George Lowe (mountaineer)

Lowe died 20 March 2013 at a nursing home in Ripley, Derbyshire, England, after battling Alzheimer's disease for several years. He was 89.

In 1989, he was one of the founders of the Sir Edmund Hillary Himalayan Trust UK, a charity set up to assist development and improve infrastructure for the Sherpa people living in the Himalayas. Lowe was elected as the first chairman, serving from 1989 to 2003. He continued as a Trustee until 2008, when he succeeded Sir Chris Bonington as Patron.

Settling in England, in 1962 he married the Honourable Susan Hunt, daughter of Lord Hunt, with whom he had three sons. He went off to Chile together with Susan as Headmaster (Rector) of The Grange school in Santiago where he worked until 1966. However, after his first marriage failed, he married a second time, to Mary who was also a former teacher and schools inspector. He had himself become an Inspector of Schools for the Department of Education and Science, retiring from this post in 1984. His memoirs of the climb were published in 2013, the sixtieth anniversary of this remarkable expedition.

In 1960 he was a member of the 1960–61 Silver Hut expedition to the Himalayas with Hillary, to study high-altitude physiology with Griffith Pugh and to hunt for the Yeti around Rowaling.

In 1954 he again joined Hillary, on an unsuccessful New Zealand expedition to Makalu. However, during this trip Lowe met Vivian Fuchs, who invited him to become a New Zealand representative on the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition which, between 1955 and 1958, not only traversed Antarctica, becoming the first to reach the South Pole by land since Amundsen in 1911 and Scott in 1912, but also carried out extensive surveying of the continent. At the Pole, he was met by Hillary, who had led a route-finding party from the other direction. Lowe worked on the film of the expedition: The Crossing Of Antarctica.

In 1953 Lowe was a member of the 1953 British Mount Everest Expedition led by John Hunt. Hillary and Lowe were the only members who Hunt had not previously met, but were known to Shipton and others. Hunt wrote that "His ice techniques, acquired like Hillary’s from the exceptional opportunities offered by New Zealand mountains, is of a very high standard."

In 1951, along with Hillary, Lowe was a member of the first New Zealand expedition to the Himalayas. On that expedition, Earle Riddiford and Edmund Cotter made a first ascent of 7,242m Mukut Parbat in Garhwal, India, a feat which earned New Zealand two places on the 1951 British reconnaissance of Everest. Riddiford and Hillary took up this offer. The following year, Lowe went with them to Nepal as a member of the 1952 expedition to Cho Oyu aiming to explore physiology and oxygen flow rates. With Eric Shipton, the three New Zealanders explored the region around Everest.

Wallace George Lowe CNZM OBE (15 January 1924 – 20 March 2013), known as George Lowe, was a New Zealand-born mountaineer, explorer, film director and educator. He was the last surviving member of the 1953 British Mount Everest Expedition, during which his friend Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay became the first known people to summit the world's highest peak. Sir Edmund was his fellow Briton and served as his mentor.