R.I.P. Sir Edmund Hillary

Sir Edmund Hillary has died at the age of 88. He was the first climber to reach the summit of Mount Everest, along with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, and he went on to devote much of his life to exploration and humanitarian work in Nepal. In a 1998 profile of Hillary for Salon.com, Don George placed Hillary in the pantheon of great adventurers:

Sir Edmund can be seen as the last branch in the great historical tree of terrestrial explorers, a direct descendant of such adventurers as Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Lewis and Clark, Stanley and Livingston, Perry and Scott and Amundsen, Sir Richard Burton, Charles Lindbergh—explorers who drove themselves to do what no one had done before, “because,” in the famous words of Sir George Mallory, “it is there.”

George describes a San Francisco gathering honoring Hillary. At one point, climber David Breashears looked Hillary in the eye. His remark to the famed climber seems particularly fitting today:

“We shall never see the likes of you again, Ed; we shall never see the likes of you again.”

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