On a big climb there usually comes a point when you are faced with a decision: either turn back or crank up the commitment level and stick your neck out. For Edmund Hillary that moment came at about 9.30 on the morning of May 29, 1953, when he and Tenzing Norgay reached the foot of an abrupt cliff blocking the final knife-edge ridge of Everest. Three days earlier, Tom Bourdillon had been forced by a combination of failing oxygen equipment and the cautious urgings of his companion to turn back near here.

Hillary had a more reliable oxygen set and he had started from a much higher camp; he faced better odds. Nevertheless this final hurdle, with its fragile blob of snow stuck to a rocky crag overhanging a three-mile-high precipice, looked precarious. And, as far as Hillary knew, he was now higher than any human had ever climbed. No one had done this before.

Tenzing, the local boy made good, was all smiling compliance. He longed to climb the mountain that had dominated his whole life. But there was an unspoken agreement that Hillary – the comparative newcomer who had been climbing for only a few years – had the technical edge. Hillary was going to have to lead this scary pitch. It was his decision.

Thirty-five years later, arriving alone on Everest’s south summit and staring up at that famous obstacle, I got a glimmer of what it might have been like for the man who first led the “Hillary Step”. After a great team effort lasting many weeks, I was the lucky one to have the final prize almost in my grasp. By then, 1988, 200 people had won that prize, but most of them, like Hillary and Tenzing, had done it with oxygen equipment. I was climbing without oxygen, my companions were a long way behind and afternoon cloud was beginning to swirl around the summit. At a personal level, at least, it felt like a big, dangerous step into the unknown.

Sir Edmund Hillary

Resolute climber who made mountaineering history with Sherpa Tenzing in ascending the world’s highest peak in 1953

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BACKGROUND

• Modest hero honoured with a state funeral

• Hillary wants Everest put on UN danger list

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Like Hillary, I decided to carry on and claim my reward. Later I got to meet the great man at conferences and charity events, and once we shared a plastic BBC rock, sitting on a set in the Blue Peter studio. He was friendly, in a bluff, cheerful, nononsense, antipodean sort of way – wary of hyperbole, always insistent that he had just been the lucky one who was in the right place at the right time.

All of which was true. But people make their luck. In 1951, when four young New Zealanders climbing a peak in India received a message that two of them were invited over to Nepal to join Eric Shipton’s Everest reconnaissance expedition, Hillary made damned sure he was one of those two. He seized the opportunity gleefully, impressing Shipton with his toughness and energy. The following year he and his fellow Kiwi George Lowe returned to Nepal for the Everest training expedition and in 1953 they were invited by the new leader, John Hunt, to join the big show.

In comparison with the slick tour operation working Everest these days, the 1953 expedition seems wonderfully innocent. Unlike so many first ascents, this was pulled off without rancour and jealousy; egotistical posturing was entirely absent and everyone subscribed to Hunt’s team ethos. Wilfrid Noyce, who used to read Wordsworth on the South Col, was a phenomenally strong climber. Lowe, who selflessly helped Hillary and Tenzing establish the top camp, could also have done it. Without the curse of their experimental oxygen system, Bourdillon and Charles Evans could have been the lucky ones.

So why Hillary? Talking over the years to his companions, and reading the accounts, I get the feeling that he just had the edge. It was a mixture of physiological suitability, practical intelligence, cussed determination, confidence and a streak of opportunism.

Only in his final autobiography, published on his 80th birthday, did he admit to distancing himself slightly from his friend Lowe in 1953 and establishing an informal partnership with Tenzing, reasoning that Hunt would be unlikely to select two Kiwis for the summit but might well choose one Kiwi and the head Sherpa.

That’s not to suggest that Hillary was some kind of cynical manipulator. Everyone seems to have recognised his cheery stamina and his practical attention to detail. He was the one who was always tinkering with the Primus stoves, recognising that efficient melting of snow was essential to avoid dehydration. Not convinced by the necessity of oxygen, he was prepared to go along with it, knowing that this was probably the final chance for the British Commonwealth to claim the last great geographical prize.

When the great day came, it was his meticulous mental arithmetic – constantly checking meters and adjusting flow rates – that ensured he and Tenzing didn’t run out of oxygen. Hillary also had the nous to capture the great moment on celluloid. His 360-degree panorama proved the pair had made it, while the shot of Tenzing flourishing ice axe triumphantly aloft became one of the defining images of the 20th century.

Two days later, when the summit pair returned to advance base, Hunt was filmed flinging his arms round both of them, British reserve abandoned. How sad that it all turned sour when they got back to Kathmandu to be greeted by angry crowds claiming that Hillary had been dragged to the summit by his Sherpa. Although born Tibetan, Tenzing was being used, entirely against his will, as a symbol of Nepalese nationalism. He was deeply embarrassed by this cynical manipulation.

As for Hillary, he never let the incident mar his friendship with Tenzing. In a roped pair of climbers, one normally reaches the top a few moments before the other, but it is totally irrele-vant who that one is – it is a shared experience. Nevertheless the question of who was first to the summit persisted, and it is a measure of Hillary’s magnanimity that he refused for years to answer, even though it was he, not Tenzing, who first stood on the summit.

For Hillary success was a well-earned lucky break, but it was what he did after Everest that really showed his stature. For him fame was the ser-endipitous byproduct of a genuinely adventurous life. He continued climbing and expeditioning. He was joint leader of the first crossing of Antarctica in 1958. Then in 1960 he returned yet again to Sola Khumbu, the Sherpas’ homeland just south of Everest, for high-altitude medical research.

However, his greatest satisfaction was the expedition’s collaboration with the Sherpa people, sowing the seeds of the Himalayan Trust, which continues to this day to fund schools, hospitals and ecological initiatives in the area.

Much of the funding over the years came from Hillary’s own efforts on the global lecture circuit. His account of the final summit climb was unvarying, delivered with deadpan modesty, usually preceded by a few jokes. The refusal to self-dramatise was endearing. But so too was his reaction to tragedy. When his first wife and daughter were killed in a Nepalese air crash, he was utterly distraught. But somehow he managed to reinvent himself, seizing the invitation to become New Zealand’s ambassador to India and building a new marriage with June, the widow of his friend Pete Mulgrew, who was also killed in an air crash.

My best memory of him is of a winter evening in 1990. It was the bicentenary of the birth of George Everest, after whom the mountain was named. A group of Everesters, including Lord Hunt, Sir Chris Bonington, Doug Scott, Sir Edmund and me, was coming out of a London restaurant when a tramp sidled up asking for money.

Fixing his eye on Edmund Hillary, the tramp said: “You’ve no idea what it’s like, night after night, out in the open, in the cold.” Hunt tapped the beggar gently on the shoulder and said: “I’m awfully sorry, but I think you’ve got the wrong man.”

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