The Miss Marple of Kathmandu
Elizabeth Hawley
I'm pretty lazy and like to sleep.
The highest mountain Elizabeth Hawley has ever climbed was 1300 meters high, a hill in Vermont. "I'm pretty lazy and like to sleep in a warm bed," she explained her lack of mountaineering ambitions.
However, they do not prevent them from cross-examining with people who have climbed the highest peaks in the world. Men and women often sitting in front of her with violet discolored, frostbitten fingertips and bandaged feet. Climbers who tell her about icy steep slopes and kilometer-deep crevasses, of survival at minus 50 degrees at altitudes, in which the oxygen content shrinks to a third and the body constantly degrades, even lying down.
But not everyone who claims it was up there. Not everyone who has a photo of the Dhaulagiri? one of the 8000s of the Himalayas? bring along, know that the prayer flags and katas, white lucky scarves, do not mark the highest point on this mountain. Sometimes it is fraud, sometimes a mistake.
Your word is law.
Elizabeth Hawley is covering both, for 40 years already. She became the chronicler of the Himalayas. She has built a unique archive that covers more than 4,000 expeditions and more than 36,000 mountaineers. But the 84-year-old interviews the men and women twice? just before and then after their tour. It decides when an expedition may call itself that. Your word is law.
On-site Elizabeht Hawley has spun a network
So she does not escape a mountaineer, she has spun a network between agencies, hotels and the Ministry of Tourism in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal and the center of the Himalayan trekking. An expedition is reported to her, and already her light blue VW Beetle parks in front of the hostels of the newcomers. The car is her trademark? as well as her strictly cut costumes and dresses, her red lipstick, the glasses on the tip of her nose, and the clipboard with the notorious questionnaire: what was the timetable and route? What were the sherpas involved as carriers? How many camps were set up? Were other teams there? What did you see from the top? Even abandoned oxygen cylinders can be an indication. Every little detail is important, especially when there are no photos due to frozen cameras, fog or night.
Rugged and relentless
Rugged, relentless, true, feared and loved at the same time? Elizabeth Hawley has the reputation of being the Miss Marple of the Himalayas. There should have been men who exclaimed in one of the interviews, after weeks of hardships, "I do not know, I can not remember, your questions are too difficult!"
Exactly she was already in her youth: When Elizabeth spent a summer in a New York camp, the mother asked how the food was there. She answered with a list: "Breakfast: 1 glass of tomato juice, 2 rolls of butter, 1 banana ..." To this day, lists are their way of conceiving the world. Sort and sort? these were also her responsibilities at Fortune magazine, where Elizabeth Hawley worked as a researcher after studying history.
Elizabeht Hawley set out to discover the world in 1957.
In the mid-1950s, after eleven years in the archives, the then 34-year-old was tired of cataloging the world. The women were inside, the men were traveling around? an impenetrable hierarchy. For months she made herself only homemade sandwiches for lunch, saved money and set out in 1957 to experience the world itself. Everywhere, in Vienna, Finland or Warsaw, in Istanbul, Cairo or Baghdad, they wondered about the young foreigner traveling alone.
She just stayed in Kathmandu.
She remained the mystery, even in Kathmandu. At the end of her two-year journey she reached the city, which immediately fascinated her. The narrow houses with their wooden ornaments, the crimson robes of the monks, the bells of the temples that pierced uninterruptedly from the valleys. She decided to stay, got a job with the Reuters news agency, and realized news about Nepal was always news about mountaineering.
Especially the beginning of the 60s, the time of the great expeditions that followed Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, the two men who conquered Mount Everest for the first time in 1953. Elizabeth Hawley's reports to Reuters, as well as her stories for magazines such as the American Alpine Journal, were written in the same style as the letters to her mother: unrated, with a strong preference for statistics. She liked to list the expeditions, with names, routes, records, special occurrences, deaths. At home in her office, she collected her interviews.And incidentally, a unique chronicle grew up, Hawley's life's work, which took more and more time.
She experienced many first times.
She could afford it, because she later had other sources of income. Such as the leadership of the Himalayan Trust, an organization founded by Edmund Hillary, who works for the Sherpas in their remote villages. Mountaineering shaped their lives, it went parallel to hundreds of historical moments: the first woman on Mount Everest, the first ascent without additional oxygen, the first time without ropes and girders, the first expedition at night or in winter.
Nobody knows more than she does.
The "first times" have become rarer. Since one can buy in travel catalogs "Everest for everybody", the competition for records has tightened. Elizabeth Hawley is worried. Climbers who respect their work therefore share their knowledge with them. She knows the walls where danger threatens, she has an overview of the plans of other expeditions? a lead that professionals value. "I must be grateful to her," once said Reinhold Messner, who often talked to Hawley about his plans. And Edmund Hillary, Everest's first ascendant, said, "No one knows more about mountaineering in the Himalayas than they do."
Elizabeth Hawley just keeps going.
Elizabeth Hawley has become an instance. She has established herself as a woman among men. A woman who had something for adventurers because she was an adventurer herself. She always lived alone and let Kathmandu's society speculate with which mountaineers she was sharing her bed. Nobody really knows if there were any affairs at all. Does your own story protect you as well as the now electronic Himalaya database that? earthquake-proof? stored in a tin chest. And while the mountaineers care about her succession, Elizabeth Hawley just keeps working, every day until nine in the evening. She will not be able to beat the big mountain any more. She does not have to. In the spirit she has done it a thousand times.
