In 1986, Audrey Salkeld, who has died aged 87 after suffering from dementia, fulfilled a longheld ambition by climbing to the foot of the North Col of Mount Everest, a pass carved by glaciers that formed a crucial staging post for expeditions bidding for the summit from the north.
To reach a cluster of tents pitched below the ice-wall flanking the North Col she had trekked through deep snow, crossing crevasses in the teeth of a bitter wind.
This enabled her to glimpse the summit itself, “foreshortened but impossibly distant”, some 8,000ft (2,440 metres) above, and to see for herself the places she had written about when pondering the enduring enigma of whether George Mallory and Sandy (Andrew) Irvine had reached the summit in 1924, before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing made the first documented ascent, in 1953. She was captivated by the mystery and by the characters involved, including Noel Odell, the last person to see them alive.
For four days Audrey remained in the camp before the effects of the altitude – heavy limbs, a persistent cough – compelled her to descend. “I had loved being up there,” she wrote, “but felt an overwhelming sense of deliverance upon coming down.”
The expedition she was advising as a historian and archivist failed in its aim of finding the body of either Mallory or Irvine; Mallory’s body was eventually discovered in 1999. Nonetheless, Audrey proved to be an unrivalled source of information, often opening new perspectives and contesting received truths.
That visit to Everest and another to the remote desert region of Mustang in northern Nepal featured in People in High Places (1991), the first of her four principal books. The second, in 1996, was A Portrait of Leni Riefenstahl, in which she achieved the tricky balance of admiring the artistic creativity of Hitler’s film-maker while addressing Riefenstahl’s infatuation with the Nazis. The chapters on Riefenstahl’s 1920s Bergfilme, filmed dramas set in the Alps, brought it that year’s Boardman Tasker award for mountain literature.
In 2002 came Kilimanjaro: To the Roof of Africa, written after she had climbed the mountain in her 60s for a 40-minute Imax film directed by David Breashears. Climbing Everest: Tales of Triumph and Tragedy on the World’s Highest Mountain (2003) told the stories of six ascents from Mallory onwards.
Born in Lambeth, south London, Audrey was the daughter of Alice (nee Court), a secretary, and Cecil West, a builder. After attending Nonsuch high school for girls in Cheam, in the south-west of the city, she worked as a secretary at the Iraq Petroleum Company, later nationalised.
In 1963 she married Peter Salkeld, an architect, and her interest in mountaineering developed from their walking holidays in the Lake District and the Alps. She pursued her writing career while bringing up their three sons, starting with her People column for Mountain magazine, which personalised the dramas of the mountaineering world and championed women climbers.
An article in Mountain in 1971 by an American, Tom Holzel, contended that Mallory, climbing alone, had reached the summit of Everest before he and Irvine died on the descent. Audrey delved into the Everest archives at the Royal Geographical Society in London, bringing the characters to life in her writing, although she did not share Holzel’s conviction that Mallory made it to the summit.
I first met her while I was a reporter for the Sunday Times, and found her unassuming, meticulous and persistently curious, seeking to resolve contradictions and plug narrative gaps. We went on to produce an Everest anthology together, published in 1993 and expanded in 2001.
When I visited her in Clevedon, north Somerset, where her family moved in 1973, she would retrieve manuscripts from the files that lined her study. She also had some magnificent panorama photographs, taken on Everest in 1922, which she had unearthed from the basement of the Alpine Club.
She liked to challenge orthodoxies, as when we wrote about the notorious 1951 Yeti footprint, almost certainly faked by the mischievous Eric Shipton. He was nonetheless fiercely defended by mountaineering luminaries such as Michael Ward and Bill Murray.
On the subject of Mallory, Irvine and Everest, she also co-authored a book with Holzel and another with Breashears, returning to Everest with him in 1996 to assist in making another of his Imax films.
When Walt Unsworth wrote the definitive history, Everest (1989) she was a vital source. After teaching herself German, she translated books by the top-flight mountaineers Reinhold Messner and Kurt Diemberger.
Audrey also assisted Jeffrey Archer with his fictionalised account of Mallory and Irvine, Paths of Glory (2009), winning his praise “for her invaluable help, advice and expertise”. She told me, with a characteristic laugh, that when she sent Archer corrections to his factual solecisms, he usually ignored them.
She and Peter took disadvantaged children on camping holidays in Dorset and Pembrokeshire. Throughout her career she was resolute in maintaining a work/life balance, with her family to the fore.
Peter died in 2011. She is survived by her sons, Adam, Ed and Tom, and by six grandchildren.
• Audrey Salkeld, historian of mountaineering, born 11 March 1936; died 11 October 2023
