End of the Rope
Mountains, Marriage, and Motherhood
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
In the tradition of Cheryl Strayed's Wild, the gritty, funny, achingly honest story of a young climber's struggle to become whole by testing herself on mountains and life.
As a young teenager Jan Redford runs away from a cottage where her father has just put her down for the zillionth time and throws herself against a 100-foot cliff face. Somewhere in that shaky, outraged kid is a bedrock belief in her right to exist, which carries her to the top. In that brief flash of victory, she sets her sights on becoming a climber.
Falling in love with climbing eventually leads to falling in love with the climbers in her tight-knit western Canadian climbing community. It also means that the people she loves regularly vanish in an instant, caught in an avalanche or by a split second of inattention. It almost crushes Jan when her boyfriend, the gifted climber Dan Guthrie, is killed. Instead of marrying Dan, she marries one of his best friends, a driven climber who was there for her when she was grieving and becomes the father of her two children. Not what either of them planned.
End of the Rope is raw and real. Mountains challenge Jan, marriage almost annihilates her, and motherhood could have been the last straw...but it isn't. How she climbs out of the hole she digs for herself is as thrilling and inspiring as any of her climbs--and just as much an act of bravery.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With a wonderful combination of adventure and introspection, outdoor writer Redford tells of a life lived on the fringes of society and in the heights of the Banff mountains in British Columbia. Her love of climbing began in 1974 when, as a 14 year old, she shrugged off a fear of falling and free climbed a cliff "four times as high as" her house. The sense of achievement and approval she got from subsequent successful climbs pushed her into a life of adventure. In her early 20s she fell in love with fellow climber Dan, but he soon died in an avalanche. She found comfort in one of Dan's friends, an extreme climber named Grant; they married, had two children, and she got a teaching degree and taught elementary school. As Redford reflects on the evolution of both her marriage and her professional life, her prose seamlessly moves from witty and gutsy to introspective and sad (" sat on the edge of the mattress, my knee bouncing up and own like it did when I was scared out of my mind on a climb"). She divorced in middle age and became a single mother; it was then that she took lessons learned from climbing and quit teaching to pursue writing. Redford's is a truly inspiring and honest account of what it means to be a strong woman who can reach new heights because she isn't afraid to fall.
