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New Zealand's mountaineers farewelled Sir Ed with the same alpine guard of honour they used for his hero's welcome home from Mt Everest in 1953 and for his wedding to Louise Rose later that year.
As a young climber, Brian Davies thought it fun to become part of the guard of honour at the Hillary wedding when, together with a dozen other members of the Alpine Club, he held up his ice axe to help form a triumphal arch as the newlyweds left the church.
Yesterday, he proudly held it aloft again, as a now retired professor, formerly of Auckland University's chemistry department.
Professor Davies is very proud to have been part of the Sir Ed story on two such special days, if only in a small way.
Unlike some others in the funeral honour guard, he did not claim to be a close friend, but remembers well when the men ran into each other a few times over the years; including when Professor Davies limped into one of the club's climbing huts on Mt Ruapehu with what Sir Ed recognised immediately as frostbite.
What the 40 people with the ice axes had in common yesterday was that Sir Ed had inspired them all.
And just as they were gathered from around the country, so too were their wooden-handled long ice axes - nostalgia pieces taken off walls or out of storage.
The axes were pointed to the sky as if to indicate a mountain peak, while Sir Ed's Everest axe lay flat as it was carried past.
After the coffin passed by, the guard came together, shaking hands to seal another challenge met with alpine camaraderie.
In the line were Lydia Brady, the first New Zealand woman to climb Everest and the first to climb it without oxygen; Graeme Dingle, outdoor educator and climber of some of the first peaks in New Zealand and around the world; Gottlieb Braun-Elwert, the global mountain guide to, among others, Prime Minister Helen Clark; and Graham Ayres, the mountaineer and godson of Sir Ed.
Guard member Guy Cotter said he had thought about Sir Ed's achievements in a place few others have - standing beneath the vertical "Hillary step" that marks the ascent to the summit.
"It is steep, it is precipitous and it is psychologically daunting," Mr Cotter said. "The first time I was there I thought of what Sir Ed did to get over it that first time, to do what others turned back from."
Mr Cotter, who has climbed Everest four times and whose father was part of the first New Zealand expedition with Hillary to the Himalayas in 1950, said he marvelled not only at Sir Ed's courage to be the first to get up the 12m rock face, but at the technical steps he and Tenzing had taken, particularly with 1950s equipment.
