All Edmund Hillary's Sherpa Guide Asked For After Everest Was a School. So Hillary Built 63.
In 1961, hand-carried aluminium panels and three weeks of bolting at 3,790 metres created the first school of Hillary's Himalayan Trust — a project that still shapes the Everest region today.
When Sir Edmund Hillary sat with his Sherpa expedition sirdar Urkien at a high camp above the Khumbu in 1960 and asked what he could do to repay the Sherpa people, he expected to hear money, or medicine. Urkien asked for one thing: a school for the children of Khumjung.
Key facts
- Khumjung School opened in June 1961 at 3,790 metres, the first project of Hillary's Himalayan Trust
- Its frame was a prefabricated aluminium classroom, donated by the Indian Aluminium Company and flown in with Red Cross help
- It was airlifted to the Mingbo airstrip, then carried up the trail by porters and bolted together by Hillary and a handful of New Zealand volunteers in three weeks
- The original building is now the Hillary Visitor Centre, opened in 2023 on the 70th anniversary of the first Everest summit
Hillary wasn't looking for a monument. In 1960 he'd returned to the Khumbu leading the Silver Hut expedition, a scientific mission studying human physiology at extreme altitude, not a philanthropic one. It was a private conversation with his own sirdar that changed the trajectory of his life. There was no school in Khumjung, no clinic within days of walking, and nothing about the site, three days from the nearest road at the time, made a Western-style prefab schoolhouse an obvious idea.
It happened anyway. An aluminium-framed classroom was fabricated flat-packed in Kathmandu, then chartered by plane into the short dirt airstrip Hillary's team had scraped out of a ridge at Mingbo. From there it went the rest of the way the only way anything moves through the Khumbu without a helicopter: on the backs of porters, piece by piece, along the same trail that today's Everest Base Camp trekkers walk past without a second thought. Hillary and a small crew of New Zealand volunteers spent three weeks bolting the sections together at altitude, and the school opened its doors in June 1961.
That one favour became a five-decade project. By the Himalayan Trust's 50th anniversary, the foundation Hillary built around that first classroom had put up 63 schools across the Khumbu and beyond, alongside clinics, water systems and airstrips, including the one at Lukla that now carries his name. The work didn't stop with him: today the UK-based charity Classrooms in the Clouds continues building earthquake-resistant classrooms in the same Solukhumbu region, and says it now supports more than 5,500 children a year across the schools it funds.
What this means for trekkers
What this means for you
Khumjung sits a short, worthwhile detour off the main Everest Base Camp trail, most itineraries pass within an hour of it on an acclimatisation day out of Namche Bazaar. The old schoolhouse, preserved as the Hillary Visitor Centre, is one of the few buildings on the entire route with a story as tall as the mountain it sits under, and it costs nothing extra to walk through the door.
If your trek follows the classic route toward base camp, or the shorter Everest View Trek, ask your guide to build in the Khumjung stop. It's a quieter, more human counterpoint to the summit statistics that usually define this valley, and a reminder that the region's most lasting record wasn't set on the mountain at all.
Source: HuffPost, the Himalayan Trust, and Classrooms in the Clouds (citcnepal.org).
Cover photo: Image Noise via Pexels (Pexels License).
Source: HuffPost
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