Highs and Lows

Twenty-two years after Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay summited Mount Everest, Junko Tabei — who had previously conquered another Himalayan giant, Annapurna III — became the first woman to set foot on the putative “roof of the world.” She was the only member from her Japanese team to reach the top, prevailing despite an avalanche that blasted her tent away at camp 2. Her triumph, in 1975, came during International Women’s Year, declared by the United Nations, and she became an inspiration.

Given that thousands of mountaineering books have been published since the first ascent of Mont Blanc, in 1786, it’s hard to believe there hasn’t been a comprehensive survey of female climbers. Joanna Croston’s impressive Mountaineering Women tells how trailblazers such as Tabei embraced an activity that for many decades was deemed unladylike. A highly experienced climber and the director of the Banff Centre Mountain Film and Book Festival, Croston whittled down her list of worthy candidates from more than seventy to twenty. Some, like Lynn Hill, Alison Hargreaves, and Wanda Rutkiewicz, are well known to armchair experts. Several others are not. But their stories, each one thoroughly researched and superbly retold, are no less compelling.

The most harrowing if not psychotic accounts centre on the Greater Ranges of the Himalayas and Karakoram. (The British climber Joe Tasker named his posthumously published memoir, Savage Arena, after the region.) Croston painstakingly reconstructs the drama involved, including the perils of frostbite, snow blindness, dehydration, altitude sickness, and pure exhaustion. She ably treads a fine line between telling a story that appeals to enthusiasts and explaining the mechanics to generalists who can’t differentiate a crampon from a crouton. (To that end, the author provides an extensive glossary.)

Alpinism always brings risk and often death, irrespective of gender. In the summer of 1995, Alison Hargreaves of England perished on K2, one of the world’s deadliest mountains. In 2019, her son died on Nanga Parbat, also in the Himalayas. In 2015, Brette Harrington of the United States and her climbing partner, Marc-André Leclerc, completed bold ascents in the Canadian Rockies and the Chilean Andes, but Leclerc died three years later, in Alaska. In 1986, Wanda Rutkiewicz of Poland topped K2 without supplemental oxygen, then spent a night in the “death zone” (above 8,000 metres) during her descent. Her crewmates Maurice and Liliane Barrard never made it down. Rutkiewicz’s feat “was overshadowed by tragedy, and it wasn’t until years later that she could truly celebrate.” In 1992, she died on Kanchenjunga, leaving unfinished her “Caravan of Dreams” quest to scale all fourteen peaks over eight kilometres. (She had six to go.)

Like the achievements of female polar explorers, those of female climbers are historically limited to those from Western (or westernized) countries. It took a long time for women who faced social opprobrium in countries such as Nepal and Pakistan to be recognized. Croston recounts the adventures of one of them. After trekking for fourteen hours one day in April 1993, Pasang Lhamu Sherpa became the first Nepali woman to stand atop Everest. She died on the way down, “but her goals and ambitions were championed by a nation.” (It’s worth noting that the people who have scaled the world’s highest peaks most often, by far, are Nepali Sherpas.)

After reading a half-dozen chapters, the uninitiated reader might think, “What an immense amount of pain and suffering to go through! Why bother?” It’s a tricky question that Croston doesn’t fully examine. Climbers can suffer serious depression and post-traumatic stress disorder in the weeks and months after even successful expeditions. Failure, debilitating injury, and tragedy are common, and summit euphoria is fleeting. Sponsored climbers can feel pressure to move on to the next great challenge or lose their funding.

Women carry the extra load of a double standard. Female climbers who spend weeks away from their families are labelled greedy, selfish, and — the worst epithet — bad mothers. Such was the case for Hargreaves. Journalists lauded her solo, oxygen-less trip up Mount Everest, but they turned on her after her death. “The press criticized her risk-taking,” Croston writes, “claiming she had placed mountains before motherhood.” The coverage, as is often the case with the sport and its more esoteric offshoots, such as bouldering, was bereft of nuance. Hargreaves’s husband had even encouraged her, since her work provided the family’s main source of income.

Greatness requires more than brute strength. One needs poise, balance, elegance, confidence, and the ability to withstand physical and mental anguish. Lynn Hill’s experience as an elite gymnast, for example, allowed her to quickly tackle difficult routes. When she became the first person to free-climb the Nose on Yosemite’s El Capitan, in 1993, the media attention was unprecedented. She returned to California a year later to do the same route in less than twenty-four hours. Her accomplishments, as well as her girl-next-door charisma, have created a durable fame that far exceeds the recognition given to contemporary male colleagues whose exploits are known only within their elite circles.

Indeed, as Croston clearly illustrates, many role models exist, as do viable pathways. The proliferation of climbing gyms has introduced millions of women to the sport. Indoor climbing made its debut at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, and there’s an established World Cup tour. Stars such as Sasha DiGiulian, who free-climbed the longest route on El Capitan in November 2025, continue to attract interest. Still, professional climbing is a selfish pursuit. Relationships falter, families break up, and careers are thwarted. Life alternates between adrenaline-fuelled moments of razor-sharp focus and long periods of self-doubt and insecurity.

If they find the anecdotes of surviving frostbite (several unlucky adventurers in these pages lose digits) or burial by avalanche too jarring, readers can always enjoy Tessa Lyons’s splendid, muted watercolour paintings of the featured peaks. The same can’t be said for the photographs, which are arranged somewhat haphazardly and leave readers hunting to connect captions. That’s just a molehill. Seeing as Croston admits that the efforts of fifty other female mountaineers were left out, her book deserves a sequel.