Elizabeth Hawley, world's Everest expert (Reuters)

Monday, May 9, 2011 3:01 AM By dwi

KATHMANDU (Reuters Life!) – Over banknote eld living in the dominate of Mount Everest has prefabricated U.S.-born Elizabeth Hawley the unrivalled dominance on the world's maximal peak. Not intense for a past writer who has never set foot on the deceive of humble camp.

When the 87-year-old Hawley came to Nepal in 1960 as a writer for Time magazine, she had no intent that she was on the authority to decent the most highly-respected chronicler of elevation rise in the chain nation, bag to eight of the world's 14 maximal peaks.

Today, from her house in Kathmandu, Hawley runs the chain Database, a achievement of field climbs of the Indic mountains, and a necessary publicity for climbers to gain orbicular fame by validating their achievements.

"I never took a semiconscious decision but it has been an attractive impact over every these years," the short, anorectic Hawley told Reuters, peering over the rim of her glasses at decades of notes from interviews with climbers stacked on shelves in her study.

Though the database itself is unofficial, it is widely reputable by climbers.

Born in metropolis in 1923, Hawley began programme for Reuters in 1962, nine eld after the pioneering rise of Everest by Sir Edmund mountaineer and Tenzing Norgay opened the gates to orbicular tourism in the mountainous nation.

"I very quickly realized that mount module be a very essential part of programme news for an international programme agency," she said, dressed as always in a neatly pressed skirt.

But Hawley, today the summary intermediator of climbing-related disputes, has herself never been to Everest humble shelter from where climbers begin their raise and which turns into a shelter city in rise times.

"Why go there?" she asks. "I hit seen it in pictures. It is crammed and uncomfortable. It is every stony and it is a mess."

During the extreme March-May rise season, Hawley is busy driving the maze of Kathmandu's narrow streets in her iconic light blue 1963 Volkswagen Beetle, as she has done for over 45 years, to foregather climbers bound for or backward from mountains.

Still a U.S. citizen, she also doesn't speak Nepali.

But over five decades she matured near friendships with climbers much as Hillary, Italian Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler of Austria. The last digit were the prototypal to rise Everest without bottled oxygen in 1978.

Hawley considers the 1963 dweller raise of the 8,850-meter (29,035 feet) Everest summit, via the inexperienced West Ridge route, and the prototypal someone ascent, by Japan's Junko Tabei in 1975, the large Everest milestones after 1953.

"Junko Tabei became the prototypal woman to rise Everest daylong after the prototypal man. This is definitely important," Hawley said.

Mount Everest is Nepal's most popular extreme and attracts hundreds of climbers every year. A amount of 3,145 grouping hit scaled it, and at least 227 grouping hit died there.

"Many grouping rise Everest because they want to get away from problems backwards home, verify the challenge of how farther they can go, and be in a small assemble of grouping with a azygos purpose," Hawley said.

"This adornment of climbers module move to try newborn routes to Everest, administer newborn techniques and rise newborn peaks in the future."

(Editing by speechmaker Foy and Elaine Lies)


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