Hillary Reminisces on Everest Feat : Nepal: It was 17 below and the wind blew slivers of ice as the New Zealander and his Sherpa guide scaled the last 1,100 feet to the top of the world on May 29, 1953.

Edmund Hillary awakened in his tent at 4 a.m. and thawed his frozen boots over a stove. At 6:30, he began his climb up the last 1,100 feet to the top of the world.

It was 17 degrees below zero. Wind whipped slivers of ice into his bearded cheeks on that brilliant morning May 29, 1953, as he and Tenzing Norgay, a guide from the Sherpa mountain tribe, chipped and picked their way up the steep white slope of Mt. Everest.

Recalling the climb 40 years later, Hillary, now 73, acknowledged that he was frightened.

“I experienced fear on many occasions,” he said in an interview. “I often thought, ‘What the heck am I doing here when I could be on the beach?’

“But I always considered fear to be a stimulating factor. It makes you able to perform beyond what you thought was physically possible.”

In the previous two months, the team of 13 foreigners and their Sherpa porters had crossed obstacles they named Atom Bomb, Ghostly Crevasse, Nutcracker, Hell-Fire Alley and Hillary’s Horror.

The last hurdle was a vertical, 40-foot crack in the ice now immortalized as The Hillary Step. After crossing it, with oxygen tanks running low, Hillary and Tenzing scrambled over bumps and cornices, searching for the summit at 29,028 feet, where Earth pokes highest into the heavens.

“Time was running out,” Hillary wrote in his autobiography. “Finally, I cut around the back of an extra large hump, and then on a tight rope from Tenzing I climbed up a gentle snow ridge to its top.

“It was 11:30 a.m. and we were on top of Everest.”

Neither Hillary nor Tenzing ever revealed who was first to stand on the summit. Tenzing, known to his people as the Tiger of the Snows, died of lung cancer in 1986.

Along with Robert E. Peary’s discovery of the North Pole, Charles Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic and Neil Armstrong’s footstep on the moon, the conquest of Everest ranks among the great exploring feats of the 20th Century.

It made the beekeeper from New Zealand an overnight sensation. His exploit rivaled the crowning of Queen Elizabeth II for attention in the world press. Before the team descended to the foot of the mountain, they were met by runners from Katmandu with bundles of telegrams and a knighthood for Hillary.

“It changed all our lives,” said John Hunt, 83, the British army officer who led the Everest expedition.

Of the 13 foreigners and 14 Nepalese in the expedition, only Hillary and Tenzing reached the summit.

Everest, towering over the border between Nepal and Tibet, had been inaccessible to most outsiders until a few years before. The first Westerners set foot in the mystical land of Tibet at the turn of the century, and the secretive kingdom of Nepal opened its frontiers only in 1950.

The mountain’s height was first calculated in 1852 from the distant Indian plains by the Survey of India, and it was named for the organization’s founder, Sir George Everest.

Last month, a team of European and Chinese scientists using satellite and laser technology announced a revised calculation of Everest’s altitude as 29,022.6 feet, or 6.66 less than previously accepted. The Nepalese government said it will stick to the previous estimate for now.

Nepalese call the mountain Sagarmatha, “Head Touching the Sky.” Tibetans know it as Qomolangma, or “The Mother Goddess of the Earth.”

The earliest attempt to scale it was from the north, in Tibet, in 1922. That expedition came within 900 feet of the summit before a cliff of ice broke away, carrying seven Sherpas to their deaths. Two years later, two British climbers disappeared in fog as they struggled toward the peak. They were never seen again.

Seventeen expeditions failed in the 30 years before Hillary and Tenzing stood on the summit.

About 500 climbers have reached the peak since then. On one day last year, 32 climbers waited in line at The Hillary Step for their turns at the summit.

“Today, it is too much of a business operation for my taste,” Hillary said. “The vast majority of climbers are just following in others’ footsteps. These days, Hillary’s Step is littered with fixed ropes. I just had to climb it.”

If the novelty of scaling Everest has faded, the dangers have not.

Government figures say 123 people have died on its forbidding slopes, including five this year. Nearly half were buried under snow and rock by avalanches, some plunged into hidden crevasses, others succumbed to exposure in the fierce, freezing winds.

On May 13, Tenzing’s nephew, Lobsang Tshering Bhutia, plunged to his death on a climb to celebrate the anniversary of his uncle’s achievement.

Hillary said that, although only he and Tenzing reached the summit in 1953, “The Everest expedition was a pyramid of effort. All members played an important part.”

The other team members, waiting a few thousand feet below, were exhausted. Oxygen was low and the monsoon snows began.

“Everybody, obviously, would have liked to get to the top, but I doubt if it would have been possible,” Hillary said.

Hunt, the team leader, who was interviewed separately during a recent reunion of seven expedition members, said others were disappointed and grumbled afterward that they had missed their chance.

“But they were enough imbued with the idea that this was a team effort to suppress their own personal ambitions,” Hunt said. “To me, getting to the top wasn’t really the important thing.”

Fame gave Hillary the chance for more adventures: an expedition into the Antarctic; a hunt for Yeti, the mythical Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas; and a trip up the Ganges River. In the 1980s, he was New Zealand’s ambassador to India and Nepal.

He returns frequently to trek through Nepal’s stunning mountain scenery, although he now suffers more readily from altitude sickness and rarely goes above 12,000 feet.