From the NY Times
"Climb Other Mountains
By SIR EDMUND HILLARY as told to EDWARD LEWINE
When I reached the summit of Mount Everest on the 29th of May, 1953, I
wasn't the slightest bit interested in mankind. As far as I was concerned,
our objective was to reach the summit, and what mankind thought about it
was more or less unimportant. It wasn't until we came down off the
mountain, in fact, that we became aware that the public and the media had
built up a big sort of aura of heroic effort. We didn't feel heroic at
all. My climbing partner, Tenzing Norgay, in many ways was more emotional
about it than I was. In those days, Tenzing, who was a Sherpa, did not
speak particularly good English. My ability with Nepali was pretty
limited. Even when we were on the summit, we didn't discuss things at
all. I put out my hand, in sort of stuffy old Anglo-Saxon fashion, to
shake
his hand, but that wasn't enough for him. He threw his arms around my
shoulders, and I threw my arms around his.
When Tenzing and I came down from the summit and reached our highest camp,
we had a bit of tea to give us reinforcement. Then we descended the lower
part of the Southeast Ridge. We could see someone coming up to meet us,
and I knew it would be George Lowe, the other climber from New Zealand in
the expedition. He had a thermos flask of tomato soup. George said, ''How
did it go, Ed?'' Now, I had never been someone who used strong language;
it just wasn't something that my parents encouraged. However, I seemed to
be carried away, and I said to George, ''We knocked the bastard off!'' I
don't ever regret having been spontaneous about that line. I read the
utterance that Neil Armstrong made when he set foot on the moon, and it
was a very dramatic utterance and all the rest of it. But it wasn't a
natural sort of reaction. I am sure it had been produced down in Texas for
his use when he set foot on the moon.
After the expedition, Tenzing and I spent quite a lot of time together,
but we never, ever, talked about the climb up Everest. I don't know why.
We talked about our families; talked about the world and its problems;
talked about just about everything, but we never ever once talked about
Everest. He died in 1986. My wife and I were the only foreigners at his
funeral. A lot of people were weeping. A lot of people were laughing and
cheerful. The
Buddhist people believe in reincarnation. They believe Tenzing will
return in some great form. For me, well, it was sad, no question: Tenzing
had been a heroic figure.
Once we reached the summit, Tenzing and I felt that everyone would lose
interest in climbing Everest. Instead, every country and every
mountaineering group got stimulated to tackle the mountain. Well over a
thousand people have stood on the summit. I think that we were the
fortunate ones 50 years ago. At that time, we had to cross the crevasses;
we had to overcome the avalanches; we had to establish the tracks; we had
to put in fixed ropes; we had to climb up the Southeast Ridge. That was
a battle between us and the mountain. Nowadays things are very different.
Many of the commercial climbers are not very experienced. They are
conducted up by good guides or very experienced Sherpas.
It is always difficult to find new challenges, but you have to have a bit
of imagination. I always had two or three exciting challenges, which I
thought would be quite nice to do. When the time was right, I would
organize an expedition. It doesn't matter how much you dream about these
things. It's a waste of time for a young person to wait around for a
good expedition to be put in his hand. My soundest advice for
inexperienced mountaineers would be to get in touch with a very confident
mountaineer of an older generation and suck out of him all his knowledge.
You can get a lead, as it were, into the adventure world.
All of the big things have been done now; all the great peaks have been
climbed; and the depths of the ocean have been reached; and the poles, of
course, are just routine nowadays. But the fact remains that there are
still hundreds of lower mountains that are technically very difficult. I
have a few little secret places that I still wish I had done. There is one
place in the Antarctic that I would have loved to go up. It is a glacier,
and I would have loved to go to the top of it and climb the mountains
there. It's still not climbed, so it remains as a good challenge. But I am
not going to tell you where it is. "
What is not said in this article is that Hillary devoted his life after
the climb to helping the Sherpa people, building schools, hospitals, and
infrastructure. He went there frequently and often swung a hammer
himself. He was very modest about this and it was not well known to the
world for many years.
The National Geographic has a commemorative issue as well.
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM).
http://calendar.yahoo.com
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
SkiVt-L is brought to you by the University of Vermont.
To unsubscribe, visit http://list.uvm.edu/archives/skivt-l.html
