Selected work

I had a plan for motherhood. It did not include twins. A memoir built from six years of letters, written in real time to Irenna and Kaz, about becoming a mother without giving up the rest of who I am.

What does community-led change actually look like? In Northern Kenya, Samburu women are healing their land and changing who gets to decide what comes next.

I went to climb what no one had climbed. What I found was somebody's backyard. A slice of years of first ascents across Africa and beyond, and how they taught me there is no such thing as untouched.

Emily Oster and me, on the part of parenthood nobody puts on the birth announcement: what young kids do to a marriage.

Everyone told me to go bigger, colder, harder. I moved back to small to go big. An essay about ambition, fear, and finding my way back to climbing by paying attention instead of pushing.

In 2012, Anne-Marie Slaughter asked whether women could have it all. A decade later, she put me on a stage to answer with a different word.

I went to Mozambique to climb a 2,000-foot wall. What I found on Mount Namuli changed the direction of my life.

I first went to Ethiopia on a coffee expedition in 2006. Seven years and two books later, one of them was featured by Starbucks.

When international funding disappeared, Ngilai’s priorities didn’t. What it means to keep moving, even if you have to move slow like tortoises.

The life in between the climbing you pretend is the life– a selection of my 7-year Whipped column for Climbing Magazine. From decoupling your climbing gear to the real skinny on dating non-climbers, from why capris matter to how to be a dictator of your own van-world.

I learned activism long before I had a word for it. An opinion piece about climate, the mountains I call home, and why caring for a place eventually means standing up for it.

How much truth can you afford in the mountains? An essay about fear, risk, and the stories climbers tell themselves in order to keep going. Featured in Vantage Point: 50 Years of the Best Climbing Stories Ever Told.