Thursday, January 10, 2008 Categories:
Outdoors
| Books and
writing
Famed
Mount Everest climber
Edmund Hillary was
born in 1919 on a small farm in Auckland, New
Zealand. He loved wilderness travel and had
begun climbing
New Zealand’s mountains when
World War II came. He joined the New Zealand air
force and was trained as a navigator. He was
only in the service for two years, but his
navigation skills proved vital in 1957, when he
led the fi
rst New Zealand expedition to
the South Pole (his team reached it on Jan. 4,
1958.) Compasses are unreliable in polar
regions, and the Antarctic summer brought
24-hour daylight. Hillary navigated with an
astrocompass, a device which
allowed him to determine the team’s location by
measuring the sun’s position in the sky.
Tags: Edmund Hillary, Mount Everest, New Zealand, Antarctica, Astrocompass
