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Listen as Kristen Laine describes her day of climbing in the Whites at outdoors.org/climbingslideshow.

"Tell me a story, Mama, a true one," my daughter insists, and has insisted, practically since she could talk. She wants tales of adventure and misadventure, mishaps and derring-do. Each time she asks, the first stories I think of come from the years I spent climbing. And every time, I don't tell them.

I climbed seriously for about a dozen years, starting in my mid-20s. During some of that time, I climbed more than 200 days in a year, driving through the night to climb at this crag or that, and, when the high peaks were in season, hiking in by headlamp to start alpine ascents at first light. There were longer trips, too, lasting months, during which I lived out of my backpack, hitchhiked alone, and scrounged in trash cans for bottles and cans to turn in for their deposits.

The stories that come to me involve daring action and questionable judgment and disaster narrowly averted, just the kind Ursula likes. But some—well, let's just say that I've heard climbing described as a "bad uncle" sport, and I don't want to be my daughter's bad uncle.

It also seems to me that the calibrations of risk and danger in my stories make them unsuitable for children. Friends of mine have died climbing. Sharing only the adventure and the fun without also acknowledging climbing's darker side would mislead Ursula, I fear. My own sense of risk has recalibrated since becoming a mother. I haven't climbed since she was born. I'm not sure I want to encourage my daughter to do it.

And so there's an important part of my life I haven't shared with her.

The summer Ursula turned 10, we traveled to Yosemite National Park, where I'd come of age as a climber. We spent most of our time in Tuolumne, Yosemite's high country. I saw something familiar in Ursula there. Everywhere we went, she was drawn to the rocks, especially to Tuolumne's smooth granite domes. We ended one day at Pothole Dome. Our guidebook described a "short, safe climb" of 200 feet to its rounded top. Ursula scrambled up the granite slab ahead of us, trailed by her younger brother, Virgil. She picked a steep line—steeper, in fact, than I was happy about following. Off to the side, other sightseers walked up a gentle ramp. I called up the face, "Stop! Wait!" Virgil stopped immediately. But Ursula was already out of hearing and beyond my ability to help if she got into trouble. She moved nimbly up the face and out of sight. I followed behind on shaky legs, breathing shallowly, and helped Virgil to the top.

Ursula's climbing had been impressive. But it had also been unsafe. "You always stay with your party," I chided her. What had felt comfortable to her, I explained, had put Virgil in danger. "I didn't know, Mommy," she cried, in tears. I knew she didn't know, because I'd never taught her—and I still wasn't ready to. The next summer, we returned to Yosemite with Ursula's best friend, Kirsten. Ursula begged me to show them climbing moves. At first I had trouble just finding the words: Was a dihedral the same as an open book? What was a layback, again? As we tried moves on boulders and aprons and buttresses, my climber's vocabulary came flowing back. Ursula didn't run ahead this time. She spotted for Kirsten, even noticed my hesitation. She pulled me over to the rock, laughing. "Mommy, you can do this!" she said. Showing the girls a vertical crack, I slid my fingers into coolness and cupped my hand, then helped them find slots for their own hands. I sensed something growing in Ursula, and shifting in me.

Which is how the two of us find ourselves early on a Saturday morning in September in North Conway, N.H. I've arranged for a full day of instruction with Brad White, the director of the International Mountain Climbing School (IMCS), which has for four decades been teaching young people to climb.

Ursula, now 12 and on the cusp of adolescence, greets White shyly. She's told me she has a stomachache. She's subdued as White fits us with gear, then drives us a few miles west of the village.

Our instruction begins on a granite slab on Cathedral Ledge known as "the classroom." No more than 10 feet high and 50 feet long, it's hardly impressive as a piece of rock, but White wants his students to focus on details, not scale. If we want scale, or what we might aspire to, we have only to turn and look across the Mount Washington Valley to Whitehorse Ledge, where woolly clouds line up across the deep blue sky. The cool morning air carries a familiar scent of pine and duff.

The morning is devoted to fundamentals: how to put on our harnesses and tie into a rope; how to rappel; and, especially, how to place our hands and feet and move on rock. White, father to two children, takes his time with Ursula. He asks her to walk up the lowest-angle part of the slab and stops her gently when she tries to rush. Move slowly, he tells her. Use your weight. Feel the rock. Find a good place and then trust it as you move onto it.

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