of Nepal and Edmund Hillary of New Zealand become the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest (29,035 feet/8,850 meters) on this date in 1953. The mountain is called Chomolungma (“goddess mother of the world”) in Tibet and Sagarmatha (“goddess of the sky”) in Nepal. It’s growing/moving about 6 cm a year.
George Everest (1790-1866) was the British Surveyor General of India (1830-1843). (He pronounced his name E-ver-est, not Ev-er-est as we know it.) Everest’s successor named the mountain for the surveyor.
Norgay’s son, Jamling Tenzeng Norgay, wrote a pretty interesting book called “Touching My Father’s Soul: A Sherpa’s Journey To The Top of Everest”. He writes about the 1996 summer climbing season on Everest (the one that Jon Krakauer details in “Into Thin Air”) but uses that as a point of departure for telling the story of his father’s ascent. He also goes into some detail about the life of the Sherpa and Tibetan culture.
Jamling Tenzing Norgay was also one of the team put together by David Brashears to film the Imax epic about Everest during that ill-fated climbing season back in ’96; the team that played such a major role in the rescue efforts which kept the unfortunate death toll from growing even larger.
See many of Breashear’s photos and read an account in Broughton Coburn’s “Everest; Mountain Without Mercy.”
I have a copy autographed by both Breashears and Coburn. I saw them speak in Portland back in ’97. The slide show was incredible.
Breashears has summited Everest four times. He told me personally that evening that he will never summit Everest again.
For those who have not seen the Omnimax feature, “Everest,” I cannot recommend it enough. It is absolutely breathtaking. All the more so in light of what was happening at the time it was filmed.