Edmund Hillary's Sherpa party loaded with supplies en route for Base Camp, Nepal on April 19, 1953. It’s hard to imagine how monumental Britain’s successful summit of Mount Everest was in 1953. Fourteen previous attempts, three major British ones alone between 1921 and 1924, had failed to conquer the 29,035-foot-high peak. Expeditions were military in scale, requiring huge teams and tons of supplies. They were also intimately bound up with entrenched ideas of class.
Making Everest as easily purchased as a Caribbean cruise did not happen immediately. For years after 1953, the mountain remained a singular test of alpine skill and endurance. Jim Whittaker became the first American to summit in 1963; Reinhold Messner the first to summit without supplemental oxygen in 1978. In the early 1980s, two events coincided.