Memoirs about Motherhood and the Outdoors
Books have played an important role in my life as both a mother and writer. I leaned on them during my own transition to parenthood as I sought out inspiration for how I could keep my outdoor passions alive. I read numerous memoirs in the process of writing my own. Over the years, I’ve become intrigued by the many ways one’s outdoor experience or passion for the outdoors intersect with motherhood and/or the relationship between parent and child, including our relationships with our mothers/mother figures as adults.
The memoir genre is rich with wonderful books about motherhood and the outdoors. Below you’ll find some of my personal favourites and new recommendations, including my memoir about motherhood. It’s by no means a comprehensive list but instead represents the myriad ways these two topics intersect. Some stories are hopeful, others are filled with challenges and adversity. They all keep the outdoors front and centre in the story — like a character within itself. Whether it’s through climbing, hiking, or a simpler life on the trail or in the mountains, these journeys share a common thread of motherhood as it converges with Mother Earth.
Book descriptions from Goodreads (follow me there!).
End of the Rope: Mountains, Marriage, and Motherhood
by Jan Redford
After the love of her life is killed in an avalanche, a grieving Jan finds comfort in the arms of his climbing buddy, an extreme alpinist. But their marriage soon falters. While her husband logs forests and dreams of distant peaks, Jan has children, and takes on a wife’s traditional role. Over the following years, however, she pursues her own dream, one that pits her against her husband—attending university, and ultimately, gaining independence.
End of the Rope is Jan's telling of heart-stopping adventures, from a harrowing rescue off El Capitan to leading a group of bumbling cadets across a glacier. It is her laughter-filled memoir of learning to climb, and of friendships with women in that masculine world. Most moving, this is her story of claiming freedom from a crushing marriage, an act of bravery equal to climbing mountains.
Everything Left to Remember: My Mother, Our Memories, and a Journey Through the Rocky Mountains
by Steph Jagger
In this heart wrenching and inspirational memoir a woman and her mother, who is suffering from dementia, embark on a road trip through national parks, revisiting the memories, and the mountains, that made them who they are.
Steph Jagger lost her mother before she lost her. Her mother, stricken with an incurable disease that slowly erases all sense of self, struggles to remember her favorite drink, her favorite song, and―perhaps most heartbreaking of all―Steph herself. Steph watches as the woman who loved and raised her slips away before getting the chance to tell her story, and so Steph makes a promise: her mother will walk it and she will write it.
Too aware of her mother’s waning memory, Steph proposes that the two take a camping trip out to Montana―which her mother, on the urging of Steph’s father, agrees to embark upon. An adventure full of horseback riding, hiking, and “tenting” out West quickly turns into one woman’s reflection on childhood, motherhood, personhood―and what it means to love someone who doesn’t quite remember the person she spent her lifetime becoming.
A staggeringly beautiful examination of how stories are passed down through generations and from Mother Nature, Everything Left to Remember brings us the wisdom of who our memories make us under the constellations of the vast Montana sky.
More: Life on the Edge of Adventure and Motherhood
by Majka Burhardt
As one of the world’s leading female professional rock and ice climbers, Burhardt and her husband led globe-trotting, adventure-seeking lives. When she learns that she’s pregnant— with twins —Burhardt at first tries to justify her insistence on pursuing extreme risk in the face of responsibility. But she is ultimately forced to grieve the avalanche of emotions that accompanies any major life transitions along with the physical changes in her own body.
Based on the letters and journals Burhardt diligently kept over the course of those six years, More takes the reader on an around-the-world journey as Burhardt explores the transformative, identity-shifting experience of motherhood and its irreversible impact on career, identity, marriage, and self.
In the early weeks of her children's lives, Burhardt immerses herself in adoration for her twins and grappling with the tremendous guilt and struggle around having to return to risk-laden work and that ever elusive balance mothers everywhere seek amidst it all.
As the newness of her twins fades into a permanent reality, Burhardt turns her attention towards her marriage and the collateral damage as she and her husband, Peter, struggle to navigate their new normal. As anger and resentment threaten the foundation of her family, Burhardt courageously looks to her past—and her own mother's tumultuous and confusing history of success, violence, and ragged divorce—to better understand her own way forward. How will she break free from the legacy of her own childhood to start fresh with her own family?
Raw, candid, and galvanizing, More is a passionate and poignant testament to the enduring power of love and our lifelong journey to understand ourselves as we strive to always pursue more.
Lights to Guide Me Home: A Journey Off the Beaten Track in Life, Love, Adventure, and Parenting
by Meghan J. Ward
Meghan J. Ward was 21 years old when she journeyed across the country for a summer job in the Canadian Rockies. As an inexperienced hiker from the suburbs of the nation’s capital, she knew she was in for an adventure. But what she didn’t know was that her move to the mountains would result in a 90-degree turn towards a life she never expected.
In the Rockies, Meghan fell in love with the wilderness, the high elevations, and a man whose way of life expanded her horizons. As that summer drew to a close, she took her first of many courageous steps off the beaten path to create the life of her choosing—one that brought her a sense of purpose and meaning, and a new set of challenges.
In Lights to Guide Me Home Meghan takes us on a trip around the world while chronicling her transitions through some of life’s major milestones. From Costa Rica to Nepal, Rapa Nui to Malta, Meghan explores what it means to carve out her own identity amidst family expectations, her responsibilities as a parent to young children, and her marriage to an ambitious travel and landscape photographer. Whom will she discover beneath these entanglements?
This One Wild Life: A Mother-Daughter Wilderness Memoir
by Angie Abdou
Disillusioned with overly competitive organized sports and concerned about her lively daughter's growing shyness, author Angie Abdou sets herself a challenge: to hike a peak a week over the summer holidays with Katie. They will bond in nature and discover the glories of outdoor activity. What could go wrong? Well, among other things, it turns out that Angie loves hiking but Katie doesn't.
Hilarious, poignant, and deeply felt, This One Wild Life explores parenting and marriage in a summer of unexpected outcomes and growth for both mother and daughter.
Up: A Mother and Daughter's Peakbagging Adventure
by Patricia Ellis Herr
When Trish Herr became pregnant with her first daughter, Alex, she and her husband, Hugh, vowed to instill a bond with nature in their children. By the time Alex was five, her over-the-top energy levels led Trish to believe that her very young daughter might be capable of hiking adult-sized mountains.
In Up, Trish recounts their always exhilarating--and sometimes harrowing--adventures climbing all forty-eight of New Hampshire's highest mountains. Readers will delight in the expansive views and fresh air that only peakbaggers are afforded, and will laugh out loud as Trish urges herself to "mother up" when she and Alex meet an ornery--and alarmingly bold--spruce grouse on the trail. This is, at heart, a resonant, emotionally honest account of a mother's determination to foster independence and fearlessness in her daughter, to teach her "that small doesn't necessarily mean weak; that girls can be strong; and that big, bold things are possible."
Small Feet, Big Land: Adventure, Home, and Family on the Edge of Alaska
by Erin McKittrick
Small Feet, Big Land follows the expeditions and daily life of a family of four: Erin McKittrick and her husband, Hig, lifelong adventure trekkers, set out to explore the vast and remote wild corners of Alaska with their two young children in tow.
After trekking thousands of miles through harsh and beautiful wilderness together, Erin and Hig must adjust to the short attention span — and short legs — of a toddler and the weight of a newborn baby, as they walk Alaska’s rapidly changing coastline. While visiting remote Arctic villages, touring a zinc mine, and exploring for two months on one of Alaska’s largest glaciers, Erin sees the dramatic effects of climate change on the landscape around her, and considers the very different world in which her children may live one day.
Whether huddling in the pelting rain, facing a curious grizzly bear, eating whale blubber with new friends, or picking berries on the sunny tundra their unconventional adventures draw Erin’s family — and readers — closer together as they explore the intersection of wilderness and industry in America’s wildest state.
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
by Cheryl Strayed
At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State — and she would do it alone.
Told with suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild powerfully captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.
Breaking Trail: A Climbing Life
by Arlene Blum
A legendary trailblazer, Arlene Blum defied the climbing establishment of the 1970s by leading the first all-female teams on successful ascents of Mount McKinley and Annapurna and by being the first American woman to attempt Mount Everest. At the same time, her groundbreaking scientific work challenged gender stereotypes in the academic community and led to important legislation banning carcinogens in children’s sleepwear.
With candor and humor, Breaking Trail recounts Blum’s journey from an overprotected childhood in Chicago to the tops of some of the highest peaks on earth, and to a life lived on her own terms. Now with an index, additional photos, and a new afterword, this book is a moving testament to the power of taking risks and pursuing dreams.