Long before Sharon Wood became the first North American woman to reach the top of Everest in 1986--also becoming the first woman to ever climb Everest by the difficult West Ridge, via a new route from Tibet, without Sherpa support--Sharon Wood has been in the vanguard of North American mountaineering.

Despite having a broken shoulder bone, she persevered through a multi-day alpine style climb of the Ancash Face of Huascaran Sur (6768 m/22,205 ft) in Peru. In Argentina she climbed the notorious 2700-metre French route on the South Face of Aconcagua (6,962m/22,841 ft) alpine style and she reached 8000 metres during an ascent with fellow Canadians Dwayne Congdon and Albi Sole on the difficult West Ridge of Makalu (8,463 m/27,766 ft) in Nepal.

As the first woman to become an ACMG certified Alpine guide in Canada, Wood has since become the owner of her own speaking and mountain guiding business, Adventure Dynamics, and she has co-authored an ebook with her long-time partner and photographer Pat Morrow, Everest: High Expectations (Bungalo Books, 2012), in which she describes how she and the rest of her Canadian team successfully made the ascent of the West Ridge of Everest.

Also published by Mountaineers Books in the United States (US rights sale arranged by Bill Hanna of Acacia House), her memoir, Rising (D&M, 2019), is a mountaineering story as well as a meditation on sustaining passion and purpose. Often the only woman on excursions, on the outskirts of a male pack, Wood has remained aware that her accomplishments are also on behalf of female climbers everywhere.

"Axe, axe, foot, foot, repeat," she says. "What a way to live."

She has been published in several anthologies, including Everest: Eighty Years of Triumph and Tragedy (Mountaineers Press, 2001), and now lives in Canmore, Alberta.

BOOKS:

Everest: High Expectations (Bungalo Books, 2012) by Pat Morrow & Sharon Wood

Rising (D&M, 2019) $29.95 978-1-77162-225-7

[BCBW 2019]