Valley of Giants: Stories from Women at the Heart of Yosemite Climbing ed. by Lauren Delaunay Miller (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Valley of Giants: Stories from Women at the Heart of Yosemite Climbing ed. by Lauren Delaunay Miller
• Peter L. Bayers

Lauren Delaunay Miller, ed., Valley of Giants: Stories from Women at the Heart of Yosemite Climbing. Seattle: Mountaineers Books, 2022. 240 pp. Paper, $21.95.

Yosemite Valley is a mythical Western landscape in US climbing lore, and nothing better captures this mythos than the award-winning film Valley Uprising (2014). Drawing from frontier mythology and western tropes of the outlaw male hero, the film recounts the ground-breaking climbing achievements of hypermasculine individual climbers and the hedonistic counterculture of the Yosemite climbing scene from the 1950s to the first decade of the twenty-first century. Judging from the film, the story of Yosemite climbing has been—with but one exception in Lynn Hill—the prerogative of white males who competed with one another to demonstrate their prowess on the cliff formations of the Valley. If women had a role in Yosemite, it was primarily as an object of desire for the fraternity of "manly" men.

Lauren Delaunay Miller's Valley of Giants, a compelling anthology of thirty-eight original and previously published interviews, letters, memoirs, and essays from (almost exclusively) white women climbers is a welcome feminist counter-history to the mythic story of Yosemite climbing. Though today women climbers in Yosemite abound, Miller writes that the stories in this anthology "demonstrate that women have always been at the center of Yosemite climbing" (16), as far back as the 1930s. Though for decades their numbers were relatively small compared to the male population, Valley of Giants underscores that, like many of their male counterparts, women climbers lived for months at a time as countercultural "dirtbags" scraping by with their male peers in "Camp 4," and they were as—if not more—capable as many of their male peers in their climbing ability.

Though many male climbers considered women equal in ability, [End Page 377] the sad—and, given the historical context, unsurprising—reality was that women were patronized and disparaged by other men, for example, when in the early 1970s one male climber made the contemptible comment to Ellie Hawkins that "women were talented in cooking and sewing but didn't have the spatial intelligence" to ascend the massive cliffs (101). But these women suffer no male fools, illustrated by 1960s climber Jan Sacherer, who relates an incident about how her first husband belittled her on a climb. Infuriated, she responded by unroping and downclimbing a section of the cliff, "leaving him alone and aghast," after which she never "climbed with him or any man in Yosemite" (54). And capturing the egregious bias of received Yosemite climbing history, Lynn Hill, one of the most respected and accomplished Yosemite climbers in the world, points out that though Beverly Johnson put up a first ascent on El Capitan with Charlie Porter in 1974, she "was not given credit or even acknowledgement during those times, [which] was disgraceful to me" (115).

At the same time, Valley of Giants offers an alternative ethos to what Libby Sauter acknowledges has been "a culture of competition and bravado [that] has always pervaded the Valley climbing scene" (183). For instance, Steph Davis explains that she draws from Eastern philosophies in an effort to transcend a competitive climbing ethos, and Sauter, while acknowledging that though climbing might seem to be a strictly "individual pursuit," at root it is a communal activity (185). And world-class climber Beth Rodden relates a story about her successful project to be the first person to climb a route she named "Meltdown." She states, "'Meltdown' was the pinnacle of my accomplishments in climbing" after "fifteen years of wanting to push myself and the sport of climbing" (173). But with time this accomplishment began to ring hollow as Rodden "felt pressure to do more and bigger and better" (173). Unhappy, she walked away from climbing stardom to share a quiet, unassuming domestic life. She observes, "I love going on hikes and climbs with my husband and son that I would have scoffed at in my younger days" (173). And in regard to a beginner climbing route she states, "If I could do...