Dancing at the feet of Everest

It’s not everyone who can dance at the foot of Mount Everest for his 40th birthday, and in the shadow of the world’s most famous mountaineer.

The death Jan. 11 of Sir Edmund Hillary left a hollow spot for Tim Wilson, a documentary filmmaker who calls Bear River home.

“I worked on a film with Sir Ed—and for his foundation--20 years ago now in Nepal, and stood with him in the shadow of Everest,” Wilson recalls.

It was Wilson’s birthday and he was presented a white silk scarf in the Buddhist monastery at the foot of the world’s highest peaks. The scarf would eventually be used to swaddle his firstborn son, but he wore it when he joined in a celebratory dance at the monastery.

The Nepalese know Everest as Sagarmatha, ‘where the rains first fall on earth’, but for much of the world it is simply the world’s tallest mountain at 29,028 feet (8,848 m). Hillary, a 33-year-old New Zealander with a relatively limited mountaineering background, along with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, was first to the summit of the world's highest peak on

May 29, 1953.

Their feat ended years of expeditions trying and failing to scale the mountain.

News of the successful expedition reached Britain on the day of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, and Hillary knighted was almost immediately by the young queen. Wilson said the New Zealander was put out by the honour—“He really was self-effacing—but it became useful later in life in raising funds to help the Sherpa people of Nepal.

Hillary first returned to Nepal 10 years after the ascent of Everest, and he devoted much of his life to helping the Sherpa people of Nepal. His efforts led to construction of many schools and hospitals in the remote region of the Himalayas.

He started a foundation in Canada to raise funds to help develop Nepal. Wilson said the Toronto-based foundation is headed by a friend of Hillary’s, Zeke O’Connor, and it was the foundation that commissioned the film Wilson worked on in 1987.

The film was to show the work Hillary was doing, building a school on the back of a monastery at Tengboche. The amazing monastery is in a ‘sacred bowl’ of surrounding peaks-- Tawache, Everest, Nuptse, Lhotse, Ama Dablam and Thamserku—and mountain skies of a deep cobalt blue.

It was the first school in Nepal built for novice monks, Wilson said, and it burned to the ground—along with the monastery—two years later. The Hillary Foundation raised the money and rebuilt the monastery and school, finishing the work in 2003.

Wilson remembers it was a steep walk into Nepal, a thousand feet (of elevation) a day. His thoughts were recorded in a diary that he turned to again after the news of Hillary’s death—and which may some day become the basis for a new documentary.

Hillary was 67 when Wilson met him during the filming, but the mountaineer was extraordinarily vital and was physically quite imposing. “At six feet, five inches he towered over even most Westerners,” Wilson said, “but what I remember most was how slowly he moved.

“It was slow as in gracious. When he arrived in a village, it was like he was a maharajah—or an elephant. There was time for people to gather around, and he was treated like visiting royalty.”

Hillary was a mythic figure in Nepal and even among many Westerners who knew him, Wilson says.

“You can’t separate who he was from what he did,” but that was more than climbing Everest, says Wilson. He said there is a Buddhist concept of one who turns back from the summit of enlightenment and comes back to help others.

“That’s what he did”

Hillary’s climbing career ended about eight years after the conquest of Everest, the result of a lung condition, and the mountains made other claims on him. He lost his first wife and youngest daughter in a plane crash near Katmandu.

In some ways, his efforts to help the people of Nepal also had a shadow side. Young men who would once have become monks have instead become tour guides for the thousands of visitors—and the hundreds of climbers who scale Everest, and who have left tons of litter on the mountainside.

Wilson has maintained contact with the Sir Edmund Hillary Foundation of Canada that he says has begun doing unprecedented literacy work with Sherpa women. Details are available on the foundation’s web site, www.thesiredmundhillaryfoundation.ca and readers can make a donation in memory of Sir Edmund Hillary.