Everest climber dead at 88 5

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1. 

   GreenEngineer Posted 6:46 am
   11 Jan 2008

   his most impressive accomplishment:Being a world-famous adventurer, and yet dying of old age.

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2. 

   Werdna Posted 7:47 am
   11 Jan 2008

   Another thing......Hillary reached the summit of Everest the same day that Queen Elizabeth was coronated.  Don't have a reference for this, but heard it on CBC.
   
   Andrew Eisenberg
   
   
   The gateway project is wrong---http://www.livableregion.ca

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3. 

   katc Posted 8:06 am
   11 Jan 2008

   and also...His day job was as a bee keeper in New Zealand, where he also participated in efforts to preserve the country's endemic species and biodiversity.  Great guy, all in all- will be missed by the climbing and mountaineering world.

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4. 

   caniscandida Posted 2:00 pm
   11 Jan 2008

   a very sweet manHillary was a great humanitarian.  He loved the Sherpas, and all the people of Nepal, and did a great deal for them by promoting the construction of schools and medical facilities.
   He is said to have protested bitterly the commercialization of alpinism on Everest.  Whether that had more to do with disgust at the pollution, or with a sense of violation of a mountainclimber's idealism, I do not know.
   I think it was E.O. Wilson who recently shared an amusing memory with Bill Moyers of a visit to Edmund Hillary, not many years ago, at his home in a neighborhood high on a hill overlooking Wellington.  Wilson's driver drove him up the road to the house, and Hillary, on greeting him, kept exclaiming how frightfully high that hill was, and how he could never drive on that road without trembling.
   The moral of which is, Everything is relative, even within one and the same person.  Or, after Heracleitus, You cannot step into the same river twice.
   
   Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.

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5. 

   Jay Alt Posted 5:20 pm
   11 Jan 2008

   Conquest & coronationHillary was a very humble man.   IIRC, Neither he or his Sherpa climbing partner Tenzing would say who reached the summit first.  Only that they walked up together and that neither one noticed at the time.  Nice.  
   The Everest expedition included a newspaperman.  He realized the goal might be achieved in time for Elizabeth's coronation.  The two men reached the summit on May 29 but it took time for word of it to get off the mountain and out.  The reporter hired runners and a driver to speed to Katmandu.  A telegram with a code phrase was sent to Britain.  His paper scooped the story and portrayed it as a coronation gift to Elizabeth.
   According to wiki, there was a 2nd climb team that came within 300 feet of the summit two days earlier, but turned back due to exhaustion.  

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