Moving Mountains

Moving Mountains celebrates the extraordinary women who reached the pinnacles of exploration and are immortalised in destinations named after them. It reveals for the first time a small group of exceptionally daring women who, against all odds, achieved an honour usually reserved for men and royalty. Blazing trails across the globe and straight through the status quo, they defied convention to achieve the impossible. They left inhibition at home and travelled through a man’s world. What they did had never been done before. Their triumphs are recognised in the names of a scattering of mountains and peaks around the world from the Alps to the Andes, the Rockies to the Karakoram. Some you may have heard of – British archaeologist and political advisor Gertrude Bell, Japanese mountaineer Junko Tabei. Others are lost in obscurity – inexhaustible traveller Gertrude Emily Benham, ‘Queen of the Climbers’ Annie Smith Peck and more. These are the women you are about to meet.