Edmund Hillary og bestigningen af Mount Everest

Edmund Hillary became famous in a day, in 1953. It was the coronation day, the magnificent party, which the British Empire celebrated.

Actually his fame should’ve been proclaimed they day before, when he reached the top of Mt. Everest, but they kept the sensational news as a coronation gift to Queen Elizabeth.

Before the defeat of Mount Everest, there had been made tremendous efforts.

However, it wasn’t Hillary, but the leader of the expedition, the well-known Colonel Hunt, who had carried the burden of the mighty organization. Only when the expedition’s vanguard had made it’s way into the peaks of the horrible mountain, Hillary and a native mountaineer called Tenzing were chosen to make a last try, on climbing the mountain. When they came back down, they revealed that they both had saved each others life. Tenzing had pulled Hillary up from a gulf, and Hillary had discovered that a valve in Tenzing’s oxygen cylinder, was getting filled with ice

As a reward for the victory Hillary became a knight, while Tenzing got the George-medal.

Before Hillary got famous, he was a young New Zealander, with a big interest for sport, and who was on this seventeenth year as a bee-keeper, a profession which very organized gives it man plenty of time to climb a mountain.