Elizabeth Stark

Elizabeth Betty Stark (17 September 1923 to 2000), also known as Rachel Stark, was a British speech therapist and mountaineer born in Glasgow. A member of the Ladies Scottish Climbing Club, she took part in an early expedition to the Lyngen Peninsula in Norway in 1954. In 1955 she climbed in the Jugal Himal with Monica Jackson during what was described as the first all-female expedition to the Himalayas, reaching the previously unmapped Phurbal Chyachumbu glacier and an unclimbed peak on the frontier of Nepal and Tibet that they named Gyalgen Peak after their lead Sherpa. She and Jackson wrote the 1957 book Tents in the Clouds, and she later became a professor of audiology and speech sciences at Purdue University in Indiana.