Facing The Extreme: One Woman's Tale of True Courage, Death-Defying Survival and Her Quest For The Summit

She stepped into a death zone. The climbers on Alaska's Mt. McKinley called her "the woman." Ruth Anne Kocour, a world-class mountaineer, wasn't bothered. It was part of the challenge she faced as she joined an all-male team to conquer North America's highest peak...the mountain the Indians called Denali, or God.

Faced the extreme. But nine days into this ascent, a forty-fifth birthday present to herself, the most violent weather on record slammed into the mountain. Ruth Anne and her group would be trapped on an ice shelf at 14,000 feet for the deadliest two weeks in Denali history. Pinned down by blinding snows, unable to help other teams dying around her, and her own feet freezing solid, Ruth Anne tells of a wind chill of minus 150 degrees, deadly hidden crevasses, and being trapped in a place so violent and unforgiving that it threatened to push her over the edge and into a place of no return. And yet, in prose as crystalline as the ice around her, she tells, too, of beauty, courage, and the spirit that drives true mountainers higher, as she risks all to go for the summit...and perhaps, for a transcendant moment, touch heaven.

And lived to tell about it.

Ruth Anne Kocour is a veteran mountaineer with nine international summits under her belt (including Mt. McKinley, Kilimanjaro, Aconcagua, Nevado Illimani, and Mt. Elbrus). She is an artist by avocation and lives in Galena, Nevada.

Michael Hodgson, a former mountain guide, is an editor for Outdoor Retailer magazine and also writes for Men's Health and Outside, to name a few. Like Ruth Anne, he continues to seek the wilder side of any mountain. This is his sixteenth book.