Audrey Salkeld, pioneering historian of Everest, dies at 87

Audrey Salkeld, a pioneering historian who collected archives neglected for decades to write about mountains like Kilimanjaro and Everest, which she also climbed, died on October 11 in Bristol, England. She was 87.

Her sons Ed and Adam Salkeld said the cause of death at an assisted living facility was dementia.

In a tribute, Climbing magazine called Ms. Salkeld “the world’s leading expert on the history of Everest.”

Her books include ‘First on Everest: The Mystery of Mallory & Irvine’ (1986, with Tom Holzel), about an ill-fated Everest expedition by George Mallory and Andrew Irvine in June 1924. When Mallory’s frozen remains were discovered on the slopes of Everest in 1999, Ms Salkeld was the expert everyone wanted to speak to. She had even climbed the mountain looking for his body.

That mysterious and deadly peak in the Himalayas, the highest point on Earth, dominated her life and career, her sons recalled in telephone interviews from London. She was fascinated by the men who had dared to do it and wanted to understand why they had done it.

“It was the eccentric characters that could do this,” Ed Salkeld said. “That was what interested her.”

Ms Salkeld has carved out a unique place in the field in Britain, where mountains and mountaineering have had a special appeal, linked to the country’s imperial history and its 19th-century fascination with the Alps.

During her research into Mount Everest, she searched 56 boxes of forgotten archives from the Royal Geographical Society in London, reconstructing the first expeditions and bringing mysterious figures like Mallory to life. For decades, mountaineers were tormented by the question of whether he had reached the summit, which would have made him the first, before Edmund Hillary during his 1953 ascent with the Sherpa Tenzing Norkay. Mrs. Salkeld was unable to solve the mystery, although she remained a deeply informed skeptic.

“Mallory was always portrayed as some sort of heroic figure,” she told a BBC interviewer, “and a lost hero always has a bit more appeal, I think.”

David Breashears, a climber with whom Ms Salkeld collaborated on films about Everest and Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, recalled that her modesty had led people to underestimate her considerable talents. Sometimes she provided material for other writers, who did not always recognize her contributions.

“Audrey had a gift,” Mr. Breashears said in a telephone interview. “She had a profound understanding of human nature.”

He added that she was haunted by questions: ‘Why do they go to the mountains? Why are they climbing?”

Being a climber herself, she could easily get along with fellow mountaineers. She spent hours with Noel Odell, who survived the 1924 Everest expedition and was the last person to see Mallory and Irvine alive. “We were always visited by these incredible figures from the mountaineering world,” recalls Ed Salkeld.

Her son Adam said that “people were surprised that this young, beautiful woman was working in the dusty archives.”

“She always talked about the grumpy old men who dominated the establishment,” he added. But “the relations she maintained with the ancient Everesters lasted for years and years.”

Ms. Salkeld also wrote a biography of Hitler’s favorite filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, who had starred in daring 1920s films set in the Alps. Gitta Sereny, a leading historian of Nazism, called the book “great.”

There was a human mystery at the heart of the Riefenstahl saga: how close had she herself been to Hitler and Nazism? For Ms. Salkeld, that question recalled the mystery of the Mallory-Irvine saga and drew her in, Adam Salkeld said.

Audrey Mary West was born on March 11, 1936 in South London to Alice (Court) West and Cecil West, a building contractor. She was present Not so High School for Girls in Cheam, a suburb of London, attended secretarial college and worked as a secretary for the Iraq Petroleum Company.

She was very interested in the outdoors and began writing a column for Mountain magazine, which introduced her to the world of mountaineering.

Two trips to Everest instilled in her a deep respect for it; she reached a distance of less than 2,000 meters from the summit. “You have no control over the wild weather on Everest,” her son Adam recalled her saying.

She married Peter Salkeld, an architect who enjoyed walking, in 1963. He died in 2011. In addition to Ed and Adam, she is survived by another son, Tom.