Profiles in Perseverance: Science Takes Time and Dedication

photo credit: Manang Circuit, Nepal (Patrick Burns)

Patrick Burns MD FAWM DIMM
ACEP WM Section Chair Elect

I recently attended the 8^th World Congress on Wilderness and Mountain Medicine in Snowbird, UT, a joint venture by the Wilderness Medical Society (WMS) and the International Society for Mountain Medicine (ISMM) and heard a captivating talk by the keynote speaker, Billi Bierling. Billi is an avid and accomplished climber, summiting six of the world’s +8,000m peaks including Everest. She has even done a few without the aid of supplemental oxygen. The Bavarian native spoke extensively about other climbers, highlighting accomplishments and recognizing many that history has overlooked. She now conducts interviews for the Himalayan Database in addition to serving as a communications expert for Swiss Humanitarian Aid. Her work with the Himalayan Database gave insight into the perseverance of research and highlighted Miss Elizabeth Hawley who started the endeavor.

Miss Hawley was born in Chicago, IL in 1923. She studied at University of Michigan and finished with an honors degree in English in 1946. She moved to Nepal in 1959 full time and left her job as a researcher at Fortune Magazine in NYC at a pivotal time in the country’s political history. In 1960, she began working for TIME as a journalist and correspondent and then Reuters in 1962. It was in 1963 that she reported on the first US expedition to traverse Everest, gathering the attention of royalty and politicians alike. This began her lifelong endeavor to chronicle Nepalese Himalayan expeditions from the 1960s onward. Miss Hawley focused on accuracy of record keeping, winning her the respected title of, “the Sherlock Holmes of the Mountains.”  Reinhold Messner and Sir Edmond Hillary were counted as close friends, although high-altitude summits were not part of her own adventures. Messner was once quoted as saying “If I need information about climbing 8000-meter peaks, I used to go to her.”

According to the Himalayan Database website, Miss Hawley is said to have “regarded herself as a reporter not a writer, stringently recording Nepal’s political and mountaineering facts with minimal opinion or analysis.” During her lifelong endeavor, she met almost every expedition to the Nepalese Himalaya, often at the airport and in her Volkswagen Beetle. She accumulated records of more than 25,000 ascents in her lifetime.

Miss Elizabeth Hawley died on January 26, 2018 in Kathmandu, Nepal. Her tribute on the Himalayan Database website exclaims, “As both a successful woman in a man’s world and a highly visible foreigner recording Nepal’s history, we are all in her debt. She defied the conventions of her time, and determined to live life on her own terms and in her own incomparable style.”

Thank you to Billi Bierling for continuing the work of this amazing figure in wilderness medicine history and helping us to better understand the challenges of the climbing world.