‘Wikipedia’ of Nepali Himalayas ‘retires’

KATHMANDU: American journalist Elizabeth Hawley, popularly known as the Wikipedia of Nepali Himalayas breathed her last in Kathmandu on Friday at the age of 94.
She passed away at a hospital in Kathmandu in the early hours of Friday, a week after falling ill with a lung infection.
Born on November 9, 1923 to a Chicago-based chartered accountant and a suffragist, Elizabeth Ann Hawley attended university in Michigan. After graduation in 1946 she started working with Fortune magazine as a researcher.
But bored of her job, she went on world tour in 1957, finally ending up in Nepal in February 1959.
But she came back to Nepal in 1960 never to return. She was a correspondent for the Reuters news agency in Nepal. She reported on mountaineering and the expeditions, and continued to live her life devoted to the Himalayas in Nepal. Though Hawley was never a climber, she was interested in the people, and knew how to get the accurate information.
Hawley has founded the Himalayan Database, an archive of all summits in Nepal’s mountains that she managed until five years ago.
For her contribution, Nepal in 2014, named a 6,182-metre mountain in her honour: Peak Hawley in the country’s northwest.
“I retire when I die. It might be the same thing,” Hawley wrote in her book The Nepal Scene, a collection of monthly dispatches she wrote until 2007.
“Kathmandu will be a lesser place without her and her original VW beetle,” wrote 12-time Everest summiteer Kenton Cool on Twitter, describing her as the ‘Oracle of Himalayan climbing’.