THE HARDEST CLIMB

A unique story of little known women's history: a bold team of women climbers debunking the then commonly held notion of the weaker sex in the world of high altitude pursuits. It's Fly Girls meets Into Thin Air.

In 1969, as second wave feminism was slowly churning to life, a woman's place may not have been in the kitchen anymore - but it certainly wasn't at the top of a three and a half vertical mile peak. Yet try telling that to a 24-year-old climber named Arlene Blum who called a company named Mountain Travel in hope of joining one of their Denali expeditions. Arlene had the experience and skill, and a growing resume of successful ascents, but the standing belief was that women weren't physically strong or emotionally stable enough to climb the high peaks of the world. When a woman did achieve success in the mountains, cultural narrative often attributed that success to the men who carried her pack, held her hand on scary heights, or helped her over plunging crevasses. When women did achieve summits alone, those mountains were deemed "too easy" for men to attempt ever again.

So when Arlene was told she could join to help with the cooking but could go no further than base camp, what did she do? She found five other like-minded, accomplished, bold women to form their own kind of venture: the first all-female expedition to the top of Denali, also known as "The Great One."

THE HARDEST CLIMB is a riveting, white-knuckle narrative of the six women known as the "Denali Damsels" who, in 1970, push through the glass ceiling in the sky, taking on a peak so fearsome that to this day with modern climbing technology, only half the people who attempt it succeed, and more than a hundred people have died trying. For women climbers, success had to be wrenched from the hands of men. Failure was not an option. And so the stakes were set. If anyone could rise to such a challenge, it was these six women, who as rare female doctors, chemists, physicists, and pilots, were already boundary breakers by necessity.

Drawing on access to the remaining members of the team, extensive archival research and the author's own lifetime of pushing boundaries for women in the outdoors, Cassidy Randall brings a new voice and perspective to the adventure category, also long the province of men, with this thrilling, suspenseful narrative that spotlights strong female protagonists doing the very thing they were told they couldn't do.

Randall is a journalist experienced at telling narrative nonfiction stories on adventure and people expanding human potential. Her work has appeared in TIME, The New York Times, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, Men's Journal, and Outside, among others, and she's an adventure travel columnist on Forbes. She wrote Paralympian Oksana Masters' memoir The Hard Parts, forthcoming from Scribner in February 2023.