Expeditions and Achievements

Peter Hillary's adventures have included:

• Over 40 expeditions including mountaineering expeditions on Everest's West Ridge, Makalu West Pillar, K2, Mt Vinson in Antarctica, Aconcagua, Lhotse West Face, Amadablam West Face direct and Carstenz Pyramid. He has traversed the Himalayas on foot from East to West, climbed Everest twice, in 1990 and in 2002.
• Surviving a howling storm on K2, the world’s second highest mountain. Peter was just 400 metres from the summit. He survived, but the storm claimed the lives of seven others he’d been climbing with. Surviving K2 is " probably my greatest mountaineering achievement."
• Reaching the Three Poles:  North Pole, South Pole, and the summit of Mt Everest. Sir Edmund and Peter flew in a small aircraft to the North Pole with astronaut Neil Armstrong.
• The first ski descent of Mt Aspiring: the Matterhorn of the Southern Hemisphere.
• The first high-altitude traverse of the Himalayan Range: a 3000 mile/5000 km, 10 month long route (averaging 13,000 feet / 4000 metres) from Mt Kanchenjunga in Sikkim across Nepal and India to K2 in Pakistan.
• From the ‘Ocean to the Sky’: jetboating up the sacred Ganges river with his father, from the Sundarbunds in the Bay of Bengal across the Gangetic plains to high in the Himalayas near Badrinath, where they made first ascents of two Himalayan peaks."For Dad and I this was the finest adventure of them all."
• Shark frenzies in the Coral Sea: feeding and filming sharks with Ron and Valerie Taylor at the Osprey Reef 120 miles/200kms off the north Queensland coast.
• Extensive mountaineering and ice-climbing in the Southern Alps of New Zealand, including the Balfour Face of Mt Tasman, East Face of Mt Cook, South Face of Mt Douglas and Strauchon Face of Unicorn.
• The Seven Summits: climbing all seven of the highest mountains on each of the seven continents.