11:30 a.m., 29 May 1953. At 8,849 m, on the summit of the highest mountain on Earth, two people stood. A beekeeper from New Zealand, Edmund Hillary, and a Sherpa from Nepal, Tenzing Norgay. The moment was the end point of more than thirty years of human effort on the mountain — and a turning point in the history of climbing.
Behind that single moment of glory sit other stories: the climbers who paid with their lives, the bitter technical fight over oxygen systems, and a question still unanswered — the riddle of George Mallory.
Three decades of attempts on Everest
The history of climbing Everest begins in 1921, when the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club jointly founded the "Mount Everest Committee" and sent out the first reconnaissance expedition.
Between the early 1920s and the early 1950s, at least ten major expeditions and two solo attempts pushed at the mountain, and not one of them reached the top. In that era Everest was approached almost entirely from the Tibetan side (the north face); when Nepal opened its borders to foreign climbers in 1950, the south side suddenly became a real possibility.
In 1952, a Swiss expedition with Raymond Lambert and Tenzing Norgay pushed up the Southeast Ridge to a point roughly 240 m below the summit (around 8,599 m) — the highest any human had ever reached at the time. Worsening weather and exhausted oxygen forced them down.
Who Tenzing Norgay was
Tenzing Norgay was born into a Sherpa family in the Khumbu region of eastern Nepal, the 11th of 13 children in a yak-herder household, raised in sight of the Himalaya from the start. His exact date of birth was never recorded; he reportedly knew the season only by the way the late-May grain stood in the fields.
At 18 he moved to Darjeeling, in India, and got his first chance to work for a British expedition as a porter — Eric Shipton's 1935 Everest reconnaissance. By 1953 he had attempted Everest seven times. As the man who knew Everest better than anyone alive, he had built an unshakable reputation in the climbing world.
The Mallory and Irvine mystery — vanished in 1924
Any honest account of the first ascent of Everest has to begin with George Mallory and Andrew Irvine.
On 8 June 1924, Mallory and Irvine of the third British expedition set off from the Northeast Ridge for the summit. Around 12:50 p.m. the geologist Noel Odell caught a brief glimpse of two figures through a break in the cloud — the last anyone saw of them. They were reportedly about 240 m below the summit by elevation.
Found 75 years later
On 1 May 1999, a search team led by Conrad Anker found Mallory's body at around 8,156 m. The high-altitude environment had preserved it astonishingly well.
What drew the most attention was a detail from Mallory's own letters: he had planned to leave a photograph of his wife on the summit. No such photograph was found on the body. That can be read as indirect evidence that he reached the top — but only as suggestion, not proof.
In 2024, a National Geographic team found a portion of Irvine's remains on the Rongbuk Glacier. Whether the two of them ever stood on the summit is still one of the great unsolved questions in climbing history.
Mallory's famous line
Mallory is best remembered for his answer when a reporter asked him why he wanted to climb Everest: "Because it is there." A century later it still gets quoted as the cleanest possible expression of why people climb mountains at all.
The 1953 British expedition — the last chance
For Britain, the 1953 expedition really was the last chance. China's takeover of Tibet had closed off the north-side route, and Nepal would only issue one permit per year. The French already held the permit for 1954, and if the British missed 1953, no one knew when the next opportunity would come.
Colonel John Hunt takes charge
The expedition was originally to be led by the experienced Eric Shipton, but the Himalayan Committee, prioritizing military-style organisation, replaced him with Colonel John Hunt of the 60th Rifles. The decision was controversial at the time — and yet, in hindsight, it was Hunt's organisational discipline that pulled the expedition together.
The scale of the team was staggering. Ten climbers from Britain and the Commonwealth were joined by 362 porters and 20 Sherpas — close to 400 people in total. Several tons of supplies had to be ferried up the mountain, and the strategy was to stage progressively higher camps from Base Camp to the South Col.
The first summit team — Bourdillon and Evans
On 26 May, the first summit pair — Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans — set out from the South Col for the top. Using closed-circuit oxygen, they made remarkably fast progress and reached the South Summit (8,750 m) by 1 p.m. The true summit lay only about 100 m above them.
Then Evans's oxygen apparatus failed, and they couldn't fix it. Doing the maths on the oxygen they had left and the time they had left, they made the call to turn around. The summit was right there — but pushing for it would have cost them their lives.
The oxygen debate — open-circuit or closed-circuit
On the 1953 expedition, the oxygen system was the single technical factor that decided success or failure — and a fierce engineering argument had been running for years over which design to use.
Two competing designs
Open-circuit systems feed a small flow of oxygen from the bottle while the climber still breathes ambient air. They had been used on Everest since the 1922 expedition, and their advantage was simplicity and reliability. The kit weighed about 13.6 kg and gave roughly six hours of use at a flow of four litres per minute.
Closed-circuit systems supply 100% oxygen and recycle the exhaled breath, scrubbing CO₂ through a sodium-hydroxide filter. On paper this is far more oxygen-efficient and can dramatically increase climbing speed. In practice, the kit weighed about 15.9 kg, and the field problems were stacked high: freezing valves, heat-producing filters, and serious sealing issues.
How the argument was settled
The expedition ultimately carried both — twelve open-circuit sets and eight closed-circuit. The Bourdillons, father and son, were the strongest advocates for closed-circuit and put real engineering work into the system, but at altitude its reliability never quite caught up.
When the first summit pair (Bourdillon and Evans) on closed-circuit failed to reach the top, and the second pair (Hillary and Tenzing) on open-circuit succeeded, the debate effectively closed itself. High-altitude climbing has run on open-circuit oxygen ever since, and that has not changed.
29 May 1953 — the route to the top
On 28 May, Hillary and Tenzing left the South Col with support from George Lowe, Alfred Gregory, and the Sherpa Ang Nyima. They pitched a small tent at 8,503 m and spent that final night just the two of them.
A morning that started with frozen boots
Hillary woke to find that his boots, left outside the tent, had frozen solid. He spent two hours thawing them over the stove before they were finally usable. The two of them shouldered packs of about 13.6 kg each and set off on the last push.
The Hillary Step
Above the South Summit, a roughly 12 m wall of rock and ice blocked the way — the feature now known as the Hillary Step, the last real obstacle below the top. In the steep, thin-aired terrain, Hillary wedged himself into a crack between rock and snow and worked his way up. Tenzing followed.
11:30 a.m. — the summit
Above the Step the slope eased into a gentle snow ridge. There was no more up. The two of them were standing on the highest point on Earth.
Hillary offered his hand; Tenzing pulled him into an embrace. Tenzing raised his ice axe overhead with the flags of Nepal, the United Nations, the United Kingdom, and India fluttering from it. Tenzing, a Buddhist, made an offering of food to the gods of the mountain; Hillary buried a small crucifix in the snow that John Hunt had entrusted to him.
The two of them looked for any trace that Mallory and Irvine had been there before them. They found nothing. Their stay on the summit lasted only about 15 minutes. They ate some candy, took photographs, and started down.
Tenzing didn't know how to operate the camera, so no photograph exists of Hillary on the summit. The single image of Tenzing holding the flags aloft is the entire visual record of that moment.
What the first ascent left behind
News that reached Queen Elizabeth's coronation
The coded telegram announcing the summit was decoded in London, and the news reached the public on 2 June — the day of Elizabeth II's coronation. For a British public still working through the aftermath of the Second World War and watching the empire contract, the success on Everest landed as the symbol of a new era beginning.
Who actually stepped onto the summit first
Almost from the moment the climb ended, the question of whether Hillary or Tenzing had set foot on the summit first turned into a global debate. In Kathmandu, banners went up claiming Tenzing had dragged a half-conscious Hillary to the top.
For years, both men refused to break ranks, insisting the climb was the team's achievement and nothing more. Tenzing finally settled it in his 1955 autobiography Man of Everest, where he wrote plainly that Hillary had stepped onto the summit first.
What each of them did next
Hillary was knighted in 1953, but the rest of his life he poured into Sherpa welfare rather than his own celebrity. Through the Himalayan Trust, which he founded in 1960, he helped build schools, hospitals, and airstrips across mountain Nepal. In 1958 he reached the South Pole by tractor; in 1985 he stood at the North Pole with Neil Armstrong. He was the first person ever to reach all three of the "three poles" — the summit of Everest and both geographic poles.
Tenzing was appointed the first Director of Field Training at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, founded in Darjeeling in 1954, and spent 22 years training the next generation of climbers. In 1978 he opened a trekking business, Tenzing Norgay Adventures. Until his death in 1986 at the age of 71, he kept his life rooted in the mountains and the people of the Himalaya.
Japan and Everest
The first Japanese climbers to reach the summit were Teruo Matsuura and Naomi Uemura on 11 May 1970. In 2013, Yūichirō Miura, at 80, set the record as the oldest person to summit Everest. The history of the mountain is still being written.