Compiled by Outside Online

March 5 2002 Forty-nine years ago Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay stood atop Everest. This May, Hillary's son, Peter Hillary, and Norgay's grandson, Tashi Tenzing, hope to do the same. They plan to meet on the summit of the world's highest peak, kicking off a year of celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of their forbearers' remarkable feat.

"There is no better way of commemorating the anniversary than for the next generation to go to Everest and honor our fathers' achievements," Jamling Tenzing Norgay, Tenzing Norgay's son, told London's Sunday Telegraph from his home in India. In the same interview, Peter Hillary, who scaled Everest in 1990, said, "It's really rather a nice thing that our two families' histories keep crossing. My father and Tenzing were the greatest of friends."

New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay made history on May 29, 1953 when they became the first men to stand atop the 29,035-foot Himalayan massif. In the decades preceding their success numerous expeditions failed and climbers died. Only two teams managed to reach the top in the ten years following Hillary and Norgay's climb. The first American team —- Jim Whittaker, Luther Jerstad, Barry Bishop, Willi Unsoeld, Norman Dyhrenfurth, and Tom Hornbein —- summited Everest in 1963. Tenzing Norgay died in 1986.

Hillary, 47, plans on meeting with Jamling Tenzing Norgay, who summited Everest in 1996 as the climbing leader for David Breashears's IMAX film, at the famed 18,000-foot-high Everest Base Camp on the Nepalese side of the mountain, reported the Sunday Telegraph. At the same time, Tashi Norgay will be acclimatizing and preparing himself at the base camp on the northern (Tibetan) side of the mountain. Hillary will retrace the route his father and Tenzing Norgay did in 1953. Tashi Norgay will be climbing a northern route with a Swiss expedition.

"My father has lived an extraordinary life of remarkable achievements and it's that history I am most proud of," Peter Hillary told the Sunday telegraph. From the summit, the younger Hillary plans to call his father, now 82, on a satellite phone. "I might be tempted to repeat [his] momentous words when he reached the top, 'We knocked the bastard off,'" Hillary was quoted as saying.

The details of other celebrations planned for the 50th anniversary of Hillary and Norgay's feat have not yet been finalized, though Peter Hillary did tell the Sunday Telegraph that there were plans for a celebratory banquet at the foot of Everest next year.