Thirty Below
Every avenue of life traditionally considered men’s domain has witnessed brave female pioneers. Select few women have been drawn to “man’s work”—be it in the operating room, the board room, or on treacherous mountain ascents—well before culture shifted to include women in those spaces. Cassidy Randall’s debut book, Thirty Below: The Harrowing and Heroic Story of the First All-women’s Ascent of Denali (2025) zooms in on a group of pioneering women mountaineers who summited the continent’s highest peak in 1970. The story takes shape as Randall introduces readers to the individual women who in time coalesce into an all-women’s climbing group. Thirty Below mixes history with carefully-researched portraits of each of the female members of the team. Ultimately, Randall creates a well-rounded biography of the individuals comprising the first all-women’s ascent of Denali alongside that of women mountaineers generally, in her brand new nonfiction, Thirty Below.
First readers meet Grace Hoeman, a doctor and an Alaskan mountaineer whose path eventually led her to find her beloved (third husband) in the wilds of 1960s Alaska. She, like all the members of the women’s Denali ascent, faced bitter sexism in pursuit of her passion for mountaineering. In time her path crosses that of Arlene Blum, a chemist graduate student at Berkley and driven female mountaineer. Then readers meet Kiwi, Margaret Clark, who fell in love with climbing as a child on New Zealand’s South Island in the 1940s. In time, the story ropes in a few other trailblazing women climbers (Faye Kerr, Margaret Young, and Dana Isherwood), and the “Denali Damsels” emerge undaunted in the face of both “the tall one” (the meaning of Denali in Athabaskan) and the institutional sexism of the sport.
Indeed, Thirty Below paints a portrait of incredibly tough ladies both in terms of physical and mental strength, but also in terms of their emotional fortitude. Despite each of them experiencing infuriating prejudice by male climbing partners and clubs over the years, each of these women pursued the sport. This feminist adventure narrative interweaves the history of women in mountaineering with the lived experiences of each of the women who eventually coalesced as an all-women’s climbing crew to bag one of the world’s tallest and most difficult peaks; and this at a time when no such thing had previously been conceived of, let alone achieved. Thirty Below is exciting and suspenseful as well as instructional as it encapsulates the trailblazing grit of twentieth-century women who banded together and did what many thought impossible: they summited all 20,000 plus feet of Alaska’s Denali (or Mount McKinley as it was officially known at the time). This is not a book that readers will struggle to finish; it is a nonfiction read that demands its reader’s attention early and doesn’t relent until the final pages.
Like Grace Hoeman, I have lived in the long shadow of Denali (visible on the rare clear day). Unlike Grace, I was a child and it has only been on return visits as an adult that I fully appreciate the enormity of the mountain. Denali rises over 18,000 feet from its 2,000 feet above sea level base. Yes, that makes its vertical rise larger than that of Everest. On days when the cloud-heavy sky clears, Denali is visible for hundreds of miles in all directions. It is no wonder so many people (men and yes, women too) are drawn to its grandeur. Twenty years ago, my now-husband was among those to summit. He also read Randall’s book and loved it in part because it brought the story epic (and at times grueling) experience back to him, reflecting things like, “I had forgotten about that stretch of 800’ that took hours to scale.” My point is that Randall’s new book (hitting shelves March 4, 2025) is one for any sort of adventurer, lover of trailblazing expeditions, or ardent feminist who revels in the stories of bold women who broke, what Randall terms, the “stone ceiling.” Her writing is smooth and smart, while the story she weaves is compulsively readable.
Photograph of Thirty Below ARC (thank you to Abram’s Press) and a watercolor painting of the shores of the swollen Talkeetna River on a rare clear day with Denali in the background. Painted May 2023.
Bibliography:
Randall, Cassidy. Thirty Below: The Harrowing and Heroic Story of the First All-Women’s Ascent of Denali. Abrams Press: New York, 2025.
