KATMANDU, Nepal — The hundreds of people who attempt to climb Mount Everest every year know one important thing that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay didn't before 11:30 a.m. on May 29, 1953.
It's possible to climb the world's tallest peak and survive.
Fifty years after Hillary and Norgay became the first humans to stand on the world's highest peak, at a height of 29,035 feet, some 1,200 people have equaled their feat.
"People ask, 'What was all the fuss about?' " Hillary, 83, said to Indian mountaineers last week as he made his way to Katmandu for the golden jubilee celebration of the conquest of Everest.
He is being joined by Junko Tabei of Japan, the first woman to climb Everest; Reinhold Messner of Italy, who climbed first without bottled oxygen; Temba Tsheri, a Sherpa who is the youngest to reach the summit. A blind man has climbed Everest. A Sherpa named Appa has made it up a record 12 times and is on the mountain trying for No. 13. A climber without hands is making the attempt this year.
So what was all the fuss about 50 years ago, when Hillary and Norgay came down the mountain to find they had become world heroes?
"The major thing that Tenzing and I did was showing that it was indeed possible to reach the summit of that great mountain and survive," Hillary said.
"This question was hanging over our heads. We didn't know whether we would reach the top and just collapse," said Hillary, who will head a horse-carriage procession through Katmandu on Tuesday, then attend a string of seminars, dinners and exhibitions celebrating the achievement.
Neither man ever went back, but it was enough. "The only footsteps in the snow were our own," Hillary said.
The conquest of Everest altered the face of Nepal. Today, up to 50,000 trekkers hike into the mountains each year, part of an annual wave of a half million visitors. For Everest alone, climbers pay up to $65,000 each for a chance to reach the top. Tourism is the country's top foreign currency earner, bringing in $160 million a year and employing 200,000 people.
Still, 40 percent of Nepal's 23 million people live in poverty, according to the World Bank, while the royal family and upper class in the Hindu kingdom live in splendor. That gulf incited a Maoist guerrilla rebellion that has killed more than 7,000 people since 1996, though no foreigners have been harmed and peace talks are under way.
Many Nepalis — particularly mountain folk — want the government to spend the $70,000 it collects from each Everest expedition, and lesser amounts for other peaks, to build schools, bridges and medical clinics in rural areas.
Mountaineering changed the face of Nepal's mountains, too.
"Commercial climbing has developed, with many inexperienced enthusiasts, dozens of aluminum ladders, thousands of meters of fixed rope," Hillary said. "It is hardly mountaineering; more like a conducted tour."
The paths hacked out of the ice by the first expeditions are now littered with oxygen bottles, tents, food cans and old ropes. Exhausted climbers leave excess gear behind as they hurry down from the summit.
Lower on the mountain, villagers are cutting down forests to provide firewood for visitors' camp fires and hot showers in inns that line the trails.
Some climbers pay to be flown part of the way up Everest by helicopter. Trekkers can reach the base camp at 17,388 feet without ever sleeping in a tent.
The camp is a field of gray rock and often grayish snow — stained by pollution and muddy boots — dotted with bright red, yellow, green and blue tents.
There are 22 expeditions trying to put some 100 people on the summit this year. The climbing season ends when the monsoon rains arrive in early June.
There are the dangers of altitude sickness, dehydration, hypothermia, disorientation, falls, avalanches and getting lost in blizzards. At least 175 have died over the decades trying to reach the summit.
Former Everest climbers and mountaineers from around the world are converging on the base camp to meet old comrades and hold 50th anniversary parties. One party will be hosted in the Everest foothills by Hillary's son, Peter, who reached the summit twice.
Kim Jacobs of Sun Valley, Idaho, led a group of trekkers to the base camp in mid-May. On the trail, they ran into Jim Whittaker, 74, the first American to reach the Everest summit. He was back in Nepal for the first time since his 1963 feat.
"He said he had seen people on the trail that he hasn't met in 40 years," said Jacobs. "All the most famous climbers have been up there."
When Hillary reached the snow-blanketed summit in 1953, he recalls focusing on "the feeling of satisfaction." He had little understanding that he was about to become the most famous mountaineer of all.
But as the British-led expedition headed back down the mountain to Katmandu, Nepal's capital, he gradually became aware of his gathering fame as runners kept bringing up newspapers and messages from around the world reacting to the accomplishment.
Now there is an Internet cafe on the shifting ice floes at base camp. For a dollar an hour, mountaineers send messages on how their teams are doing and get news from home. The cafe runs on solar powered chargers and a fuel generator. The parts were carried up on the backs of yaks and human porters.
The cafe was set up by Tsering Gyalzen, whose grandfather was one of the 100 Sherpas who carried supplies for the 1953 expedition.
Gyalzen is an example of the success the Sherpa community has enjoyed. Many have become prosperous owners of mountaineering companies, educating their children abroad and hoping the next generation will not have to climb the dangerous mountain to earn a living. Their villages now have electricity, television, microwaves.
"The Sherpas are the unsung heroes of the mountain," says Norgay's son Jamling, who climbed Everest in 1996, a decade after his father's death.
The Sherpas risk their lives more than the adventurers who later write books, because they must repeatedly climb up and down, setting up camps and laying out the climbing route. They fix ropes and ladders. They carry oxygen bottles and food to camps at various levels while the mountaineers take time to acclimatize before moving on.
While most Sherpas climb because it's their job — and in the old days few tried to reach the summit themselves — more are becoming aware that a little fame is good for business, and that the summit is a lifetime experience in itself.
Ang Karma, 44, a Sherpa who reached the summit in 1986 without bottled oxygen, said it was like a college degree to boost his mountain-guiding business.
But there was another reason, he said.
"It's the highest mountain. Everybody wants to be on the summit and see what the world looks like from there."