Charlotte Fox, who climbed to dizzying heights as the first American woman to conquer three 26,000-foot or higher mountains and once defied a freak blizzard as she descended Mount Everest, died on May 24 in Telluride, Colo. She was 61.

Ms. 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.

Ms. 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, “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. Ms. Fox nearly froze to death, but she and others were rescued and evacuated by helicopter. (Another version of those fatal climbs was captured in the 2015 3D film “Everest.”)