New Book Recounts the First All-Woman Ascent of Denali

Author, Cassidy Randall, is on tour to promote her new book Thirty Below.  Randall spoke about the book at the Talkeetna Alaskan Lodge to both visitors and the local mountaineering community.  Thirty Below is the gripping account of the first ascent of Denali, or of any major peak, by an all-woman team.  But the story is much more than that.  KTNA’s Colleen Love has this story.

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Adventure writer Cassidy Randall first learned about the 1970 all-women ascent of Denali after reading a National Park Service blog post.  

The post was written by NPS Climbing Ranger, Frank Preston. On the 50th Anniversary of the ascent, Preston wrote a lengthy tribute to the team who called themselves the Denali Damsels.  Preston claimed that the women on that climb inspired a generation of female climbers, many of whom now patrol on Denali.

But Randall couldn’t find any other written history on climb. And while she understood that the general consensus in 1970 was that women didn’t belong in the mountaineering community, she tried to decipher why this accomplishment didn’t make the headlines.

“Nobody covered that 1970 Denali Attempt.  There was no national press on it.  And so it’s all about what stories resonate with the mainstream narrative and how we prop up those narratives and who elevates those voices. And I’ve always been drawn to that. I think that’s really fascinating.”

Lead climber, Grace Hoeman, was a medical doctor.  She was also an Alaskan who climbed mountains with her husband. Hoeman’s husband was killed on an expedition that had barred her from participating because she was a woman. Despite the loss of her climbing and life partner, Hoeman continued to climb. Her dream was to summit Denali and so she gathered a highly competent team. They happened to all be women. 

While researching the historic expedition, Randall tracked down the journals of the team and reached out to the two remaining team members.

“So I reached out to Margaret and Arlene, the only two women who were still surviving and both of them were very willing to talk.  At the same time, it was interesting.  They both said in various ways, “I don’t thing we really did anything all that important.”

Five out of the six members of the team reached the summit, but climb was not uneventful. According to Preston’s blog post, the team performed a self-rescue that went beyond what he, as a Ranger, feels most people are capable of doing.  

In her book, Randall describes the high-risk rescue as harrowing and heroic.  

Thirty Below, by Cassidy Randall, is the winner of the 2025 Banff Mountain Book Festival Grand Prize.  The book can be found at most major bookstores. 

In Talkeetna, I’m Colleen Love