SHERLOCK HOLMES OF NEPAL'S HIMALAYAS

KATHMANDU : Sherlock Holmes of Nepal's Himalayas dies at 94.

American journalist Elizabeth Hawley whose fifty years chronicling summit 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 of the 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,'' Dr. 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, Dr. Pandey said.

Hawley founded the  Himalayan Database , a meticulous archive of all summits in Nepal's mountains that she managed until five years ago.

Known for ferreting out the truth from climbers claiming to set new records, her word on the 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 of someone thinks they can evade my questions, they can think again,'' she told AFP in a 2014 interview.

Elizabeth an Hawley was born on November 9, 1923 to a Chicago-based chartered accountant and a suffragist. She attended university in Michigan and promptly moved to Manhattan after graduation in 1946, landing a job as a researcher in Fortune magazine.

The job bored her and she took off to see the world in 1957, finally ending up in Nepal in February 1959, then a Hindu Kingdom which had only recently opened its gates to foreign visitors.

Hawley eventually became a correspondent the Reuters news agency in Nepal and landed her first major scoop during the 1963 US expedition to Everest.

The American Military Attache offered her access to secret radio communications between Everest Base camp and the embassy, enabling her to be the first to file when they reached the summit .

Agencies.