Off Trail : Finding My Way Home in the Colorado Rockies

In the face of trauma and a family history of mental illness, Jane Parnell turned to the Colorado Rockies for healing. At twenty-one, after reporting a rape that only one person believed—the mountain man who would become her husband—she discovered that the simple act of climbing one peak after another gave her a way forward. By age thirty, she became the first woman to climb the 100 highest peaks in Colorado.

But the mountains that saved her couldn't save her marriage. Unprepared emotionally and financially for singlehood, Parnell kept climbing—the 200 highest peaks, then nearly all of the 300 highest. The mountains were the one anchor in her life that held. Finding few contemporary role models to validate her ambition, she looked to the past for inspiration, particularly to English travel writer Isabella Bird, who also sought refuge and transformation in the Colorado Rockies by climbing Longs Peak in 1873. Reading Bird's now-classic A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains emboldened Parnell to keep moving forward—she was not alone in her drive for independence.

Spanning half a century from the 1950s to the present, Parnell's memoir dramatizes evolving gender roles through her remarkable personal journey. From witnessing the first ascent of the Diamond on Longs Peak as a child—the "Holy Grail" of alpine climbing in the Rockies—to confronting the catastrophic Colorado wildfires of 2002 and nearly losing her leg in a climbing accident five years later, her story shows us how pushing ourselves to the limits of our physical endurance and confronting our deepest fears can make us whole again. In the tradition of Cheryl Strayed's Wild and Tracy Ross's The Source of All Things, this is a mountaineering memoir about finding your footing when everything else falls away.