Charlotte Fox is pictured at Katmandu airport on May 15, 1996.BINOD JOSHI/AP
Charlotte Fox, who climbed to dizzying heights as the first American woman to conquer three 8,000-metre or higher mountains and once defied a freak blizzard as she descended Mount Everest, died on May 24 in Telluride, Colo. She was 61.
Fox was found dead inside her home in the Rocky Mountains from injuries apparently suffered after slipping down a steep flight of stairs, Emil Sante, the San Miguel County Coroner, said.
Fox, a self-described Southern debutante who transplanted herself to the Rockies right after college and never left, figured in Jon Krakauer’s breathless first-person 1997 chronicle of the Everest climb, titled “Into Thin Air.”
She was descending from the summit when a rogue storm swept across the mountain with wind chills of 100 degrees below zero. The blizzard, which lasted for hours, had killed eight climbers from four expeditions. Fox nearly froze to death but she and others were rescued and evacuated by helicopter.
Mountaineering assumes its own momentum, Fox explained in an interview for the 2008 PBS program “Frontline.”
“You’ve gone so far up the mountain, you’ve come so far from home, and you spent six months preparing for this goal,” she said. “There’s no way you’re going to turn around unless things are really going south.”
But the fatal blizzard struck overnight on May 10, 1996 – her 39th birthday – when she had reached her goal and was already descending.
“My eyes were frozen,” she was quoted as saying in “Into Thin Air.” “I didn’t see how we were going to get out of it alive.”
“I didn’t think I could endure it anymore,” she added. “I just curled up in a ball and hoped death would come quickly.”
Everest was the third jewel in Fox’s triple crown. She also reached the top of two other mountains with a height of at least 8,000 metres (26,246 feet): Gasherbrum II in Pakistan in 1994 and Cho Oyu, in the Himalayas in 1995, and was the first American woman credited with surmounting all three.
When Ms. Fox’s friends and acquaintances heard what had happened to her, they were less stunned by her death than by how she died.
Returning from dinner, weekend guests discovered her body at the bottom of a steep 77-step hardwood staircase connecting the four stories of her house.
“When someone dies of a long illness, it gives you time to process that; it’s even a blessing,” Connie Self, a movie producer and friend of Fox told the Telluride Daily Planet. “It’s hard to find the blessing in this. It’s a huge reminder of how vulnerable we are; how risk is everywhere.”
Charlotte Fox was born on May 10, 1957, in Greensboro, N.C., the only child of Ann Robinson Black and of Jared Fox, whose father founded Blue Bell, the manufacturer of Wrangler jeans.
An expert water skier and equestrian as a child, she graduated from Hollins College, in Roanoke, Va., with a degree in American studies, then planned to spend a year in the Rockies mulling what to do next. She never left.
In addition to her mother, she leaves her brother, Ralph R. Black, and her stepmother, Rachel Camp.