The Roof of the World: Hillary and Tenzing Summit Everest

At about 11:30 on the morning of 29 May 1953, a lanky beekeeper from Auckland and a Sherpa mountaineer from the Khumbu stepped together onto a small dome of snow with nothing above it. Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had become the first people known to stand on the summit of Mount Everest, the highest point on the surface of the Earth. [1]

Thirty years of trying

Everest had repelled every attempt since the first British reconnaissance in 1921, killing climbers as celebrated as George Mallory. The 1953 expedition, led with military thoroughness by Colonel John Hunt, approached from Nepal via the South Col, a route opened only after the country admitted foreign expeditions in 1950. [2] It was a vast undertaking — hundreds of porters, tons of supplies, and a deliberate scientific attention to oxygen equipment, diet, and acclimatization that earlier attempts had lacked. [1] Tenzing brought experience no one else on the mountain had: the year before, with the Swiss climber Raymond Lambert, he had reached higher than any human before turning back. [2]

The last ridge

Hunt’s first summit pair, Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans, came within a few hundred feet of the top on 26 May before failing oxygen equipment and time forced them down. [1] Three days later Hillary and Tenzing, climbing from a tiny tent perched higher than any camp in history, crossed the summit ridge and its final obstacle — a forty-foot rock wall now known as the Hillary Step. They spent about fifteen minutes on the summit: Hillary photographed Tenzing with his ice axe raised, flags streaming; no photograph was taken of Hillary himself. Tenzing left an offering of sweets in the snow; Hillary buried a crucifix given to him by Hunt. [1]

News timed for a coronation

A runner carried the coded dispatch down the mountain, and the news broke in London on the morning of 2 June 1953 — the day of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, an accident of timing that turned a mountaineering triumph into an imperial celebration. [3] Hillary and Hunt were knighted; Tenzing received the George Medal, and became a national hero across India and Nepal. [3]

Two men, roped together

Both climbers spent the rest of their lives deflecting the question of who set foot on top first, insisting they arrived as a team — Tenzing eventually wrote that Hillary stepped up first, and that it did not matter. [1] Hillary devoted much of his later life to building schools and hospitals for the Sherpa communities of the Khumbu. [3] The mountain has since been climbed thousands of times, but the partnership of 1953 — colonial subject and Commonwealth citizen sharing one rope — remains the defining image of exploration’s last great terrestrial prize.