Monica Jackson
Monica Jackson was a Scottish climber and part of the first non-male expedition to scale the Jugal Himal in the Himalayas. In 1955, she climbed the Jugal Himal with Elizabeth Stark and Evelyn McNicol. They managed to get to the previously unmapped Phurbal Chyachumbu glacier and made it to the 22,000 ft peak on the frontier of Nepal and Tibet. They named it Gyalgen Peak, after their lead Sherpa. Jackson wrote the book Tents in the Clouds: the first women’s Himalayan expedition in 1957 about the adventure.
The Scottish National Portrait Gallery had a show called On Top Of The World from 2002-2003 that included pictures of Monica Jackson and her team.
Monica Jackson was born in Kotagiri and grew up in the Biligirirangan Hills of southern India where her father Ralph Camroux Morris and her mother Heather née Kinloch were coffee planters. Jackson studied sociology and conducted research in the Kollegal region. She wrote a biographical account of her experience growing up in India in Going Back.
