Cassidy Randall On The Incredible Story Of The First All-Women Team to Ascend Denali
In 1970, Grace Hoeman, a doctor living in Alaska, frustrated that her attempts to summit Denali were being regularly stymied by her male counterparts, recruited some of the world’s top mountaineers to form the first all-women team to summit Denali. This group included Arlene Blum, Margaret Clark, Faye Kerr, Dana Isherwood, and Margaret Young. While these women hailed from different backgrounds—from a PhD chemistry student at UC Berkeley to a geology assistant in Australia—all were united by their passion for mountaineering and the physical and mental challenges the sport provides. In her enthralling Thirty Below: The Harrowing and Heroic Story of the First All-Women’s Ascent of Denali, Cassidy Randall plunges the reader into the incredibly arduous summit, rendering these women who have achieved such a heroic feat in vivid complexity. Critics have praised Thirty Below, with Kirkus Reviews stating that “readers will be left in awe of the women’s enthrallment to the sport, their determination, and the bittersweet spirit of their life-changing experience.” Randall spoke to us about bringing this little-remembered tale to light and weaving together the incredible stories of these six women.
You dive into the lives of the women who made up this team, and they all become these compelling, fascinating characters. The two who really come to the forefront are Grace and Arlene. Could you start by giving a brief overview of who they were?
I could have written a whole book just on Grace Hoeman, she’s fascinating. Grace was the leader of this all-women’s ascent, and it was her idea to lead the first all-women’s ascent up Denali. She was European and was raised in Holland. She went to university for a medical degree in 1942 in Berlin in the heart of World War II. By the time she was twenty-one-years-old, she had fallen in love with a fellow doctor, married him, and been widowed when he was shot in combat while she was pregnant with their second child. When she finished out her degree in 1945, her mother hopped on a bike from Holland, found a bike for Grace, and the two of them cycled themselves and Grace’s two daughters out of wartime Germany, which is amazing.
She ended up moving to the States because she wanted to be a surgeon. She wasn’t seeing those opportunities for women at that time in Europe, and unfortunately, found the same barriers in America. She ended up becoming an anesthesiologist. She had been denied a position at Syracuse University after she’d offered several papers and done a great internship there. She picked up and moved to Alaska because she loved mountains. She’d learned to climb when she was in Europe. In Alaska, she fell in love with these wild, huge mountains. Also, in Alaska, she fell in love with a man [Vin Hoeman] who was ten years younger and who became her third husband. She ended up doing quite a lot of climbs with him and did many climbs solo too. She just had so much experience under her belt.
But she’s fascinating because of the stakes for why she wanted to do this. She had been turned back on two separate attempts on Denali for what she suspected was because she was a woman, although she was also battling some altitude sickness. Then she was barred from an expedition to Dhaulagiri I in the Himalayas, even though her husband Vin was on the expedition. That expedition leader accused her of having delusions of grandeur and that since she had light experience, she wouldn’t be able to make the team. Vin, the love of her life, ended up dying on that Himalayan expedition. She was so in love with him, and she developed this incredible survivor’s guilt, thinking that had a woman been on that expedition, would they have made different choices that wouldn’t have led to his death? She’s carrying this chip on her shoulder up the mountain that she hasn’t climbed yet—and if she doesn’t climb it this third time, the park will never let her do it again. It’s her identity that’s at stake here, and she’s just carrying this weight of enormous grief.
Arlene was much younger. She was only in her early twenties at the time. She was from the Midwest and fell in love with mountains when she moved out west. She had been barred from expeditions repeatedly for just absolutely ridiculous reasons. One was that “the presence of a woman would be unpleasant high on the open ice, not only in excretory situations, but in the easy, masculine companionship of the heights.” Or she’d been told that women were slow and weak or that women weren’t good climbers. She had just been told no over and over again. These two ended up fatefully running into each other. Grace leads the expedition, and Arlene is the deputy leader. Both of them, again, had very different stakes for proving that women could do this on their own.
Even though both women seem so larger than life, you make them so human. After you first heard about the story and were beginning to research it for the book, what stood out to you as the most surprising aspect of the climb?
For me, I’ve been writing about the outdoors, adventure, and adventure sports, and women’s issues within those worlds for years. The fact that I had never heard about this climb until it fell into my lap was astonishing, because it was the first all-women ascent up any of the world’s high peaks, right? At the time, in 1970—which when you think about it really wasn’t that long ago, right? That’s still very modern history. But in 1970 there was still this popular narrative that women could not do this. People really thought they were incapable of handling these elements, of carrying heavy loads, of [surviving] storm-ravaged slopes, of just being physically capable of doing it all. Of course—this is not surprising, but the fact that it was part of the narrative of the time is still outrageous— people thought that their periods made them weaker and prone to hysteria on a monthly basis.
I was astounded by how primitive their equipment was in comparison to the high-tech equipment that’s readily accessible today. Can you describe what the world of mountaineering was back in 1970 in terms of what kind of tools or resources people were using?
This is far from the light and fast alpine style that most mountaineers would use today, where you just carry a single pack on your back with everything you need. You have a ton of freeze-dried food, and maybe you have some gear drops from a bush plane if you’re doing something long. But generally you just start carrying everything on your back, because our equipment now is so astonishingly light, right? You have carbon fiber. You have down sleeping bags that weigh next to nothing. All of this technology has really improved. But in 1970, people were still climbing mountains in what was called siege style, where you would have just this enormous amount of gear, and you would piggyback it up the mountain. By the last camp, you had probably climbed Denali three or four times, because you would go back and get more gear and leave it at that high camp, and then go back and get more gear and leave it at the next high camp. Not only that, but you look at the photos of the snowshoes that people were using at the time and they’re these four-foot monstrosities that I can’t even imagine trying to operate. I think the gear has come so far that it’s astonishing to think of how people used to struggle up mountains with what they had. It’s an amazing amount of work.
There almost seemed to be a DIY aspect of mountaineering, too. I’m thinking of Margaret Clark who makes her own windbreaker out of a trash bag at some point.
Yes, and that definitely was specific to New Zealand and this idea that you couldn’t get a lot of things in New Zealand. New Zealanders have always been known for innovation and a DIY kind of style. But in general, that’s why the North Face and Patagonia were born, right? It was Yvon Chouinard trying to build things in his garage because they didn’t exist. There is generally a DIY aspect to mountaineering. Arlene and Margaret Clark made their own overboots, which are the boots that go over clagging boots to keep them waterproof and warm. There was definitely an aspect that you knew what you were doing with repairs and constructing what you need. They possessed an immense amount of knowledge that also went totally unacknowledged for this time and what all the feats were,
The book is an incredible achievement of storytelling in terms of taking all these disparate narratives and weaving them all together. Can you talk about how you approached telling this story so that all these women’s voices and their different perspectives were heard?
It was a mental feat of acrobatics. There were three chapters in Arlene’s memoir [where she detailed the climb], and Arlene is still alive to tell her side of the story. Although it’s fifty years ago, which she would tell me repeatedly. “I can’t remember unless I wrote about it!” Which is fair! (laughs) Margaret Clark is still alive in New Zealand and had written extensively about it in the Christchurch press after it happened. Her expedition journal, her surviving journal, is actually the most detailed. She wanted to be a writer at a certain point and wrote beautifully.
Grace had also written [about the climb]. It’s interesting because she hand-wrote her journal during the expedition, and a lot of it is fairly terse. Then she went back and typed it with a lot more detail. It makes me think about writing today, how we just don’t keep correspondence anymore, right? It’s just all over email, and then you trash your email. These people kept letters, and that’s how people communicated. I swear these women never used a phone! (laughs) They were sending letters back and forth, and they were sending letters with other teammates and other climbers to get sponsorships. It was amazing to be able to put together all of this correspondence from going through the Grace Hoeman archives at the University of Alaska in Anchorage. Arlene had archived a ton of her materials in Stanford, so she’s just got a huge file there. She also had Dana’s journal. Dana died in May of 2022, and so I never got to meet her, but her journal was in Arlene’s archives from the expedition. Faye and Margaret Young were the two that didn’t have any surviving correspondence. Neither of them wrote, neither of them had journals. Margaret Young didn’t write a single letter about any of this to anyone that survived. That’s why you start to see that it’s really difficult to tell a story from a perspective of six different people. I wanted to zero in on three at the most. Dana walked into this story because her expedition journal was amazing, but so little existed on her from before. To be able to piece everything together then from these writings after the fact—the expedition journals, the pre-correspondence—and then look at all these accounts from other people who were climbing Denali at the time, talk to surviving relatives and other surviving climbers who were on the mountain at the time with these women, it was definitely a feat to weave it all together.
I was struck by your endnote at the book about your interviews with the family members and the children of some of these women. I was curious how their recollections of that time colored in the story.
It’s interesting because Marianne, who is Grace’s youngest daughter and is still alive, has a different perspective obviously on her mother than a lot of other people did. Grace was a complicated woman. She could be really brusque, and honestly a lot of people didn’t like her. Once you were in her inner circle, you absolutely loved her, but from the outside, she could be really hard to get to know. She had been demonized after this climb for the way that she handled a lot of things as the leader. Her daughter, Marianne, just gave me this totally different perspective on her mom that was so incredibly helpful. Colin, who is Margaret Young’s son, remembers so much crystal clear, because a lot of it was traumatic for him. Margaret Young was not a traditional kind of mother. He did not grow up in any kind of traditional, supportive family, and so he has a lot of clear memories from that time and about her.
One of the reasons these women were able to climb is because they were not occupying these traditional roles of motherhood, right? Dana’s daughter does not remember her mother favorably at all, because her parents separated. In fact, she didn’t even live with her mom, which was really rare at that time. The other women didn’t have children—Arlene adopted much, much later—but that’s one reason that they could climb at that time. You think about mountaineering and it wasn’t conducive to the role of motherhood then, let alone now. I mean, we’re only just now beginning to accept it. To be gone on a month-long expedition, to do the training that it requires, to undertake the risk that it demands, was not something that traditional parents, traditional moms, were allowed to do.
You write about moments of the expedition that are especially fractious, where certain members make decisions that are hard to understand. I was struck by how there’s never a tone of judgment about any of these decisions, and how that allows readers to make their own conclusions. How did you approach writing about these more contentious moments?
I was coming at it from a perspective and a knowledge that women have been only allowed to occupy the roles that have been historically given us. They’re often things like the lone heroine, the damsel in distress, the princess, the witch. Being complicated is not something that has generally been allowed women, right? You either are likable or you’re unlikable. That’s it. To be a likable woman in society, particularly historically, you had to take on what were considered feminine traits like vulnerability and compassion and ability to admit mistakes. Masculine traits were more like stoicism, infallibility, bravery, courage, strength and speed, and that makes people one-dimensional. These women were not one-dimensional. It was so important to me to portray them as the real people they were with all these different stakes. All of us make decisions that other people would question or judge or think are a little bizarre for the situation, and that’s normal, right? I wanted them to come off as the complex people they were with these different fears, these different obstacles, these different things they were carrying up the mountain emotionally that I don’t think gets talked about in traditional mountaineering accounts. They tend to have been a lot drier and not imbued with the emotion and heart that makes people real people. That was particularly important as we’re talking about these boundary-breaking women. They have to get to be real people.
I think that’s what makes them look so compelling. There are these moments when they’re making choices that are maybe more selfish, for lack of a better word, and then we see the result of what that choice is.
That’s true. Even the idea of being selfish, right? You cannot be a woman and be selfish. That’s not something that is generally allowed in society as a good thing. But if you’re a man and you’re selfish, you get things done and you’re ambitious. Grace definitely struggled quite a lot with that. I think Arlene did too, to some extent. It’s really important to bring those things to light, but then also to portray them without judgment and give the context. We need the historical context and the experiential context of where were these women coming from and what placed them there.
At one point when you’re writing about Faye, you write, “there’s something about the physical communing with the natural world that draws the weirdos, the misfits, the shy and quiet, the sages, to meet the natural elements without the buffer of ‘civilization.’” Can you talk about what it was about mountaineering that attracted these very different women?
Oh, man, there’s so many different things. There’s the moving meditation of it, and this idea that you can be absolutely present without distractions. And you can be selfish, right? You get to focus only on your needs, the needs of your team, the needs of the moment. There’s something so attractive about that. There’s the challenge aspect of it, obviously. None of these women were women who led boring lives, right? They sought out newness and novelty and physical challenges and mental challenges. They were all incredibly smart women.
There’s the aspect of being part of a mountaineering community that understands where you’re coming from, why you would want to risk your life, [your fascination with] the heights and what it means to you. It’s like this transcendence of self. You can talk about being selfish, but also there’s so many studies on how mountains provide that sense of awe that allows us to feel that we’re part of something bigger that transcends the self, which is an incredible feeling. It’s a feeling of grace. There’s kind of nothing like it. It’s hard for me to say what out of all those things drew each of these women, but I think that there is a common feeling of wanting to feel like you part of something bigger, wanting to feel like you are pitting yourself against yourself in a lot of different ways, of maybe not escapism, but finding a true presence that’s really difficult to find in the “real world.”
The book is so visceral in terms of how you immerse the reader into the world of the climb. Can you talk about what the physical effects that kind of climb has on not only people’s bodies, but also on their brains?
Altitude definitely plays tricks on us, and there’s two ways it can go on the brain. Some people can experience euphoria and rapture, but it’s a little more rare. A lot of people experience irritability. It kind of flays you down to your base layer, really. The reason for that is because when there’s so much less oxygen in the air, our blood gets less, which means we get less to our brain, we get less to our lungs. Depending on the way that your body works, everybody’s body acclimates at a different rate. There’s no set rule, right? Some people are slower. Some people are quite quick. In the context of this climb, Grace Hoeman, who was the expedition leader, was slower to acclimate. Part of the reason for that may have been that she had two bouts of tuberculosis in her early twenties, which just ravages the lungs, which is the organ that holds oxygen from the air, right? All of them were feeling the effects of altitude, where you’re more tired, things take you longer, things like dizziness, headaches are really common, loss of appetite, you don’t want to drink as much even though you’re quite thirsty, and you need a lot of sleep. They were all experiencing those things to some degree. Grace was even more so. With altitude sickness, when your body doesn’t acclimate fast enough, you can either experience, high-altitude pulmonary edema, when your lungs start to flood, or high-altitude cerebral edema, which [swells] your brain, and that is lethal. Part of the reason the cerebral edema is lethal is that the person who’s experiencing it may not notice the effects worsening, so they can’t make the call on their own to turn back to save themselves.
Which is why the team leader is such an important position, right?
Exactly. And that’s why there’s a deputy leader to help make decisions. In this case, I think the social dynamics were quite interesting, because Grace, the leader, was older. She was forty-one at the time of this climb and very experienced. Then you had Arlene, who was in her early twenties and very experienced for her twenties. But if she had to tell Grace to go down, this woman who was very confident and strong, that would be intimidating in a lot of ways.
And finally, what role has the library played in your life?
I grew up in Yucaipa, which is at the foot of the San Bernardinos, sort of halfway between LA and Joshua Tree. Our library was on top of the hill, and we would go in and pick out books on a regular basis. My family were voracious readers and I loved going to the library. It was just a cool thing that you got to do, you know? Now I live in Missoula, and we have one of the coolest libraries in the nation. It was rebuilt recently and it’s won all these awards. It has these huge picture windows. It’s several floors just full of books. It has this children’s floor that’s not just books, but also all these activities. My niece and nephew just want to go to the library to hang out. How cool is that? I love it. Libraries and forms of libraries have been immensely helpful in writing things and researching. I could not have written this book without the university libraries at Stanford and Anchorage where a lot of these archives are housed.
Tags: Cassidy Randall
