About thirty feet away we stop for a minute and look up. Then we go on...." From that fateful day on, Tenzing has been a symbol of Sherpa strength and contribution to Himalayan climbing.

But some people say he ran away from the Sherpa family who adopted him in Khumbu. In his autobiography, Tenzing said he was born to a Sherpa family in Khumbu. But a writer who recently researched ...