Earlier this month King Charles reflected: “Seventy years ago, on the eve of her coronation, my late mother, Queen Elizabeth II, received the wonderful news that a British team, led by Colonel, later Lord, John Hunt, had successfully climbed Mount Everest.” The Queen had indeed been informed on June 1, 1953, that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had done what no human had ever managed before, and scaled 8,850m to reach the highest point on Earth. The following day the achievement was announced to the nation.
The news had been broken by the 26-year-old reporter Jan (then James) Morris, who was covering the attempt for The Times, which was the official media partner of the expedition. Another companion was Rolex, which supplied the team with timepieces.
The Swiss watchmaker had a thing for explorers. Today Rolex says: “The founder of Rolex, Hans Wilsdorf, saw the world as a living laboratory. He didn’t hesitate to entrust his watches to extreme adventurers so that they could test their reliability in any circumstances.” In particular Rolex had a thing for Mount Everest, having partnered with a British expedition in 1933 — the first time the brand had equipped a mountaineering enterprise. The British party reached an altitude of 8,570m, accompanied by their Rolex Oyster timepieces. A Rolex newspaper advertisement of the time referenced the attempt and stated: “The Rolex Oyster was chosen because it is airtight, waterproof and absolutely unaffected by extremes of temperature or climate.”
In the same year Rolex Oysters were used by a team flying over Everest to photograph it, the first time this had been done (the pictures would later be used by Hillary and Norgay to plan their route). Then in 1952, the year before the British team’s triumph, Rolex teamed up with a Swiss group, which included Norgay, that came very close to reaching its goal, and is considered to have laid the groundwork for 1953’s achievement.
As the King said, this year marks the 70th anniversary of Hillary and Norgay’s success, and I am holding two very special Rolexes in my hands. One is Hillary’s personal Rolex Explorer, which is worn today by Alex Hillary, the grandson of the New Zealand mountaineer and also a climber; the other is Norgay’s gold Rolex Oyster Perpetual, which is still worn by his son Norbu, and is engraved on the back “Presented to Sherpa Tenzing Norgay by the Rolex Watch Company as a memento of the Swiss expedition to Mount Everest”.
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I am meeting both of Norgay’s sons and Hillary’s daughter and grandchildren to hear about the way Everest has shaped their lives. Jamling Tenzing Norgay has literally followed in his father’s footsteps and is an accomplished Sherpa mountaineer, and he and his brother Norbu also work with the Tenzing Norgay Sherpa Foundation, which is dedicated to the history of Sherpa identity and culture. “My father’s legacy, it’s growing more and more over the years. He really wanted to impart the knowledge, that experience, to a younger generation. I think he’d be really pleased to see the progress in the community,” Norbu says.
Alex Hillary is also proud of his grandfather’s work with the community local to Everest. “The Hillary relationship with the Himalayas began with an attraction to topography, the mountains,” he says. “But it continued over three generations with a relationship with the people and the villages below. It wasn’t long after Ed climbed Everest that he came back to Nepal and started the Himalayan Trust. It’s an incredible legacy . . . 42 schools, hospitals, forestry projects, nurseries and airstrips that he built in a pretty short period of time. Really that was his life work, it wasn’t mountaineering, the summit shot. It was the work that he did in these villages. And that’s something we continue today.”
For Rolex, the Everest story continued in a similar way. Today it supports the foundations of both the Hillary and Norgay families, and is still involved with the mountain through its Perpetual Planet Initiative. This has evolved out of Rolex’s initial interest in exploration as a testing ground for its products to a commitment to how exploration can help protect the planet, so that future generations can enjoy its wonders.
Following the 1953 Everest ascent, in 1954 Rolex partnered with the National Geographic Society to support exploration long-term. In 2019 this partnership was reinforced with the launch of the Perpetual Planet Expeditions, which are designed to investigate and document the effects climate change is having in sensitive and remote places like tropical rainforests and high mountain glaciers.
As part of this focus, in April 2019 Rolex supported a scientific expedition led by National Geographic to conduct pioneering research on the alpine environment and glaciers of the Hindu Kush–Himalayan region. As part of its activity it installed five weather stations on Everest to monitor the changes taking place because of climate change. The expedition included Baker Perry, a National Geographic explorer, who explains: “High mountain regions are warming faster than many other places around the world. Before we went on this expedition in 2019 there was one weather station above about 6,000m. And so we just really didn’t fully understand the scientific processes and the climate changes taking place in these critical water towers.” Perry and his team put in a network of weather stations, but one, which was exposed to winds of 150mph, failed in 2020.
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So he returned in 2022 to carry out maintenance on the stations and established a new, higher one, just below the summit. One of the members of his team in both 2019 and again in 2022 was a young Sherpa named Dawa Yangzum Sherpa, and she too has become part of Rolex’s Everest story. The firm has invited her to join the Perpetual Planet Initiative, supporting her mission to train the next generation of female Nepali climbers. Yangzum Sherpa guided an expedition to Everest in 2012, aged 21, becoming the first Nepalese woman to do so. She is also the first Nepalese woman to be recognised officially as an international mountain guide.
“Climbing is still a male-dominated sport,” she says. “I started an all-female course, training high-altitude climbing. We teach them how to wear all the gear, knots and climbing techniques — rock climbing, ice climbing. They need to love what they’re doing to become really good. When I see them I think they were like me ten years ago. So this change makes me so happy and I realised it was also really good for myself too. I want to be there for them so that they can continue.”
Another of Rolex’s ambassadors is a man who has climbed all of the world’s 14 8,000m peaks with no oxygen, including Everest, which he has tackled no less than 11 times (summiting it seven times). This is Ed Viesturs. I ask the high-altitude mountain climber why Everest casts such a spell.
“Because it’s the highest point on Earth,” he says. “It represents achievement. It represents human endeavour, exploration. When Hillary and Norgay climbed it for the first time it was literally like putting man on the moon. It was a place that no one had gone before. Could you survive at that altitude? How would you deal with the environment? I mean, it was mental and physical.”
Viesturs also makes the sort of connection between watches and mountaineering that Wilsdorf, the Rolex founder, would have appreciated: “Timekeeping is critical. For an explorer the watch that you have has to be reliable. I have a Rolex Explorer II. I received the watch in 1994, when I had climbed at that point three of the 8,000m peaks and I was just then starting with the idea that I wanted to climb all 14. I wore it every single day since that moment on all my climbs and I still wear it today. This watch is a reminder of the journey that I went on. It’s probably the most important piece of equipment that I had with me.”
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