While she never climbed a mountain herself, Hawley was the best-known chronicler of Nepalese Himalayan expeditions from the 1960s onwards (she did not chronicle the Karakoram Himalaya such as K2 or Nanga Parbat), and was respected by the international mountaineering community because of the accuracy of her records, and the tenacity of her investigations; winning her the nickname The Sherlock Holmes of the Mountaineering World. Italian climber Reinhold Messner told Outside, If I need information about climbing 8,000-meter peaks, I go to her. Sir Edmund Hillary, one of her closest friends (she was an Executive Officer for Hillary's Himalayan Trust), once called her a bit of a terror.