“From almost any direction it looks like a vast tent,” one author wrote of Kangchenjunga, “the massif being created by four ridges radiating virtually on the cardinal points from the summit.” Straddling the mountainous domains of the Kingdom of Nepal and the north Indian state of Sikkim, Kangchenjunga (8586 m) forms the easternmost of the world’s 14 8000 m peaks.

On May 26th, 1955, two climbers reached the apex of this colossal mountain. One of them was Briton Tony Streather; the other, New Zealander Norman Hardie. Both belonged to a British expedition that had succeeded in placing four men on the summit. No one would stand there again for another 22 years.
To the north the pair could glimpse the high dry plateau of Tibet. Westwards lay Nepal, where the great pyramids of Everest and Lhotse rose in the distance. And eastwards stretched the mountainous and heavily forested terrain of Sikkim.

Clad in beige down suits and carrying awkward oxygen apparatus, the two climbers halted just short of the summit. “The screaming winds held their peace, and in the tranquil sunshine the gleaming peak of Kangchenjunga was as sacred as Olympus itself—a true dwelling place of the gods,” Hardie later wrote of the occasion. Breaking the silence, he turned to Streather and simply said, “We made it Tony.”

As the first summit pair, George Band and Joe Brown, had done the day before, Hardie and Streather left the remaining few steps unsullied by human footprints. This gesture they made in deference to the people of Sikkim, who believed the summit to be the home of sacred deities.

After 55 minutes on the mountain top, Hardie and Streather began a careful descent towards Camp VI, where their tent perched precariously on a slope at 8200 m. Remarkably, Streather made the descent largely without oxygen, after a nearly full bottle had accidentally been dropped on the ascent.

In just two years, New Zealanders had climbed the world’s highest and third-highest peaks, confirming the country’s reputation for producing some of the finest mountaineers on the planet. Edmund Hillary, rightfully, became world famous. But Hardie’s climb received comparatively little attention, and 50 years on his feat remains largely forgotten, even by many in the mountaineering community.