Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Elizabeth Hawley" in English language version.
One of her closest friends, Sir Edmund Hillary, once described her as "a bit of a terror." But he freely admitted that her friendship was gold standard—one that lasted a lifetime. Reinhold Messner called her a "first-class journalist." Kurt Diemberger described her as a "living archive."
The French ice climber François Damilano has named a newly climbed peak in Nepal after Elizabeth Hawley, the longtime chronicler of mountaineering in the Himalaya. Damilano made a solo first ascent of Peak Hawley (6,182 meters) in the Dhaulagiri Group in early May.
But a South Korean climber, who followed in their footprints on the crusted snow three days later [in 1997] in clearer weather, did not consider that they actually gained the top. While [Sergio] Martini and [Fausto] De Stefani indicated they were perhaps only a few meters below it, Park Young-Seok claimed that their footprints stopped well before the top, perhaps 30 meters below a small fore-summit and 150 vertical meters below the highest summit. Now in 2000 [Sergio] Martini was back again, and this time he definitely summited Lhotse.
In 2014 the government of Nepal named a peak after her in recognition of her contribution to the mountaineering industry—and Miss Hawley was not amused.
Elizabeth Hawley, who died in Kathmandu on 26 January 2018 aged 94 years, was an American journalist living in Nepal since 1960, regarded as the undisputed authority on mountaineering in Nepal. She was famed worldwide as a 'one-woman mountaineering institution' because of her systematic compilation of a detailed Himalayan database of expeditions still maintained today by her team of volunteers, and published by the American Alpine Club.
Climbers nicknamed her the "living archive" and the "Sherlock Holmes of the mountaineering world".
As I noted in my 2011 profile of Hawley for this magazine, her information came to be relied upon by newswires, scholars, the Nepal Mountaineering Association, the American Alpine Journal, European climbing publications, and the world's best mountaineers. "If I need information about climbing 8,000-meter peaks, I go to her," Italian climbing legend Reinhold Messner told me.
Hawley has been in the middle of it, and her suspicions appear to have been borne out: in spring 2010, Oh admitted that, although one of her Sherpas still maintains that they reached the summit, she thinks they actually stopped "five vertical meters from the top."
The global climbing community has lost a "great friend", said Ang Tshering Sherpa, a former president of the Nepal Mountaineering Association.
Climbing historian Elizabeth Hawley said Oh's 2009 ascent of the world's third highest Mount Kanchenjunga was in dispute as the picture of the climber was "clearly" not at the summit of the mountain because it showed her feet on the rock and not on snow. "Summit pictures of other people on the same mountain in the same season show them standing in the snow," Hawley, who chronicles major climbs in Nepal's Himalayas, told Reuters.
And they get their info from Liz Hawley in Kathmandu. "Hinkes said that he 'has no proof to have not been to the summit'," the website explained, "and so he counts it a done deal. The statisticians didn't buy it, and Alan was deleted on all of the Cho Oyu lists."
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".
In 2014 the government of Nepal named a peak after her in recognition of her contribution to the mountaineering industry—and Miss Hawley was not amused.
