Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked, we’re adding the stories of remarkable people.

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When Alison Hargreaves reached the peak of Mount Everest on May 13, 1995, she sent a radio message to her son and daughter: “To Tom and Kate, my dear children, I am on the highest point of the world, and I love you dearly.”

With that triumph, she became the first woman in history to conquer the Earth’s apex — 29,029 feet high — alone and without bottled 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.

Her homeland, Britain — stoked by a front-page headline in The Times of London that read “One of the greatest climbs in history” — rejoiced.

“The rest of Fleet Street followed, keeping the story in the air” until her return, her daughter, Kate Ballard, said in January.