An aspiring mountaineer who was in high school when Edmund Hillary became the first to scale Mount Everest received an invitation from Hillary 10 years later to work with him in the Himalayas.

Jim Wilson, 82, was “deliriously happy” because it “was a dream come true” and has subsequently worked with Hillary for more than four decades on projects for sherpas and also going on expeditions together.

Wilson is in Calcutta as one of the speakers with Hillary’s son Peter at The Telegraph & The Himalayan presents In Edmund Hillary’s Footsteps at Kalamandir on Tuesday.

“His (Hillary’s) biggest achievement is what he did after achieving the feat and helped his sherpa friends by building schools, hospitals and airstrips in and around the Everest region (Khumbu in Nepal),” Wilson said.

“He could have enjoyed being famous and done nothing…. He always responded to requests from sherpas for developing the area and I want to get across to people what a wonderful leader and friend he was.”

Hillary, along with Tenzing Norgay, was the first to scale the 8,848m peak on May 29, 1953.

Hillary started taking young mountaineers with him to Nepal to help with his school-building and other aid programmes, Wilson said. “It was like a dream come true going with my mountaineering hero, working with young sherpas my age building schools and so on and then climbing a mountain with him. It was perfect.”

Wilson in his teens was already climbing peaks in New Zealand on new routes. In the early 1960s he had climbed Mount Cook (3,724m), the highest peak in the country.

When the invitation to work in the Solukhumbu region in eastern Nepal came from the first Everester, Wilson grabbed it. “Going on a mountaineering expedition, you will be passing through villages but wouldn’t be staying there. But what it meant for us was we would work for months with young sherpas our age, become really close friends and then climb the mountains with them. We always became part of the way of life, which is much better than just an expedition. Anyone can go to the mountains but to live with the local people and help them build schools is just phenomenal,” Wilson, who retired as a teacher of Indian philosophy and religion at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, said.

Wilson recalled that on those expeditions “Ed” would leave young mountaineers and the sherpas “loose on the small but spectacular peaks surrounding the Everest”. “In 1963 we narrowly failed on Taboche, a bit over 21,000ft and succeeded on Kangtega, just over 22,000ft.”

Hillary also led the Indian and New Zealand contingent jet boat expedition in the Ganga that started at Gangasagar and went to Badrinath to climb a peak, which was called the Ocean to Sky expedition in 1977.

Nine years prior to that, in another jet boat expedition in Nepal, Wilson had sank one of the two boats that they had and jeopardised the expedition. “He (Hillary) accepted what happened. He reorganised the expedition and we completed with one jet boat. He was a leader who trusted you to do your best. If you did your best even if it was a total disaster, he accepted it and he was a brilliant organiser…. He still chose me as one of the drivers for the Ganga trip.”

Wilson, who lives in Christchurch, takes on the mountains with his old mountaineering friends, though now more on “tramping trips” on the sides of the mountains rather than “up to their peaks”. “It’s a matter of slow adjustment to what you can do. My mantra is I have to cease grieving for what I have no more and be thankful for what I still have.”

Wilson has a family holiday home in Arthur’s Pass, where his wife and he “happily gaze up the mountains we used to climb”.