10 women travelers who broke all the rules

Junko Tabei

Born in Fukushima in 1939, Junko Tabei fell in love with mountaineering at a young age, in an era when few Japanese – and fewer women – engaged in the sport. At age thirty, she founded a women’s mountaineering club to carve out a space for herself and fellow female climbers, and just five years later had led teams to successfully summit both Annapurna III and Mt Everest. She continued to climb mountains on every continent and in 1992, at age 53, became the first woman to complete the storied Seven Summits. 

Taibei wrote extensively about her love of nature, her adventures in the mountains, and her experiences with both motherhood and grief – but until recently her essays hadn’t been translated into English. In Honouring High Places: The Mountain Life of Junko Tabei, Yumiko Hiraki and Rieko Holtved make Taibei’s reminiscences accessible to a wider audience and capture the highlights of an extraordinary life.