Arlene Blum PhD, environmental health scientist, author, and mountaineer is founder and executive director of the Green Science Policy Institute and a Research Associate in Cell and Molecular Biology at UC Berkeley. The Institute’s scientific research and policy work has contributed to the removal of classes of harmful chemicals in products world-wide. Arlene Blum led the first American — and all-women’s — ascent of Annapurna I, one of the world’s most dangerous and difficult mountains, co-led the first women’s team to climb Denali, and hiked the length of the European Alps with her baby daughter on her back. She is the author of Annapurna: A Woman’s Place and Breaking Trail: A Climbing Life, was named to the Forbes Sustainability Leaders list of 50 global changemakers in 2024, and was inducted into the California Hall of Fame.
Summit Journal: How did you first start writing for Summit Magazine?
Dr. Arlene Blum: Well, I started climbing in the Sixties and Summit was the only regular climbing magazine. I was an avid climber and looked forward to reading it every month.
Then in ’69 I was trying to organize an expedition to Denali and we needed rescue support so I wrote Vin Hoeman. He had just died on Dhaulagiri, which I didn't know, but his widow, Grace Hoeman, contacted me and said she would join us if we were a women's team. She ended up leading our expedition.
I wrote Helen and Jean and proposed that they do a story about it before we went and they wrote back and said, well, they didn't know if women were strong enough to climb mountains like Denali. Because in those days, to climb Denali you had to bring 30 days of food and gear — so it ended up being around 100 pounds of gear and 30 days of food at three pounds each day.
“They didn't know if women were strong enough to climb mountains like Denali.”
Anyway, the general belief was that women weren't strong enough to carry the loads needed to climb Denali. I wrote to join a guided trip that said women were invited to stay at base camp and help with the cooking, but they couldn’t climb the mountain — and that sort of settled it for me in organizing the trip. It was a big open question at the time.
Helen and Jean didn’t say women aren’t able to climb Denali, but they genuinely didn’t know if it was possible. Nonetheless, they were supportive.
Cresting the ridge at 16,000 feet, the team was in a world of brilliant light and ice. Before reaching this height, the group ferried 700 pounds of food and equipment — about 65 pounds at a time — to Camp II, at 9,800 feet, and then to a cache 2,500 feet higher. Photo by Arlene Blum.
Summit Journal: Well, it’s the 55th anniversary of the climb…
Dr. Blum: Right, we ended up doing the first all-women ascent of Denali, with a very dramatic rescue… and it didn't get much press. Except from Helen and Jean.
I wrote an article about our ascent and they put my photo of the team on top of Denai on the cover of the magazine. And this story was my first publication and initiated my writing about climbing.
So Jean and Helen’s support helped make the Denali climb the story it is today and helped launch my climbing and writing career
Editor’s note: The May 1971 “Denali Damsels” issue is one of the most iconic in the history of Summit.
Summit Journal: How did that climb and story lead to a 15-month round-the-world mountaineering trip?
Dr. Blum: It was 1970 and I was still in grad school. I was 25 and finishing my last Ph.D. experiment; I'd been preparing a sample for my last experiment for months, and I dropped the sample on the floor. So I went to the movies and saw The Endless Summer — about two surfers who went on an around the world trip looking for the perfect wave — and I thought, Okay, I'll do an Endless Winter, looking for the perfect mountain after I finish grad school.
I had been reading about the highest mountains in different countries in a book called Mountains of the World, and I designed the trip around those peaks. The only ones we didn't get to climb were Carstensz Pyramid (Puncak Jaya) in New Guinea because we couldn't get permission, and mountains in Bhutan even though we got permits — when we were in Kashmir, we learned we couldn't enter the country. But otherwise, we pretty much climbed all the peaks I’d planned.
I continued to correspond with Jean and Helen, and they were very supportive. They said they would pay me a hundred dollars an article, which was incredible because if I wrote 10 articles I would get paid a thousand dollars, which made it possible for me to do the trip. A hundred dollars was a lot of money for me as a grad student earning $200 a month.
“Their support enabled me to do these expeditions all over the world and I think they helped give me the confidence to go ahead and do an all-women's climb of Annapurna and Bhrigupanth (next to Meru), among other climbs.”
This was before other climbing magazines, so Summit was where climbers all reported in and what they read. I don't think it would've happened if they hadn't supported me.
Summit Journal: That seems very representative of how Helen and Jean approached the magazine. Along those lines, what would you say made Summit special?
Dr. Blum: It was very inclusive, you had every type of climber, from Reinhold Messner doing the first oxygen-free ascent of Everest mixed with family adventures. There was a range and it made it welcoming and approachable to climbers of different abilities.
Summit Journal: Back to your trip, how did the correspondence, editing, photo selection, etc. work? Obviously, you are traveling to far-off places and were only intermittently on the grid.
Dr. Blum: There was no editing or revising because I couldn't get mail.
I was traveling with a couple of guys who would edit my drafts and then I would send the piece to Jean and Helen. I wouldn’t see the articles until they were published.
It was amazing because we had about $200 a month as our budget. Yet, we were able to hire porters and buy food and ended up doing first ascents in the Himalayas, so it was pretty wild.
Ethiopia, Uganda, Iran, we just went to these countries where we didn't know anything and figured out how.
So in each country, I'd write the articles by hand and send rolls of film to my boyfriend at the time — who was loyal for my 15-month trip and took care of my cats — and he picked out the best slides and sent them to Jean and Helen.
I remember sitting on a porch in the Alborz Mountains, by the Caspian Sea in Iran, writing one article. Because the Shah liked climbing, we got to live in very fancy, beautiful places, while the locals didn't have good drinking water or electricity… so I was often writing articles in unlikely terrain.
Descending from the summit. Blum writes, “The wind dropped and the clouds rolled away uncovering dazzling views of the Alaskan Range.” Photo by Arlene Blum.
Summit Journal: You talk about following your curiosity, usually towards seemingly impossible goals. And you’ve been impressively successful. What did you learn from the Endless Winter trip?
Dr. Blum: Perseverance. It was really hard.
The hardest part was right before we left: there was the avalanche on Mount St. Elias, which killed the man who was kind of the love of my life, and my college roommate, and two other friends. So four people died and only one person survived.
I was actually going to go on that trip but couldn’t because I had to finish my PhD thesis. The person who replaced me survived and joined me for some climbs during Endless Winter, but there was survivor’s guilt, and other tension.
And, I was determined to keep going in spite of it all.
I think my personal thing is I tend to have pictures in my mind of things that I really want to happen. I now feel it's like a gift because in terms of my scientific work, I realized PFAS was important 10 years before people started talking about it — I was doing everything I could to involve the scientific community and get the word out.
It sounds immodest, but my very small environmental nonprofit has done a number of things to remove toxic chemicals from everybody's homes and make the whole world healthier. It has been that same process of sharing this picture [for how the future can look] and then you find other people to share the vision with.
So I often say that science, which I do now, is similar to mountain climbing because it starts with a picture of something that seems obvious to me and important, like women should get to climb Denali. You have to plan for it, you always have to raise money, and get gear, and pack up heavy loads, and plot step by step up the mountain. And then there are avalanches and rockfalls and storms and Yetis, and that's how it feels with what I'm doing now, too.
(Except the Yetis are the chemical industry, who are determined to keep selling their chemicals.)
Summit Journal: What are you working on now?
Dr. Blum: I helped remove flame retardants from baby products a long time ago; there was a chemical called Tris [(1,3-dichloro-2-propyl)phosphate], a flame retardant that was in kids’ pajamas in the '70s, and we got the use of it stopped. Then I spent 26 years focused on other things, climbing, trekking, and raising my daughter.
When I came back to science, the same Tris was in furniture foam. Another flame retardant was shown to have caused an average of four points of IQ loss across the U.S. population. And people with higher levels of exposure were four times as likely to die of cancer. So there had been really harmful carcinogens and neurotoxins in our furniture.
It took three months to get them out of the baby pajamas, and ten years to get them out of our furniture.
Now, the same chemicals are in our cars. We did a study of 101 cars and they all contain kinds of Tris and it's a U.S. standard that was promulgated in 1970 with no data showing it provides a fire safety benefit. Still, it became standard all over the world.
Everyone who gets in a car the world over is getting a dose of carcinogen, neurotoxin, obesogen, endocrine disruptor; these really bad chemicals.
And of course, they end up in the environment, and they end up in wildlife and plants. So we have been trying. We started 10 years ago to get the standard changed but the U.S. government agency called NHTSA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, they're very difficult to work with.
It's really hard, but getting the regulations for furniture changed — these chemicals were 5% by weight of the foam in all the furniture in the U.S. and Canada — means that new furniture purchased in the last 10 years is healthier.
Nobody thought that could happen, but now the car initiative feels even harder because this agency is challenging to work with — especially now.
Summit Journal: For readers, from longtime fans to those new to the title, what would you hope they remember about the legacy of Jean and Helen, and the vision that they had for Summit?
Dr. Blum: Well, they encouraged so many climbers over their career — I'm just one — by publishing their articles and their letters.
For years, they were the only place for people to get published; you could get published in the American Alpine Journal, but you have to do something fairly heroic. This was an opportunity for people — climbers of all ilk — to share their adventures, their hopes, their dreams, their photos, and I think they really helped propel mountaineering and so many mountaineers.
Their support enabled me to do these expeditions all over the world and I think they helped give me the confidence to go ahead and do an all-women's climb of Annapurna and Bhrigupanth (next to Meru), among other climbs. And then even the work I do now, I think these mountaineering successes that they helped nurture and encourage have really helped me and inspired so many other climbers over the years.
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Buy the cover
The cover of the May 1971 issue of Summit features the first team of women ever to climb Denali, the highest point in North America. Standing left to right are Dana Isherwood, Margaret Young, Margaret Clark. Sitting are Faye Kerr and Grace Hoeman. Not shown is the photographer, Arlene Blum.
