In 1990, when only fifty of the thousand annual attempts to climb Denali were made by women, Norma Jean Bowers summited without assistance. As a solo climber, she could not rope to others for safety along the deeply crevassed Kahiltna Glacier. She could not accept help with keeping her tent from collapsing, shredding, or blowing away during multi-day storms. She could not clip into fixed ropes that others used on the steepest sections of the West Buttress route. Worst of all, she had no one to help ease her fears as she edged past a dead climber just below the summit.
Norma Jean's successful solo capped more than a decade of summit attempts that began when she was a teenager. Over the years, she weathered physical setbacks, fierce storms, unprepared teammates, and the horrors of losing friends to the mountain. It was sheer grit that brought her back time and again for another attempt.
Her triumph was celebrated in the mountaineering community and memorialized in the pages of Alaska Magazine, the Anchorage Daily News, and The Anchorage Times. There it stopped. Her singular tale never reached the national media or unfolded in the pages of a book. Until now.
