Hannelore Schmatz

Lene Gammelgaard, the first Scandinavian woman to reach the peak of Everest, quotes the Norwegian mountaineer and expedition leader Arne Næss Jr. describing his encounter with Schmatz's remains, in her book Climbing High: A Woman's Account of Surviving the Everest Tragedy (1999), which recounts her own 1996 expedition. Næss' description is as follows:

British mountaineer Chris Bonington spotted Schmatz from a distance in 1985, and initially mistook her body for a tent until he got a closer look.

In 1984, police inspector Yogendra Bahadur Thapa fell to his death while trying to recover Schmatz's body on a Nepalese police expedition.

During a 1981 expedition Sungdare Sherpa was the guide again for a new group of climbers. He had refused at first due to losing his fingers and toes during the 1979 expedition, but was paid extra by climber Chris Kopcjynski. During this climb down as they passed Schmatz's body, Kopcjynski was shocked, thinking it was a tent and stated "We did not touch it. I could see she had on her watch still."

Hannelore Schmatz (16 February 1940 – 2 October 1979) was a German mountaineer who was the fourth woman to summit Mount Everest. She collapsed and died as she was returning from summiting Everest via the southern route; Schmatz was the first woman and first German citizen to die on the upper slopes of Everest.