Norman Hardie

Norman David Hardie (28 December 1924 – 31 October 2017) was a New Zealand climber who was one of the climbers on the 1955 British Kangchenjunga expedition who first reached the summit of the 8,586-metre (28,169 ft) mountain, the third-highest mountain in the world.

Early life Hardie was born in Timaru in 1924. He left school early and, encouraged by his father, spent two seasons hunting deer in the Boyle and Hurunui River valleys. Encouraged by a local Timaru engineer, in 1943 Hardie enrolled at Canterbury University College for a degree in civil engineering. He continued hunting to finance his studies, but became increasingly involved in tramping (the New Zealand term for hiking) and mountaineering. He graduated from Canterbury in 1947 and worked at Lake Pukaki on the hydroelectricity scheme. He married Enid Hurst in 1951. Technically much harder than Mount Everest, Kangchenjunga was not climbed again for 22 years.

After the successful climb, Hardie travelled with three Sherpa for several months in their home region. Joined by his wife and a friend from New Zealand, Joe Macdonald, he mapped the last uncharted areas of the Himalayas south of Mount Everest. Hardie published a book in 1957 based on his diaries, In Highest Nepal. An official translation is available in German, and a plagiarised version exists in Japanese.

He published his autobiography, On My Own Two Feet, in 2006. In the book's foreword, Sir Edmund Hillary describes Hardie as follows:

Hardie lived in Cashmere, a suburb of Christchurch in a house designed by Don Donnithorne. It was announced at the 60th anniversary of the Kangchenjunga ascent that the New Zealand Alpine Club has commissioned a film to be made about Hardie's climb.