Peter Hillary

Peter Edmund Hillary (born 26 December 1954) is a New Zealand mountaineer, philanthropist and writer. He is the son of adventurer Sir Edmund Hillary, who, along with mountaineer Tenzing Norgay, completed the first successful ascent of Mount Everest.
When Peter Hillary summited Everest in 1990, he and his father were the first father/son duo to achieve the feat. Hillary has achieved two summits of Everest, an 84-day trek across Antarctica to the South Pole, and an expedition guiding astronaut Neil Armstrong to land a small aircraft at the North Pole. He has climbed many of the world's major peaks, and on 19 June 2008, completed the Seven Summits, reaching the top of the highest mountains on all seven continents, when he summited Denali in Alaska.

Personal life

Peter Edmund Hillary was born in Auckland, New Zealand on 26 December 1954. He had two younger sisters, Sarah Louise and Belinda Mary, and was the eldest of the three children of Sir Edmund Hillary and his first wife, Louise Mary Rose. Peter Hillary received his education at King's College, Auckland and at Auckland University.

As a child, Hillary travelled the world extensively. In 1962, when he was seven, his family travelled all over the United States and Canada while Sir Edmund was on an extended lecture tour. On the way back to New Zealand, the Hillary family capped off their year abroad in Nepal for a visit with Tenzing Norgay. Additional travels included trips to the United Kingdom; drives in the deserts of Australia; learning to ski on New Zealand's South Island; climbing New Zealand's highest peak, Aoraki / Mount Cook; and sitting around campfires in the Himalayas. At age eleven, his father took him to climb Mount Everest.

On 31 March 1975, after having spent a year in Nepal, Hillary's mother and youngest sister, sixteen-year-old Belinda, were killed when their plane crashed shortly after taking off from a Kathmandu airfield. Hillary, then twenty, was in Assam, India, visiting a friend, when he received the news that there were no survivors in the crash. He described Lady Hillary and Belinda as 'the glue that bonded the family together'.

Hillary's climbing friend, Australian Mark Moorhead, died on 15 October 1983 attempting to ascend Makalu, a Himalayan mountain that is the fifth-highest in the world. When Hillary went to pay his respects to the family, he met Moorhead's sister Ann, whom he would later marry. They separated in 1993 when Hillary began talking about resuming his mountaineering career after a three-year hiatus, and were subsequently divorced. Hillary later married Yvonne Oomen, with whom he has two children, Alexander and Lily; he also has two children, Amelia and George, from his first marriage.

On 11 January 2008, Hillary was in Lisbon, Portugal, at a dinner with some clients when he was informed his father had died of a sudden heart attack at Auckland Hospital. Sir Edmund lay in state at the Auckland Cathedral of the Holy Trinity and his funeral on 22 January 2008 at Auckland's St. Mary's Church was televised live throughout New Zealand. Hillary delivered a eulogy for his father in which he said, recalling his childhood, 'Growing up in the Hillary family, was quite an adventure... Adventure was compulsory'. On 29 February 2008, Hillary, his sister Sarah, and Sir Edmund's widow, Lady Hillary (formerly June Anderson Mulgrew) scattered most of his ashes, in a private ceremony held on Auckland's Hauraki Gulf

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases