As I detail in another post, Arlene Blum has climbed to great heights as a mountain climber, pioneered the way for women in male-dominated environments (climbing and academia) and brought change and awareness regarding harmful chemicals in our everyday life.

Her book Breaking Trail – A Climbing Life is a deeply personal narrative of her adventures around the globe, her time at colleges and universities studying chemistry (she received a PhD), and of her life as a young girl.

The mountain adventures are gripping and in fact I had to stop reading it before bed time due to the anxiety/adrenaline-producing literal cliff-hangers. I marveled at the level of preparation, planning, logistics and fund raising that went into her expeditions. You don’t really think about it (at least I didn’t), but if you and your team are going to spend weeks on a mountain, you’d better have the right food and gear (tons of it) at the right place/time.

Spoiler alert: while the book is rife with successful climbs and many “firsts”, Arlene and the climbing community lost team members and fellow climbers in tragedies along the way. Mountains, while powerfully alluring, can be unstable and arbitrarily lethal.

Arlene’s parents divorced when she was young and she did not know her father much – she and her mother were in Chicago and he was in New York. Her mother suffered from depression. Her grandparents and aunts, though loving, had a tough old-school notion of how things ought to be and how children should behave.

Overall, Breaking Trail was the best book I’ve read in a long time and I highly recommend it – particularly for those longing for adventure these days while we’re stuck at home in the pandemic. Though my life and background are quite different from Arlene’s – I somehow found the stories relatable, familiar and oddly comforting.