Thirty Below

The intensely gripping, prize-winning, and inspiring story of a group of female adventurers and their treacherous, pioneering ascent of Denali in 1970, winner of the Banff Mountain Book Award Grand Prize

Grace Hoeman dreamed of standing on top of Denali. The tallest peak in North America, the fierce polar mountain loomed large in many climbers’ imaginations, and Hoeman, a doctor in Alaska, had come close to the top, only to be turned back by altitude sickness and a storm that took the lives of seven fellow climbers in one remorseless blow. Other expeditions denied her a place because of her gender, and when a letter arrived from a climber in California named Arlene Blum, who’d also been barred from expeditions—unless she stayed in base camp and cooked for the men—Hoeman got a defiant idea: she would organize and lead the first-ever all-female ascent of the frozen Alaskan peak.

Everyone told the “Denali Damsels,” as the team called themselves, that it couldn’t be done: Women were incapable of climbing mountains on their own. Men had walked on the moon; women still had not stood on the highest points on Earth. But these six women were unwilling to be limited by sexists and misogynists. They pushed past barriers in society at large, the climbing world, and their own bodies. And then, when disaster struck at the worst time on their expedition, they could either keep their wits and prove their mettle or die and confirm the worst opinions of men.

Author Cassidy Randall draws on extensive archival research and original interviews to tell an engrossing, edge-of-the-seat adventure story about this forgotten group of climbers who had the audacity to believe that women could walk alone in such extraordinary and treacherous heights.