FOUR HILLARYS AND A MOUNTAIN
So much will be different. If brothers George and Alexander Hillary reach the summit of Mt Everest, it will be the same spot where their grandfather stood in 1953, but a world apart.
When Sir Edmund Hillary and Ten-zing Norgay became the first people to climb the world’s highest mountain, each swing of their ice axes was a blow of pure exploration, each step took them further into the unknown.
Now, hundreds have followed Hillary and Tenzing to Everest’s summit, standing more than 8km towards the sky.
“To climb the great mountains is to leave the comfort of familiar places and to challenge the very essence of oneself. Perhaps there is no greater quest.”
Peter Hillary
But so much will be the same. The physical exhaustion, the sapping cold, oxygen eked from thin air. The steepness of the summit ridge will not have slackened, nor the wind that can blow a climber from it. The concentration needed to make each step and each decision will remain. The reliance on their fellow climbers, their eye to the horizon’s weather, the panorama of peaks and glaciers and faraway valleys will be just as it was. As will the hopes and love from their families and everyone at home.
If they make it, there will be elation, a legacy extended, an inevitability fulfilled. And then they will face the same challenge that confronted their grandfather, and their father, Peter, after him – to get down alive.
Eighteen months after Sir Ed’s ascent of Everest, Peter Hillary was born. As much as his parents may have sought it, life could never be plain as the son of one of the world’s most famous people. There were engagements with royalty, speaking tours, phenomenal expeditions, and numerous returns to the Everest region, where Sir Ed had started to build schools and hospitals.
There was grounding normalcy, too – camping trips to Wānaka each summer, a family of five squeezed into a Mini Minor, equipment and luggage lashed to a roof rack. But throughout it all, there was adventure – as Peter recalled at his father’s funeral in 2008, this was compulsory.
However, there was never an expectation Peter would follow his father
