Sir Edmund Hillary

Sir Edmund Hillary was the first person to reach the poles and summit Everest. He was a New Zealand mountaineer, explorer, and a philanthropist.
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He reached the summit of Mountain Everest on 29th May, 1953 with the help of the Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Nargay - making them the first to Mountain Everest. Sir Edmund Hillary was born on 20th July 1919 in Aukland, New Zealand. As a child he helped in his father's beekeeping business with his father full-time.

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He became interested in mountain climbing while high school. In 1935 during on a school trip to Mount Ruapehu, Hillary discovered his joy in the mountains and it never left him. He would often escape to the mountains to enjoy hiking, and he developed a love of climbing. He worked in the Royal New Zealand air force as a navigator. He reached South Pole and later North Pole as part of the Commonwealth Trans-Atlantic Expedition. Although Hillary had achieved worldwide fame for his adventures, he never lost touch with the Nepalese people and devoted much of his time to their environmental, social causes. Hillary built hospitals and schools in the mountains of Nepal by raising the money, buying the materials and working on many of the buildings etc. He was awarded a Knighthood and Coronation medal by the Queen Elizabath and Padma Vibhushan posthumously by the Indian Government in 2008 and many other awards.

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Hillary remains an important voice in the sport mountain climbing, even in retirement. He wrote the forward for a book by Helen Thayer titled Polar Dream in 1993. In the year 1996 he reacted to the death of eight mountain climbers in a storm on Mount Everest with the comment to Time 's David Van Biema, 'I have a feeling that the people have been getting just a little too casual about Mount Everest. This incident will bring them to regard it rather more seriously.' He died on 11th of January, 2008.

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