In 1970, the wind-swept slopes of Denali were the site of an unsung historic feat: the first all-women’s attempt to summit one of the big mountains of the world. By then, we had sent men to the moon, but 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 the Denali expedition, led by Alaskan Grace Hoeman with Californian Arlene Blum as deputy leader, all the more audacious. It was a historic first that turned into an improbable tale of survival. Until now, the women’s story has unjustly faded from our collective consciousness. I dove into the saga for my new book, Thirty Below: The Harrowing and Heroic Story of the First All-Women’s Ascent of Denali.
A note on the name of the mountain: From 1917 to 2015, North America’s tallest mountain was officially named Mount McKinley. But over that century, Alaskans, climbers, and many others still called it by the name it had held for millennia: Denali, which is Koyukon Athabaskan for “The Great One.” President Obama restored the peak’s Indigenous name in 2015, and that was its official name at the time I wrote this book. As one of his first acts in office, President Trump ordered that the mountain be renamed Mount McKinley in January 2025. But Alaskans and climbers have already come forward in droves to say they will continue calling it Denali.
In the small hours of a September 1964 night, nineteen-year-old Arlene Blum stepped upward through a dark world of rock, ice, and snow on the flank of Mount Adams in Washington state. Her breath came hard, so hard it surprised her, as she ascended the lower share of a monster elevation gain to reach the top of the mountain before the sun set again on the coming day. She’d never used crampons or an ice axe, or tied into a rope before. She didn’t know what a crevasse was. She owned no technical gear. Although Arlene was a half century removed from the early female climbers who had to wear heavy skirts that weighted them down, technical gear for women was still a long way in the future—as was the concept of welcoming women into the mountains.
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Just five years before, French alpinist Claude Kogan had led a team of twelve 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 only three years before, in 1961, Sir Edmund Hilary forbade Irene Miller, an American climber, from setting foot on Makalu in the Himalaya as part of his expedition; she would go no farther than base camp. One member of the team offered the rationale that “if you want to climb with the expedition, you ought to be willing to sleep with all the men on the team”—as in, “have sex with,” despite the fact that Miller had gone to Makalu base camp with her husband, who was on the expedition.
It wasn’t only mountaineering that was off-limits to women; any profession that might be considered risky was de facto barred. The first female commercial pilot wouldn’t fly for American Airlines until 1973. Sally Ride wouldn’t become the first American woman in space for ten years after that. While women were permitted in the military in the 1960s, they’d be banned from active combat for decades still. In intellectual arenas, women in science, technology, and math were still rare; women wouldn’t be allowed in the library stacks at Harvard until 1967. In the nearly half century that had elapsed since the Nineteen Amendment gave women the right to vote, less than a dozen women had been elected to Congress.
So on this climb, Arlene wore borrowed boots and a pair of dress slacks—the only pants she owned, as she normally wore skirts. Hailing from the horizontal Midwest, she never thought she’d be climbing a 12,000-foot volcano. Let alone make the summit of such a giant.
And neither did the man who invited her to join the climb.
John Hall, her chemistry lab partner at Reed College in Portland, had invited Arlene under the assumption that she wouldn’t make it to the top. She was to be the perfect default partner for the member of John’s climbing group who, without fail around ten thousand feet, came down with altitude sickness—which is when the body doesn’t acclimate well to less oxygen at higher elevations, John explained to Arlene while the unfortunate climber leaned over his ice axe and vomited as morning broke. Arlene wrote in her memoir, Breaking Trail, that John said to her, “I thought that by ten thousand feet you’d have had enough and be ready to go down, too. That way Mike would have company” (Breaking Trail, p.3) The others would continue up to the summit.
Arlene flat-out refused. She felt good. This was the most enthralling landscape she’d ever seen. She’d been introduced to the eerie blue deep of a crevasse where the glacier cracked itself open. She’d learned to travel tied onto a rope in case of plunging through the thin layers of snow that often hid those cold voids. She’d seen the glacier glow in the dawn as if it were a living thing waking to the world. She’d learned to attach the metal frame of crampons with their precise, sharp spikes to her boots, learned to walk with them clicking on the ice, to trust that these small foreign attachments could keep a human body from sliding down a steep slope. Each step took her toward some new wonder. She wasn’t about to leave it all now. Even though it meant that John, on whom she had a crush, would have to go down with the sick climber instead, leaving her with three men she didn’t know, and who’d never been to the top and didn’t know the route as well as John did.
She waved to him as he led his flagging companion away. Then she struggled to keep up with the others as they charged up in a speedy departure from John’s measured pace. Arlene finally threw herself down on the rocky point of the top—only to discover it was a deceptive false summit. She was exhausted, though, and could go no further. As she waited for her companions to summit and then return, she took in the heights: Mount Rainier to the north and Mount Hood to the south rising like a line of lonely watchtowers from the otherwise smooth landscape; the ice-covered ridge on which she sat that was so foreign from the dry valley far below; her newfound proximity to the sun.
She felt little regret at not making the true summit. This did not feel like a consolation. It felt like a great and sudden expansion.
Arlene’s grandfather had fled Russian-occupied Ukraine at the turn of the twentieth century to escape military conscription and oppression of Jews. He landed in small-town Iowa where he met Arlene’s grandmother. The couple raised four daughters, the eldest of whom they named Gertrude. Gertrude became a concert violinist and moved to Chicago, where she met a man named Ludwig Blum, a tall, blue-eyed doctor and a Jewish German refugee with an old-world accent. The pair wed after just two months and gave birth to Arlene. They divorced three years later. Gertrude moved back in with her parents, toddler in tow, and all Arlene knew of her father was that her grandparents considered him a monster. They considered her mother a failure.
When Arlene was five, her grandparents moved all of them to the south side of Chicago in hopes Gertrude would find a husband who would be a good father for Arlene. Her grandparents were overprotective and restrictive. Arlene grew up in close relationship with the word “no.” No, she couldn’t learn to play the piano. No, she couldn’t cook for herself in her grandma’s kosher kitchen. No, she could not go to the private science school her fourth grade teacher suggested to nurture Arlene’s intelligence; those students came from wealthy families with intact marriages, which would only make her unhappy at being so different. Instead, eleven-year-old Arlene would skip sixth grade and be thrust into cutthroat middle school social dynamics complete with makeup, fashion, and crushes, where she would stand on the sidelines at dances, shy in her awkwardness at already being taller than all the boys (she would eventually grow to just a couple inches short of six feet). No, she could not learn to swim, even though the local high school had no athletic teams for girls and the only way to letter in sports was to log a certain number of hours swimming independently. Athletics, after all, weren’t ladylike.
Arlene graduated high school as class valedictorian. The train that took her to Reed College—the university farthest from Chicago that had offered her a full scholarship—carried her far from the monotonous flats of the Midwest, over the Rocky Mountains rising like the backbone of a fresh world.
On Mount Hood, the three men bounded back from the summit and reunited with Arlene for the long descent. It was late, the sun already beginning to set. Walking back down would take too long, the men told her. They would glissade. Another novelty for Arlene. They gave her a quick explanation—sit on the snow, use the ice axe like a rudder behind to steer, and slide down, flopping onto her belly and draping an arm over the axe to arrest her fall if she felt out of control. Then they slid away down the glacier, leaving her alone on the empty ice with the unfamiliar equipment.
After a terrifying false start of slipping wildly downhill, Arlene got the hang of it. The ice was painfully freezing through her pants though, until it finally numbed her behind entirely. It was dark by the time she rejoined her companions in the timber. They discovered their flashlight batteries were all dead. They staggered lost through the interminable woods until John waved a flashlight from near the car, and their mission was completed a full twenty-four hours after it started.
Sitting gingerly in the car on the way back to campus in the dark, Arlene discovered why the other climbers wore trousers with leather seats. Unbeknownst to her, thanks to the numbing power of sliding down ice, the glissade had shredded her pants, and her underwear, and the skin beneath. She landed in the university infirmary with her derriere scraped bloody and a doctor picking pebbles out of her scoured flesh while admonishing her that she wouldn’t be able to sit for weeks. She ended up attending classes sitting on a plastic toilet seat she carried around with her.
She couldn’t wait to climb another mountain.
Five years after that day on Mount Hood, in the spring of 1969, Arlene sat in her room of the shared house in Berkeley she rented as she worked her way through a PhD in chemistry. She looked at the brochure in her hands for a guided trip up Denali, North America’s highest peak.
In the last years, Arlene had been on expeditions to mountains in Mexico and Peru—as the only woman on both. But she’d subsequently been barred from a trip to Nepal on the excuse that there were no other women she could tent with, and then from an expedition to Koh-i-Marchech in Afghanistan because the presence of a woman would “be unpleasant high on the open ice, not only in excretory situations, but in the easy masculine companionship which is so vital a part of the joy of an expedition.”
Frustrated with the denials, Arlene had begun organizing an expedition herself for the coming summer. By now, she was used to organizing climbs, although of a smaller magnitude. Often, if she wanted to climb, she had to dream up the objective, find the partners, and get logistics in order. But she was never the leader; that would go to the more experienced men she climbed with. Now, she hankered for another big climb, another challenge, another progression. Mesmerized by its position as the highest polar mountain and its conditions that mirrored the great Himalaya, Arlene chose Denali. Two of her male friends from graduate school were interested, and Arlene began planning. But then the two men had decided to join this guided trip instead. Perhaps this was her ticket up the mountain as well. She should be able to afford it, she thought. She’d been saving for two years to go on a proper expedition.
But she’d already read through the brochure once, and upon the second time around, those words were still there throwing up a wall in black and white:
“Women will not be admitted on the climb.”
It did say, though, that if women wanted to cook for the climbers at base and advance base camp—but not go any higher—they could join the trip for a discounted rate. Disgusted, Arlene threw the brochure in the trash.
Then she fished it out and found the phone number.
She thought that if she could actually speak to the trip leader, she could convince him to allow her on the full climb. After all, she was experienced and had already climbed to similar—albeit more forgiving—altitudes as the top of Denali. She got through to the trip leader. He turned her down immediately. Women lacked the physical strength and emotional stability to make the climb, he said.
Arlene explained that she had climbed just as high in Peru, carrying a heavy load.
With a team of men, he asked, who were leading?
Yes, mostly, she admitted. They were more experienced, and thus led the hardest sections.
Were the men breaking trail through the snow? Were they doing all the hard work? Had they taken on all the responsibility? No, Arlene could not go. Women could not climb Denali, he said. It was impossible.
It seemed she wasn’t going to Alaska at all this summer. Denali might be out of her reach forever at this rate. Arlene would have hung up on him if she hadn’t been raised to be so polite.
He hung up on her first.
That night, she lay awake in the dark, wracked with doubt. Had she actually done less work than the men on all those climbs? Could she have even done it without them? What if everyone was right?
Arlene had heard of the great French female alpinist Claude Kogan. She did not know then, though, about Miriam Underhill and Alice Damesme, nor about Fanny Bullock Workman, Elizabeth Stark, and Dora Keen, those women who’d come before to pave what path there was for female mountaineers. To be fair, the vast majority of people, even climbers, hadn’t either, such was the obscurity of women’s mountaineering. But even if Arlene had known of them, it might not have been much comfort. Those women had achieved shorter day-long routes, climbed big mountains only with men—or died trying.
In that moment, a vision came to Arlene, clear like a photograph. A group of women atop the summit of Denali. Women who led the entire climb, carried every load, made every decision. In her mind those women stood there on the magnificent heights, strong and exultant.
Proving everyone wrong.
Excerpt from the new book Thirty Below: The Harrowing and Heroic Story of the First All-Women’s Ascent of Denali by Cassidy Randell published by Abrams Press
© 2025 Cassidy Randell
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