From the Black Forest to Tibet: One Woman's Mountains

Publication Year: 1994.

From the Black Forest to Tibet: One Woman’s Mountains. Trudy Healy. New York: Vantage Press, 1993. Illustrated by the author. 288 pages. $18.95.

Trudy Healy has written a charming book:

This climbing memoir has something of interest to every mountain lover because the author has been everywhere, climbed everything—well, close enough.

She takes us from childhood beginnings in Germany’s Black Forest across the ocean to her new home in the Adirondacks where she raised her six children on mountains, to a later home in Utah and the nearby Wasatch Range. In between, Trudy climbed in the Alps, the American West, and the Canadian Rockies, in Mexico and Ecuador. She’s explored the Southwest’s desert canyons. She’s climbed in the Cordillera Blanca. She climbed Kilimanjaro, she’s trekked in Nepal, Sikkim, Tibet, and the Sinai Peninsula.

Trudy’s love of mountains shows on every page. It is impossible not to be infused with her enthusiasm. We are carried along by her stories, chuckling at her adventures … and mis-adventures—like the time she broke her leg on Dix Mountain, five miles from the road. We feel her exhilaration on standing on the summit of Kilimanjaro on an exceptionally snow-filled Christmas day. We’re with her on those first ascents on Adirondack rock, a region for which she wrote the first guidebook.

This is a light-hearted book: a delightful reminiscence which has the power to have us recalling our own fine mountain days. The author’s engaging pen-and-ink illustrations capture the spirit of mountains as naturally as her prose.

Laura Waterman