The keeper of the mountains of Nepal.

This recent article on Liz Hawley reminded me of the first time I met her in Kathmandu in 1975. I don’t think she was that impressed by me or the 1975 NZ Jannu expedition. Jim Strang records in the 1976 NZAJ (p14) “Crawford writing off two push-bikes at Bob McKerrow’s place in Kathmandu.”  I invited Liz Hawley to this farewell party to the NZ Jannu expedition I hosted.  I had a small two storey house in Kathmandu in 1975 and Lynn Crawford got this bright idea that it would be fun to cycle down the stairs. Next morning I had to face the owner of the hire company and pay for the two mangled bikes and three other badly damaged ones.  For the records, members of that expedition were:Limbo Thompson, Geoff Wayatt, Jim Strang, Pete Farrell, GraemE Dingle, Lynn Crawford, Bryan Pooley, Brian Fearnley, Noel Sissions, Ian Jowett, Roger Foley, Don Cowie. 

Here is an excellent article written by Billi Bierling, 

CHRONICLING HIGH-PEAK HISTORY WITH ELIZABETH HAWLEY

“Isn’t Miss Hawley coming?” a disappointed Hiro Takeuchi asked me when I was debriefing him about his expedition. The Japanese climber had just come back from a successful expedition to his 14th and final 8,000-meter peak and had become the first Japanese to complete this impressive feat. It was difficult to tell the 42-year-old mountaineer, who had known Miss Hawley for over 20 years and had been “examined” by her several times, that she was busy. She and her driver, Suban, were on their way to meet another expedition and, as usual, they were stuck in the mad Kathmandu traffic in her 50-year-old baby-blue Volkswagen Beetle.

Elizabeth Hawley, who lives in a modest flat in the Nepalese capital Kathmandu, has archived expeditions to so-called expedition peaks in Nepal for 50 years, and it’s difficult to escape her grilling interview technique. “It sometimes happens that we miss an expedition, but most of the time we find them—even if it is years later,” Hawley says. In order to keep up with the rising number of expeditions—this year there were more than 50 on Mount Everest alone—she has three assistants, who help her scan the streets of Kathmandu for mountaineers. 

Most climbers deem it important to get into Miss Hawley’s records, as she’s considered the last instance for them to get recognition from the mountaineering world. Hawley, however, doesn’t quite see it this way. “I am not a judge. I am a historian and all I do is collect data. And that’s what I would like you to do,” she said to me when I started working for her in 2004. Even though the 89-year-old has never climbed a mountain herself, she is very tough with her questions and has made some mountaineers sweat and wrack their brains to remember the right dates. “Come on, get your act together. You must know when you slept the first night at Camp 1,” I once heard her bark at a climber at the Yak & Yeti Hotel in Kathmandu. 

Hawley was born in Chicago. She studied politics, English and zoology. She never followed a career in any of these subjects, but became a journalist. Her first job was with Fortune magazine in New York, where she worked as a researcher. Not content to sit behind a desk day in and day out, she jumped when her employer gave her the chance to travel, enabling her to discover the world. However, wanting to spend more time in the countries she visited, the young journalist quickly got fed up with the short trips. In 1956, she quit her job and embarked on a journey around the world, which eventually took her to her future home, the Himalayan Kingdom of Nepal. 

She arrived in Nepal during a time when the kingdom opened up towards the West, a movement that absolutely fascinated Elizabeth Hawley. In order to properly follow this process, she decided to immigrate to Nepal in 1960. At first, she worked as a correspondent for Time Magazine, and later moved to Reuters. In 1963, when the first US expedition to Mount Everest arrived in Nepal, the young journalist was commissioned to report about it. Hawley followed this expedition closely and found her work with the mountaineers so fascinating that she decided to interview the second expedition. And the third. And fourth. Her initial interest became her vocation, eventually developing into the worldwide reference for mountaineering. 

Something she just “slipped into,” the job is something she speaks of as if she were still thinking of changing her career. “This job literally just happened to me, and I am not really progressing, which I have to change,” she says.

However, changing her career would be difficult now that she has become the Keeper of the Mountains. With more than 340 mountains on her list, she has interviewed countless expeditions for the past 50 years,  the collected data handwritten on paper, some of which has yellowed in her office’s huge drawers over the years. “I will have to stop at one point, as I am running out of space,” she observes, pulling out a file reeking of mothballs. 

Despite never having worn a pair of crampons or used an ice axe, Hawley knows each mountain’s routes like the back of her hand. “I want to sleep in a bed, eat at a table and be driven around in my beetle,” she says, regarding her lack of enthusiasm to climb a mountain, and she does not understand why people like me are attracted to high peaks. “What, you are going climbing again?” she yelled at me when I told her about another expedition in spring. “I need you in Kathmandu and not on top of some stupid mountain.” Even though a certain interest in mountaineering is necessary, Miss Hawley doesn’t like her team to be away from Kathmandu. Preferably they should be available to her 24/7, as finding and interviewing the hundreds of people going to various expedition peaks has become a huge task each season. But despite turning 90 this year, Hawley still managed to see about 40 expeditions this spring.

With an ever-increasing number of punters wanting to climb Mount Everest and other 8,000-meter peaks, it’s very unlikely that Miss Hawley’s system of meeting all the teams personally and writing the information down on paper will be sustainable. Her data has already been available on a CD-ROM, known as The Himalayan Database since 2004, and getting the information electronically will probably be the future. However, as long as Miss Hawley is the boss, we will happily continue to do it her way. And even though getting the information electronically will mean a lot less work for the team in Kathmandu, we will certainly miss meeting up with the usual suspects every season.

When was the last time you were alone?

Having spent a year in Antarctica with three other people, I thought I knew

what being alone was. For seven nights every three weeks I would be alone 

for 8 hours on fire watch while the other three slept. This book by Felicity  Aston is

very much about alone-ness and very much a journey of attitude and determination. 

To me her most powerful realisation was something I discovered many years ago.: 

"The fact that I had crossed Antarctica, despite the tears and the fear 

and the alone-ness, deepened my belief that we are each far more capable

than we give ourselves credit for." 

When was the last time you were alone?

Before you answer I need to clarify - by ‘alone’, I don’t mean simply ‘by yourself’ when there might be someone in the next room, or in a building across the street. I mean the last time you were somewhere without any sign of another human being. It’s amazing how many people, when they think about it, realise that they have never, in their whole lives, been truly alone. For many sports people, however, it is a little different. Their discipline might involve regular solitary experiences – running back-country trails, hiking in the hills, climbing routes in wilderness locations – but equally any competitive sport can also be very isolating. After all, at the moment of performance there is no-where to retreat except into your own head and your own motivation.

Towards the end of November 2011 I stood on the frozen 
Ross Ice Shelf of the Antarcticcoast. The plane that had 
brought me there quickly became a tiny black blob in the sky.

 I could still hear the distinctive drone of its engines but 
with every breath the sound became fainter. I closed my
 eyes to focus my ears on the noise but it was slowly, and
 inevitably, blotted

 out by the silence. When I opened my eyes again, the plane
 had gone. I was alone.

I stood motionless for
a second, breathing in
 the cold air.

 Even the smallest of
movements sounded
brutally intrusive in the 
stillness: the rasp of 
brittle fabrics, the 
polystyrene squeak of
 my boots in the snow. 
I turned onthe spot, 
running my gaze slowly 
over the horizon, trying

 to take in my surroundings.
 To my right was the flat 
expanse of the Ross Ice Shelf,
 a featureless divide of
white snow and blue sky, 
while to my left were the
Transantarctic Mountains
which extended in an unbroken 
line as far as I could see in 
either direction. Each peak
appeared intimately close-by
even though I knew that I could
travel for hours towards them and still not touch stone. As I looked around me, 

one thought echoed through my brain: in all this landscape, in all this space, I was 

the only living thing. I could search every fold of rock, every block of ice and not 

find so much as a nesting bird, a minute fly or a single blade of hardy grass. The 

nearest  open water where any wildlife was to be found was more than 700

 kilometres away to the north and the nearest human habitation perhaps as 

much as 1,000 kilometres to the west. The scale of the emptiness was

 almost too much to absorb. 

Panic filled my chest like a slow rising bubble threatening to block off the air to

 my lungs. It burned in my stomach like corrosive acid and I felt choked. It wasn’t

 that I feared for my life or for my safety, it was the alone-ness itself that scared me.

 I have always been comfortable in my own company and often travel by myself to

 remote places but this was a whole new level of isolation; to be so far not just 

from other human beings and any signs of civilisation but from any form of life 

whatsoever. The sense of absolute 

loneliness was instant, overwhelming and completely crushing. Every fibre of my

body was yelling at me that something was terribly, terribly wrong.

Ahead of me was a 1700km ski journey across the entire Antarctica continent –

a journey that would eventually take me 59-days to complete, making me the first

 woman ever to do so alone. But, during those first moments of the expedition

 as I stood contemplating the challenges ahead - the cold, the 

altitude, the crevasses, the terrain – it was the alone-ness that

was most daunting.

Every morning I would wake up filled with a deadening conviction; I couldn’t go

on. Antarctica was more than I could manage on my own. I knew that it was

 impossible for me to get out of the tent and confront  the remorseless weather 

that waited for me. I could not spend another day battling forward on my skis 

trying to ignore the clammy discomfort of the close fitting material around my

 face protecting my skin from freezing. I could not bear anymore the moment 

I would be forced to expose myself to the cold hastily refastening stubborn

 clothing with painfully numbing fingers, only to repeat the agonising process a 

few hours later. The relentless struggle just to stay safe, never mind move forward, 

was more than I could take. I understood, in that moment, categorically, that the 

distance ahead of me and the number of days to come, as well as my alone-ness, 

was more, much more, than I could face. It wasn’t that I was giving in;it was a calm 

and rational realisation that I didn’t have the physical or mental capacity for the

 challenge ahead. I had found what I had come to Antarctica for. I had found 
my limit.

And yet every morning I would have

 to get myself out of that mind set and 

find a way to motivate myself. Often it 

wasn’t pretty; it  usually involved a lot of 

crying, a lot of cajoling and a lot of  

painful angst. I found that it was 

remembering those who had  been

 disparaging of me in the past, or events 

that had left m feeling angry and indignant,

 that provided the greatest incentive

. I made old wounds fresh by recalling those who had dismissed

 me, people who had been unjustly harsh in their evaluation of my

 character and my capability, in order to galvanise myself. At first

 I felt a little embarrassed at this way of going about things; but 

perhaps it is natural that the strongest feelings provoke the most

 dramatic responses and hurt so often stays with us longer and

 more vividly than praise.

I realised that the success or failure of my expedition was not going to

 be down to anything heroic; it was not about ploughing through blizzards,

 crossing crevasses or dealing with frostbite - it would come down

 to the simple, fundamental and yet very difficult challenge of getting out

of the tent each and every morning.

When I returned home, having completed my expedition, I found that this

part of my experience struck a chord with lots of people - what is it that keeps

 us going even when we know it is impossible to continue? 

The fact that I had crossed Antarctica, despite the tears and the fear

and the alone-ness, deepened my belief that we are each far more capable 

than we give ourselves credit for. 

Felicity's book Alone in Antarctica went on sale earlier this year - check it out and find out more

 about this incredible, record-breaking, adventurer!