Off trail : finding my way home in the Colorado Rockies
(Book)

"Only one person believed Jane Parnell when she reported being raped at twenty-one: the mountain man who, after leading her up one peak after another in the Colorado Rockies, became her husband. Parnell took to mountaineering in the Rocky Mountains as a means to overcome her family's history of mental illness and the trauma of rape. By age thrity she became the first woman to climb the 100 highest peaks of the state. But regaining her footing could not save her by-now-failing marriage. Unprepared emotionally and financially for singlehood, she kept climbing - the 200 highest peaks, then nearly all of the 300 highest. The mountains were the one anchor in her life that held. Parnell's memoir spans half a century, and her personal journey dramatizes evolving gender roles from the 1950s to the present. In the tradition of Cheryl Stayed's Wild and Tracy Ross's The Source of All Things, Parnell's mountaineering memoir shows us how, by pushing ourselves to the limits of our physical endurance and by confronting our deepest fears, we can become whole again." -- from back of book.