By Kurt Hettler, Marketing Director, Special Projects
In recent years, climbing Everest has become something of an industry (on one single day in 2003, nearly 120 people reached the top), and today when I learned of Sir Edmund Hillary’s death at 88, in his native New Zealand, I marveled at his extraordinary accomplishment. High Adventure is one of my favorite Oxford books. It brings to life all the unforgiving conditions the adventurers endured—the unstable snow ledges, the brutal weather, the chaotic icefalls—and shows how, with relatively low-tech equipment, but an indomitable will to conquer, they succeeded where many others had failed. Hillary recounts the two-year odyssey that began with the discovery of a new Southern route up Everest in 1951, continued with grueling training in the Himalayas the following year, and culminated with Hillary and his Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, triumphing atop the summit in 1953. It’s the thrilling and remarkable story of risk and adventure, and a fitting final testament to a man that spent his life seeking new challenges. We here at OUP tip our hats at the passing of this simple man who climbed to the top of the world and came back down.