Arlene Blum Reflects

Appalachia, Summer/Fall 2006

The leader of the first all-female climb of Annapurna I has written a memoir connecting a difficult childhood to her motivations in the mountains

Arlene Blum was the first American woman to attempt to climb Mt. Everest, in 1976. She led the first all-female American team to the summit of Annapurna I two years later. She reached the summit of Mt. McKinley with a group of women in 1970. In the early part of that decade, she spent a year and a half on an “Endless Winter” odyssey, climbing high mountains in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, seeking perfect climbing conditions the way the surfers in the movie “Endless Summer” traveled the globe seeking the perfect wave. In 1981 and 1982, she completed a nine-month-long traverse of the Himalayas, from Bhutan to the western border of India. Since then, she has led educational treks to the Himalayas, raised a daughter alone, and, now, written a thoughtful memoir about her life as a climber and chemistry researcher.

Breaking Trail: A Climbing Life (Scribner, 2005) tries to answer the central question of her life: Why did Arlene Blum, the overprotected Midwestern daughter of a divorced mother and absent father, grew up to be a mountaineer who took tremendous risks on peaks like McKinley, Everest, and Annapurna? There are many answers, and most of them connect to her difficult childhood. The signature memory is her earliest, when she was only four, playing under her grandparents’ porch in Davenport, Iowa, when she overheard an aunt say that Arlene would never amount to much. She set out to make sure that that would not happen, aiming to show them they were wrong, and to win them over.

Her childhood, overshadowed by her family’s entreaty to find a good Jewish husband, ended when she left home to study chemistry, first at Reed College, then later in graduate programs at MIT and the University of California at Berkeley. In academia, she encountered many men, both in the lab and on mountain ridges, who seemed dubious of her capabilities. Extraordinary ambition came out of Arlene Blum as she crusaded to follow her natural instincts.

“In writing Breaking Trail, I was really trying to understand how I, a relatively non-risk-taking [woman]—I consider myself a cautious, thoughtful person—ended up leading so many expeditions where people could, and in some cases tragically did, die,” Blum said in an interview in January at the Westin Hotel in Waltham, Massachusetts, where she had come to address the Appalachian Mountain Club at its annual meeting. “And so I wondered, ‘What is it about me that led me to that?’ This was my twenty-year book. It was such a long process with my family.”

The many-layered story of how she ended up on 8,000-meter peaks falls into three major themes. The first is her unhappy childhood in Iowa and Chicago, which she tells in a series of engaging flashbacks at the start of each chapter. Second is her natural tendency to keep the peace in her family and, later, in the family-like groups with which she climbed mountains. Third is her natural curiosity for the outdoors, particularly for snow and ice. She loves the high country.

“I’m a very curious person, and I have a lot of optimism,” she said.

It may seem amazing that so many childhood memories could explain the decisions she made as an adult. But each vignette appears to lead directly to something in Blum’s adult self. For example, her mother, a talented violinist, married her father somewhat rashly; it was a disastrous union, and by the time Blum was only three, her mother was suffering from depression and returned to the grandparents’ house to live. Blum’s parents divorced soon after. Her mother’s parents took over raising Blum while her mother moved to Chicago on orders to find a husband. Eventually, grandparents, mother, and Blum ended up together in a claustrophobic, smoke-filled house in Chicago, the scene of many bickering days. Blum didn’t even meet her father until she was a teenager, and when she did, he was distant and critical.

She found in her early life that she had a natural propensity to keep the peace and a strong desire to get outside. She writes about running from room to room, trying to keep all of the dour adults happy. As a mountaineer, she developed into a natural leader who wanted everyone in her climbing groups to get along.

Christine Woodside of Deep River, Connecticut, is a freelance writer and the editor-in-chief of Appalachia.