For all of his 70 years, mountains have loomed large in the life of Peter Hillary.
Even during our Zoom interview, he turned his screen to point the camera at the view from his window and showed me the snowy mountains in his homeland of New Zealand.
"New Zealand's highest mountain, Mount Cook, on a gorgeous wintery day," he explained proudly. And you get the feeling he would rather be outside trekking up the mountain than admiring their majesty indoors.
"I love being in the mountains, so I'm a mountaineer, a bit of exploration, and I do love adventure," Hillary told KCLU.
You could say that mountaineering is in his blood. His father, Sir Edmund Hillary, completed the first successful ascent of Mt. Everest, alongside Nepalese-Indian sherpa Tenzing Norgay, in 1953.
"The mountains have a magnetic draw on me, just as they did for my father Sir Edmund Hillary," said Peter. He added that he's happy to have followed in his father's footsteps, starting when he was young.
"I just had my 12th birthday, and we ascended up the valley towards Everest Base Camp," he shared. "We climbed a little peak that was 18 and a half thousand feet high. In the Himalayas, you know, yaks graze up there. In any other country, it'd be the most important mountain in the land. But in the Himalayas, it's just another one of them."
"And then we walked all the way up to Everest Base Camp, up the Khumbu Glacier," he said. "I'll never forget wandering around on the ice...and dad excitedly going, 'Oh, this is where our 1953 British expedition base camp was.' There were old bits of tent and equipment still lying around. Because in those days, people just went, 'We don't need this, let's go,' and left it behind. It was terribly exciting because it really meant I was walking in his footsteps. I could see where they'd been. It wasn't all that long before that they were there on that historic climb, and it really just brought it all alive for me," he said.
Peter Hillary has twice summited Everest and climbed many of the world’s peaks.
"I think you could compare it to a whole lot of life-changing experiences you have. You know, the birth of a child, the success of a small start-up business, and getting a PhD. You know, people who accomplish these sorts of things, they're changed by it forever," he said.
"Himalayan mountains, particularly the highest of mountains, penetrate into the jet stream. So you have to time your climb for a windless or near windless day. That's all part of the game. You know, making these critical decisions when you're right up there," said Hillary.
"I just love it. And it was not just the experience of climbing a mountain. I just loved the people involved in it. You know, the excitement, the camaraderie, and your shared incredible intensity. So really, it was an intellectual and an emotional journey. That's where the impact comes from."
Peter Hillary will be talking about what it takes to travel to the ends of the earth on Friday, September 26, at Thousand Oaks Performing Arts Plaza, as part of their Trailblazers series.
