Edmund Hillary was a shy teenager with a 100-minute commute to school who dropped out of university and spent his days hauling 90-pound honey boxes while getting stung by bees. This episode traces how beekeeping, the Radiant Living movement, and work as a wartime navigator on Catalina flying boats built the resilience and spatial skills he would later need on Everest.

We cover the 1951 reconnaissance through the Western Cwm, John Hunt’s siege-style 1953 expedition with more than 400 people, the first summit attempt by Bourdillon and Evans, and the final push by Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, from frozen boots to the Hillary Step. We then follow his overland tractor journey to the South Pole, the Silver Hut science expedition, his debunking of Yeti scalps, the Himalayan Trust, the 1975 plane crash that killed his wife and daughter, and his request to show Mount Cook on New Zealand’s $5 note.

• How bee stings, heavy labor, and wartime navigation prepared an unlikely climber
• Mapping the southern route through Nepal after Tibet closed its border
• Siege mountaineering explained as a multi-stage rocket of porters, camps, and assault teams
• The biology of the death zone, the Hillary Step, and why Hillary took no summit photo of himself
• The South Pole by tractor, the Silver Hut and Yeti investigations, and his lifelong work for the Sherpa people