Mountaineer who prepared the way for Hillary and Tenzing to conquer Everest
In the annals of human endeavour, there can have been few encounters more cheerfully down-to-earth than the moment that the New Zealander George Lowe, who has died aged 89, greeted his friend Edmund Hillary returning from the summit of Everest. "Well, George," Hillary said. "We knocked the bastard off." "Thought you must have," Lowe replied and then offered Hillary, who disliked tea, a cup of soup from a flask. It was 29 May 1953.
The day before, Lowe had led an advance guard, cutting steps relentlessly with his ice axe above the South Col, preparing the route for Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. At 27,350ft (8,340m), Lowe's team picked up a cache of gear left behind by John Hunt and the Sherpa Da Namgyal. Lowe phlegmatically added another oxygen bottle, weighing 20lb, to his load and kept swinging his axe, thereby helping Hillary and Tenzing establish their top camp at just under 29,000ft – the springboard for success.
Hardly surprising, then, that Hunt, the leader of the expedition, was fulsome in his praise of Lowe's contribution. Hunt had been reluctant to bring Lowe along at first, but Hillary insisted, and his role proved crucial. Not only did Lowe support the summit pair, he fought hard to push the route up the Lhotse Face towards the hostile South Col as others dropped out with health problems.
That Hunt should, partly for diplomacy's sake, have chosen to match Hillary with Tenzing rather than his old climbing partner never rankled with Lowe. "I'm absolutely delighted I didn't have the life that Ed's had," he said later. "Ed was the right one. I would have been a bugger." Cussed and straight-talking possibly, but Lowe was also an immensely likable man, good-humoured and the best of company – and a tireless worker for the benefit of others. Jan Morris, the Times reporter and last survivor of the group on Everest, called him "a gentleman in the old sense – very kind, very forceful, thoughtful and also a true adventurer, an unusual combination".
Lowe, the seventh of eight children, was born in Hastings, North Island, to Archibald and Christina, who had emigrated from Scotland. His father was a fruit grower and, like Hillary's family, kept bees. As a child Lowe broke his arm. It was badly set, later had to be re-broken and was severely weakened. This could have hampered his prowess as an ice climber, but Lowe was a determined and curious man, whose practical common sense found ways round most problems.
As a schoolboy in Hastings, Lowe developed an interest in photography, and would play truant to visit the studio of the aviator Piet van Asch. Asch was taking landscape pictures for the New Zealand military to produce maps, and took Lowe up in his Monospar ST-25. Lowe's photographic ability stood him in good stead on Everest, where he took outstanding images high on the mountain. His skill would later earn him an invitation from Vivian "Bunny" Fuchs to be official photographer on the trans-Antarctic expedition of 1957-58, which made the first overland crossing via the South Pole.
After teacher training college in Wellington, Lowe was in sole charge of a rural primary school, for children aged between four and 14. In the summers he trained as a mountain guide, and it was in the Southern Alps of South Island that he first met Hillary. On the Tasman glacier one day, he broached the subject with Hillary of going to the Himalayas. Grand plans of reaching Everest proved overambitious, but their reduced group of four managed instead a perfectly respectable first ascent of Mukut Parbat (23,760ft), in India's Garhwal region. At the end of the expedition, the team were surprised, on reaching their hotel in Ranikhet, to be handed a letter from the English mountain explorer Eric Shipton asking for two of them to join his Everest reconnaissance that was about to leave Kathmandu, on the basis that they had sufficient funds and could manage a visa. Lowe, having spent all his savings, could only fume on the roadside as he watched Hillary leave on a bus without him.
Their friendship easily survived such vicissitudes, and Lowe was Hillary's best man at his first wedding, joining the happy couple on their honeymoon. "He and Hillary climbed together through life, really," was how Morris put it. The following year, in 1952, Shipton took them both to the world's sixth highest peak, Cho Oyu, to test equipment and train for their attempt on Everest.
After Everest and before Antarctica, there was an expedition to Makalu in Nepal, the world's fifth highest mountain, where Hillary fell ill, and then in 1959 Lowe was appointed geography teacher at Repton school in Derbyshire. During his four years there, he joined a medical research expedition in the Everest region, hunted the yeti, and joined several of Hunt's expeditions for the National Association of Youth Clubs and the Duke of Edinburgh's award, to Greenland and Ethiopia.
In 1963, he took on his most challenging and rewarding post, at the Grange school in Santiago, Chile. Two years later he was appointed rector. He had married Hunt's daughter Susan in 1962, and their three sons, Gavin, Bruce and Matthew, were born in Chile. But when Salvador Allende was driven from power and murdered in 1973, Lowe and his family reluctantly returned home. Lowe took up the offer of a job with Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools, where he remained for the rest of his career.
His first marriage was dissolved. With his second wife, Mary, and living back in Derbyshire, Lowe launched the UK branch of Hillary's Himalayan Trust, tirelessly raising money for schools, hospitals and environmental projects for the Sherpa homeland of Khumbu.
Mary, his children and six grandchildren survive him.
• Wallace George Lowe, mountaineer, photographer and teacher, born 15 January 1924; died 20 March 2013