The Untold Story of the First All-Women Team Who Summited Denali 55 Years Ago

In 1970, six women made the first all-female ascent of Denali. Alaskan mountaineer Grace Hoemen led the team, which included talented climber and chemist Arlene Blum, New Zealand geologist Margaret Clark, and pilot (and Forbes family pariah) Margaret Young.

Last week, the story of this historic achievement came into full focus with the March 4 release of Thirty Below, written by award-winning adventure writer Cassidy Randall. In her new book, Randall recounts the tale of the Denali climb, as well as the many challenges the female alpinists faced, from extreme winds and storm conditions, to a high-risk self-rescue, to the many insults of their male compatriots, like “no way dames could ever make it up that bitch.”

Yet the women succeeded in summiting the West Buttress route. While Hoeman and Blum were skilled enough to take on a more technical line on Denali, they also knew that the stakes were high. “An all-women’s ascent had never been done before,” Randall explains. “They were—as are many boundary breakers who bear the burden of proving not just their own capability, but the capability of the entire demographic to which they belong—representing all women on this climb.”

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Furthermore, Randall emphasizes that this “less technical” line was anything but easy—especially back in the day, with heavy loads of unwieldy equipment. “The route still presented hidden crevasses big enough to swallow a bus, icefall, avalanches, and steep ridges that dropped off thousands of feet,” Randall says.

We caught up with Randall to find out why this story hasn’t been told until now and what surprised her in her research. Below the Q&A, we also include an excerpt from Thirty Below. 

Q&A: Thirty Below Author Cassidy Randall

Climbing: What inspired you to tell the story of the first all-female ascent of Denali in book form?

Cassidy Randall: One morning in February of 2022, snow fell outside my window in Montana as I opened an email from my agent with a link to a National Park Service blog post. “Is there a good story here?” she’d written. Clicking on it transported me to a different snowy world half a century ago: 1970 on the slopes of Denali. That year, six women made for its wind-hammered summit in the first all-female ascent of North America’s tallest peak.

This was no small thing. By 1970, we had sent men to the moon, but women had yet to stand on top of the world’s highest mountains. Popular belief held that they were incapable of withstanding high altitudes, savage elements, and carrying heavy loads up storm-ravaged slopes. I’d been writing about adventure and women’s issues in the outdoors for several years by then. Yet I’d never heard of this audacious, boundary-breaking climb.

Who were these women? And had enough accounts survived to tell the tale? In my research, it became clear that not only was this Denali climb the first all-women’s summit of any of the world’s high peaks—it was an improbable tale of survival. And yet it had escaped widespread notice and thus disappeared from our collective consciousness.

“Historic firsts are important as they set the bar for what is possible,” the NPS post read. “The stories of these firsts sometimes become common knowledge in certain communities, or grow into legend, while some feats fade as time passes.”

I considered it past time this historic first, and the people who were part of it, received their due.

Climbing: Why is this an important story to tell right now?

Randall: Female figures in mainstream adventure and exploration literature, in the vein of Touching the Void and Into Thin Air, are shockingly slim. There remains a void of strong and complex women in the canon: stories of female mettle, bravery, curiosity, and impact—on how we see the world, what we know of the world, and what we are capable of in it. These six are some of those women that history unjustly forgot, though they deserved a lasting place in the annals of adventure. There are no doubt many more stories like theirs, perhaps waiting for the one that opens the floodgates to all the rest.

Also, we’re still in an era where women sometimes aren’t allowed to be complex. Too often, we’re only meant to play the roles we’ve been historically assigned: lone heroine, damsel in distress, princess, witch. We’re supposed to be likable, or villainized for being unlikable. Far from a fairy tale exploit with clear-cut saints and sinners, Thirty Below explores the complicated dynamics of real and complex individuals on their own arcs of development: the stakes each were facing, what emotional weight they were carrying up the mountain, the pressures they were under.

And regardless of the timeliness of gender equality—it’s just a damn good story, one that reminds us that it’s possible to do the things that everyone else believes are impossible.

Climbing: What’s your own experience on Denali or in the mountains?

Randall: I’m not an alpinist. For Thirty Below, I didn’t climb Denali. I already know from other mountain climbing that my body doesn’t do well at altitude. But I am a backcountry skier who dabbles in ski mountaineering, so I understand the call of the mountains. I’ve been on multi-day expeditions with a small team of people, and I’ve been in wilderness situations where I thought I might die, including in Alaska’s Brooks Range. I spent several days at the end of the road at Wonder Lake in Denali’s shadow, flew around it in a bush plane, hung out in Talkeetna with famed bush pilot Don Sheldon’s daughter Holly, and, obviously, spoke with and spent time with so many people who climbed the mountain in that era.

I have imposter syndrome around not being a true mountaineer myself. But then I think it allows me to hit the sweet spot between carrying the same kind of awe that average people do when they think of accomplishments like this, and the almost blasé attitude that those of us who are steeped in these pursuits tend to inevitably adopt.

Climbing: What surprised you about women climbers when researching and writing this story?

Randall: It’s wild to me that still in 1970, people truly thought women were incapable of climbing mountains without men’s help. The outrageous things women had to deal with in trying to break into the climbing world are appalling. I wrote about some of those incidents in Thirty Below to illustrate what an audacious idea this Denali ascent was at the time. And stories about the few women who had broken into mountaineering weren’t widely told, so even women immersed in that world, like Grace and Arlene, knew of few role models who’d come before them.

Climbing: Is there one unforgettable quote that you found from your research?

Randall: There are some great ones from the insults these women faced leading up to the climb, including “no way dames could ever make it up that bitch,” they had “illusions and grandeur” and “light experience,” “women climbers either aren’t good climbers or they aren’t real women,” and “women should be able to climb McKinley more readily than men—after all, they have all that extra insulation.”

Thirty Below Excerpt

Below is an excerpt from Chapter Two of Thirty Below, courtesy of Abrams Press.

In 1967, Alaskan mountaineer and doctor Grace Hoeman was the only woman on an Alaskan expedition to summit Denali. By this time, we were racing to send men to the moon, and women still hadn’t stood on the highest points on Earth. Popular belief held that they were incapable of withstanding high altitudes, savage elements, and carrying heavy loads without men’s help. On that expedition, the team leader turned Grace back midway up the mountain claiming he suspected she was suffering from altitude sickness—even though a nightmare storm had broken over the summit, several mountaineers from another party above had disappeared in it, and a doctor might be critically needed for those men. That incident, along with the one below to recover the bodies of the climbers who ended up dying in that storm, would help spur Grace to develop a bold idea: to lead the first all-women’s team up the great mountain.

That fateful summer of 1967, Grace’s husband Vin returned to civilization from Mount Logan on July 31 to news of the tragedy on Denali—all seven climbers at the top dead in a savage storm—and the relief that his wife was not among them. She was safe. But the mysteries left as to the decisions that led to those men’s deaths spurred Vin, a member of the Alaska Rescue Group, to organize a climb to the summit to learn what he could, and try to identify and bury the bodies. He pulled together a six-person expedition that included Grace, who was again the only woman. It was a humanitarian expedition. It was also Grace’s second chance at Denali. 

On August 19, after climbers and supplies had been organized and a weather window opened up, Alaskan bush pilot Don Sheldon flew the team straight into the Kahiltna Glacier at 9,800 feet to start climbing—nearly three thousand feet above the usual base camp elevation. The group climbed to Windy Corner at over thirteen thousand feet the following day. 

Grace again felt sick. Her pack was too heavy, she thought. She popped medications to sleep. She went back down to base camp with Vin and another teammate for a gear carry. Vin encouraged her to climb Mount Capps with them as a side trip, a 10,790-foot peak at the head of the Kahiltna Glacier. She did. And then was too weak to accompany the men back up to Windy Corner. In a nightmarish repetition of her ill-fated expedition the month before, the men refused to wait for her to recover enough to continue. Although there was no urgency this time—the men at the summit had already perished—Vin left her in a leaky tent on the glacier at the base camp, alone, with only the wind and heavy snow for company.

“I’ll have to tell the world again of my failure,” she wrote in her journal, shivering in the bleak tent. “It would have meant the world to me to go up that mountain again and DO it. And my husband knew it…The park will never give me permission to climb again.”

Sheldon flew in the next day to the base camp to collect Grace and the boxes left there for a higher supply drop. As the plane circled above, Grace noted that the team hadn’t, in fact, made much progress without her. She dropped the boxes from the sky for them, and then was flown back to Anchorage, to be alone in her home once more.

So much new snow had fallen over the last month that Vin’s team could not locate any trace of the men who’d died. It remains the worst disaster ever to occur on Denali. In the months and years following, the Wilcox expedition would be would be excoriated for its choices, personal dynamics, and infighting as possible contributors to the tragedy, and rescuers and the park service would re-evaluate everything they knew about rescue on the mountain. 

The incident also no doubt caused many outside the climbing community to question: why would anyone climb mountains at all? Why, through the ache of cold and hunger and exhaustion, when avalanches and storms and falls claim companions and lovers, wreak injury on bodies and sometimes minds from the trauma of disasters like the one Grace lived through, when chances of even making it to the top are slim—why leave the comfort of home to risk all that? Why risk their lives at the hands of such a great and powerful wild?

Some would say it’s because, at its simplest, it’s in our genes. More specifically, it’s in one particular variant of a dopamine receptor gene, called DRD4-7R, carried by an estimated twenty percent of all humans. Studies have isolated 7R as the driver behind what makes people more likely to take risks, seek novelty like exploring new places and experiences, and pursue adventure. But if you ask those devoted to mountains—from rock climbers to backcountry skiers to mountaineers—many will tell you it’s more ephemeral, more foundational, more beatific than some biological mechanism. That it’s not science. 

It’s magic.

Some climb mountains to test themselves, to prove their strength and skill—to themselves or others. Some, in attempting more dangerous routes, are after the quicksilver rush of adrenaline. With the lungs rinsed with the high clear air and burning with the work of movement, the blood brims with endorphins. Perhaps there’s a kind of addiction involved in going back, over and over, for the high, the rush, the rapture. 

Some will say it’s bigger than that. That the feeling of true awe that mountains provide transcends the self, so that even our perception of time changes and we feel part of something bigger. Absent the distractions of cities and obligations, ringing phones and jobs, when life is pared down to the simplicity of waking, sustaining oneself, and moving forward and upward, the human-made veil between us and the natural world begins, magnificently, to dissolve. 

Some scale mountains because there’s a kind of meditation in moving—and in the presence of risk. The proximity to the thin line between life and death at the hands of the volatile elements of this Earth demands an ultimate presence: the kind of presence that some meditate for hours and lifetimes to achieve. Walking that teetering edge of mortality—where our own decisions and will and capability determine our fate—is where we feel the most alive. And at the end of it all, riding the tail of the experience before inevitable re-entry into the “real” world, is the closest we come to grace. 

Once we’ve had a taste of it, we often make sacrifices to return to the mountains. What others might see as a kind of madness, true believers see as a quest for an elusive peace in the devotion to the vertical wall, the towering mountain, to the terrible, beautiful wild.

On clear days from Anchorage, Denali is visible towering impossibly above the horizon: a regular reminder to Grace of her failure, at the same time it was a constant reminder of the mountain’s spectacular presence. Of a summit that, after everything, still beckoned from its impossible heights.