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An American journalist who, for over fifty years, reported on mountaineering expeditions in Nepal.
Personal details
name: Elizabeth Hawley
born: 9 November 1923 – Chicago, Illinois, United States
died: 26 January 2018 – Kathmandu, Nepal
Nationality: American
Occupation: journalist and correspondent covering mountaineering expeditions in Nepal
Pen name / nickname: Liz; Miss Hawley; the “Sherlock Holmes” of mountaineering
affiliation: honorary member of theAlpine Club of London
Biography
Elizabeth Hawley was born in Chicago on 9 November 1923, the daughter of an accountant and a trade union relations officer employed by the League of Women Voters. She graduated from the University of Michigan, where she developed an interest in history and international politics, and in 1946 she moved to New York to work as a researcher for Fortune magazine. Her role was to verify the information in articles, as writing was reserved for men. After eleven years, at the age of 34, she left the magazine and set off on a two-year round-the-world trip, almost always alone, which took her to Nairobi, Beirut and Khartoum, amongst other places.
She arrived in Kathmandu in February 1959, at the end of that journey, for a brief visit. In September 1960, she returned to settle there, accredited as a part-time correspondent, first for Time Inc. and, two years later, for Reuters. Nepal had only opened up to foreigners a few years earlier. Hawley also worked for Tiger Tops, a Nepalese tourism company, from 1965 to 2007, and lived for 57 years in the same flat in the Dilli Bazar neighbourhood. In 1985, her reporting on a bomb attack near the royal palace cost her her official accreditation for three years. From November 1988 to May 2007, she compiled a monthly report on Nepalese political events.
She had no direct experience of mountaineering, never made it as far as Everest base camp and did not learn Nepali. The first mountaineering stories she covered concerned the 1963 American expedition to Everest, the results of which she managed to report before the other correspondents. In the years that followed, her gathering of data on the expeditions went beyond what was required for news reporting. Every season, he would meet the expedition leaders in Kathmandu’s hotels, travelling in a light blue Volkswagen Beetle, both before their departure and on their return. His most persistent questions concerned the final stretch of the ascent, the view from the summit and which peaks were visible from there. In total, he conducted around 7,000 interviews with expedition members. His focus was on Nepal: he did not cover expeditions in the Karakoram, such as those to K2 and Nanga Parbat.
His position did not stem from an official mandate to verify ascents, and the data he collected remains an unofficial record. His judgements had tangible consequences for mountaineering careers. In 1997, the register marked the ascent of Lhotse by the Italians Sergio Martini and Fausto De Stefani as disputed, after the South Korean Park Young-seok, who had climbed the mountain three days later, claimed that their tracks ended well below the summit. Martini repeated the ascent of Lhotse in 2000; De Stefani did not.
In the early 1990s, during an expedition to Annapurna IV, Hawley met Richard Salisbury, an American mountaineer and IT analyst, who proposed converting the paper archive into a database. The work took several years and led to the publication of the Himalayan Database, which was updated until 2017 with the help of contributors, including Billi Bierling.
At the end of 1961, she had met Edmund Hillary in Kathmandu. Following the establishment of the Himalayan Trust in 1966, she became its representative in the city in the role of executive officer: she managed the finances and liaised with government ministries regarding permits and agreements for schools and hospitals in the Khumbu region. In 1975, it was she who informed Hillary that his wife Louise and daughter Belinda had died in a plane crash in Phaphlu, and her home became a place of refuge for him in the months that followed. From 1990 to 2010, she served as New Zealand’s honorary consul in Nepal.
In 1998, she received the King Albert Mountain Award, presented by the Swiss King Albert I Memorial Foundation. In 2004, the New Zealand government awarded her the Queen’s Service Medal for Public Service, in recognition of her work with the Himalayan Trust and as a consul. She was one of 25 honorary members of the Alpine Club of London and received the Sagarmatha National Award from the Nepalese government. In early May 2008, the Frenchman François Damilano made the first solo ascent of a 6,182-metre peak in the Dhaulagiri range and named it Peak Hawley. The Nepalese government confirmed the name in 2014. Hawley dismissed this as a joke, remarking that mountains should not be named after people.
He died on 26 January 2018 at CIWEC Hospital in Kathmandu, aged 94, from pneumonia. Her cremation took place at Swayambhunath following a Sherpa ritual. She bequeathed her library and papers to the American Alpine Club.
Works
The Himalayan Database: The Expedition Archives of Elizabeth Hawley, Golden, American Alpine Club, 2004 (with Richard Salisbury)
The Nepal Scene: Chronicles of Elizabeth Hawley, 1988–2007, Kathmandu, Vajra Books, 2015 (edited by Lisa Choegyal and Mikel Dunham)
Bibliography
As a writer
no critical study dedicated to her written work has been found
As a key reference
McDonald, Bernadette, I’ll Call You in Kathmandu: The Elizabeth Hawley Story, The Mountaineers Books, 2005
McDonald, Bernadette, Keeper of the Mountains: The Elizabeth Hawley Story, Rocky Mountain Books, 2012
Otto, Allison (director), Keeper of the Mountains, documentary, 2013
Goodwin, Stephen, “Elizabeth Hawley (1923–2018)”, The Himalayan Journal, vol. 73, The Himalayan Club, 2018
McDonald, Bernadette, “Elizabeth Hawley”, The Himalayan Journal, vol. 73, The Himalayan Club, 2018