‘Sherlock Holmes’ of Nepal dies at 94

American journalist Elizabeth Hawley, whose 50 years chronicling summits and tragedies in the Himalayas earned her the moniker “the Sherlock Holmes of the mountaineering world”, died yesterday aged 94.

Hawley built a reputation as one of the most authoritative voices on Himalayan mountaineering after moving to Nepal in 1959 as a journalist, where she continued to live up to her death.

“She had a very peaceful death,” Dr Prativa Pandey, who looked after Hawley at the end of her life, told AFP.

Ferreting out the truth

She passed away at a hospital in Nepal’s capital Kathmandu, a week after falling ill with a lung infection. She later likely suffered a stroke, Dr Pandey said.

Hawley founded the Himalayan Database, a meticulous archive of all summits in Nepal’s mountains that she managed until five years ago. Known for ferreting out the truth from climbers claiming to set new records, her word on summits in the mountains was considered final.

“I retire when I die. It might be the same thing,” Hawley said in her book The Nepal Scene, a collection of monthly dispatches she wrote until 2007.