First All-Women’s Ascent of Denali Wins Book Award

The Banff Mountain Book Competition announced the 2025 grand prize winner at this year’s 50th anniversary Banff Centre Mountain Film and Book Festival. The following information is from a press release.

Grace Hoeman dreamed of standing on top of Denali, the tallest peak in North America. A doctor and mountaineer in Alaska, Grace had come close to the top, only to be turned back by altitude sickness and a storm that took the lives of seven fellow climbers in one remorseless blow. Other expeditions denied her a place because of her gender, and when a letter arrived from a fellow climber in California named Arlene Blum, who’d also been barred from expeditions—unless she stayed in base camp and cooked for the men, Grace got a defiant idea: she would organize and lead the first-ever all-female ascent of the frozen Alaskan peak.

Everyone told the “Denali Damsels,” as the team called themselves, that it couldn’t be done: women were incapable of climbing mountains on their own. Men had walked on the moon; women still had not stood on the highest points on Earth. But these six women were unwilling to be limited by doubters and misogynists. They pushed past barriers in society at large, the climbing world, and their own bodies. And then, when disaster struck at the worst time on their expedition, the team’s actions would decide not only their fate, but how the world would judge them—and all women’s ability to climb and survive the fiercest mountains.

In Thirty Below: The Harrowing and Heroic Story of the First All-Women’s Ascent of Denali, author Cassidy Randall draws on extensive archival research and original interviews to tell an absorbing, edge-of-the-seat adventure story about this forgotten group of climbers who had the audacity to believe that women could walk alone in such extraordinary heights.

Juror Kate Neville said: “Thirty Below is a gripping book about a groundbreaking climb. In a feat of detailed journalism and propulsive storytelling, Cassidy Randall revitalizes a neglected story of boundary-breaking alpinism, tracing the first all-women’s ascent of Denali. With rich and unflinching portraits of these mountaineers, Randall shares the boldness and fallibility of humans in an extreme environment.

“At the same time, she shines light on the specific challenges facing this team of ambitious women in climbing, and in their professional, technical, and scientific fields. Randall illuminates the skill and grit needed for them not only to reach the summit, but to be in the mountains at all. Thirty Below is a masterful tribute to mountains as places to challenge individual and social limits, in ways both historic and intimate.”