He is the son of Sir Edmund Hillary, who, along with mountaineer Tenzing Norgay, completed the first successful ascent of Mount Everest.

[6] On 31 March 1975, after having spent a year in Nepal, Hillary's mother and youngest sister, sixteen-year-old Belinda, were killed when their plane crashed shortly after taking off from a Kathmandu airfield.

[8] Hillary's climbing friend, Australian Mark Moorhead, died on 15 October 1983 attempting to ascend Makalu, a Himalayan mountain that is the fifth-highest in the world.

[10] On 11 January 2008, Hillary was in Lisbon, Portugal, at a dinner with some clients when he was informed his father had died of a sudden heart attack at Auckland Hospital.

It was ruled that, under New Zealand's heritage laws, the Everest watch should never have left the country and was a violation of the Protected Objects Act.

[17] When the courts awarded ownership of the watches to Sir Edmund's children, Hillary donated them to the Auckland War Memorial Museum.

Peter Hillary now devotes most of his time to fundraising in support of his father's Himalayan Trust, which was established in 1960 to fund capital projects in the Khumbu Valley region of Nepal.

[24] Peter Hillary has written and co-written several books, including: A Sunny Day in the Himalayas (1980);[25] First Across the Roof of the World: The First-ever Traverse of the Himalayas, 5,000 Kilometres from Sikkim to Pakistan (with Graham Dingle, 1982);[26] Two Generations (with his father, Sir Edmund Hillary, 1984);[27] Ascent: Two Lives Explored – The Autobiographies of Sir Edmund and Peter Hillary (also with his father, 1986);[28] Rimo: Mountain on the Silk Road (1992);[29] Bridgit was Bored (a children's book written with his first wife, Ann Moorhead, 1992);[30] and In the Ghost Country: A Lifetime Spent on the Edge (with John Elder, 2003).

[33] He also wrote an article called "In the Name of the Father", describing what it was like on K2 in August 1995 when the mountain claimed the lives of seven summiters, leaving him as one of three survivors of that expedition.