Everest, Mount
Mount Everest, known in Tibetan as Chomolungma ("mother goddess of the land") and in Nepali as Sagarmatha ("peak of the heavens"), is located in the Himalayan Range on the border between Nepal and Tibet. It is 8,848 meters high and thus the world's highest mountain. Its English name honors Sir George Everest (1790–1866), the surveyor-general of India from 1830 to 1843. Although it had been surveyed from a distance and flown over, in 1921 George Mallory was the first European to attempt to climb it. He lost his life there in 1924. Sir Edmund Hillary (b. 1919), a New Zealand mountaineer, and Tenzing Norgay (1914–1986), a Sherpa, finally reached the summit in 1953. Subsequently many adventurers have made the ascent from several directions with the help of modern equipment. Six deaths on the mountain during an ill-fated climb in1996 were seen as a consequence of increasingly novice climbers tackling the mountain. In 2000 a Slovenian mountaineer, Davo Karnicar, ascended to the summit in four days and became the first person to ski down.
Snow-capped Mount Everest in Gokyo, Nepal. (ALISON WRIGHT/CORBIS)Paul Hockings
Further Reading
Hagen, Toni. (1963) Mount Everest. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hillary, Edmund. (1955) High Adventure. London: Hodder.
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