Memoir explores life of a female climber

End of the Rope: Mountains, Marriage and Motherhood Jan Redford | Random House Canada

There’s a long and celebrated tradition of memoirs by male mountaineers who roam the globe, heroically scaling its most daunting peaks. Books by women alpinists, however, are harder to come by.

What is the tight-knit, maledominated climbing community like for women? How do female climbers’ experience differ from that of their male counterparts? And why don’t we hear the voices of these women more often?

Squamish outdoorswoman Jan Redford’s fascinating new book, End of the Rope: Mountains, Marriage, and Motherhood seeks to answer these questions, taking a deep-dive into the rarefied world of mountaineering — from a women’s perspective.

In the pages of this high-adrenalin (if a little lengthy) book, the first-time author weaves together jaw-dropping hijinks hanging off the sides of cliffs with her own coming-of-age story, from a young teenager with a troubled home life, to a twenty-something adventurer trying to find her place in the world, and, finally, a middle-aged writer and mother of two. What remains constant is the mountains, and the clarity she finds there, testing herself on its rock faces. That, and the sense of belonging she experiences in the climbing community.

As she falls in and out of love, grapples with the tragedy of losing friends and lovers to accidents and avalanches, and struggles to find a creative voice and acquire an education — achieving independence from the men in her life, both on the mountain and off — Redford must apply all the courage, and survival instincts, she experiences climbing to her own life.

Redford, a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University who’s published in Explore and Mountain Life, cuts a colourful figure. Tough, frank, ambitious, and prone to cursing, it’s not hard to see how she’s held her own with macho male climbers.

But it’s not all boldness and bravado. Redford is equally fearless in probing the painful parts of life: the vulnerability of love, the confusion of youth, the agony of loss. And she does with much poignancy.

End of the Rope proves a promising debut and an invaluable addition to the canon of chronicles by women climbers.