This August marks the 30th anniversary of the death of an extraordinary woman, British mountaineer Alison Hargreaves.

She was six months pregnant with her first son when she solo-climbed the north face of Eiger, the mountain in the Bernese Alps that overlooks the picture postcard villages of Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen in Switzerland.

On May 13, 1995, Alison Hargreaves became the first woman in the world to climb Mt Everest without a sherpa or supplemental oxygen.

“Hargreaves, one of the world’s greatest alpinists then and of all time, also did without the fixed ropes set by others on that Himalayan climb. Only the Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner had ascended Everest in a similar manner before,” The New York Times wrote.

The Times of London had called Hargreaves’s Everest success “One of the greatest climbs in history.”

Three months after conquering Everest, on August 13, 1995, Hargreaves died in a storm while descending after a similar climb of the world’s second-highest mountain, K2. She was 33.

Through her life and even after her death, Hargreaves was the subject of controversy.

When she climbed the six great north faces of the Alps solo in 1992, the media and the mountaineering community were sceptical. Next winter, she climbed another Alps peak solo and got a professional photographer to capture it.

She was also criticised for climbing while pregnant.

“She was always something of an outsider, never quite pukka in British climbing circles, where the prevailing ethos remains one of masculine rubbing-shoulders-in-the-pub bravado, veiled by disingenuous understatement,” wrote Stephen Venables, who knew her, in her obituary in 1995 in The Independent.

Although Hargreaves was hailed as a pioneer when she climbed Everest, after her death she was criticised for going to dangerous faraway peaks leaving her young children behind and prioritising her love for the mountains over her family.

In 2002, Hargreaves’s husband, James Ballard, told The Guardian: “The media wheeled out the psychologists who asked why I didn’t break down. The next stage was everyone saying she shouldn’t have left the children.”

Even though her radio message from the top of the world on May 13, 1995 was for her children. “To Tom and Kate, my dear children, I am on the highest point of the world, and I love you dearly,” she had said in the radio message.

It was much after her death that she was again hailed as the trailblazer she was. The New York Times published her obituary in 2018, in the “Overlooked” section.

Twenty four years after her death, in 2019, the son she was pregnant with when she climbed Eiger, Tom Ballard, died in another storm on Nanga Parbat, a mountain near the one where Hargreaves had disappeared. His body was found on March 9, 2019.

Tom Ballard was a fine mountaineer in his own right and he wanted to follow in his mother’s footsteps in the highest mountains of the world.

Both K2 and Nanga Parbat are considered among the toughest mountains to climb; Everest in contrast is seen as much easier.

In September 2021 the BBC broadcast a documentary called The Last Mountain about Hargreaves and her family, focused on Tom Ballard. “When I climb a mountain I become a part of the mountain itself,” Tom Ballard said in the documentary.

“My relationship with the mountains is not too different from Tom’s. But he’s got goals,” his sister said.

Bill Aitken, a Britisher who fell in love with the Himalayas and lived in India, wrote about the effect the tallest mountains of the world have on some people.

“If it seems strange that the mere sight of mountains can arouse the most maddening of human passions it probably means the doubter has lived far from their lofty beckoning or lacks that inner lodestone, cherished as an implant of great price by those who possess it,” Aitken wrote in his landmark book, The Nanda Devi Affair.

Alison Hargreaves and her family embodied that love of the high places that can seem maddening to those who do not possess that inner lodestone.