Keeper Of The Mountains

by Bernadette McDonald

  But on the subject of mountaineering, Sharma can’t imagine the Ministry of Tourism getting along without her. “They use her as a reference,” he explained. “If you go to them for information about a climb, they will suggest that you go see Liz Hawley.” He worried about the situation in Nepal should she ever leave Kathmandu, since nobody else had the information or the knowledge that she had about mountaineering.

  Personal tragedy struck the Hawley household when Elizabeth’s dog, Tigger II, passed away on the night of April 9. Though the cause of death was unknown, it was attributed to some kind of internal problem. Earlier in the week he had been vomiting and hemorrhaging and nothing the veterinarian did could save him. The apartment was suddenly quiet.

  Some good news arrived soon after, for June Mulgrew had found her a new apso puppy, just three months old. Sir Edmund delivered the dog to her, letting it perch on his lap during the Royal Nepal Airlines flight. She remembered it with delight: “This great tall man with a little puppy in his lap!” She decided to call the puppy Mallory after the famous British mountaineer. She briefly considered calling him Hillary or Messner, but thought it might be embarrassing – or even confusing – for them if she were to call the dog in their presence. Mallory was the last dog she would own, and he was her favourite.

  Meanwhile, in the United States, Elizabeth’s mother’s health was failing and it appeared she would no longer be able to live alone. Elizabeth was distressed by her mother’s loss of independence and frustrated by her inability to be there for her. Yet she also understood that there comes a time when independence is no longer practical and that such a time had arrived for her mother. For Elizabeth, it was a period of serious consideration for the future. Would she ever return to the United States? Would it be to care for her aging mother? How would she make a living there, and – more important – how could she ever adjust to life in America again? The prospect was not a happy one.

  Elizabeth had developed a network of friends in Kathmandu, friends who represented a wide and varied slice of humanity, from the travel industry, to diplomats, to that crazy “family” of mountaineers she had adopted. She relished the climbing seasons, when climbers from around the world trooped in, one expedition after another, giving her a chance to visit, learn of their latest plans and catch up on mountaineering gossip. And there was often a change of government, a new cabinet or some political goings-on that kept her interested. She couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.

  In addition to Elizabeth’s numerous jobs, a new one popped up: screening prospective air hostesses for Royal Nepal Airlines. When Florelle heard about this latest line of work for her daughter, she was baffled. What kind of expertise did Elizabeth have in this field? Elizabeth admitted it was a little sketchy but explained that she was part of a panel interviewing candidates and weeding out the unsuitable ones. Pressed by her mother as to how one does that, Elizabeth explained that they were rated “on looks, self-possession, intelligent responses, fluency in English, and so on.” One can’t help imagining the scene: the critical, perfectionist, intelligent and impatient Elizabeth Hawley screening potential airline hostesses for looks and intelligence. It can’t have been an easy time for them.

  Elizabeth’s importance as a journalist was made clear in the fall of 1987 when a Chinese CAAC flight landed in Kathmandu direct from Lhasa, Tibet. It was the first flight from Lhasa to anywhere outside China, and it offered her an unexpected opportunity when two passengers walked into her office carrying written reports and photos of the riots that had taken place in Lhasa two days before. She didn’t know the individuals who had sent them to her, but they knew her and they knew how to find her. She sent a telex to Reuters about the accounts of marching monks and fierce police, and that evening she sent the photos to the Reuters office in Delhi in a traveller’s hand luggage. They were among the first reports and photos to come out of Lhasa, and an appreciative Reuters distributed them far and wide. She had achieved another (unofficial) scoop. Because of her report, flights from Lhasa to Nepal abruptly ceased.

  A truly momentous event occurred in the Hawley household in January 1988: Elizabeth purchased a computer. Day after day she went to the salesroom to observe demonstrations on three different word processors, trying to choose the best one for her. Then came the installation. An electronics man arrived first, then an electrician and finally a carpenter. After all this, there it was, standing majestically on her desk. The excruciating lessons followed – “God help me!” she exclaimed to her mother. “This week is the time I enter the computer age.” She would have many hours of work transferring all of her mountaineering data to the computer, but she was optimistic she would be able to figure it out. “God knows, it’s a thing of logic and detail, and I think I can handle those attributes.”

  The transition to the computer age was a slow process, but it began to produce results. By January 23 she could word process and had grown particularly fond of the delete key. By the 30th she could create a right margin as straight as the left, and even the date at the top of the page was properly aligned. Another happy discovery was the spell-check feature: “I’ve learned how to call into play a wonderful invention, an ability the computer has to check misspellings, let you know if you’ve typed the same word twice in a row, or done something else you didn’t really want to do. Lovely!” She began to enjoy her new toy.

  The winter mountaineering season wrapped up in February, and although she was still not accredited to report for Reuters, Elizabeth faithfully assembled the reports for her archives and assisted Mike Cheney with his mountaineering reports. Then, suddenly, Cheney died of a heart attack. Like her friend Boris the previous year, another Kathmandu regular was gone forever. And when Hillary returned from a work visit to the Solu Khumbu, he too was looking weak and unwell – not his cheerful self at all. He had done no trekking and seemed silent and withdrawn.

  Everest in 1988 was a study in contrasts, as a huge 283-member expedition costing $7-million sent 14 climbers to the summit on two of the more common routes. At the same time, a team of four climbers who hardly knew each other put one climber on the top by a difficult new route on the gaping, gigantic East Face of the mountain. Elizabeth’s report summed it up beautifully: “The big party got the television coverage and a series of gala victory celebrations in three nations’ capitals, while the little group quietly went their separate ways home.”

  But it was the little group that captured her attention. Four climbers from England, the United States and Canada formed a loose team with an ambitious objective: an unclimbed buttress they called the Neverest Buttress, leading up to the South Col on the East Face.

  Briton Stephen Venables recalled having breakfast at their hotel on the morning before they were to head out for the climb, when Elizabeth Hawley showed up. To him, it felt as if the headmistress wanted to grill them, looking somewhat severe in her spectacles. The four climbers – Venables, Americans Ed Webster and Robert Anderson and Canadian Paul Teare – hardly knew each other, causing her to be skeptical about their chances of success, especially on such an ambitious objective. She told them the Chinese–Japanese–Nepalese Friendship Expedition and the Australian Bicentennial Everest expedition would both be on the mountain at the same time, exclaiming, “It’s going to be a zoo.”

  The climbers scanned the Tibet Guesthouse dining room to make sure it was safe to bring out their six photos of the route to show her – they didn’t want their plans to leak out because they didn’t want to be “scooped.” They felt confident she was trustworthy, so Teare showed her their intended route. Elizabeth may have appeared disapproving, but in fact she was fascinated. What a welcome break from the big-expedition tradition she was used to and somewhat tired of: a big new route tackled by four climbers. Venables was sure she thought they wouldn’t make it back. In Snow in the Kingdom, Webster wrote, “Impressed either by our phenomenal daring or our obvious stupidity, Miss Hawley wished us sincere good luck.…”

  Without oxygen and in deteri
orating weather, the team became fractured on the mountain. One member turned back due to altitude sickness and two retreated in bad weather, but Venables plodded on, despite the knowledge that he had lost feeling in his toes. Venables made the summit, and eventually all four climbers managed to get down alive.

  When Teare later came to Elizabeth’s office to tell her about the climb, Messner was there. Respectful of what they had accomplished, he praised them with “you have done a very brave thing,” and then added, “You are very lucky!” After getting all the details, Elizabeth mentioned she was going to an Australian expedition party and asked Messner and Teare if they’d like to accompany her. It turned out that Messner couldn’t go, but Teare could and he brought Venables with him. They later joked about how disappointed she must have been to end up with the two of them on her arm instead of Messner.

  In contrast to her very real concerns about the four climbers getting lost on their route, Elizabeth thought it would be impossible for any of the 283-member team to get lost. “There were too many camps and climbers and walkie-talkie radios and oxygen bottles and support staff” for that to happen. There were three national governments (China, Japan and Nepal) involved with the expedition, with tri-national commanders in Beijing radioing instructions to the climbing leaders on the scene. Despite her admiration for the complex handling of logistics, she concluded: “It is a wonder that the whole enterprise did not collapse of its own weight.” But collapse it did not and they sent 14 climbers to the top. And what did her friend Hillary think of it? Not much. “It’s a massive undertaking and I personally think a singularly unattractive one,” he said.

  Although this massive expedition was at the upper end of the spectrum in terms of cost, it was also becoming more expensive for smaller, less flamboyant teams to come to the Himalaya, and funding the expeditions was becoming a bigger part of the task. Peak permit costs were going up, so climbers sought sponsorship funding more often. As a result, climbing objectives tended to be on the really big peaks – mountains that were considered newsworthy – and toward what Elizabeth described as “stunts” – also newsworthy. In fact, she considered some of these escapades to be fundraising stunts more than mountaineering stunts.

  It was in this category that she placed French climber Marc Batard’s next climb. His intention was to leave his base camp at 5350 metres, climb to the 8848-metre summit of Everest and return in less than 24 hours. To acclimatize, he first climbed Cho Oyu, then helicoptered into the Everest area. One week after summiting Cho Oyu, he was preparing his camp at the foot of Everest. He employed eight Nepali climbers to help break trail, but he eschewed the use of oxygen. He didn’t get to the summit on his first try. On his third attempt, he did it, although not in the time he had wanted. He reached the top in 22½ hours. The descent took him 8½ hours, and two hours after reaching base camp he left for Kathmandu and France. Still, he had achieved a speed record as well as another record in climbing four 8000-metre peaks in less than 10 months. Elizabeth acknowledged his strength, determination and abilities but questioned his motives. In general, she thought speed climbing was “gimmicky.”

  Despite her opinion of this type of climbing, however, she still thought it was important to keep records – accurate records. It took seven years before Batard’s record was broken and even then she wasn’t sure it was truly beaten. Tyrolean climber Reinhard Patscheider climbed from advanced base camp on the north side of Everest to the summit in 21 hours. But, as Elizabeth pointed out, although his ascent was faster, he started a thousand metres higher than Batard, so it wasn’t really a record-breaker. The comparison was further complicated by the fact that advanced base camp on the north side was actually the bottom of the mountain. But she insisted that these records did matter and that the fine points needed to be acknowledged.

  The question of motives was at the heart of a tragedy that took place on the Southwest Face of Everest when a small team of Czechoslovakia’s best climbers attempted the first alpine-style ascent of this face, first climbed in 1975 by the British team led by Chris Bonington. The Czechs did climb the face, but all four died on the descent. They had no fixed ropes, no oxygen and no Sherpa support. They had many difficulties on the route and became exhausted, yet they “succeeded” in getting to the top. Elizabeth challenged their claim of success. “Can a climb be described as successful if one man does reach the summit but all four die in the descent?” She wondered about the pressure they must have felt from their government and fellow Czech climbers, for there were high expectations that they would make a notable mountaineering achievement and thereby pave the way for more government approval for future climbs.

  These four deaths, combined with three additional Czech deaths in the Himalaya in the same month, caused an uproar in Prague as messages went out to Czech climbers around the world instructing them to “stop immediately.” Perhaps more chilling than the political response to this tragedy, was the comment of a fellow Czech alpinist who wondered aloud who he would climb with in the future, as the country had lost so many of its best climbers.

  Elizabeth was always careful to ask detailed and pointed questions of climbers when they returned to Kathmandu, and she was vigilant about recording and reporting the truth. But it wasn’t always easy and she didn’t always get it right. That may have been the case in the fall of 1988 when a climber came to report her ascent of Everest without oxygen. Lydia Bradey was a flamboyant young New Zealand climber who was climbing with a New Zealand team loosely associated with the tragic Czech group on the Southwest Face. She claimed to have reached the top illegally via the Southeast Ridge, by herself, without a watch to ascertain the time and with a frozen camera making it impossible to record the event.

  As Elizabeth remembered the event, the Czechs had the permit for the Southwest Face but, to save money, they shared the permit with New Zealand team leader Rob Hall, Bradey and the other Kiwis. The Kiwis did not go onto the Southwest Face with the Czechs but over to the West Pillar, which was at the extreme edge of the Southwest Face. The Kiwis did not reach the summit, so they descended and returned to Kathmandu. All except Lydia. Just before they left base camp, they heard that Bradey had gone back up and reached the summit via the South Col. The problem was they didn’t have a permit for either the South Col or the West Pillar route. So when they returned to Kathmandu, they issued a statement saying she could not have climbed the peak, because they didn’t have a permit for that route. Rob Hall, the leader of her party, flatly dismissed her claim, stating, “It is simply not possible that she made the summit.”

  Elizabeth saw that the Kiwis were upset and believed there were two reasons for it. The first had to do with an earlier climb in the Karakoram, where Lydia had also gone up a peak for which they had no permit. Part of their funding for the earlier climb was from the Hillary Foundation in New Zealand, so when they came back to Everest, having again secured backing from the Hillary Foundation, they swore she would behave herself. But she hadn’t. That was the first reason. The second reason, according to Elizabeth, was simple: she had reached the summit and they had not. Elizabeth was sure this was strictly macho sentiment on the part of Hall and Gary Ball. Their statement seemed a double blow, since they denied all responsibility for the climb and then said she didn’t do it anyway! But Hall may have had other motivations for making the announcement, because, as the leader of a team in which someone climbed on a route without permission, he could be banned for climbing in Nepal for up to 10 years, and he made his living as a guide in Nepal.

  However, when Lydia returned to Kathmandu she pointed out that they also lacked a permit for the Southwest Pillar on which they had been climbing. They countered that it was part of the Southwest Face. Elizabeth clarified to them that the ministry considered the Southwest Pillar a separate route, so in fact they were also in the wrong.

  Elizabeth remembered that it was very unpleasant for Lydia to get “slapped” by Hall and Ball, and though she believed Lydia had made the summit, there was simply n
o conclusive evidence at the time. Lydia subsequently gave a written statement to the Nepalese government expressing “confusion” about whether or not she reached the summit, which she may have done to lessen the expected punishment. But away from the mountain, she maintained her claim. In her seasonal mountaineering report, Elizabeth expressed both Ball’s opinion that the climb hadn’t happened and Lydia’s claim that it had.

  As time passed, many in the mountaineering community came to believe Lydia’s claim and assumed that political and economic pressures had prevailed upon her to sign the statement about her “confusion.” Several years later Elizabeth received confirmation of Lydia’s ascent from a Spanish climber who said he had been on the same route on the same day. He hadn’t climbed with her, but he was at the South Col when she came back. They descended to Camp III and, as Lydia was a “great chatterbox,” she talked about the climb in detail. The Spanish climber told Elizabeth that Lydia’s description was detailed enough that he was convinced she had reached the summit.