I am a lucky man. I have had a dream and it has come true, and that is not a thing that happens often to men.”

Sir Edmund Hillary,Mount Everest Conqueror- from bees to the highestmountain.....
Everest, to its immediate south, is guarded by the treacherous glaciers and ice-falls of the Western Cwm. It forms a huge punch-bowl between Everest itself and Lhotse (27,890 feet), to the south-east, and Nuptse (25,680) to the south-west. The South Col is high above the Western Cwm, between Lhotse and main mass of Everest. To reach it the party traversed stretches of dangerous ice and "bad" snow, under which crevasses are liable to open up suddenly into chasms of great depth. On their way up these massifs of ice, rock and snow the Hunt party carried a new kind of mortar to dislodge loose snow which might start avalanches in their path. In this as in other respects the party were better equipped for reaching the summit than any of their predecessors.
Mr E. P. Hillary, aged 34, is a beekeeper in New Zealand. He served in the Royal New Zealand Air Force during the war. He started climbing in the New Zealand Alps and was an originator of winter ski mountaineering in the country.http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,966102,00.html