Tenzing Norgay

The details of Tenzing Norgay's birth and childhood shift depending on which account is consulted, including his own. In his autobiography he described himself as a Sherpa born and raised in Tengboche, in the Khumbu region of northeastern Nepal. In a 1985 radio interview he said his parents came from Tibet but that he himself was born in Nepal. Later accounts, including one co-written by his son Jamling, place his birth in Tibet, at Tse Chu in the Kama Valley, with his family later moving to Thame and Kharta before he went to Nepal as a child to work for a Sherpa household in Khumbu.

His exact birthdate was never recorded, but he knew it fell in late May, judging by the weather and the state of the crops. After reaching the summit of Everest on 29 May 1953, he chose to mark that date as his birthday from then on. His birth year, calculated from the Tibetan calendar as the Year of the Rabbit, was most likely 1914, a figure consistent with expedition leader John Hunt's description of him as 39 years old in 1953.

He was originally named Namgyal Wangdi. As a child, the head lama of Rongbuk Monastery advised changing his name, and he became Tenzing Norgay, meaning wealthy, fortunate follower of religion. His father was a Tibetan yak herder and his mother was also Tibetan; he was the eleventh of thirteen children, several of whom did not survive childhood. As a teenager he ran away from home twice, first to Kathmandu and later to Darjeeling, India, the usual starting point for Himalayan expeditions at the time. He was briefly sent to a monastery to train as a monk but left, and by nineteen had settled among the Sherpa community of Darjeeling, eventually becoming an Indian citizen.

Norgay's first chance to join an Everest expedition came at age twenty, in 1935, when Eric Shipton was recruiting for a British reconnaissance trip. After two other candidates failed medical checks, Norgay was put forward by a friend who had worked on an earlier expedition, and Shipton took him on. Over the following years he served as a high-altitude porter on three official British attempts on Everest from the Tibetan side during the 1930s, and took part in various other climbs across the Indian subcontinent. In the early 1940s he lived for a period in Chitral, then part of India, working as an assistant to a British officer; his first wife died and was buried there.

Norgay returned to Darjeeling with his two daughters during the upheaval of Indian partition in 1947, reportedly crossing the country by train without a ticket, unchallenged because he wore an old British army uniform given to him. That same year he took part in an unauthorized attempt on Everest with a Canadian mountaineer and another Sherpa, entering Tibet illegally; the attempt ended when a severe storm hit at around 22,000 feet. Also in 1947 he became sirdar, or lead guide, of a Swiss expedition for the first time, after helping rescue an injured fellow sirdar, and was part of the summit party that reached the top of Kedarnath in the Garhwal Himalaya. In 1951 he joined a British reconnaissance expedition to Everest.

In 1952 Norgay joined two Swiss expeditions attempting Everest from the Nepalese side for the first time, an approach previously only scouted by American and British parties. On 28 May, he and climber Raymond Lambert reached roughly 8,595 metres on the southeast ridge, setting a new altitude record. This expedition marked the first time Norgay was treated as a full member of the climbing team rather than solely as support staff, an honour he later called the greatest ever paid to him, and it forged a lasting friendship with Lambert. A second Swiss attempt that autumn was turned back by bad weather after reaching about 8,100 metres.

In 1953 Norgay joined the British expedition led by John Hunt, having already been to Everest six times before. During the climb, team member Edmund Hillary fell into a crevasse and was saved when Norgay quickly secured the rope with his ice axe, an incident that convinced Hillary he wanted Norgay as his partner for any summit attempt. The expedition was a massive undertaking, involving more than 400 people including 362 porters and 20 Sherpa guides, along with over ten thousand pounds of equipment.

After an earlier pair turned back just short of the top when their oxygen system failed, Hunt sent Norgay and Hillary for the summit. The two pitched a high camp at about 27,900 feet, and after Hillary spent two hours thawing his frozen boots, they set out wearing thirty-pound packs. Hillary found a route up a forty-foot rock face, later named the Hillary Step, wedging himself between rock and ice, with Norgay following. They reached the 29,028-foot summit at 11:30 in the morning and spent about fifteen minutes there. Hillary photographed Norgay with his ice axe, but since Norgay had never used a camera, no picture exists of Hillary at the top.

News of the achievement brought enormous acclaim in Nepal and India. Hillary and Hunt were knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, while Norgay, not a British subject, received the George Medal instead. Persistent press questioning over which man had technically reached the top first was addressed by Hunt, who insisted they arrived together as a team. Norgay eventually settled the matter himself in his 1955 autobiography, written with an American collaborator since Norgay could not read or write, stating plainly that Hillary stepped onto the summit first and he stepped up right after.

After Everest, Norgay became the first Director of Field Training at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute in Darjeeling when it opened in 1954. In 1975 he guided the first American tourist group permitted into Bhutan, leading a trek from Paro through the Tiger's Nest monastery and on into India via Nepal and Sikkim. In 1978 he founded Tenzing Norgay Adventures, a trekking company later run by his son Jamling, who himself climbed Everest in 1996.

Recognition continued throughout his life: the Himalayan Club had awarded him its Tiger Medal back in 1938, Nepal made him a Member of the Order of the Star of Nepal in 1953, India awarded him the Padma Bhushan in 1959, and the Soviet Union named him an honorary Merited Master of Sport in 1963. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Darjeeling on 9 May 1986, at the age of 71, and was cremated at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute. His legacy includes Nepal's proposal to name a nearby peak after him, a mountain range on Pluto called Tenzing Montes, and India's renaming of its top adventure sports award in his honor in 2003.