A conversation about the ground-breaking mountaineer you never heard of

Christine Boskoff (photo courtesy Johanna Garton)

“[The monks at Lenggu Monastery] said very matter-of-factly to me that the mountain is mighty, and if the mountain is not happy, the mountain will send you down.”
— Johanna Garton

Christine Boskoff was a mountaineer who pushed boundaries and set records on the world’s highest peaks.

She climbed mountains that no North American woman had ever summited, and she was the only American woman to have reached the top of six of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks. She was also a well-respected guide.

But despite her impressive resume, Chris’s story went largely untold — until this year.

This spring, writer Johanna Garton published a book called Edge of the Map, chronicling Chris’s rise in the mountaineering world. Johanna joins us to talk about how Chris got her start, the challenges she faced as a woman in a man’s realm, and the complicated moral questions surrounding her death on a sacred mountain.