Book Review: Breaking Trail - A Climbing Life
Breaking Trail - A Climbing Life
--- Arlene Blum
Picked up this book from a friend's place in Pune, during Mumbai Marathon. On finding me browsing through it intensely, I was offered to take it to Bangalore for a read.
Arlene is a daughter of a conservative jewish single mother, and was brought up under the supervision of her maternal grand parents. All along, she was brought up to be a good house-wife material by her grand mother. Despite that, she builds up interest in climbing, mountaineering at a very early age. She excels in academics and chooses chemistry as her major, only to know that even premier institutes like University of California at Berkeley, Stanford etc., too discriminate against women, both in a Chemistry lab and mountaineering clubs.
Breaking Trail is a little about her journey fighting in the Chemistry lab, and a lot about her fighting to conquer the tallest mountains across the world, against the discrimination against women. She succeeds in both the fronts, by being a professor at premier institutes and doing some world class research to discover carcinogenic chemicals in infant sleep wear, which leads to a world wide ban on those chemicals, and by successfully leading a hand-full of all women expeditions to conquer the world's tallest mountains (located in Europe, Africa, Russia, India, Nepal etc.,).
This book gives a first hand report of what it takes to plan a high altitude mountaineering expedition, both physically and mentally. Right from applying permit to reaching the base camp, it takes a couple of years, at times. Finding a group that can actually team up, fund raising, fitness training, hardware procurement, permits, information gathering about the mountain, meticulous planning about travel, food and gear requirement at all the camps etc., is quite a feat. All this preparation aside, more often than not, team looses a few members in each expedition. Dealing with that and moving on is part of an expedition. In some of their expeditions, they had to return with out evening confirming the deaths of the lost members, and in some expeditions, they just had to climb down leaving the bodies of some team-mates half-buried in some crevasse.
It is hard to understand what goes in their minds, when they plan the next expedition, just after returning from one, loosing half the team. Arlene says, 'High altitude mountains are the places, where I belong'. Probably, that's what make them go there, time and again, the way ordinary mortals go to the safety and comfort of home, at the end of every/any day.
--- Arlene Blum
Picked up this book from a friend's place in Pune, during Mumbai Marathon. On finding me browsing through it intensely, I was offered to take it to Bangalore for a read.
Arlene is a daughter of a conservative jewish single mother, and was brought up under the supervision of her maternal grand parents. All along, she was brought up to be a good house-wife material by her grand mother. Despite that, she builds up interest in climbing, mountaineering at a very early age. She excels in academics and chooses chemistry as her major, only to know that even premier institutes like University of California at Berkeley, Stanford etc., too discriminate against women, both in a Chemistry lab and mountaineering clubs.
Breaking Trail is a little about her journey fighting in the Chemistry lab, and a lot about her fighting to conquer the tallest mountains across the world, against the discrimination against women. She succeeds in both the fronts, by being a professor at premier institutes and doing some world class research to discover carcinogenic chemicals in infant sleep wear, which leads to a world wide ban on those chemicals, and by successfully leading a hand-full of all women expeditions to conquer the world's tallest mountains (located in Europe, Africa, Russia, India, Nepal etc.,).
This book gives a first hand report of what it takes to plan a high altitude mountaineering expedition, both physically and mentally. Right from applying permit to reaching the base camp, it takes a couple of years, at times. Finding a group that can actually team up, fund raising, fitness training, hardware procurement, permits, information gathering about the mountain, meticulous planning about travel, food and gear requirement at all the camps etc., is quite a feat. All this preparation aside, more often than not, team looses a few members in each expedition. Dealing with that and moving on is part of an expedition. In some of their expeditions, they had to return with out evening confirming the deaths of the lost members, and in some expeditions, they just had to climb down leaving the bodies of some team-mates half-buried in some crevasse.
It is hard to understand what goes in their minds, when they plan the next expedition, just after returning from one, loosing half the team. Arlene says, 'High altitude mountains are the places, where I belong'. Probably, that's what make them go there, time and again, the way ordinary mortals go to the safety and comfort of home, at the end of every/any day.