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Forehead In The Sky Classification

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At 29,035 feet( National Geographic) , Mount Everest is the top of the world. Split in half by the Nepalese and Chinese border this is just one of the enormous mountains in the mountain range named the Himalayas. This spectacle of nature doesn’t come without it’s risks though, about 240 people have died on the mountain. The locals call Everest Sagarmatha, meaning “Forehead in the Sky”, and it was first climbed in 1953. Sir Edmund Percival Hillary, a New Zealand veteran, and Tenzing Norgay, a Nepalese sherpa, were the first to summit Sagarmatha. Hillary and Tenzing took seven weeks to reach the summit on May 29, 1953. Since then about 4,000 climbers have attempted the deadly climb. But Hillary was the very first to do it.

Many people think climbing a mountain is an almost vertical climb all the way up. But that is not the case, there are many smaller climbs that go both up and down. The climb is very demanding on the body. You must be in top shape if you expect to summit the mountain. To get all the way up you need oxygen tanks, because the air is too thin once you get near the top. There are many camps up the mountain for climbers to rest for the night or day. But you must acclimatize, or let your body get used to the thin air (Mount Everest.Net). A common method is to …show more content…

At age 16 Hillary fell in love with mountains on a school ski trip to Mount Ruapehu in Tongariro National Park( Biography.com). By 20 years old he climbed Mount Ollivier in New Zealand’s Southern Alps. Eventually he joined the New Zealand Air Force. But after an injury on a boat he went away from the army and pursued his love of climbing. He was now set on climbing Mount Everest, and he attempted in 1951 with a British expedition but that mission failed. In 1953 another attempt was organized and Edmund Hillary was one of the climbers on that trip. Just seven weeks later he was standing on top of the world at 29,029

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