A Team of Women Battled Sexism and Deadly Elements to Summit Denali

In 1970, Alaskan mountaineer and doctor Grace Hoeman led the first all-women’s attempt to summit Denali — which was, in fact, the first all-female attempt at any of the world’s big peaks.

By then, we had sent 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 up storm-ravaged slopes. Which made Hoeman’s idea all the more audacious.

Everyone told Hoeman and her six-woman team that it couldn’t be done. Then, when disaster struck at the worst time on their expedition, the team’s actions would decide not only their fate, but how the world would judge them — and all women’s ability to climb and survive the fiercest mountains.  

This Denali climb was not only a historic first. It became an improbable tale of survival. And yet the feat escaped widespread notice and disappeared from our collective consciousness. In 1970, the narrative still persisted in many pockets of the world that any route or summit achieved by a woman was deemed too easy for men to attempt again. And this, after all, was Denali.

Female figures in mainstream adventure and exploration literature in the vein of Endurance, The Wager, and Into Thin Air are shockingly slim. There remains a void of strong and complex women in the canon, of stories that tell of female mettle, bravery, curiosity, and impact — on how we see the world and what we are capable of in it. These six are some of the women whom history unjustly forgot, though they deserved a lasting place in the annals of adventure. And gender aside — it’s just an incredible adventure story.

In this excerpt from my new book, Thirty Below: The Harrowing and Heroic Story of the First All-Women’s Ascent of Denali, the saga begins with Hoeman in 1967, then the only woman on an Alaskan expedition to summit Denali. When a monstrous storm broke over the top of the mountain, the team leader presented her with an impossible choice — a choice that would determine her future.

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Grace Hoeman paused in her labor to raise her face to the sudden sun. A clear sky on the flanks of Denali was rare; the Alaskan climber could probably count on one hand the number of such skies she’d seen during her three weeks on the constantly socked-in mountain. Now the sun lit up the astonishing length of the Muldrow Glacier thousands of feet below, animating its frozen folds like ripples on a running river. It warmed the backs of Grace and the two men — her expedition mates — as they cut steps into the snow and ice to work their way up the knifelike rib of Karstens Ridge. At this high altitude, oxygen was already receding, making every movement slower and more difficult. The climbers’ shoulders ached with the seventy pounds of food and gear they carried on their backs, that they’d leave at the top of this ridge before going back down for more. It was 1967, and as the sole woman on this expedition, Grace was acutely conscious of how much weight she carried. She was only a lean 5’6”, but she ensured her load was equal or close to what the men bore.

It had been a harrowing journey to get to this point. The nine-member Mountaineering Club of Alaska expedition, led by Bill Babcock, had set out on foot from Wonder Lake, at the end of the Denali National Park road, more than three weeks before. Twenty-five miles of trail-less, wild terrain, cut with creeks and rivers and creased in ridges and valleys, stood between them and the mountain before the true climbing even began. In an era when climbers were starting to be flown by bush plane into a base camp at 7,200 feet directly on the mountain, the MCA team hankered to recall the “glory days” of the mountaineers who’d first pioneered routes up the mountain.

Grace’s team wasn’t the only one after a stiffer challenge. An expedition two weeks ahead led by Joe Wilcox took the same route — although they used horses to transport their hundreds of pounds of food and equipment to establish stocked camps up the mountain over the course of a month. The Mountaineering Club used only their own backs, which called for several trips each of heavy loads to leapfrog all their gear forward. By the time they’d reached Karstens Ridge, they’d easily hiked two hundred miles and climbed the equivalent of three Denalis. Which was no small feat.

The summit of Denali scrapes the Alaskan sky at 20,310 feet, towering from a moat of convoluted glaciers like a temple of ice and stone. It’s not the tallest peak on Earth, or the most technical to climb. But it is one of the biggest, and its flanks, buried deep in perpetual winter, are infamous as some of the most savage to climb. Huge glaciers flow down all of its sides, reaching up to fifty miles. Boggy tundra, thick boreal forest, and great braided rivers stymied early mountaineers seeking to climb Denali — and that was before they even reached the sawtooth rank of formidable peaks surrounding it. Many of those peaks rise to 17,000 feet on their own, most of them unclimbed in 1970, and all of them dwarfed by Denali’s astonishing mass. It’s why, in every language of the Athabaskan people living near the mountain, its name is similar: the tall one, the high one, the great one.

Because Denali rises from a plateau that’s only two thousand feet above sea level, its twin peaks gain eighteen thousand feet from its base — a full six thousand more in vertical rise than Everest from its base. Such altitude gain requires climbers to be on the mountain for longer to acclimatize as they ascend, which also exposes them to Denali’s frequently fierce weather for longer. It’s the highest polar mountain, sitting on the far north 63rd parallel, and its air is thin like Everest’s. And because it’s so close to the coast, powerful low-pressure systems can create quicksilver-fast, bitingly cold storms out of nowhere.

Even with all of our modern technology, the mountain’s weather remains incredibly difficult to predict. To this day, only about half of the climbers who attempt Denali reach its summit, fewer than on Everest; in 2023, less than a third reached it. More than a hundred people have died on the mountain since people began attempting to climb it in 1903. At least thirty of their bodies remain on its icy slopes.

From the first morning of the Mountaineering Club of Alaska’s expedition, the northern wild bared its teeth with dangerous crossings of glacial rivers, relentless rain, encounters with grizzly bears, close calls with avalanches, and mysterious illness — which Grace, as the expedition doctor, treated. Some of the team broke under the weight of it all and turned back. By that day on Karsten’s ridge, of the nine who started, five men and Grace remained.

By then, Grace was known as one of the most accomplished mountaineers in Alaska. She’d climbed more than one hundred peaks here, including several first ascents — five of them solo. She was part of the Alaska Rescue Group, a civilian search and rescue operation that deployed itself on plane crashes, in search of missing hunters and climbers, and to the aid of expeditions in distress on Denali. Grace herself, though, had never been on the mountain until now.

If she made it all the way to the summit of Denali, she would be only the third woman ever to reach the highest point in North America—and one of very few women to climb to such heights across the entire globe. She would prove that she was worthy of joining expeditions to 8,000-meter peaks in the Himalayas, the near-mythological palisades that beckoned mountaineers the way the meaning of life intrigued mystics and sages. Nations were racing to send men to the moon, but no woman in recorded history had yet stood atop the highest points on Earth.

Grace had been actively demonstrating her endurance on this expedition. The weather and wilderness shredded her pants and tenderized her boots like a piece of meat. She battled chronic knee pain. And her male teammates were an added challenge. They didn’t let her forget that she carried only sixty-pound loads across the McKinley River the first morning while they each carried seventy pounds. When she took a nasty fall on the chaotic moraine leading to the Muldrow Glacier with her loaded backpack driving her hard into the rough ground, no one helped her up — or even acknowledged it. When she removed her pack to unclip her snowshoes and inadvertently sent her bedroll tumbling deep into the icy blue chasm of a crevasse, necessitating Grace tying onto a rope with a teammate belaying her from above in order to retrieve it, Babcock responded with a head shake of disgust. The men criticized her choices of certain pieces of gear. Any mistake she made, perceived or real, she felt was magnified.

It wasn’t enough to discourage her from the climb, though. By then, Grace had heard it all before and it had thickened her skin.

On the outside, anyway. The hyper-masculine world of mountain climbing and the people who inhabited it had never made space for vulnerability, generally shoving it down or aside, pretending it didn’t exist. Grace conformed accordingly, and grew outer defenses that would come to be called abrasiveness by others. She confided her softer, raw inside only to her journal. She wrote after her fall on the moraine: “My ugliness is just terrible and I sometimes think how much more chivalrous men will be for, or towards, a beautiful woman.” The men called her “the guy without the beard.” Grace’s long face was lined from a life spent in the wind and sun. Her curly brown hair was cut close to her head like a helmet. It’s easy to picture her shearing the locks methodically, no patience for the extra maintenance long hair would demand on multi-day expeditions in the wilderness.

Grace bent to shovel another square step in the endless ice up Karstens Ridge. Then, in the space of a minute, the shining world darkened with mercurial force. Wind hurtled across the ridge, delivering explosive blasts fit to drive the climbers to their knees. The temperature seemed to drop nearly fifty degrees. They fumbled layers from their packs, shouted at each other through the accelerating gale, and turned back toward their camp six hundred feet below. Grace led the retreat. The storm was already obliterating the steps they’d just carved, rendering their work irrelevant. Grace followed the orange wands they’d placed along their route for such a circumstance as this; the blowing snow hid dangerous crevasses and the way back to their camp in a pale and riotous sameness. But if Grace was afraid, she didn’t show it.

In truth, she lived for this.

Through the intensifying onslaught, Grace and her two teammates made it back to camp just before the rest of the expedition members set out to rescue them. They rushed to build walls of snow to protect against the sixty-mile-per-hour winds, transforming their camp into a fortress, and then dove into their shelters to wait it out. By the following afternoon the snow had let up, but the terrible wind persisted. They estimated it howled down from Harper Glacier at upwards of a hundred miles per hour. In a rare moment when the clouds lifted, the team watched the wind pick up twenty-foot slabs of ice a thousand feet above their camp and fling them like flimsy kites.

Wind up here was not surprising. The restless mass of the glacier, constantly on the move, regularly sent atomic blasts down the ridge. But this wind was something different. It had a foreboding ferocity. It was something monstrous.

THE TREMENDOUS STORM KEPT Grace’s team pinned in their camp below the ridge for the next two days. At noon on the third day, during a partial clearing, Grace spotted through binoculars five figures moving slow and stilted down the ridge toward their camp. Three of them appeared to be stumbling. The Mountaineering Club geared up to ascend and meet the distressed party.

They found part of the Wilcox expedition, including its twenty-four-year-old leader, Joe. He and another climber, Anshel Schiff, were in bad shape. But their teammate Jerry Lewis was the worst off, staggering and occasionally collapsing altogether.

The Mountaineering Club members handed over food and liquids to the descending men — who drank and ate every single thing offered — wondering at the spareness of what they knew to once be a large climbing party. Where were the others?

After getting Lewis down to camp, Grace took him into a tent to find severely frostbitten extremities. She slowly warmed his hands with massage and warm water. His feet, though, were too far gone to risk re-warming in the field. She broke the news to him gently. As both a climber and a doctor, she knew what such a prognosis could mean: possible surgical removal of the ravaged parts, limiting his ability to climb mountains.

While Grace worked, Wilcox explained that a portion of his party, including himself, had summited on July 18. There were seven more members of the expedition who stayed up on the mountain determined to summit themselves, while these five moved to lower elevations to wait. They’d waited for six days. Nothing had been heard from the men on top since the storm broke furiously right over them. Attempts to reach them via radio yielded only silence. Radio checks had been inconsistent anyway, and it was possible that the summit group’s radio had been damaged or frozen. But they were likely without food and fuel. The wildly high winds had prevented Wilcox’s group from climbing back up to their comrades, and with their own conditions worsening, they were forced to keep descending.

Along with Grace, Babcock and a few others on the Mountaineering Club team were also part of the Alaskan Recue Group, and it was clear a rescue effort was critically needed. But they were still so far below the summit, at least a few days of climbing away from those men — and that was if they moved fast. If the mountain and its weather allowed them to move fast. The climbers retired to tents in somber moods.

That evening, an ache bloomed in Grace’s head. She’d been tiring some over the last day. Babcock had noted that she was having difficulty keeping up her share of the work — although she still accomplished it — appeared to become moody, and wasn’t eating well. Grace chalked it up to the date: her period was nearing. With it came the wrenchingly disappointing reminder that she’d once again failed to become pregnant. At forty-one and with two grown daughters, she dreamed of raising a child with the love of her life. Her newlywed husband Vin Hoeman was then on a month-long expedition of his own, leading a new traverse route on Mount Logan in the Yukon, Canada’s highest peak and second only to Denali as the tallest in North America. In that moment, Grace missed him even more dearly than she had every other day of the last few weeks.

Grace kept the headache (and the heartache) to herself; she wasn’t about to broadcast either to the rest of the team. As she readied for bed, though — a simultaneously arduous and simple task in the stark environment of a freezing mountain, with no cover, among men —the headache worried her.

By morning, the ache had metastasized into a blinding migraine. She lay miserable in the cramped tent, Babcock on one side and Lewis with his dying feet on the other, amidst a chaos of gear stinking with weeks of hard labor. The pain screamed through her head at such a pitch that it competed with the wind roaring outside. She was terribly thirsty. Her stomach rolled with nausea.

She likely knew this was more than just her cycle announcing itself. She was, after all, an experienced doctor. But given the stakes — and the fact that Grace was a magnificently stubborn and determined woman — she wasn’t about to admit to herself that she might be succumbing to altitude sickness. Not when 7,000 feet of mountain still rose above. Not after everything she’d already been through to get to here, to this moment. She told herself that she just needed to rest for a day. She wouldn’t turn back now.

Babcock roused himself and headed out to check on the storm and the rest of his party in the second tent. Lewis remained prostrate in his own misery, while Grace made desperate attempts at controlling her pain and nausea with medication. An hour later, though, she struggled outside to vomit.

Babcock re-entered the tent. The team was going up today, he told her. He felt it his duty to find those men above, as much as he felt the urgency that exists like a subsurface layer when there are finite supplies and human stamina to reach such a mammoth goal as the summit of Denali. No one would carry Grace’s loads and allow her time to recover as they had done with their sick comrade the week before. And although Grace was the team doctor and a situation had just arisen where a doctor might be critically needed for those seven men above, he wasn’t certain she was in a condition to continue. Babcock issued her an agonizing ultimatum: either come up with the team now, or go down with Wilcox.

The first was an impossibility in her weakened state. The second… well, an equal impossibility for Grace Hoeman.

Outside, the wind raged and raged.

Adapted excerpt from the new book Thirty Below: The Harrowing and Heroic Story of the First All-Women’s Ascent of Denali by Cassidy Randall published by Abrams. Copyright © 2025 Cassidy Randall. Used by permission of Abrams, an imprint of Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York. All rights reserved.