Elizabeth Hawley never climbed a Himalayan mountain, although she once reached the summit of Mount Mansfield in Vermont, which at 1,340m above sea level is a mere mole hill compared with Everest (8,848m). Nor did she venture as far as Base Camp, declaring that from the photographs she had seen it looked “a mess”.
Yet for five and a half decades she was the undisputed and unrivalled authority on every significant climbing expedition in the region. No climber entered or left Nepal without being interrogated by the diminutive “Miss Hawley”. The moment they checked into their hotel she would call to arrange an interview. On their return, exhausted, elated or both, they would face her razor-sharp questioning; the “second summit”, some called it.
Nothing got past this walking encyclopaedia. She knew who was up, who was down and who was dead. Climbers were asked for photos, contacts and drawings of their route, while their accounts would be triangulated with sherpas, cooks and other witnesses. If Hawley felt that a climber was being less than honest, she would quiz them until she was satisfied or they confessed. When Oh Eun-sun, from South Korea, claimed in 2010 to have completed Mount Annapurna, and thus all 14 of the world’s 8,000m-plus mountains, Hawley was suspicious. Oh’s climb was marked “disputed” and she later admitted that she had stopped short of the summit.
Hawley’s busiest time was the March-to-May climbing season, when — from dawn to dusk — she would drive around Kathmandu in her 1963 powder-blue Volkswagen Beetle, only in later years accepting the services of a driver, Suben, a handsome young man. She never learnt to speak Nepali, but her network of contacts at outfitters, hotels and the ministry of tourism, which issues climbing permits, kept her informed about who was in town.
Her record-keeping was impeccable, as was her memory, even as the number of ascents increased from a handful a year to several hundred and the claims and counter-claims grew more demanding. Filing cabinets stuffed with notes and questionnaires lined the office of her apartment. She was not one to suffer fools gladly. “May comes before June,” she would snap at anyone taking too long to find a file. Some of the fittest men in the world would cower in the presence of this diminutive, bird-like woman, who had the no-nonsense demeanour of a 1940s schoolmistress.
Advertisement
All the great mountaineers knew her. Edmund Hillary, who in 1953, with Tenzing Norgay, was the first to conquer Everest, provided her with a modest income working for the Himalayan Trust’s Nepal division; Reinhold Messner, who made the first ascent without oxygen with Peter Habeler in 1978, was a friend. Some found her irritating, a self-appointed busybody; she would scold climbers for not reading a particular book and she could certainly be dismissive to the point of arrogance.
Although Hawley held no official position, an entry in her Himalayan Database is recognised as the gold standard of mountaineering. As a result she became the single most reliable source of climbing statistics. Even the Rum Doodle restaurant, which offers a free meal to anyone reaching the summit of Everest, would confirm the feat with her before throwing meat on the grill.
In addition to the great climbers, she also had to tolerate those who should not have been near the Himalayas. She recalled one woman who had never climbed a mountain in her life. “She wanted to be a motivational speaker [and] thought it would be really good to get clients if she could say she had climbed Everest,” Hawley said. “She went up, she didn’t come back down.”
Elizabeth Ann Hawley was born in Chicago in 1923. She was the daughter of Frank Hawley, a First World War navy veteran who became a chartered accountant, and his wife, Florelle (née Gore), a campaigner for the League of Women Voters. She was raised in New York. Even in her youth Hawley, who had suffered from polio, barely hiked. “I don’t like trekking at all,” she said. “I like to sleep in a comfortable bed [and] eat hot food in a chair at a table.”
She studied history at the University of Michigan, where she mastered the art of the sharp tongue. She also became involved in the Post-War Council, which organised lectures and through which she met the philosopher Bertrand Russell and the pianist Artur Schnabel. At one point she became chairwoman, but was relieved of the position after speaking her mind.
Advertisement
In 1946 she landed a researcher’s post at Fortune magazine, but there was little prospect of graduating to writer, a job reserved for men. Two years later she made her first overseas trip, arriving in Southampton on RMS Queen Mary. Gradually her destinations became bolder: eastern Europe, North Africa, where a French expat propositioned her on the train from Marrakesh to Casablanca, and the Middle East. She lost 1,000 francs gambling in Monte Carlo and met Marshal Tito in Belgrade.
She left her job for good in 1957 and set off around the world, travelling by train whenever possible. In Nepal for a couple of weeks in 1959 she was just in time to cover the country’s first general election for Time magazine, before continuing to southeast Asia. She was drawn back to Kathmandu permanently in September 1960, “a refugee from the Manhattan rat race”, as she put it.
When, in May 1962, the Reuters correspondent in Nepal upset his hosts and was thrown out, Hawley picked up the stringer’s position. “I quickly realised that mountaineering was an important part of the job,” she recalled, although she would tell inquirers that she never took a conscious decision to record all the significant Himalayan climbs.
She was soon part of the Kathmandu social scene, mixing with diplomats, expats and members of the Rana family, who had ruled the kingdom until 1951. She covered the visit by the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh in 1961 and found work with Tiger Mountain, the country’s first adventure travel agency. When a US expedition arrived to climb Everest in 1963 she persuaded her contacts at the US embassy to let her have access to their ham radio so she could scoop the other correspondents.
Her records were transferred to computer by Richard Salisbury, a retired climber from the University of Michigan computer centre. “He saw the records I had from the 1960s . . . and he thought there should be a database with all the records that I had. So I agreed,” she said. Reluctantly she learnt to enter data herself, backing up the files and placing the disks in a tin box by her bedside “in case of an earthquake”.
Advertisement
Her adventures were chronicled in Keeper of the Mountains: the Elizabeth Hawley Story, by Bernadette McDonald (2012), with a foreword by Hillary. Her office was filled with mementos, photos, mountaineering books and local paintings, while the small sofa and two upholstered chairs were worn and battered. She never shopped or cooked, leaving those chores to her domestic staff, and was always dressed in a neatly pressed skirt, never trousers or a sari.
Although Hawley did not marry, there was no shortage of admirers. At university there had been “a graduate student who was half-bald, a Frenchman who got me smoking a cigarette, and a very nice architect who walked me home”. In Khartoum she fell in love with a Muslim named Mamoun El Amin, spending hours sipping whisky with him on the veranda of her hotel, while in Cairo she witnessed the full moon from the top of a pyramid with an Egyptian doctor. As her biographer noted: “Elizabeth’s lively, and complicated, personal life did not go unnoticed in Kathmandu.”
In 2008 François Damilano, a French climber, named a peak after her. Peak Hawley (6,182m) was later formally recognised by the Nepalese government, but she was dismissive. “I think it’s a joke,” she snorted.
Elizabeth Hawley, journalist and chronicler of Himalayan expeditions,
was born on November 9, 1923. She died on January 26, 2018, aged 94