by Michael Gill
They were now camped at the foot of the face. Their route lay up a buttress that started with 4000 feet of highly technical rock leading to a vast snow face crumpled into big folds of ice and snow that was prone to avalanche after fresh falls. Advanced Base was set up at 18,500ft and from there relays of climbers began to fix ropes up the rock. Snow fell on most days.
Down in his tent Ed was feeling the altitude in the form of nausea, headaches, and swelling around his temples and forehead. After three days, Jim Morrissey, expedition physician as well as a lead climber, realised he had to take Ed down to a lower altitude. Over a week Ed slowly improved, but not before climbing leader Lou Reichardt was suggesting that maybe Ed should retreat to the altitude of Lhasa at 12,000ft. This was tricky territory, and Ed’s response was to improve and make his way back to Base Camp on 8 September.
He found that although the climbers had made good progress on the buttress, the expedition had stalled because of daily snowfalls blanketing the route and sending down avalanches. Clearly the steep snow above the rock buttress would be dangerous until it consolidated in fine weather. Snowbound in their tents, the climbers discussed the feasibility of the route and whether it might even be better to decamp around to the unclimbed North Face for which they also had permission. Reichardt called one of his team meetings at which all were invited to express their views. Ed wrote in his diary, ‘I spoke at length. Pointed out my belief that we must concentrate on improvement of route up buttress.’13
Tabin, one of the climbers at the meeting, enlarged on this in his article for the American Alpine Journal:
Sir Edmund Hillary made a very stirring speech, saying that it would be insignificant for the American team to reach the summit by the north, but that an attempt of any kind on the east face would be a triumph of the human spirit and a significant step forward in international mountaineering. His talk roused enthusiasm dampened by the late monsoon snow. The team voted on what to do. All but Roskelley and Eric Perlman voted to stay with the east face.14
Ed felt that it should be the leader who made decisions, not a team vote, but this was a younger generation of climbers and his was but one voice among them.
Over the next three weeks the team forced their way up to over 22,000ft, leaving the fearsome technical difficulties of the climb behind them. But though the angle of the snow above was easier, it remained soft, deep and avalanche-prone. Only five of the climbers were prepared to go higher, but their fitness to climb more than another 6000ft in reasonable safety without oxygen was uncertain. Lou Reichardt, who had been to the summit of K2 without oxygen, looked at what lay ahead and didn’t like it. On 5 October, from their high camp, he announced his decision to abandon the climb.15
Long before this, Ed had been forced down from Base Camp by cerebral edema. On 13 September he began vomiting, and had double vision, a severe headache and hallucinations. After a night on oxygen, Jim Morrissey bundled him down to the more reasonable altitude of 14,000ft and then accompanied him over a high route to Kharta. Ed wrote a memorable description of their two-day shortcut to the road-head over the Langma La:
Though I still had headaches and a tightness in my chest, I was moving reasonably well and recognized a long steep hill from the journey so my mind was clearing a little. Then we diverted to the left on a different route up a long traverse, entering a beautiful high valley with snow-tipped peaks all around, a sparkling stream running down the middle, a lovely clear blue lake, with nearby the remnants of an old monastery. Camped here were two handsome Tibetan children, a boy and a girl almost godlike in their looks. They had half a dozen yaks with them and willingly took some of the loads of our porters onto their yaks.
The pass, the Langma La, rose steeply in front of us and on and on we went. I was desperately tired and moving pretty slowly. Finally we came to the top at 17,660 ft, so we’d climbed 4000 feet that day. For quite a way we crossed a series of summits in deep snow and I noted how the Tibetan children almost danced along in their bare feet. Then we started descending by a steep zigzagging track, first over snow, and then on to slippery mud. We were entering a long steep gully, very narrow, with a small blue lake far below.
I heard a shout from above and looked up to see a horrifying sight. Charging down the gully with widespread horns and a tent dragging behind was one of the yaks. I looked desperately for somewhere to escape but there was nowhere. I shrank into the right-hand wall and the desperate yak rushed by, knocking me headfirst onto some boulders. Groggily, I clambered to my feet, glad that I was still alive. Something wet was dripping down my neck and I realised it was blood.
Jim rushed up to join me and anxiously examined my skull. There was a two-inch split with the bone clearly to be seen. ‘What next!’ said Jim in despair, but he sat me down and went calmly and confidently to work, snipping off the hair, putting antibiotic in the wound and plastering it up. The yaks were reloaded and we continued down. First around the lake, then a plunging descent and finally a rocky traverse to a huge boulder which had been a campsite before. We pitched our torn tent and scrambled inside.
I had a rather uncomfortable night but next morning I felt stronger … and at last reached the village of Kharta at the end of the road. I have rarely been more pleased to arrive anywhere.
Dick Blum and I travelled by Jeep and bus over the long road back to Lhasa. I was still experiencing headaches and slight difficulty in breathing and was eager to get to lower altitudes. After a reluctant wait of two days in Lhasa I caught a plane to Chengdu and the thicker air at lower altitude felt superb. I flew on to Canton, anxious to return home … Hong Kong … then for ten hours I flew south over the ocean to land in Auckland on a warm spring morning. For two weeks my head still troubled me but then the pain disappeared. The shaved hair grew back and my split scalp mended. It had been quite an adventure, but now I was back to normal …16
I was amazed at how much I enjoyed being back with June Mulgrew again. It wasn’t surprising really. Neither of us now had a partner and we’d known each other a long time. We had a great deal in common …
… But one thing was clear – Chairman Emeritus or not, my big mountain days were now definitely over.17
High Commissioner in New Delhi
The 1980s began to have a settled and more comfortable look. With June to provide the emotional support Ed needed, life had become worth living again. There were annual trips to Solukhumbu with June, Rex, Zeke, Larry and various others who liked building additional classrooms, clinics or school hostels. There were trips to the States and Canada for Sears meetings and river trips, and there were lectures and fundraising dinners in Canada and San Francisco where Dick Blum’s American Himalayan Foundation was raising large sums for the Himalayan Trust work.
It seemed there was nothing larger and more exciting on the horizon, but as always with Ed Hillary something turned up. This time it came from a politician, David Lange, New Zealand’s just-elected left-of-centre Labour Party prime minister. Apart from in 1953, when Prime Minister Sid Holland basked in the windfall glory of the first ascent of Everest and had accepted the knighthood on Ed’s behalf as though he had climbed the mountain himself, Ed’s encounters with politicians, particularly those of the right-of-centre National Party, had been frosty. The tractors-to-the-Pole episode, and the British disapproval that followed, had caused Wellington to fear that Britain might renege on its duty to buy New Zealand butter and lamb and defect to the European Economic Community. The short-lived Labour prime minister of 1958, Walter Nash, had privately approved of Ed’s trip to the Pole but shrank from saying so in public.
In 1967 there was a brief flare-up with the four-term National prime minister, Keith Holyoake. Ed had been invited by Rotary to inspire an assembly of school prefects in Auckland. ‘Expediency and just plain dishonesty of utterance in Government and politics are recorded in our newspapers every day,’ Ed told them. ‘Let’s have more honest-to-God morality in politics and government …’18
‘Substantiate or retra
ct!’ thundered the PM. Ed did neither, and the public was on his side.
A more formidable National Party opponent, PM-in-waiting Robert Muldoon, entered the fray in 1969 when Ed said that New Zealand should spend more of its GDP on aid for developing countries.
‘I think Sir Edmund knows as much about the New Zealand economy as I know about mountain climbing,’ said Muldoon, and stored in his capacious memory a note that Hillary was now an enemy.19
At the next election, Ed made his support for Labour explicit by joining a small group called Citizens for Rowling to help shore up the fortunes of the Labour leader, Bill Rowling. Muldoon won handsomely, leaving Ed in the political wilderness for another nine years.
During his last term of office, however, Muldoon made two decisions that would directly affect Ed’s future. The first was the closing of New Zealand’s High Commission in Delhi, following Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s outspoken criticism of Muldoon’s support for South Africa’s racial policies. The second was his decision to halt New Zealand’s galloping inflation rate by imposing a wage and price freeze, a policy which brought the country to the brink of an economic precipice and gave Labour a landslide victory in the 1984 elections.
Within a month Prime Minister Lange, having reopened diplomatic relationships with India, was asking himself who should be offered the position of New Zealand High Commissioner in Delhi. Why not the one person who was seen as a living treasure in both New Zealand and India? Thus, in August 1984, Sir Edmund Hillary was invited to fill the sort of diplomatic position friends had been predicting for him since 1953.
But what about June Mulgrew? ‘Why don’t I come too?’ she offered, and the decision was made that she would accompany Ed as his official companion.20 So began four-and-a-half good years in a country for which Ed had much affection. June was an excellent hostess and ran the household. Ed’s fame opened diplomatic doors for his trade commissioner, Tony Mildenhall: ‘He and I made a number of calls on high officials to discuss problems in the importing of such things as coal, wool and timber which he had only been able to handle at a very low official level before. So slowly, but surely, our trade relations improved.’21
Ed was welcomed and revered at innumerable social occasions over all India, and participated in such diverse activities as addressing the World Wildlife Fund and Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, judging a mango competition, and launching a Rafting Association in Rishikesh. He had his stock stories and speeches but also an empathy and ease of manner, and an ability to improvise, which made each occasion seem special to his audience. From time to time he expressed personal doubts about whether he was achieving what a High Commissioner was expected to achieve, but letters from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Wellington reassured Ed of the esteem in which he was held: ‘You continue to do an excellent job … Everyone, but everyone, regards you as one of the best Heads of Mission we have abroad.’22 ‘NZ is never likely to have a higher profile in the subcontinent than it has now.’23
Further important recognition came from the Lange government in February 1987 with the conferring of the newly minted Order of New Zealand, an honour held by a maximum of 20 living members.
In 1986 Ed received news of the death of Tenzing at his home in Darjeeling. He was 74. He had been in declining health and had felt isolated in his last years, but his death was the breaking of a special bond formed on 29 May 1953. Ed wrote, ‘It had been a sad occasion for us but June and I also felt it had been a great honour to be present at the farewelling of our old friend.’24
A sad event of a different sort was a devastating fire at Tengboche Monastery in 1989, thought to have been sparked by a fault in a recently installed hydro-electric system. It was mid-winter so there were few monks in residence, and the water supply that might have doused the fire was frozen. The first monastery built in 1916 had been destroyed by the great earthquake of 1934 but in its subsequent reincarnation it had acquired great sanctity. Ed and Dick Blum of the American Himalayan Foundation flew in to see the ruins and undertook to raise funds for the rebuild. This was completed four years later to a design which largely survived the next great 80-year earthquake, that of 2015.
Ed and June marry
Four months after their return from Delhi, June Mulgrew became June Lady Hillary.
In November 1989 it was a superb sunny day when June and I were married on the deck of my home in Auckland … It was a very happy event with all our children, grandchildren, relations and friends gathered around. I was now seventy years old and June was twelve years younger. My life would have been very empty without Louise and June. For the twenty-two years after Everest Louise was responsible for the happiest and most productive period of my middle years. After her death I had five years of depression and misery. When my long friendship with June blossomed into a much warmer relationship, I learned to live and love again. Louise and June are different in many ways, but they have each given me a feeling of unchanging security and happiness. They both have had sound judgment and their advice has been kind and prudent. What a fortunate person I have been!
Being married didn’t seem to make a lot of difference to our lives. June and I had already established a strong supportive friendship that we knew would last. But now we had become respectable – and all the old squares in the community must have nodded their heads in approval.25
– CHAPTER 31 –
The last two decades
In 1989 Ed turned 70. During the years in Delhi he and June had taken time off from diplomatic work to continue Himalayan Trust work in Nepal. He had been able to walk from the lower altitudes of Phaplu or Lukla up to the main Sherpa villages such as Khunde at 12,500ft, and could work and sleep comfortably at the heights at which his Sherpa friends lived. But by 1990 that freedom had been eroded by his increasing susceptibility to the effects of altitude.
Doctors had long been puzzled by the paradox of an Ed Hillary who was stronger than anyone else at altitude in 1953, yet from 1954 onwards had experienced serious altitude sickness at progressively lower altitudes. In 1991, he suffered yet another life-threatening episode, this time in Khunde. He had become breathless even when walking downhill, and that night was deeply cyanosed and confused. His oxygen saturation was a perilously low 34 per cent, indicating severe pulmonary edema compounded by cerebral edema. After resuscitation with oxygen he was flown to Kathmandu where he was seen by Dr David Shlim, a physician with wide experience of altitude sickness who made suggestions about the underlying abnormal processes.1 After this episode, Ed’s visits to Khumjung and Khunde were by helicopter, and from 2000 he carried a bottle of supplementary oxygen. He regretted the loss of the good times when he could wander and sleep at will in the villages and among the people he loved so much, but he still returned each year to see his friends and the familiar landscape.
Settling in at 278a Remuera Road
From 1975 to 1984 the house at Remuera Road had been more like a student flat than the family home it had been during the 20 years when Louise was there. Sarah and her husband Peter Boyer were living there from time to time with their son Arthur and later their daughter Anna; Peter Hillary had various friends passing through. During the years when Ed and June were in Delhi, Ed helped Sarah and Peter Boyer with the purchase of a house in the suburb of Mt Eden, and Peter Hillary married Ann Moorhead in Melbourne, where their two children, Amelia and George, were born.
Back in New Zealand in 1989, Ed and June settled into 278a Remuera Road. June had previously worked as an interior decorator, and she applied her skills to redesigning their Auckland home. The annual trips to Solukhumbu continued, though now from a base in Phaplu or Lukla rather than higher up. There were still the business and fundraising visits to Chicago, San Francisco, Toronto and London, and around New Zealand Ed accepted a wide range of speaking engagements. For relaxation there were holidays in tropical Fiji or the summer warmth of the South of France. June said that India gave them their best times, but Auckland was good too. Sarah had by now
risen to the position of senior conservator at the Auckland Art Gallery and in 1997 would become principal conservator.
Throughout the 1980s Peter had remained attracted to extreme climbing, and on two west ridges, one on Makalu and the other on Everest, companions had died. These were lightweight expeditions lacking the safety margins of fixed ropes, oxygen or Sherpas. And they could be deadly if you slipped and fell on steep terrain. In May he reached the summit of Everest by the route first climbed in 1953 by his father and thus became the first of the second generation to climb the world’s highest mountain. He rang Ed in Auckland from the summit on his satellite phone. ‘How did you find the Hillary Step?’ Ed asked. ‘I was pretty impressed,’ said Peter – a reply which pleased his father.2 Two years later Peter’s marriage to Ann ended.
In 1995 Peter was attempting the notoriously risky K2, 28,250ft, the second-highest summit in the world. A diverse group of eight climbers from five countries had come together by chance on 13 August. They were close to the summit when ominous cloud could be seen rapidly advancing from Tibet. Peter chose to retreat and although the storm, which was of extreme violence, had struck by 5 p.m., within two-and-a-half hours he was in the shelter of his Camp 2. All seven climbers who had continued on were killed by the storm. He gave the title In the Name of the Father to the account he wrote of the climb.