Ed Douglas (born 1966) is a writer and journalist from the United Kingdom. Douglas is also an amateur climber and mountain traveller, with a particular interest in the Himalaya. [1]
Douglas is an author of thirteen books about mountains and their people. These include the first full-length biography of Tenzing Norgay, who climbed Mount Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary in 1953. He covered the Nepali civil war for The Observer and National Geographic and interviewed the 14th Dalai Lama for The Guardian . As of April 2023, Douglas had made over forty visits to the Himalayas, including a dozen mountaineering expeditions. Douglas is a regular contributor to British radio and television and was a consultant on the BAFTA-nominated film Sherpa . He is a former editor of the Alpine Journal and has written for Climber magazine. He has been a contributor to The Guardian for thirty years, and writes a column for the paper’s Country Diary . [2] [3] [4] Douglas ghosted Leo Dickinson's 1993 book Ballooning over Everest. [5]
Douglas won the 1994 Outdoor Writer's Guild Award for his profile of rock climber Ron Fawcett. [5] His ghost-written autobiography of Ron Fawcett, Rock Athlete, won the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature in 2010. His book The Magician's Glass was shortlisted for the 2017 Boardman Tasker Prize. [6] His book Himalaya: a Human History won a Special Jury Mention in the 2020 Banff Mountain Book Festival. [7]
Douglas studied English at Manchester University, where he launched the On the Edge magazine. [6] [5] He lives in Sheffield with his wife Kate, a science editor, and two children. [2] [3]
Mount Everest is Earth's highest mountain above sea level, located in the Mahalangur Himal sub-range of the Himalayas. The China–Nepal border runs across its summit point. Its elevation of 8,848.86 m was most recently established in 2020 by the Chinese and Nepali authorities.
James W. Whittaker, also known as Jim Whittaker, is an American climber and mountain guide. Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, on May 1, 1963, he became the first American to reach the summit of Mount Everest as a member of the American Mount Everest Expedition led by Norman Dyhrenfurth, alongside the Sherpa Nawang Gombu, a nephew of Tenzing Norgay. They ran out of oxygen, but managed to reach the summit.
Tenzing Norgay, born Namgyal Wangdi, and also referred to as Sherpa Tenzing, was a Nepalese-Indian Sherpa mountaineer. He was one of the first two people known to certainly reach the summit of Mount Everest, which he accomplished with Edmund Hillary on 29 May 1953. Time named Norgay one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
Raymond Lambert was a Swiss mountaineer who together with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay reached an altitude of 8611 metres of Mount Everest, as part of a Swiss Expedition in May 1952. At the time it was the highest point that a climber had ever reached. There was a second Swiss expedition in autumn 1952, but a party including Lambert and Tenzing was forced to turn back at a slightly lower point. The following year Tenzing returned with Edmund Hillary to reach the summit on 29 May 1953.
The eight-thousanders are the 14 mountains recognised by the International Mountaineering and Climbing Federation (UIAA) as being more than 8,000 metres (26,247 ft) in height above sea level, and sufficiently independent of neighbouring peaks. There is no precise definition of the criteria used to assess independence, and at times, the UIAA has considered whether the list should be expanded to 20 mountain peaks by including the major satellite peaks of eight-thousanders. All of the eight-thousanders are located in the Himalayan and Karakoram mountain ranges in Asia, and their summits lie in an altitude known as the death zone.
The Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature is an annual prize of £3,000 awarded by the Boardman Tasker Charitable Trust to an author or authors for "an original work which has made an outstanding contribution to mountain literature". The prize was established in 1983 in memory of British climbers Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker, both of whom wrote books about their mountaineering expeditions, after their deaths on the northeast ridge of Mount Everest in 1982. It can be awarded for a piece of fiction or non-fiction, poetry or drama, although the work must have been written in English. The prize is announced at the annual Kendal Mountain Festival.
Jamling Tenzing Norgay is a Nepalese Indian Sherpa mountaineer.
George Christopher Band was an English mountaineer. He was the youngest climber on the 1953 British expedition to Mount Everest on which Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first to ascent the mountain. In 1955, he and Joe Brown were the first climbers to ascend Kangchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world.
Everest is a 70mm American documentary film, from MacGillivray Freeman Films, about the struggles involved in climbing Mount Everest, the highest mountain peak on Earth, located in the Himalayan region of Nepal and Tibet. It was released to IMAX theaters in March 1998 and became the highest-grossing film made in the IMAX format.
Stephen Venables is a British mountaineer and writer, and is a past president of the South Georgia Association and of the Alpine Club. He is the first Briton to ascend the summit of Mount Everest without bottled oxygen.
Nawang Gombu was a Sherpa mountaineer who was the first man in the world to have climbed Mount Everest twice.
Tashi Wangchuk Tenzing is an Indian-born Australian Sherpa mountaineer. His maternal grandfather, Tenzing Norgay, made the first ascent of Mount Everest on 29 May 1953.
Lopsang Tshering Bhutia was an Indian Sherpa mountaineer who died on Mount Everest and the nephew of Tenzing Norgay. His death made international headlines because he died on the 40th anniversary expedition of his uncle's summiting. His uncle, Tenzing Norgay, had died at home of natural causes in 1986 at the age of 72. Tenzing Norgay was the first person to summit Mount Everest in 1953 along with Sir Edmund Hillary.
Victor Saunders is a British climber and author. He trained as an architect at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. His first book, Elusive Summits, won the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature in 1991. He became as a UIAGM/IFMGA ski and mountain guide in 1996 and joined the SNGM in 2003. Saunders first reached the summit of Mount Everest in May 2004, and went on to climb it several more times. In 2020 he became president of the Alpine Club.
Bandarpunch is a mountain massif in the Garhwal Himalaya in Uttarakhand, India. The massif has 3 peaks: White Peak, also called Banderpunch II, to the west above Yamunotri; almost 5 km east is Bandarpunch main peak or Banderpunch I ; and about 4 km to the north-east is Kalanag.
Earl L. Denman was born on 11 December 1914 or in Tod Inlet on Vancouver Island but grew up in England. He was a Canadian mountaineer who attempted to climb Mount Everest in 1947. By 1947 he was working as an engineer in Southern Rhodesia.
Chandraprabha Aitwal is an Indian mountain climber and one of the pioneers of Indian women mountaineers. She was awarded 2009 Tenzing Norgay National Adventure Award for Lifetime Achievement, given by the Indian Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports. She has climbed Nanda Devi, Kangchenjunga, Trishuli and Mt. Jaonli.
Ron Fawcett is a British rock climber and rock climbing author who is credited with pushing the technical standards of British rock climbing in traditional, sport, bouldering and free soloing disciplines, in the decade from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, and of pioneering the career of being a full-time professional rock climber. At the end of the 1970s to the early 1980s, Fawcett was widely considered the best and most notable rock climber in Britain.
The 1953 British Mount Everest expedition was the ninth mountaineering expedition to attempt the first ascent of Mount Everest, and the first confirmed to have succeeded when Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary reached the summit on 29 May 1953. Led by Colonel John Hunt, it was organised and financed by the Joint Himalayan Committee. News of the expedition's success reached London in time to be released on the morning of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, on 2 June that year.