Sir Edmund Hillary (right), son of a commercial beekeeper in Taukau, New Zealand and one of the 20th century's greatest adventurers, died Friday at 88.
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Hillary, with his Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay, won worldwide acclaim in 1953 by becoming the first to scale the 29,035-foot summit of Mount Everest, the world's tallest peak.
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Hillary and Norgay were heroes overnight, but a controversy began about who had been first to stand on Everest's summit. It was quickly declared that they had reached it together as a team. Later, in Hillary's book View from the Summit, he broke his silence on the subject and wrote that it was he, not Norgay.
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Sir Hillary's recollection of standing on the pinnacle: "The whole world around us lay spread out like a giant relief map. I am a lucky man. I have had a dream and it has come true, and that is not a thing that happens often to men." (Note: photo shows Norgay - Hillary took the photo.)
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Four months after Everest, Sir Edmund married Louise Mary Rose, the daughter of a mountain climber. They had three children. One of their sons, Peter, followed in his father's footsteps and reached the summit of Everest with Norgay's son, Jamling.
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Close to 10 years after Everest (roughly when this photo was taken), Sir Edmund led a highly publicized but unsuccessful search for the Abominable Snowman. In 1986, accompanied by former astronaut Neil Armstrong, he also flew a twin-engine ski plane over the Arctic and landed at the North Pole, thus becoming the first to stand at both poles and on the summit of Everest.
