2002, 1st edition. 270 pp, color photos. Lynn's new book, the story of the America & the world's best female rock climber. New Hardcover with Dust Jacket.
Lynn Hill describes her famous free climb of El Capitan's Nose in Yosemite, meditates on how she harnesses the strength & courage to push herself to such extremes, tells of her near-fatal 80-ft fall, her youth as a Hollywood stunt artist, her friendships with climbing's most colorful personalities, & the tragedies & triumphs of her life in the vertical world.
Lynn Hill began climbing when she was 14, in 1970, scampering up a rock face while her companions turned away in exhaustion; by 1994, she had done something no other climber had ever done: made a free ascent of El Capitan's hideously challenging Nose. That's 3,000 feet of granite, straight up. This autobiography, written with veteran climber and author Child, is a must-read for fans of sport climbing (which is very different, Hill explains, from mountaineering).
Naturally, she hits all the high spots in a career filled with them: El Capitan and Joshua Tree in Yosemite National Park, Granite Mountain in Arizona, Nevada's Heart of Darkness, the Gunks in New York, and the ominously named Suicide Rocks in California. Hill has climbed them all, and plenty more. In the world of sport climbing, she's a superstar, and yet, unlike many autobiographies written by superstars, this book contains not a trace of ego or pretension. She is an ordinary person with an extraordinary gift; her story, which could have been aggressively self-promoting, is instead quietly inspiring.
