Tenzing Norgay

The details of Tenzing Norgay's birth were never written down at the time, and he himself gave the date as late May 1914, fixing it afterwards to May 29 in honor of the day he reached the summit of Everest ^[1]. He was born into a Sherpa family of Tibetan origin, one of thirteen children of Ghang La Mingma and Dokmo Kinzom, and the family's life revolved around yaks: herding them, trading with them, and moving between high pastures with the seasons ^[2]. The traditional account places his birth at Tshechu, near Tengboche in the Khumbu region of Nepal, though later research by the writer Ed Douglas established that his family roots and early childhood lay in the Kharta valley of Tibet, on the eastern side of Everest ^[2].

He grew up within sight of the mountain the Sherpas call Chomolungma, a name he translated as "Goddess Mother of the World" ^[1]. As a boy he was sent briefly to Tengboche monastery, an experience that did not suit him, and he ran away rather than take up monastic life ^[1]. Poverty pressed hard on the family. When disease killed the family's yak herd, the young Tenzing was sent to work for other households, a common arrangement among poor Sherpa families of the period ^[2].

At about eighteen he left home for Darjeeling, the hill town in British India that served as the recruiting center for Himalayan expeditions. He settled in the Sherpa quarter of Toong Soong Busti, married, and waited for the chance that every ambitious young Sherpa wanted: a place on an Everest expedition ^[1].

His chance came in 1935, when Eric Shipton selected him as a porter for that year's British reconnaissance of Everest from the Tibetan side. Shipton later recalled being struck by the young man's attractive grin, and Tenzing performed well enough to be hired again for the British attempts of 1936 and 1938 ^[3]. On the 1938 expedition he carried loads to Camp VI at roughly 27,200 feet and earned the Tiger Medal, an award the Himalayan Club gave to porters who worked at extreme altitude ^[1].

The Second World War closed Tibet's approaches to climbers, and Tenzing spent the war years working in what is now Pakistan, including a period at Chitral, before returning to Darjeeling ^[2]. In 1947 he joined the Canadian-born adventurer Earl Denman in an unauthorized attempt on Everest from Tibet. The small party was turned back by storms well below the North Col, but the episode showed how strongly the mountain pulled at him ^[1].

The decisive years were 1952, when Nepal opened its side of the mountain and Switzerland received permission to climb it. On the spring expedition Tenzing served as sirdar, the head Sherpa, and was also made a full climbing member of the team, a status rarely granted to Sherpas at the time. With the Swiss climber Raymond Lambert he pushed up the southeast ridge to a height of about 8,600 meters, then the highest point human beings had ever reached, before exhaustion and inadequate oxygen equipment forced them down ^[3]. He returned with the Swiss that autumn, failed again in savage winter winds, and came home having spent more time high on Everest than any person alive ^[1]. The friendship he formed with Lambert remained one of the closest of his life ^[2].

When the British organized their 1953 expedition under Colonel John Hunt, Tenzing was the obvious choice for sirdar, and he joined once more as both organizer of the Sherpa team and a full climbing member. It was his seventh expedition to the mountain ^[3]. During the approach he saved the life of the New Zealand climber Edmund Hillary, holding the rope when Hillary fell into a crevasse in the Khumbu Icefall, and the two men became the expedition's strongest pairing ^[4].

After the first summit team of Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans turned back some 300 feet below the top on May 26, Hunt sent Hillary and Tenzing up as the second pair. They spent the night of May 28 at a tiny camp at about 27,900 feet, higher than anyone had ever slept, and set out the next morning in bitter cold ^[3]. At 11:30 a.m. on May 29, 1953, the two men stepped onto the summit of Everest, 29,028 feet above the sea by the then accepted survey. Tenzing buried sweets and a pencil in the snow as an offering to the mountain, and Hillary photographed him standing on the summit with his ice axe raised, flags streaming from it. No photograph exists of Hillary on top; Tenzing later explained that Hillary declined to be photographed and that he himself did not know how to use the camera ^[4].

News of the ascent reached London on the morning of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, June 2, 1953, and the climb became a global sensation ^[3]. For decades journalists pressed the pair to say who had stepped up first. Both men insisted the question missed the point of a roped partnership, though Tenzing eventually wrote in his autobiography that Hillary had preceded him by a few steps, a disclosure he made, he said, to end the badgering rather than to diminish his own part ^[1].

The descent from Everest carried Tenzing into a political storm he had not sought. Crowds in Kathmandu and Calcutta hailed him as a national hero, and partisans in both Nepal and India pressed him to claim their citizenship and to say he had reached the top first ^[2]. He answered the citizenship question with a formula of his own: he had been born in the womb of Nepal and raised in the lap of India, and he refused to let either country own the achievement outright ^[1]. Tenzing Norgay facts are often muddled on this point; he lived most of his adult life in India and held Indian citizenship, while Nepal has equal claim on his origins.

Honors followed in quantity. Britain awarded him the George Medal, since as a non-British subject he was not knighted as Hillary and Hunt were, a distinction that drew criticism then and since ^[3]. Nepal gave him the Order of the Star of Nepal, and India conferred the Padma Bhushan in 1959 ^[5]. In 1999, Time magazine included him among the 100 most influential people of the twentieth century, with an appreciation written by his son ^[6].

Fame also brought the problem of telling his own story, since he could not read or write, though he spoke several languages. He dictated his first autobiography, Tiger of the Snows, to the American writer James Ramsey Ullman, and it appeared in 1955, giving the world a Sherpa's account of Everest in a Sherpa's voice for the first time ^[1].

Tenzing married three times. His first wife, Dawa Phuti, died young in 1944; their son Nima Dorje died in childhood, and two daughters, Pem Pem and Nima, survived ^[2]. He then married Ang Lahmu, a cousin of his first wife, who had no biological children but helped raise the girls and managed the household through the lean years before 1953. After her death he married Dakku, with whom he had four children: Norbu, Jamling, Deki, and Dhamey ^[2].

The family made its home in Darjeeling, where Tenzing built a house called Ghang La after his father's herding grounds. He kept Lhasa Apso dogs, enjoyed gardening, and remained a practicing Buddhist throughout his life ^[2]. Several of his descendants continued the family connection to the mountain. His son Jamling Tenzing Norgay climbed Everest in 1996 with the expedition filmed for the IMAX documentary Everest, and later wrote a memoir reflecting on his father's life, Touching My Father's Soul ^[7].

Everest changed Indian mountaineering, and Tenzing was placed at the center of that change. When Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru backed the founding of the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute in Darjeeling in 1954, Tenzing became its first Director of Field Training, a post he held for more than two decades ^[5]. Nehru told him, in words Tenzing liked to repeat, that he would now make a thousand Tenzings. Trainees from across India passed through his courses, and the institute became the seedbed of Indian climbing ^[5].

He never attempted Everest again. He judged that he had finished with the mountain, and that the mountain had given him everything already ^[1]. A second volume of memoirs, After Everest, dictated to Malcolm Barnes, appeared in 1977 and dealt frankly with the burdens of celebrity, his travels, and his worries about money and family ^[8]. In his final decade he worked as a trekking ambassador for an American adventure travel company, leading clients through the Himalaya and beyond, and he visited countries as distant as the United States and the Soviet Union ^[2].

His last years were clouded by ill health and periods of depression. Tenzing Norgay died at his home in Darjeeling on May 9, 1986, twenty days short of his seventy-second birthday ^[3]. He was cremated at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, where a statue of him now looks toward the mountains ^[5].

Any honest Tenzing Norgay biography has to reckon with what he meant beyond the summit photograph. Before 1953, Sherpas appeared in expedition accounts mostly as load carriers, praised for strength and cheerfulness but rarely named as climbers. Tenzing's ascent, and his insistence on being treated as a full member of the 1952 and 1953 teams, changed that permanently. Sherpa climbers today, who hold most of the speed and repetition records on Everest, work in a profession whose dignity he did much to establish ^[2].

Among Tenzing Norgay achievements, the institutional ones lasted longest: the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute he helped build has trained tens of thousands of students, and India's highest adventure award, the Tenzing Norgay National Adventure Award, carries his name ^[5]. Mountains, an Everest summit route feature, an airport proposal in Darjeeling's public debates, and even a ridge on Pluto's moonless dwarf-planet neighbor have been named for him; the International Astronomical Union approved the name Tenzing Montes for a mountain range on Pluto in 2017 ^[9].

Hillary and Tenzing remained linked in public memory for the rest of their lives, and their handshake partnership became a standing image of cooperation across cultures. Ed Douglas, his most thorough biographer, argued that Tenzing's real story was harder and more interesting than the fairy tale: a poor, illiterate herdsman's son who understood earlier than anyone around him that Everest could be a door, and who had the endurance to keep knocking on it for twenty years until it opened ^[2].