Tenzing Norgay Summited Everest in 1953. His Son Did It in 1996. His Grandson Did It in 1997 — Three Generations, One Mountain

Tenzing Norgay stood on the summit of Everest for the first time in human history on May 29, 1953. What far fewer people know is that two more generations of his own family did the same thing afterward — his son during the deadliest storm in the mountain's history to that point, and his grandson a year later, becoming the first person from a third generation of one family to stand on Everest's summit.

Tenzing Norgay had worked as a high-altitude climbing Sherpa on British Everest expeditions for nearly two decades before 1953 — this was his seventh attempt on the mountain. When he and Hillary reached the summit together, Hillary was knighted by the British crown; Tenzing received the George Medal, a lesser civilian honour. His grandson Tashi has said publicly that he believes his grandfather deserved a knighthood, not just, in his words, 'a bloody medal' — a grievance that still shapes how the family talks about 1953.

The son: summiting through Everest's deadliest storm

Jamling Tenzing Norgay was born in Darjeeling, India, on April 23, 1965, and grew up largely away from the mountains that made his father famous. In 1996 he joined the IMAX Everest expedition, led by climber and filmmaker David Breashears alongside Ed Viesturs and Spanish climber Araceli Segarra, to shoot the first large-format film footage from the summit. The team was on the mountain on May 10–11, 1996, when a sudden storm killed eight climbers from other expeditions in a single night. Breashears' team paused its own summit attempt to help in the rescue effort, then regrouped and completed both the climb and the filming on May 23, 1996. Jamling later wrote about the experience in his 2001 book Touching My Father's Soul, one of the first accounts of that season told from a Sherpa's point of view rather than a Western climber's.

The grandson: the first third generation on Everest

Tashi Tenzing is the son of Tenzing Norgay's daughter, Pem Pem. In 1997 he summited Everest himself, becoming the first person from a third generation of any family to stand on top of the mountain. He returned to the summit again in 2002 and 2007. Today Tashi runs Tenzing Asian Holidays, a trekking company based in Kathmandu, and has spent much of his career telling his grandfather's story on his own terms, including guest lectures at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute in Darjeeling — the school his grandfather helped establish.

What this means for trekkers

You do not need to climb Everest to walk through this family's history. Every trekker on the classic Everest Base Camp route passes directly beneath the bronze statue of Tenzing Norgay at the Sagarmatha National Park Visitor Centre, on the hill above Namche Bazaar — positioned facing the mountain he first climbed, with Everest, Ama Dablam and Thamserku laid out behind it. It is one of the few places on the trek where the human story behind the peak is as visible as the peak itself.

Source: The Himalayan Journal — the family of Tenzing Norgay; Wikipedia

Cover photo: Vyacheslav Argenberg via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).