How Hillary and Tenzing survived the ‘death zone’ to conquer Everest

To reach the Everest summit, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had to climb thin rocks, but they had to fight dangerous ice and fatal lack of oxygen in the most dangerous parts of the mountain. 72 years ago, they shared a victory with the BBC.

“I think my first reaction was definitely a relief,” New Zealand’s Edmund Hillary told the BBC on July 3, 1953. “We saved that one thing we were there and finding a summit for relief.” Tenzing also survived the unstable icy terrain and biting cold, and through his translator, Colonel John Hunt, the expedition team leader, his first sense of reaching the top was “immortal relief,” and Joy continued. This is because to stand on top of Everest, two men were able to enlarge the seemingly insurmountable sheer 40 feet vertical rock face in the infamous “Zone of Death,” the mountain’s most dangerous area.

At 8,849m (29,032 feet) above sea level, the mountain passes by many names, spanning the border between Nepal and Tibet. The British named it in 1856 after surveyor George Everest, but is known locally as the Nepal Sagarmasa and is known as Chomorumma, meaning the mother of the Tibetan world’s goddess.

Death Zone was a term given to a particular section of Everest in 1952 by Edouard Wyss-Dunant, a physician who led the Swiss expansion. Tensing was also a member of this expedition. A moniker refers to an altitude that allows climbers to reach a mountain that is 8,000m (26,000 feet) above sea level. There, hypoxic atmosphere has a disastrous effect on physiology, and cells begin to die. Most of the climbers who died in Everest ended in the death zone.

Humans have not evolved to survive in incredibly cold temperatures, brutal winds, and lack of oxygen present there. Thinness of the atmosphere means that climbers suffer from hypoxia, where their important organs do not get enough oxygen and their bodies begin to break. When your brain and lungs are starved for oxygen, your heart rate will skyrocket and you increase the risk of a heart attack. The lack of oxygen in the brain causes swelling, headaches and nausea, which rapidly undermines the climber’s ability to judge and make decisions, especially when stressed. As their brains bulge, climbers are known to experience delirium, talk to people who are not there, dig holes in the snow, and even undress.

Tenzing and Hillary, together with others in the expedition, had planned to slowly adapt to the harsh conditions of the Himalayas by increasing altitude and gradually climbing the mountains, climbing the mountains in 1953, expanding the time that helped the body produce oxidized cows, allowing the body to increase its lung capacity and produce red blood cells. Body – compensates for the decrease in oxygen migrating towards the peak of Everest. However, this adaptation was not without the team’s risk, as hemoglobin thickens too much hemoglobin. This makes circulation more difficult and increases the chances of lung stroke and fluid accumulation.

However, it is virtually impossible to adapt to the body at the altitudes above 6,000m (19,700 feet) and the vertical rock surface required for scaling, which was sitting at 8,790m (28,839 feet) above sea level. Therefore, climbers brought in specially designed oxygen devices. This helps to combat the effects of altitude atmospheric air. But they were not under the illusion of the magnitude of the challenge they faced. Three days ago, the expedition’s main climbing teams, Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans, came within 100m (328 feet) of the summit. However, tired from the climb, troubled by the oxygen set malfunction, and abused by the freezing wind, forced him to turn back before reaching the top.

Early on May 29, 1953, Tensing and Hillary began their second attempt at the expedition, fighting in the snow along the exposed ridgeline towards the peak. When they scrambled the ice ridge, the New Zealand climber began to question Hillary’s son, Peter, and himself about whether they could continue He spoke to BBC Witness History in 2023.

“One of the things I remember most is his description of moving steep snow and ice sides upwards towards the South Summit. He went forward, cut these stairs, loosened the wonderful sheets of snow and ice, and stripped these steep slopes into Kanshan’s face (the eastern side), saying that he went out on the condition, even if Everest fell on Tibet. Continue,” he said. “I remember him always telling this story with a glimpse of his eyes and a terrible smile. He looked down at Tenzing and said they both smiled at each other and continued despite those conditions.”

Hillary’s climbing companion Tensing feels that he is his fate, and his son clogs the no-gay “he wanted this mountain. It was a special mountain for him.” He spoke to BBC Witness History in 2023. “He has already tried to climb this mountain six times over 21 years. A year ago, an attempt with Switzerland had him reaching almost 400m from the summit and had to turn back. He always felt this was the mountain he had to climb.”

The exposed vertical rock face was the last major barrier that stood between the two climbers and their goals. The smooth surface, which didn’t seem to hold the feet or hands, looked impossible to climb. With a rope attached to him Tessing’s holding, Hillary sandwiched her body between the rock face and the adjacent ridge of ice, praying that the ice was not lost. He then slowly and painstakingly went his own way. When he reached the top he dropped the rope down and chased him down to Tenzing. The rock face he managed to make Shimmy was later named Hillary’s Step in his honor. It was destroyed in 2015 by a devastating earthquake.

“In the last few moments we went along the ridge and couldn’t see the top of the ridge,” Hillary told the BBC in 1953.

As the two climbers were at the top of the world, they embraced each other in high elevation. Hillary took out the camera and began taking pictures of Tenji by waving an x ​​of ice on the flags of England, India, Nepal and the United Nations, taking pictures of the scenery from the top of the world. The Sherpas dug holes in the snow and buried sweets and biscuits as Buddhist offerings.

“Well, we had nothing left there indefinitely,” Hillary told the BBC in 1953.

The two also searched for evidence of the missing climber. George Mallory Andrew “Sandy” Irvine disappeared in the mountains in June 1924. When the journalist asked why he wanted to climb Everest, it was Mallory who made the famous retort. But they found no signs. Mallory’s body was eventually discovered in 1999, but the partial ruins of his partner Irvine were revealed in 2024 by melting ice on a glacier.

Tensing and Hillary stayed at the summit for just 15 minutes. “We were very eager to turn around and get off again because we were lacking oxygen,” Hillary said. Feeling they conquered Everest as a team, the two men made an agreement with each other to not say who first set foot on the peak. In his 1955 autobiography, Tiger of the Snow, Tensing will ultimately end the reporter’s speculation that Hilary had preceded him.

When they went down and exhausted, they returned to base camp, they met George Lowe, a fellow New Zealander and climber of Hillary. “Well, George, we defeated the asshole,” Hilary said in greeting. News of their achievements did not reach the outside world until June 2nd, the eve of Queen Elizabeth II’s Corner Crown. The Queen was awarded the George Medals to Edmund Hillary and Queen Col Hunt, sparking a controversy over why he was not equally respected.

Since then, the growing number of adventurers attempted to match their feats, and climbing the mountains has become an important source of income for the Nepal government. About 800 people try to reach the summit every year, but that remains Dangerous efforts. According to Nepal’s Tourism Bureau, nine people died or disappeared in 2024, while 18 people died the previous year. Since the record began a century ago, more than 330 mountaineering deaths have been recorded in the Everest area. Many of these frozen bodies have remained in the mountains for years, but as global warming has melted and melted ice sheets and glaciers, these bodies have been dead. It’s currently exposed.

In 2019, the Nepal government launched a cleanup campaign Remove the corpses of climbers. And for the first time last year, rescuers risked their lives, exploring and retrieving five bodies from a dangerous dead belt in the mountains.

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