When they found Sir Edmund Hillary near death and turning blue, inside his tent and 18,000 feet up a mountain in the Himalayas, his team kicked into rescue mode.
With Sir Edmund still on his air mattress, the men collapsed the tent, wrapped him in it and dragged him down the mountain to a lower altitude.
The legendary adventurer was in grave danger, a documentary revisiting his pilgrimage in India has revealed.
"We knew he probably only had an hour to live," Australian filmmaker Michael Dillon tells ABC RN's Late Night Live.
It was almost unthinkable. The first man to reach the summit of Mount Everest, alongside Tenzing Norgay, in 1953 had life-threatening altitude sickness.
'Like a magic carpet ride'
It was 1977 and Sir Edmund had been nearing the end of a three-month 2,500 kilometre journey from the mouth of the Ganges to the source of India's sacred river in the snow-capped Himalayan mountains.
"[The journey] had everything. It was like a magic carpet ride. Tigers at one end and frostbite and altitude sickness at the other, and the rapids and India in between," Dillon, who has remade his 1977 Ocean to Sky documentary to include the rescue mission, said.
With a team of friends and his son Peter, Sir Edmund planned to drive three jet boats against the current of the Ganges as far as possible, before the group set off to climb the mountain.
The expedition, which had never been attempted before then, was full of dangers, Dillon said.
Even before the boats reached the upper rapids sections of the river, there were tigers on the river delta, crocodiles in the mangroves and hidden sandbars to be wary of.
There was so much happening that Dillon had to ration the footage to capture the "climaxes or incidents" of the trip and still have enough to film the mountaintop finish.
Millions of people flocked to the water's edge, climbed trees or walked for hours to catch a glimpse of the adventurers and their "magic boats".
"[The interest was] partly because there were jet boats and no one had seen or knew what they were, but mostly it was Hillary because he was the hero [and] almost a deity in India," Dillon said.
Unfazed by the attention, Sir Edmund calmly signed as many autographs as he could whenever they stopped.
While the journey was about adventure, it was also about healing for Sir Edmund and his son, Peter, then 22. The pair were still grieving for Sir Edmund's wife, Lady Louise, and daughter Belinda who had been killed in a plane crash two years earlier.
Sir Edmund's depression only lifted mid-way through the Indian adventure, according to his friends.
'Near death'
Eventually, the boats could go no further. A waterfall signalled it was time for the men to abandon the river and begin walking.
Dillon said the group believed they would acclimatise to the altitude as they walked into the mountains.
He described this phase as "only climbing up a hill which was 20,000 feet". This was only two-thirds the height of Mount Everest.
Sir Edmund had silently battled altitude sickness for days. Then, when they were camped at 18,000 feet, the team found him "near death" in his tent.
The group of old climbing friends instantly sprang into action to save him. One raced downhill, found an army post and managed to get a message to the New Zealand High Commission in New Delhi that Sir Edmund was dying.
Bad weather stopped an Indian Air Force helicopter's first attempt to evacuate Sir Edmund from the mountain. Hours later, it returned to fly him to safety and medical treatment.
Sir Edmund survived and years later, he became the New Zealand High Commissioner to India. He died in 2008 in Auckland at the age of 88.
The expedition was "deeply personal" for both Sir Edmund and his son Peter.
Peter remembered wondering during the rescue if he was "going to lose my father as well".
And he told the documentary: "For the rest of his life, Dad always said that this was the best, the most memorable expedition of them all."
A very different movie
The original 50-minute Ocean to Sky documentary didn't cover Sir Edmund's rescue.
The 1977 version explained that he'd fallen ill and left the mountain while the others climbed higher and reached their goal.
There was a simple reason for the gap.
"We had no visual images of his rescue as we, the film crew, were part of the rescue operation," Dillon said.
"We simply left our big, cumbersome cameras where they were and did all we could, along with all the other team members, to save Hillary's life."
The limited amount of film also meant there were no interviews with expedition members on the mountain about the rescue.
"It would be such a different film if we had filmed it in 2021 with small cameras and no need to ration what you shoot," Dillon said.
Now years later, he has re-edited the film to include the stories of the expedition members because he felt the time was right to share the full story.
"It was a time in our lives that we will absolutely never forget, and we all wanted to talk about it while we're still able."
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