The untold stories of female climbers summiting the world’s tallest peaks

In 1970, Alaskan doctor and mountaineer Grace Hoeman led a team of six women in the first all-female attempt to summit Denali – which was the first all-women’s ascent of any of the world’s big peaks.

At the time, people thought that women were incapable of climbing mountains without men’s help. We had sent men to the moon, and women still hadn’t stood on the highest points on Earth. Which made Hoeman’s bold idea all the more audacious.

When expedition leader Hoeman dreamed up the idea of the first all-women’s ascent of Denali, she was hardly the first female adventurer of her genre. Women had been scaling mountains and exploring polar regions for decades.

Margaret Clark resting on a ledge. Photograph: Courtesy of Abrams Press

Before the turn of the 20th century, American Josephine Peary wandered the cold Arctic in the company of her husband, North Pole explorer Robert Peary. Around the same time, Elizabeth Le Blond, an Irish alpinist, climbed in the Alps – without a husband. She was an anomaly who scandalized prim English society in the 1880s and 90s by staying in the mountains overnight with her male guides. Le Blond wrote that the main reason so few women climbed in that era “was that unless they had the companionship of a father, brother, or sister, it was looked at as most shocking for a ‘female’ to sleep in a hut or bivouac”.

Another reason might have been the total lack of acceptable mountaineering clothing. Women were expected to climb in skirts, an outrageous norm that left them struggling with heavy fabric, often wet with snow, encumbering their legs and feet.

Le Blond often shucked her skirt once out of sight of towns, villages or huts, and hiked in her knickers, loose-fitting trousers gathered at the calf that served as underthings for women, and would retrieve her skirt at the end of the climb. Once, an avalanche carried away her skirt from its hiding place. Back in town, she had to hide behind a tree while her guide fetched another from her hotel room. He returned carrying an evening gown.

During the women’s suffrage movement, American adventurer Fanny Bullock Workman smashed female altitude records in the Himalayas (again, with her husband) and used her success as a platform for women’s equality; in 1912, she was famously photographed on a high pass on the Siachen Glacier in the Karakoram holding up a newspaper with the headline “Votes for Women”.

As for Denali, only two women had stood on that windswept summit by the time Hoeman and her team aimed for it. In 1947, Barbara Washburn climbed the mountain alongside her husband, Bradford Washburn, a pioneering cartographer, photographer, and explorer who was the first to fully map the enormity of Denali.

‘Male explorers often failed to mention women in their expedition diaries.’ Photograph: Courtesy of Abrams Press

Barbara didn’t attempt the summit for the glory or distinction of being the first woman, although she called it “the thrill of her life”. She actually had to be convinced to make the ascent; she had three small children at the time whom she was reluctant to leave. But RKO Radio Pictures, making a documentary on mountain climbing and intrigued by the idea of a female climber, offered to pay for a nanny to enable her to join the expedition.

She wrote later of the feat: “Reporters expected me to come up with some deep psychological reason why I needed to be the first woman on the summit of Mount McKinley, why I felt I needed to excel like this. They were always disappointed when I said I simply wanted to be with my husband.” Fifteen years after that, a climber named Anore Bucknell ascended the mountain’s north flank with a team of five other men to stand on the summit as well.

Even if they’re not well-known, these early women’s accomplishments have at least lasted in the historical record. There are many more whose names never even made it into our collective history, as male explorers often failed to mention women in their expedition diaries – if women were along at all.

Margaret Young and the team during the Denali ascent. Photograph: Courtesy of Abrams Press

Women were shunted to the background, left largely unrecorded, and often discouraged from participating in the first place. Like many outdoor spheres, the male-dominated pursuits of mountaineering and climbing, were (and still are, in many senses) overwhelmingly masculine in participants, approach and culture. It’s why a beginner-level climb was dubbed in slang, “an easy day for a lady”.

When a woman did achieve success in the mountains, it was never due to her own strength or skill; cultural narrative often attributed her success to a man who carried her pack, held her hand on scary heights, or helped her over plunging crevasses. When women did achieve summits or climbing routes alone, those mountains were deemed “too easy” for men to attempt ever again – as when Miriam Underhill and Alice Damesme climbed The Grépon in 1929.

A steep granite spire in the Mont Blanc massif, the Grépon was a famously difficult climb. A tight, 60-foot vertical crevice called the Mummery Crack, beneath which is nothing but empty air, required the lead climber to squeeze up it while belayed from below; but the belay here was almost superfluous, as no leader who’d fallen from the top of the Mummery had survived. A crowd of male climbers on the route gathered to watch the two women navigate it. They did, successfully, and went on to climb the rest of the route. But the day had not even ended before French climber Étienne Bruhl declared, “The Grépon has disappeared. Now that it has been done by two women alone, no self-respecting man can undertake it. A pity, too, because it used to be a very good climb.”

But when women failed in the mountains, it was only validation of the climbing community’s certainty of their inferiority. In 1959, French alpinist Claude Kogan led a team of 12 women on the first all-female ascent, albeit with male guides and Sherpas, of Cho Oyu, which reaches to 26,867 feet – the sixth highest peak in the world. When Kogan, one of her expedition mates, and two Sherpas were killed by an avalanche at their high camp at 23,000 feet before reaching the summit, British reporter Stephen Harper called it “a verdict that even the toughest and most courageous of women are still the ‘weaker sex’ in the white hell of a blizzard and avalanche-torn mountain, that in the face of violent death and peril, men go out in front and women accept it”.

And there was the not-so-small matter of motherhood with which to contend. In 1970, the Roe v Wade decision and the social and economic liberation for women that came with reproductive choice was still three years in the future. The idea of women transcending the narrow confines of motherhood and domesticity was gaining steam – but the idea of women rejecting cultural norms and putting off having children to pursue such an outlandish and traditionally masculine passion as mountaineering was still way off the map.

Eighteen years after the Denali expedition, famed New Zealand climber Lydia Bradey would undergo sterilization to pursue her mountaineering career. Bradey grew up the only child of a single mother. From a young age, it was impressed upon her that being a good parent required a lot of time and attention. With her climbing career gaining momentum, she recognized she didn’t have those things to give to a child, didn’t want to risk being a sub-par parent as a result, and wanted to prioritize mountains.

The late Alison Hargreaves days after returning from her ascent of Everest seen in the Cairngorms where she lived with her children Tom and Katie. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

As she first began raising the topic of sterilization with doctors in her early 20s, she was constantly advised that she was too young. It wasn’t until she found a female doctor that she finally got the operation. A year later in 1988, at the age of 27, Bradey became the first woman to summit Everest without supplemental oxygen.

In her memoir, Going Up is Easy, Bradey recalled, “When I started mountaineering, I would see men who were fathers pushing themselves and taking risks. And it seemed to me that their wives and girlfriends back home were in the dark about what was going on. So men got away with what they were doing and it was only when women who were mothers started climbing that the spotlight fell on the subject.”

The spotlight hit hard in 1995 when Alison Hargreaves died on K2 in a violent storm. Hargreaves was one of the best mountaineers of her generation, also summiting Everest without supplemental oxygen and soloing all six of the classic north faces of the Alps in a single season.

But rather than eulogized for her skill, she was attacked after her death as irresponsible and selfish for being a mother of two and taking the risks inherent in any mountaineering career. The idea that women could be both mothers and mountaineers wouldn’t start gaining acceptance until well into the 2000s, although even now, female big-mountain skiers, avalanche experts, climbers and mountaineers still worry about how pregnancies will impact their careers and whether sponsors will pull contracts.

Some among the 1970 Denali expedition members – perhaps all of them – felt an enormous pressure to succeed, and not just to put to rest the demeaning jabs from the climbing community about weakness, emotional instability, and catfights breaking down the ranks of an all-female team. They aimed to prove that women definitively had a place in the world of high-altitude mountaineering.

If anyone could meet that pressure, it was these six women, already accustomed to navigating men’s worlds. Grace Hoeman, Arlene Blum, Margaret Clark, Margaret Young, Faye Kerr, and Dana Smith were doctors, chemists, physicists, pilots, and geologists. Between them, they had already scaled both literal and figurative mountains across the globe. They had but to summit this next one.

And survive it.