Sir Edmund Hillary:Sir Edmund Hillary, who has died aged 88, became the first person to scale the world's highest mountain - the 8,848m (29,028ft) summit of Mount Everest in the Himalayas - an achievement he shared with his Nepalese sherpa, Tenzing Norgay.
Eight previous British expeditions had failed to reach the top, and a number of expedition members had died in the process, most famously George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, who went missing on Everest in 1924.
But at 11.30am on May 29th, 1953, Hillary and Tenzing made it to the top of the world. Hillary's first words, to fellow climber George Lowe, when he and Tenzing returned from the summit were, "Well, George, we knocked the bastard off!" The quip was typical of his "blokish" character.
Many New Zealanders saw in his earthy directness and dry humour the epitome of the best their country had to offer.
Hillary and Tenzing's triumph reverberated around the world. Word reached England the night before the coronation of Elizabeth II, resulting in the memorable Daily Express headline the next morning: "All this and Everest too!"
Hillary, who spent much of his life helping build schools and hospitals in Nepal, was New Zealand's best-known son and was revered there. The picture of his craggy face is on the country's five dollar note.
In an age where, increasingly, heroes' reputations seem to be tarnished, Hillary's, if anything, grew through his life. New Zealanders warmed to the self-effacing "ordinary bloke" who liked to be known simply as Ed and whose number was listed in the Auckland telephone directory.
Hillary and John Hunt, the British army colonel who led the Everest expedition, were knighted by Queen Elizabeth. Tenzing received the George Medal, the second-highest award for gallantry that can be given to a civilian.
As an immediate consequence of his success, the then 33-year-old Hillary became one of the most famous men alive, his long, rugged face appearing on magazine covers and postage stamps. The tall and lean Hillary never expected to become a celebrity.
"I was a bit naive, really," he said in a turn-of-the-century newspaper interview. "I was just a country boy. I thought the mountaineering world would be interested, but I never dreamed that it would have that effect on people who didn't climb."
And, he maintained, he never regarded himself as a hero. "I was a mountaineer who worked to reach the summits of mountains," he said. "Even in my 79th year, I don't believe a word of the rubbish printed over the years."
For the final assault on the summit, Hunt chose the strapping six-foot Hillary, then a beekeeper from near Auckland, because of his experience in the Himalayas and reputation for immense energy and strength.
The second pairing in the 14-man party to attempt the summit, Hillary and Tenzing set off on a cloudless morning after spending a night at high altitude on the south peak of the South Col.
Encumbered by clothing and oxygen equipment that modern climbers would deem museum pieces, they inched ahead until they reached the most formidable problem on the final ridge, a 13m (40ft) rock now known as the Hillary Step.
Hillary "jammed" his way up a narrow crack running vertically up the rock using all his strength and determination. He then hauled Tenzing up and they moved on with little left to impede them. In his 1975 autobiography Nothing Venture, Nothing Win, Hillary said Everest "represented the ultimate in achievement; the supreme challenge for flesh and blood and spirit".
From the beginning, Hillary was asked whether he or Tenzing was actually the first to set foot on the summit of Everest.
"This has always been a controversial thing, but not between Tenzing and myself," Hillary said in 1984, declining, as he always had, to answer the question. "I actually did lead the last few hundred feet up to the summit. But it was of complete unimportance as far as the mountaineer is concerned."
But in 2000, Hillary said: "It was a very silly thing, really. We were a team, and what difference did it make that one of us reached the top a few seconds ahead of the other? But I finally got tired of all the questions, [ so] when Tenzing wrote [ that Hillary was about 6ft ahead] in his book, I admitted it too." Tenzing died in 1986.
Conquering Everest was not the last of Hillary's epic adventures.
He later climbed other peaks in the Himalayas, and in 1958 led a team of New Zealanders past a British team in a race to the South Pole in large snow tractors across 1,200 miles of glaciers and heavily crevassed snow fields. In 1960, he was back in the Himalayas, attempting to track down the legendary Yeti - the Abominable Snowman - with animal expert Marlin Perkins, and to conduct high-altitude physiology experiments.
In 1977, he led a jet-boat expedition up the Ganges river from the Bay of Bengal to as close to the river's source in the Himalayas as they could go - a 1,500-mile journey.
That was followed by 100 miles on foot to more than 5,486m (18,000ft), where Hillary was stricken with a cerebral oedema and had to be rescued by helicopter.
Hillary spent much of his time raising funds for his Himalayan Trust. He founded the nonprofit organisation in 1961 as a way to give back to the Sherpas, one of the many ethnic groups native to Nepal, who served as guides for expeditions in the Himalayas.
By 2006, the trust, which raised around €170,000 a year, had built 27 schools, two hospitals and 13 village health clinics, in addition to rebuilding bridges, an airfield, constructing drinking-water systems and providing scholarships, among other projects.
Hillary became inextricably tied to the area, not least because his first wife Louise and daughter Belinda died in a plane crash as they flew to join him at a hospital he was helping to build. Nicknamed "Bari Sahib", meaning the big man, he was even more popular in Nepal than in his homeland.
"Nothing in life can be more satisfying than being the first," Hillary said in 2000, "but what I'm proudest of is my work in the Himalayas."
The middle of three children, Edmund Hillary was born in Auckland on July 20th, 1919. His father ran a small weekly newspaper in the country town of Tuakau, where the family lived on seven acres that included half a dozen cows, a large vegetable garden and orchards. His father's hobby was beekeeping, and he eventually abandoned journalism to run what had become a profitable commercial beekeeping enterprise.
Introverted and bookish, Hillary did so well in grammar school that he skipped two grades. But the gawky boy was shorter and weaker than his classmates.
Intending to become an engineer, he entered the University of Auckland. But he found it difficult to adapt and lacked interest, so he dropped out after two years and went to work in his father's beekeeping business.
Hillary, who first saw snow at 16 when he went on a school skiing trip to Mount Ruapehu on New Zealand's North Island, began climbing four years later when he, a friend and a guide climbed a small peak near a resort on South Island.
In 1944, he was called up for service in the Royal New Zealand Air Force and flew on search-and-rescue operations in Fiji. After the war, he returned to climbing and scaled New Zealand's snow-covered 3,764m (12,349ft) Mount Cook, which he later described as "the ambition of all local climbers".
"I knew right away that this is what I wanted to do - spend my life among the mountains and the snow and the ice," he said in 2000. "I had never been happier in my life, and I couldn't wait to do it again."
After a trip to the Alps, Hillary made his first climbing venture to the Himalayas in 1951. A year later, he joined a "training run" in Nepal for the team the Everest Committee intended to send to Everest in 1953.
Hillary never lost his taste for adventure. Last year at the age of 87, he visited both Nepal and Antarctica, where he celebrated the 50th anniversary of New Zealand's Scott Base scientific station, which he helped to establish.
Sir Edmund Hillary: born July 20th, 1919; died January 11th, 2008