Monica Jackson

Monica Jackson (16 September 1920 – 7 April 2020) was a Scottish climber and a member of the first female expedition team to scale the Jugal Himal in the Himalayas.

Early life and education 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. She was sent to a boarding school in Arlesey, Bedfordshire at the age of ten and at sixteen she went to Benington College. She returned to India during World War II. She married Bob Jackson, managing director of Stronachs Advertising in Bombay. In 1949 she moved along with her daughter and son to the UK. 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 were the first people to climb the mountain and they named it Gyalgen Peak, after their lead Sherpa, Mingma Gyalgen. They wrote a book Tent in the Clouds (1957).

She also climbed in Turkey, the Alps and the Dolomites.

In 1957, Jackson wrote the book Tents in the Clouds: the first women's Himalayan expedition. She wrote about her experience climbing Cilo Dağı in The Turkish Time Machine (1966).

From 2002 to 2003, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery had a show called On Top of the World that included pictures of Monica Jackson and her team.