A Mountain of Death and Glory: The Day Hillary and Tenzing Reached Everest’s Summit
Seventy-two years ago, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first humans to reach the summit of Mount Everest. On May 29, 1953, the New Zealander and the Nepali Sherpa stood 29,032 feet above sea level, surrounded by silence and snow, at the top of the world.
“I think my first reaction was definitely one of relief,” Hillary told the press on July 3, 1953. “Relief that we had found the summit for one thing, and relief that we were there.”
The climb was far from routine. They reached the summit after surviving one of the most unforgiving stretches on Earth the death zone, a region above 26,000 feet where oxygen levels are so low the human body begins to shut down.
Climbing Against Nature
The pair had trained and prepared for weeks, building up oxygen capacity through altitude acclimatization in a series of camps climbing the Himalayan slopes. Their bodies adapted, producing more hemoglobin to carry oxygen, but the risk increased with each step. Blood thickened. Circulation slowed. The threat of stroke or fluid in the lungs grew more likely.
Above 6,000 meters (about 19,700 feet), acclimatization no longer worked. At 8,790 meters (28,839 feet), they faced a 40-foot vertical rock wall later named the Hillary Step. With Tenzing holding the rope, Hillary wedged himself into a narrow gap between rock and ice and climbed upward. At the top, he secured the rope for Tenzing to follow.
The final stretch lay ahead.
“The last few moments, we were going along the ridge and we couldn’t see the summit,” Hillary recalled. “Then we came round the last bump, and there was the summit just 30 or 40 feet above us. We cut up on the summit and stepped on it.”
Fifteen Minutes on Top of the World
At the peak, Hillary took photos of Tenzing waving an ice axe decorated with the flags of Nepal, India, Britain, and the United Nations. Tenzing buried sweets and biscuits in the snow as a Buddhist offering. They stayed for 15 minutes. “The oxygen was running short, so we were very keen to turn round and get down again,” Hillary said.
The pair searched for any trace of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, who had vanished on the mountain in 1924. They found nothing. Mallory’s body was found decades later, in 1999. Parts of Irvine’s remains were uncovered in melting glacier ice in 2024.
On their descent, Hillary greeted fellow climber George Lowe with the now-famous line: “Well, George, we knocked the bastard off.”
Legacy of a Team Effort
The expedition, led by Colonel John Hunt, had seen one previous summit attempt fail just three days earlier. Climbers Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans came within 328 feet of the summit but were forced back by oxygen failure and exhaustion.
Tenzing had climbed Everest six times before and nearly reached the top in 1952 with a Swiss team. His son, Jamling Norgay, said Tenzing believed Everest was his destiny. “He always felt this was a mountain he had to climb,” Jamling told press in 2023.
Peter Hillary, Edmund’s son, recounted his father’s doubts during the final push. As snow slid off the slope into the Kangshung Face, Hillary paused but one look at Tenzing, and they both kept going. “They smiled at each other and carried on,” he said.
To honor their joint success, both climbers agreed not to say who stepped on the summit first. Tenzing later confirmed Hillary did, in his 1955 autobiography Tiger of the Snows.
Recognition and Controversy
News of the ascent broke on June 2, 1953, the eve of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. Hillary was knighted. Tenzing received the George Medal. Critics questioned why the Sherpa did not receive equal honors, despite his central role in the climb.
A Dangerous Legacy
Since 1953, Everest has drawn climbers from around the world. Today, around 800 people attempt the summit each year. The mountain remains deadly. In 2024, nine climbers died or went missing. Eighteen died the year before. More than 330 climbers have died on Everest since records began. Bodies, once preserved in ice, are now surfacing due to glacial melt.
In 2019, Nepal launched a clean-up operation to remove waste and bodies from the mountain. In 2024, rescuers retrieved five corpses from the death zone a first in Everest’s history.
The climb that began with Hillary and Tenzing remains a benchmark in human endurance. What they achieved on that freezing May morning, with ice beneath them and death all around, still defines courage in the face of nature’s extremes.
