Remembering Edmund Hillary in the Faces of Those He Did Not Forget
(NOTE: Our friend Jim Klobuchar writes a stirring piece about another "Hillary" — not one who is in the news now but one who was once in the news: Sir Edmund Hillary, the first westerner to reach the peak of Mt. Everest — perhaps the first man.)
by Jim Klobuchar
He emerged slowly and awkwardly from a helicopter that carried him from Kathmandu to the Himalayan cliffside village of Lukla, an old man, smiling and waving amiably at the reverential crowd of villagers and Sherpa guides who greeted him.
A few of them moved closer as he stepped out of the copter, ready to protect him if he slipped. They edged in quietly and cautiously so as not to offend the dignity of this genuine hero of theirs, not so much a hero for what he had done on a mountain 55 years ago but for what he had done afterward, for them.
If he slipped. There was irony in that, but Edmund Hillary was hardly going to notice. He wasn't a man of vanity. Mountaineers get old and unsteady; but this one had somehow managed to defy one of the hoariest axioms of mountaineering: There are old climbers and bold climbers but there aren’t many old and bold climbers.
In the surmounting moments of his life as a mountaineer, Ed Hillary had climbed boldly. In the spring of 1953, with Tenzing Norgay he stood a few hundred feet below the summit of Mt. Everest, the highest and the mightiest. And here at nearly 29,000 feet, they turned a corner of ice and snow and were startled to confront a 40-foot vertical pitch of rock that couldn’t be outflanked. Their oxygen masks and their fatigue precluded any serious talk of strategy. Hillary advanced and found a seam in the rock. At 12,000 feet in the Alps it would have been a problem. At 29,000 feet in the Himalayas it was almost boggling.
(The rest is here.)
by Jim Klobuchar
He emerged slowly and awkwardly from a helicopter that carried him from Kathmandu to the Himalayan cliffside village of Lukla, an old man, smiling and waving amiably at the reverential crowd of villagers and Sherpa guides who greeted him.
A few of them moved closer as he stepped out of the copter, ready to protect him if he slipped. They edged in quietly and cautiously so as not to offend the dignity of this genuine hero of theirs, not so much a hero for what he had done on a mountain 55 years ago but for what he had done afterward, for them.
If he slipped. There was irony in that, but Edmund Hillary was hardly going to notice. He wasn't a man of vanity. Mountaineers get old and unsteady; but this one had somehow managed to defy one of the hoariest axioms of mountaineering: There are old climbers and bold climbers but there aren’t many old and bold climbers.
In the surmounting moments of his life as a mountaineer, Ed Hillary had climbed boldly. In the spring of 1953, with Tenzing Norgay he stood a few hundred feet below the summit of Mt. Everest, the highest and the mightiest. And here at nearly 29,000 feet, they turned a corner of ice and snow and were startled to confront a 40-foot vertical pitch of rock that couldn’t be outflanked. Their oxygen masks and their fatigue precluded any serious talk of strategy. Hillary advanced and found a seam in the rock. At 12,000 feet in the Alps it would have been a problem. At 29,000 feet in the Himalayas it was almost boggling.
(The rest is here.)
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