Grab a Hot Bevy and Settle in for a Gripping Excerpt from Thirty Below
- Jasmine Poblano
- Oct 7
- 7 min read
Calling all mountaineers, adventurers, and literary lovers! SheJumps is proud to host critically-acclaimed author and SheJumps Alpine Finishing School alum Cassidy Randall for a memorable reading and discussion about the first all-women’s ascent of Denali. Randall’s survival epic, Thirty Below, tells the gripping, true survival story of this climb in 1970, which was actually the first all-female ascent of any of the world's high peaks.
You’re invited to read an excerpt from Thirty Below and join us for a special online book reading with author Cassidy Randall. The live reading takes place online on November 12, 2025, and we’d love for you to be part of it! Tickets and a limited number of signed copies of Thirty Below are available at shejumps-thirtybelow.eventbrite.com
Excerpt from Thirty Below:
The 1970 International McKinley Women’s Team, also called the Denali Damsels, was the first all-women’s team to attempt to summit Denali—or any of the world’s big peaks. By then, we had sent men to the moon, and women had yet to stand on the highest points on Earth. Popular belief held that they were incapable of withstanding high altitudes, savage elements, and carrying heavy loads. Which made their attempt all the more audacious.
Alaskan climber and doctor Grace Hoeman led the expedition, with California climber Arlene Blum as deputy leader. Californians Margaret Young (M.Y.) and Dana Smith, New Zealander Margeret Clark, and Australian Faye Kerr made up the rest of the team. On July 2, eleven days into their expedition, the team members were forced to make a fateful choice—that would turn into a lethal mistake.
At the top of the West Buttress headwall, a world of ice and light like some realm of the gods, the six women sat huddled on the ridge above 16,000 feet. It had been three hours since they’d left Camp Three, and another thousand feet remained before High Camp. They were refueling with food for the climb. Except for Grace, who was feeling ill.
Her head throbbed. Her stomach threatened to empty itself. She popped a pill meant for treating tension headaches, drank coffee from a thermos, and tried to breathe. She’d been roped to Dana on the way out of Camp Three, and Dana had moved quickly, as she had the whole of the expedition. The weight of the rope, the heavy slack of it dragging on the ground, almost undid Grace. The effects of altitude were weighing on most of them by now; yesterday, on a relay back down to the 12,000-foot cache for supplies, Faye had been exhausted and Margaret had nearly collapsed in a bout of dizziness.
The pill and coffee did their work on Grace, and she recovered enough to follow Dana as the other woman started up the ridge in the lead. The route was spectacular. Stone towers reared up out of the thin spine that in places squeezed to only a foot wide. Solid ground fell away in a stupendous drop off either side into glaciers that cracked and moved like living things. All around stood lesser peaks attending Denali like devotees to a prophet. There was no apparent life up this high, save for the occasional raven, and the only sound was their own footfalls. Even the wind seemed to be holding its breath. Faye and Margaret came last, wanting to take their time to absorb the most magnificent scene the mountain had yet presented.
Arlene, in the middle of the string of women, was deep in meditation. She couldn’t look around to admire the sweeping vista. The stunning exposure, the slim safety of the ridge line where a slip would mean an unprotected fall of a thousand feet or more, the need to place her steps in exactly the right place and time her breaths to get enough air—it all demanded ultimate focus. Everything else in her mind faded away.
Sharp voices yanked Arlene out her trance. Up ahead, Dana and Grace were engaged in the same familiar argument. Dana pushed too fast. Grace wanted to move so slowly that they’d be on the mountain for two months. Arlene caught up. She gave them each handfuls from her bag of M&M candies.
“We only brought enough food for a month,” she said in an appeasing tone. “That’s our limit up here.”
“Then I’ll survive on water,” Grace shot back. Despite the medication, her head still hurt, nausea still simmered. It was making her irritable. She needed to get to High Camp and rest. This ridge felt endless. She dragged herself on. She would not quit now.
Arlene’s peace fled. She knew they had to keep harmony among their ranks; the climbing world would all too eagerly jump on the fact of squabbles breaking down an all-female team. The others had stayed out of Grace’s and Dana’s arguments thus far. If Arlene wanted harmony, she knew it was up to her to finesse it.
But Arlene was starting to worry about another potential problem: what if Grace couldn’t make it at all? Did she have an elevation ceiling above which she would, inevitably, succumb to altitude sickness? Had she already passed it?
Finally, after three hours of moving up the ridge, the women trickled onto a plateau at 17,200 feet: High Camp. A steep rampart leading to the peak itself rose above, even though it appeared they were already on top of the world here. The yellow tent of the Japanese men’s team, that was just ahead of the women in their progress, blazed on the white field, surrounded in snow block walls like a fortress. This plateau was an unforgiving place, with nighttime temperatures often twenty to forty degrees below zero and winds wailing in excess of seventy miles per hour.
Before they reached the snow cave the women aimed to use for shelter, Grace’s illness overcame her. She fell to her hands and knees, retching. A man emerged from the Japanese tent and offered her a space to lay down. She gratefully accepted. Dana, Arlene, and M.Y. made their way to the cave and cached their supplies, planning to rest a short time before heading back down to Camp Three for the night. They’d return with more supplies to spend the night here tomorrow, and the following day—hopefully—attempt the summit. This plan accommodated both relays of necessary gear and good practice for acclimation, which called for carrying supplies to high elevations and then returning to sleep down at lower elevations, allowing the body critical time to catch up to altitude gain.
By the time Margaret and Faye arrived to High Camp, Grace had begun to show some signs of recovery. But her head still throbbed, and she was weak. As the others prepared to head back down to Camp Three, what happened next is recorded in as many different ways as there are written accounts surviving from the expedition.
Dana wrote, “we knew that if Grace came back down with us, she might not make it up again.” The team suggested that Grace stay there at High Camp that night.
Margaret recorded that it was Grace who decided to stay up high, as “she was feeling so badly and couldn’t face re-climbing the route tomorrow.” They’d brought up a spare sleeping bag and bivy, and Grace had plenty of food; the others decided she should be alright up there.
Arlene wrote that Grace declared she was too tired to move, would stay with the Japanese for the night, and the others could divide up her load to carry up for her tomorrow. She asked Grace, “Who will be the leader if you’re up here and we’re all down there?” And when Grace replied, with a hard gaze, “You will,” Arlene realized with a flutter of nerves that she was not ready to lead, to be responsible for people on the mountain (Breaking Trail, p. 89). But neither was she ready to challenge the older, more experienced woman. And so she and the others “left our loads and Grace at High Camp and headed down as she ordered.”
Grace wrote simply: “It’s agreed that I stay.”
It’s possible that Grace told none of her teammates about her two bouts with tuberculosis in her twenties. In fact, it’s possible she told few people at all. The illness destroys lung tissue, and even today, up to half of TB patients experience some form of lung dysfunction after recovering, including decreased ability to take in and expel as much air; and a third have permanent lung damage. The lungs are the organs that pull oxygen from the air to deliver to the blood. It’s no wonder then, as oxygen in the air became thinner as the mountain reached higher, that Grace likely needed more time than others to adapt to it; her body, quite simply, could not keep up. Not with the other climbers, and not, to her heartbreaking frustration, with her own drive and determination.
It’s also possible that Grace wouldn’t allow even herself to acknowledge this handicap—much like she refused to admit a history of altitude sickness to herself. After all, these deficits could be interpreted as weakness. Showing vulnerability was taboo in an overwhelmingly masculine mountain culture that valued speed, strength, capability, stoicism, and infallible expertise. Expressing emotion, sensitivity, an ability to admit mistakes, acceptance of failure—these were often sacrificed as the price of belonging. Such was the cost to Grace, and others, of achieving the high places that made her feel most alive.
Instead, Grace told herself that her altitude sickness symptoms on her previous two failed Denali attempts were a result of her menstrual cycle, and she blamed being turned back on the fact that the men who did so didn’t want to see a woman succeed. That could also be true, given the popular culture of the time in which the presence of a woman on a climb seemed to diminish its worthiness in the eyes of many men.
But imagine that a woman on her cycle—a condition often used to justify accusations of women’s weakness and emotional instability—could achieve the same summit as men, while in pain and navigating hormonal roller coasters. What a powerful threat to the very foundations of the “weaker sex” narrative itself.
But such an honest analysis was a long time in the future from July of 1970. Grace admitted no “weakness.” The others did not contradict her.
It would turn out to be a grave mistake."
You can hear more from Cassidy Randall on November 12, 2025 at her online book reading. We’d love for you to be part of it!
Tickets and a limited number of sign copies of Thirty Below
are available at shejumps-thirtybelow.eventbrite.com
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