Going on a Yeti hunt: Sir Edmund Hillary and the 1960 - 1961 Silver Hut Expedition
13 April 2026
It all started in 1958 when Hillary and the British physiologist and mountaineer Griffith Pugh questioned whether Everest (29,031 ft or 8,848.86 m) could be climbed without supplemental oxygen, possibly achieving this by acclimatising at 20,000 ft for several months. Hillary surmised that the prolonged period required for acclimatisation meant that this trek would be far more costly than his first Everest climb. This was a fair assumption to make, as the expedition with which he made his first summit is said to have cost between £15,000 and £30,000, and took seven weeks to reach the summit, including leaving Kathmandu, and acclimatising over a period of weeks at multiple camps up the mountain. Cost was just one of several barriers to climbing Everest in the 1950s. By the time the Silver Hut Expedition set off, just 7 other people in 3 different expeditions had summited Everest between Hillary's first success and September 1960. Further, these expeditions are the only expeditions that are believed to have even occurred during this time. This time, Hillary estimated that this experiment could cost up to $120,000 USD.