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 Friday 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," doctor Prativa Pandey, who looked after Hawley at the end of her life, told AFP. She passed away at a hospital in Nepal's capital Kathmandu in the early hours of Friday, a week after falling ill with a lung infection. She later likely suffered a stroke, Pandey said.
Hawley founded the Himalayan Database, a meticulous archive of all mountaineering expeditions in Nepal 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 fabled mountains was considered final, though she never climbed any peaks herself.
Every climbing season Hawley - behind the wheel of her 1965 sky-blue VW Beetle - would drive to mountaineers' hotels in Kathmandu to grill them before and after their expeditions. "I guess I am quite forceful, I come to the point and if someone thinks they can evade my questions, they can think again," she told AFP in a 2014 interview.