29th May: Mount Everest Day

Mount Everest day celebrates the anniversary of the 1953 British expedition to reach the summit of the world's highest mountain. Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay were the first men to reach the top of the world on this date.

1. It was 11.30am local time when they got to the top, and after taking photographs and burying some sweets and a small cross on the summit, they turned back, returning in time to send word to England so that the Queen heard about it on the morning of her coronation.
2. Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world at 8,848 metres or 29,029 feet above sea level and the highest point from the centre of the Earth. This is the figure officially recognised by Nepal and China, but there has dispute about this over the years. If you include the height of the snow and ice at the top, the height varies and is almost impossible to measure accurately.
3. The British first became aware of the humongous mountain during a survey beginning in 1802, intended to chart the world's highest mountains. Until 1847, Kangchenjunga was believed to be the highest peak, until Andrew Waugh and John Armstrong spotted a peak that seemed to be higher, which they named "Peak B". Bad weather prevented them from verifying this, and it was not for another two years that James Nicholson returned to take more measurements, but he contracted malaria and didn't finish either, but his calculations were used by Radhanath Sikdar, an Indian mathematician, who in 1856 concluded that Peak B, which had now been renamed Peak XV, was indeed the highest in the world.
4. While it would have been the preference to use the local name for the mountain, there were several different ones, including Deodungha (Darjeeling for "Holy Mountain" and Comolungma ("Holy Mother" in Tibet), Sagarmatha ("Goddess of the Sky" in Nepal) and Shenmu Feng ("Holy Mother Peak" in Chinese). Rather than choose one of these, Waugh decided to offend everyone equally by giving the mountain a new name, Everest, after his predecessor Colonel Sir George Everest. Sir George was opposed to having the mountain named after him, especially since it wasn't possible to write it in Hindi, or for local people to pronounce it. Nevertheless, in the English speaking world, the name stuck.
5. Everest is in the Himalayas, right on the border of Tibet and China - the international border crosses the actual summit point.
6. Now Everest was established as the world's highest mountain, people started attempting to climb it, usually thwarted by altitude sickness and bad weather. In 1924, George Mallory and Andrew Irvine gave it a go, but never came back. Mallory's body was found on the North Face in 1999 - there is speculation that he might have made it to the top 29 years before Hillary and Norgay, only to perish on the way down. It was Mallory who uttered the famous words, "Because it is there" when asked why he wanted to climb Everest. It was an exasperated response to a journalist who had been bothering him rather than his actual reason.
7. In 1933, a millionairess called Lady Houston, funded an expedition which tried to plant the British flag on the summit from an aeroplane.
8. In 1975, Junko Tabei from Japan became the first woman to reach the summit. In 1988, Jean Marc Boivin became the first person to descend by paraglider, and Davo Karnicar was the first to ski down in 2000. A year later, Erik Weihenmayer became the first blind climber to ascend. Jordan Romero is the youngest person to climb Everest, aged 13, in 2010. The oldest person to achieve the feat was Yuichiro Miura, at the age of 80. There are two men, Apa Sherpa and Phurba Tashi, who have climbed Everest 21 times each. Since 1978, there has been an ascent every year.
9. No-one has stayed on the summit for an entire day. The record stay is 21 and a half hours by Babu Chiri Sherpa.
10. Since 1922, 219 people have lost their lives in pursuit of the summit. 58 of these people made it to the top but didn't live to tell the tale. 120 of them are still lying on the mountain. "A mountain without danger is not a mountain," commented Reinhold Messner (first to make a solo ascent in 1980) in 2004.