Hunt and Hillary on Everest

It is twenty past four on the morning of the twenty-eighth of May 1953, in the green-canvas Meade tent of the high camp at twenty-seven thousand nine hundred feet on the South Col of Mount Everest, in heavy pre-dawn cold (about minus thirty Celsius), in the thin air of the high Himalaya. He is forty-two years old. He is Colonel Henry Cecil John Hunt, born at Simla in British India on the twenty-second of June 1910, schooled at Marlborough, Sandhurst, the Indian Military Academy, commissioned into the Indian Army in 1930, decorated in the Italian campaign of 1944, appointed leader of the British Mount Everest Expedition of 1953 by the Joint Himalayan Committee of the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society, on the third day of the summit-assault phase of the expedition.

He has, in the high camp this morning, the second of two summit pairs. The first pair (Tom Bourdillon, thirty-three, the oxygen-equipment scientist, and Charles Evans, thirty-three, the deputy leader) was sent up the previous morning and is now, by the radio report from the South Col camp, somewhere on the south-east ridge above twenty-eight thousand seven hundred feet. The second pair (Edmund Hillary, thirty-three, the New Zealand bee-keeper, and Tenzing Norgay, thirty-nine, the sirdar of the Sherpa party) is in this tent with him, ready to go up on the second attempt if the first turns back.

He thinks: the weather window is four days. The window closes on the first of June. If the first pair does not summit today, the second pair has tomorrow.

He thinks: the oxygen sets are the critical equipment. Bourdillon and Evans have the closed-circuit sets which give them more breathable air at altitude but are more failure-prone. Hillary and Tenzing have the open-circuit sets which are more reliable but give them less air.

He thinks: if Bourdillon and Evans summit today, the expedition has accomplished its mission and the second pair stays on the South Col. If Bourdillon and Evans do not summit today, the second pair goes tomorrow and is the summit pair of the expedition.

Bourdillon and Evans came back to the high camp at one in the afternoon of the twenty-eighth, having reached the South Summit at twenty-eight thousand seven hundred feet but having had to turn back because Evans's closed-circuit oxygen-set valve had iced up at the nine-thousand-eight-hundred-and-fifty-metre mark and they could not make repairs in the conditions. They had brought back, by Hunt's later report, the first reliable description of the route from the South Summit to the main summit (the knife-edged south-east ridge, with the Hillary Step at the twenty-eight-thousand-eight-hundred-and-sixty-foot point, the forty-foot near-vertical rock-and-ice pitch that would be the final technical obstacle).

Hunt sent Hillary and Tenzing up on the morning of the twenty-ninth of May. They left the high camp at three thirty in the morning, climbed to the South Summit by nine, traversed the south-east ridge through the morning, surmounted the Hillary Step at eleven (Hillary led the pitch by the crack of the east-side rock-and-ice column; the Hillary Step has, since the 2015 Nepal earthquake, partially collapsed), and stepped onto the summit at twenty past eleven.

By Hillary's account in High Adventure (1955): Tenzing was just behind me. We shook hands in the British way. Then Tenzing, in the Sherpa-Buddhist tradition, gave me a embrace. We stayed on the summit for about fifteen minutes. We were not the kind of climbers who shouted on summits. Tenzing buried a offering of biscuits and sweets in the snow on the summit in the Buddhist tradition. Hillary left the crucifix that Hunt had given him before the climb. They photographed each other (the famous Tenzing-with-ice-axe photograph; Hillary did not let himself be photographed at the summit because, by his own statement, Tenzing had never used a camera and there was no time to teach him in the conditions).

They were back at the high camp by the evening. The news of the summit was sent down the chain of camps by Sherpa runner overnight; reached base camp at midnight; was telegrammed by the Times correspondent James Morris (the future Jan Morris) from the Indian Army radio station at Namche Bazaar on the thirtieth of May; encoded in the pre-arranged code (Snow conditions bad meaning summit reached) to defeat the Reuters and Associated Press correspondents who had been waiting at the British Embassy in Kathmandu; was decoded at the Times foreign desk in Printing House Square on the morning of the second of June 1953, the morning of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The news was on the front page of The Times at six in the morning. The Coronation processions left Buckingham Palace at ten thirty. The Coronation-day editions of the afternoon papers had the news of Everest on the front page beside the Coronation. By the convention of the British public, the two events became, in the popular memory of the year, a single national event.

Hunt was knighted on the Honours List of the eighth of June 1953 (the first honours list after the Coronation), was made a life peer (Baron Hunt of Llanfair Waterdine) in 1966, and was the Chairman of the National Parks Commission 1968–80. He died at Henley-on-Thames on the seventh of November 1998, eighty-eight years old. Hillary was knighted on the same Honours List, became the New Zealand high commissioner to India 1985–88, and died at Auckland on the eleventh of January 2008, eighty-eight. Tenzing was made the Director of Field Training at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute at Darjeeling 1954–76, and died at Darjeeling on the ninth of May 1986, seventy-one. The crucifix Hunt had given Hillary on the summit is, in the Hillary family papers, at the Auckland Museum.