Lieutenant Colonel James Owen Merion Roberts MVO MBE MC (21 September 1916 – 1 November 1997) was one of the greatest Himalayan mountaineer-explorers of the twentieth century; a highly decorated British Army officer who achieved his greatest renown as "the father of trekking" in Nepal.
After attending King's School, Canterbury and then the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, he was commissioned onto the Unattached List for the Indian Army in August 1936 as a 19-year-old subaltern to satisfy his ardent craving for mountaineering.
The second major first ascent by Roberts was the 1941 climb of the 6431 metres/21,100 peak locally called Dharmsura in the Tos Glacier of Kullu Himalaya.
Roberts's party reached Fort Hertz in early August and discovered it was still in British hands.
However Slim, the 14th Army Commander personally sent a dispatch praising the bravery of those involved in the six days and nights of hand-to-hand fighting by a force outnumbered by 18 to 1.
[8] He led the first combat paratrooper jump in Southeast Asia on 1 May 1945, dropping with a battalion-size force at Elephant Point, South of Rangoon as part of the operation to capture that city, and was mentioned in Despatches.
His trained Gurkha/Sherpa teams, took care of transportation, camping and local liaison, leaving trekkers free to enjoy the thrills.
He wrote a brief outline of his life in August 1997 as a two-part blog called The Himalayan Odyssey on the mountaintravelnepal.com website just before he died at Pokhara on 1 November 1997.