensibly a group laying supply depots for Sir Vivian — made the dash over the pole. There was debate afterward about credit, but a book by Sir Edmund and Sir Vivian belittled differences and stressed the feat of crossing Antarctica, perhaps the last adventurer’s trek on the planet.
In 1985, Sir Edmund, accompanied by Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon, flew a twin-engine ski plane over the Arctic and landed at the North Pole. He thus became the first to stand at both poles and on the summit of Everest.
Sir Edmund wrote or co-authored 13 books, including “No Latitude for Error,” (1961, Hodder & Stoughton), about the Antarctic experience. Besides writing and lecturing, he formed a foundation, the Sir Edmund Hillary Himalayan Trust, that raised millions and built more than 30 schools, a dozen clinics, two hospitals, a couple of airfields, and numerous foot bridges, water pipelines and other facilities for the Sherpa villages in Nepal. In 2003, Nepal conferred honorary citizenship upon Sir Edmund, the first foreign national to receive that distinction.
For many years, Sir Edmund also was president of New Zealand’s Peace Corps, and an important voice in his country’s conservation efforts. He never ran for public office, but was a frequent critic of New Zealand’s Government, calling for antipollution and other measures to improve the quality of life.
A footnote to the lore of Everest was added in 1999. Based on precise measurements using global positioning system equipment, an expedition sponsored by the National Geographic Society and others revised the elevation of the summit upward by 7 feet, to 29,035 from 29,028. The previously accepted elevation had been determined in a 1954 survey that averaged line-of-sight measurements from a dozen stations around the mountain that differed by 17 feet.
Edmund Percival Hillary was born on July 20, 1919, in Tuakau, near Auckland, the son of Percival Augustus Hillary and Gertrude Clark Hillary. His father, originally a journalist, was a commercial beekeeper, and Edmund and a younger brother, Rexford, worked on the family farm.
Edmund loved climbing, and at the age of 16 spent a weekend on Mount Ruapehu, a 9,175-foot dormant volcano in New Zealand. Each year after that he climbed New Zealand’s Southern Alps. He attended public schools in Auckland and Auckland University, and served in the Royal New Zealand Air Force as a navigator during World War II.
After the war he resumed climbing seriously, taking instruction from leading alpinists and specializing in ice-climbing techniques. In 1950, he climbed in the Swiss Alps and got to know British mountaineers with Himalayan experience. The next year he joined a New Zealand expedition and climbed peaks of more than 20,000 feet in Nepal.
Sir Eric Shipton, the veteran Himalayan climber, took him on an expedition to reconnoiter the south face of Everest. Sir Edmund performed so well that he was invited to join the 1952 British expedition to Cho Oyu, which tested high-altitude equipment. As his reputation grew, Colonel Hunt chose him as a member of the 1953 expedition that conquered Everest.
Four months after Everest, Sir Edmund married Louise Mary Rose, the daughter of a mountain climber. They had three children, Peter, Sarah and Belinda. In 1975, Lady Louise and Belinda were killed when their small plane crashed on takeoff from Katmandu Airport; they were flying to an airstrip near Everest where Sir Edmund was supervising the construction of schools and hospitals.
In 1979, Sir Edmund was to have been commentator on an Air New Zealand sightseeing flight over the Antarctic, but had to withdraw because of a schedule conflict. His friend and fellow mountaineer Peter Mulgrew took his place. In one of the worst aviation accidents in history, the plane crashed on Mount Erebus, a volcano on Ross Island in McMurdo Sound, and all 257 aboard were killed. Sir Edmund married June Mulgrew, his friend’s widow, in 1989.
Besides Lady June, according to the Associated Press, Sir Edmund is survived by his son Peter and his daughter Sarah.
Besides his 1953 knighthood, Sir Edmund was named a Knight of the Order of the Garter by Queen Elizabeth II in 1995, and received many other awards, including the Star of Nepal and the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. Although featured in books, magazines and newspapers, on postage stamps and television, and seen and heard by millions, he remained a modest man, friends said.
“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.”
This has to change things.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/world/asia/11cnd-hillary.html?hp
Sir Edmund Hillary, the lanky New Zealand mountaineer and explorer who with Tenzing Norgay, his Sherpa guide, won worldwide acclaim in 1953 by becoming the first to scale the 29,035-foot summit of Mount Everest, the world’s tallest peak, has died, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark announced Friday in Wellington.
He was 88.
In the annals of great heroic exploits, the conquest of Mount Everest by Sir Edmund and Mr. Torgay ranks with the first trek to the South Pole by Roald Amundsen in 1911 and the first nonstop trans-Atlantic flight by Charles A. Lindbergh in 1927.
By 1953, nearly a century after British surveyors had established that the Himalayan peak on the Nepal-Tibet border was the highest point on earth, many climbers considered the mountain all but unconquerable. The summit was 5 ½ vertical miles above sea level (up where today’s jets fly): an otherworldly place of yawning crevasses and 100-mile-an-hour winds, of perpetual cold and air so thin that the human brain and lungs do not function properly.
Numerous Everest expeditions had failed, and dozens of experienced mountaineers, including many Sherpas, the Nepalese people famed as climbers, had been killed — buried in avalanches or lost and frozen in sudden storms that roared over the dizzying escarpments. One who vanished, in 1924, was George Leigh Mallory, known for snapping when asked why climb Everest, “Because it is there!” His body was found in the ice 75 years later, in 1999, about 2,000 feet below the summit.
Sir Edmund and Mr. Norgay were part of a Royal Geographical Society-Alpine Club expedition led by Col. Henry Cecil John Hunt — a siege group that included a dozen climbers, 35 Sherpa guides and 350 porters carrying 18 tons of food and equipment. Their route was the treacherous South Tor, facing toward Nepal.
After a series of climbs by coordinated teams to establish ever-higher camps on the icy slopes and perilous rock ledges, Tom Bourdillon and Dr. Charles Evans were the first team to attempt the summit, but gave up at 28,720 feet — 315 feet from the top — beaten back by exhaustion, a storm that shrouded them in ice and oxygen-tank failures.
Sir Edmund, then 33, and Mr. Norgay, 39, made the next assault. They first established a bivouac at 27,900 feet on a rock ledge six feet wide and canted at a 30-degree angle. There, holding their tent against a howling gale as the temperatures plunged to 30 degrees below zero, they spent the night.
At 6:30 A.M. on May 29, 1953, cheered by clearing skies, they began the final attack. Carrying enough oxygen for seven hours and counting on picking up two partly filled tanks left by Dr. Evans and Mr. Bourdillon, they moved out. Roped together, cutting toe-holds with their ice axes, first one man leading and then the other, they inched up a steep, knife-edged ridge southeast of the summit.
Halfway up, Sir Edmund recalled in “High Adventure” (1955, Oxford University Press), they discovered soft snow under them. “Immediately I realized we were on dangerous ground,” he said. “Suddenly, with a dull breaking noise, an area of crust all around me about six feet in diameter broke off.” He slid backward 20 or 30 feet before regaining a hold. “It was a nasty shock,” he said. “I could look down 10,000 feet between my legs.”
Farther up, they encountered what was later named the Hillary Step — a sheer face of rock and ice 40 feet high that Sir Edmund called “the most formidable obstacle on the ridge.” But they found a vertical crack and managed to climb it by bracing feet against one side and backs against the other. The last few yards to the summit were relatively easy.
“As I chipped steps, I wondered how long we could keep it up,” Sir Edmund said. “Then I realized that the ridge, instead of rising ahead, now dropped sharply away. I looked upward to see a narrow ridge running up to a sharp point. A few more whacks of the ice axe and we stood on the summit.”
The vast panorama of the Himalayas lay before them: fleecy clouds and the pastel shades of Tibet to the north, and in all directions sweeping ranks of jagged mountains, cloud-filled valleys, great natural amphitheaters of snow and rock, and the glittering Kangshung Glacier 10,000 feet below. It was a scene Sir Hillary would recollect many times in lectures and quiet conversations.
“The whole world around us lay spread out like a giant relief map,” he told one interviewer. “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.”
There was a modest celebration. “We shook hands and then, casting Anglo-Saxon formalities aside, we thumped each other on the back until forced to stop from lack of breath,” Sir Edmund remembered. They took photographs of one another holding flags, and of the surrounding ridges and the wide views.
They left a crucifix for Colonel Hunt, the expedition leader, and Mr. Norgay, a devout Buddhist, buried some biscuits and chocolate as an offering to the gods of Everest. Then they ate a mint cake, strapped on their oxygen tanks and began the climb down.
Four days later, the news was flashed around the world as a coronation gift of sorts to Queen Elizabeth II, who was crowned in Westminster Abbey on June 2.
“We tuned into the BBC for a description of the Queen’s Coronation, and to our great excitement heard the announcement that Everest had been climbed,” Sir Edmund recalled in his autobiography, “Nothing Venture, Nothing Win” (1975, Hodder & Stoughton).
The Queen promptly made Edmund Hillary a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, while Mr. Norgay received the George Medal of Britain, the Star of Nepal from King Tribhuvan and other honors from India, France, Italy, the Soviet Union and the United States.
Worldwide heroes overnight, they were greeted by huge crowds in India and London. Their stories were told and retold. A controversy over whether Sir Edmund or Mr. Norgay had been first to stand on the summit threatened briefly to mar the celebrations, but Colonel Hunt settled the issue by declaring: “They reached it together, as a team.” Foreshadowed everywhere by the triumph, Sir Edmund continued his life of adventure for many years, climbing mountains and once crossing the Antarctic Continent, lecturing and making public appearances, serving as New Zealand’s High Commissioner, or ambassador, to India, Bangladesh and Nepal from 1985 to 1988.
Like Sir Edmund, Mr. Norgay, whose name was sometimes rendered Norkay, never again attempted to climb Everest. Mr. Norgay became an adviser to the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute of India and an inspiration to generations of climbers. Though often sought by visitors, he lived quietly in a three-story villa with his wife and six children in Darjeeling, where he died in 1986.
In 2003, on the 50th anniversary of the historic ascent, an occasion marked by banquets and other festivities, Sir Edmund recalled: “After the expedition, Tenzing and I spent quite a lot of time together, but we never, ever, talked about the climb up Everest. I don’t know why. We talked about our families; talked about the world and its problems; talked about just about everything. But we never ever once talked about Everest.”
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 Mr. Torgay’s son, Jamling, have reached the summit of Everest, while more than 200 have died in the attempt, 8 of them in a 1996 expedition that was savaged by a blizzard and chronicled in Jon Krakauer’s best-selling book “Into Thin Air” (Villard Books, 1997).
Over the years, some veteran climbers have criticized the “commercialism” and “circus atmosphere” surrounding Everest climbing. Sir Edmund added his voice to the lament in 2003 as crowds gathered for the 50th anniversary celebrations in Katmandu, Nepal.
“I’m not very happy about the future of Everest,” he said in an interview. “Yesterday there were 1,000 people there and some 500 tents. There was a booze place for drinks. Sitting around in a big base camp and knocking back cans of beer — I do not particularly view that as mountaineering.” Like Lindbergh, Sir Edmund was a gangling, unpretentious and improbable hero, uncomfortable at first with the abrupt passage from obscurity to dazzling fame. Tough, rawboned, 6 feet 5 inches tall, with a long leathery and wrinkled face, he was an intelligent but unsophisticated man with tigerish confidence on a mountain but little taste for formal social doings.
For many years after the Everest climb, he continued to list his occupation as beekeeper — his father’s pursuit — and he preferred to be known as Ed. But as a mountaineer and adventurer, his exploits were impressive. He led several expeditions into the Himalayas, scaling many peaks around Everest in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
He also led a highly publicized but unsuccessful search for the Abominable Snowman in 1960. “I am inclined to think that the realm of mythology is where the Yeti rightly belongs,” Sir Edmund wrote after weeks of trekking and investigation showed that footprints and sightings all had mundane explanations and relics of supposed Yeti skin and scalp actually came from bears and antelopes.
During the Southern Hemisphere summer of 1957-58 a British Commonwealth team that included Sir Edmund crossed the Antarctic Continent on an overland route that traversed the South Pole. No one had attained the South Pole since Amundsen in 1911, and no one had ever crossed Antarctica.
The expedition, using tractors, was led by Sir Vivian Fuchs, but Sir Edmund and a party of New Zealanders — ostensibly a group laying supply depots for Sir Vivian — made the dash over the pole. There was debate afterward about credit, but a book by Sir Edmund and Sir Vivian belittled differences and stressed the feat of crossing Antarctica, perhaps the last adventurer’s trek on the planet.
In 1985, Sir Edmund, accompanied by Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon, flew a twin-engine ski plane over the Arctic and landed at the North Pole. He thus became the first to stand at both poles and on the summit of Everest.
Sir Edmund wrote or co-authored 13 books, including “No Latitude for Error,” (1961, Hodder & Stoughton), about the Antarctic experience. Besides writing and lecturing, he formed a foundation, the Sir Edmund Hillary Himalayan Trust, that raised millions and built more than 30 schools, a dozen clinics, two hospitals, a couple of airfields, and numerous foot bridges, water pipelines and other facilities for the Sherpa villages in Nepal. In 2003, Nepal conferred honorary citizenship upon Sir Edmund, the first foreign national to receive that distinction.
For many years, Sir Edmund also was president of New Zealand’s Peace Corps, and an important voice in his country’s conservation efforts. He never ran for public office, but was a frequent critic of New Zealand’s Government, calling for antipollution and other measures to improve the quality of life.
A footnote to the lore of Everest was added in 1999. Based on precise measurements using global positioning system equipment, an expedition sponsored by the National Geographic Society and others revised the elevation of the summit upward by 7 feet, to 29,035 from 29,028. The previously accepted elevation had been determined in a 1954 survey that averaged line-of-sight measurements from a dozen stations around the mountain that differed by 17 feet.
Edmund Percival Hillary was born on July 20, 1919, in Tuakau, near Auckland, the son of Percival Augustus Hillary and Gertrude Clark Hillary. His father, originally a journalist, was a commercial beekeeper, and Edmund and a younger brother, Rexford, worked on the family farm.
Edmund loved climbing, and at the age of 16 spent a weekend on Mount Ruapehu, a 9,175-foot dormant volcano in New Zealand. Each year after that he climbed New Zealand’s Southern Alps. He attended public schools in Auckland and Auckland University, and served in the Royal New Zealand Air Force as a navigator during World War II.
After the war he resumed climbing seriously, taking instruction from leading alpinists and specializing in ice-climbing techniques. In 1950, he climbed in the Swiss Alps and got to know British mountaineers with Himalayan experience. The next year he joined a New Zealand expedition and climbed peaks of more than 20,000 feet in Nepal.
Sir Eric Shipton, the veteran Himalayan climber, took him on an expedition to reconnoiter the south face of Everest. Sir Edmund performed so well that he was invited to join the 1952 British expedition to Cho Oyu, which tested high-altitude equipment. As his reputation grew, Colonel Hunt chose him as a member of the 1953 expedition that conquered Everest.
Four months after Everest, Sir Edmund married Louise Mary Rose, the daughter of a mountain climber. They had three children, Peter, Sarah and Belinda. In 1975, Lady Louise and Belinda were killed when their small plane crashed on takeoff from Katmandu Airport; they were flying to an airstrip near Everest where Sir Edmund was supervising the construction of schools and hospitals.
In 1979, Sir Edmund was to have been commentator on an Air New Zealand sightseeing flight over the Antarctic, but had to withdraw because of a schedule conflict. His friend and fellow mountaineer Peter Mulgrew took his place. In one of the worst aviation accidents in history, the plane crashed on Mount Erebus, a volcano on Ross Island in McMurdo Sound, and all 257 aboard were killed. Sir Edmund married June Mulgrew, his friend’s widow, in 1989.
Besides Lady June, according to the Associated Press, Sir Edmund is survived by his son Peter and his daughter Sarah.
Besides his 1953 knighthood, Sir Edmund was named a Knight of the Order of the Garter by Queen Elizabeth II in 1995, and received many other awards, including the Star of Nepal and the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. Although featured in books, magazines and newspapers, on postage stamps and television, and seen and heard by millions, he remained a modest man, friends said.
“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.”