This one’s an extra special one for our team at Gutsy Girls, we’ve been inspired by Lydia’s expeditions for years!
From a two-week course in Arthur’s Pass at fourteen years old, to becoming the first woman to summit Everest without oxygen, to the peaks still waiting — Lydia has never stopped reaching.
Some people find the mountains. Lydia was called to them — first through the pages of adventure stories, then through the cold air of Aotearoa’s high country, and finally into a life shaped entirely by the willingness to go further, higher, and harder than anyone expected.
Let’s start from the beginning…
Stories First, Then Mountains
Lydia’s love affair with adventure didn’t start on a rock face. It started in books — with the kind of stories that make a young mind restless and hungry for something it can’t yet name. “Firstly, stories of adventure,” she says. “Not necessarily real ones, but reading and stories.”
The real turning point came at age fourteen, when her mother enrolled her in a New Zealand Education Department outdoor course — two weeks in Arthur’s Pass National Park. It was the kind of experience that rearranges things inside you permanently. The mountains didn’t just interest Lydia. They claimed her.
That fortnight in the Southern Alps set the course for everything that followed: a career as a professional guide, landmark ascents across the world’s greatest ranges, and a life defined by the beautiful, demanding discipline of going outside.
“You cannot get mutation and improvement with perfection — it simply doesn’t exist. Risk and chance lie alongside luck and trust. These are the beautiful things that allow us to keep morphing into different people.”
Ask Lydia about her most defining experiences and she’ll give you several — because a life this full doesn’t compress into a single peak moment. There was Yosemite, where she became seriously skilled at aid climbing, culminating in the second ascent of Sunkist (BC, Canada), a route graded A6 by its first ascentionist and offered without a topographical map. She went in almost blind and came out with something unshakeable.
Then there was Everest in 1988 — Lydia became the first ever woman to summit Everest without supplemental oxygen which was extraordinary enough. But what made it truly formative was surviving it: losing half her expedition to the mountain, being accused of lying about her ascent, and facing the particular punishment the world reserves for women who achieve things people find inconvenient to believe. It was brutal. It was also, she says, part of the story.
And then, later — perhaps most quietly satisfying — passing her IFMGA (International Mountain and Ski Guide) certification without a single failure. The credential that sets the international standard for mountain guiding, earned clean.
On Fear, Failure, and the Gift of Getting Older
Lydia doesn’t romanticise fear. She names it plainly: fear of failure, fear of an accident, fear of falling. Standard equipment for anyone who goes into the mountains. What changes, she explains, is what you bring to meet it.
“When you are young, you have fewer experiences of success to bolster those periods of fear. When you are older, you begin to lose the endless strength you had when young — but you have the golden egg of satisfaction.”
Experience becomes its own kind of courage. Not recklessness — the opposite. It’s the deep knowledge that you’ve been here before, in weather, in doubt, in exhaustion, and you’ve found a way through. On navigating a male-dominated world: Post-Everest, Lydia was publicly discredited and later experienced the kind of gendered targeting that the #MeToo era helped give language to. She has written about it, processed it, and — with characteristic directness — moved on from centering it. “The point is the climb,” she says. Her confidence has been built not through certainty, but through time: time on the ground, time in the mountains, a genuine breadth of life that includes architecture, fashion, and film alongside hard guiding.
Brave Enough to Try
Lydia’s definition of strength won’t land where you expect it. Physical capacity matters, yes — but it goes somewhere more interesting. “Strength isn’t only being good at something,” she says. “Strength is being brave enough to give it a go even when the chance of success feels unlikely.”
She’s candid about her own history: she was, by her own description, “super super bad at sports” growing up — always a failure in that particular arena. She had things to overcome that had nothing to do with altitude. That’s the version of her story she wants young people to hear.
What keeps her going on the hardest days is a mix of experience, humour, shared difficulty, and a sturdy refusal to expect everything to be enjoyable. She invokes the language of Type 2 and Type 3 fun with the fluency of someone who has lived it thoroughly: the things that are miserable in the moment, and magnificent in the memory.
(A summary of The Fun Scale- Type 1: Fun now, fun later (e.g., skiing, partying). Type 2: Sucks now, fun later (e.g., hiking up a mountain).Type 3: Sucks now, sucks later (e.g., getting rescued)
Early on, a New Zealand woman named Margaret Clark — a member of the historic all-women expedition to Denali led by Arlene Blum — took a young Lydia aside and took her climbing. A man named John Visser then took her onto harder routes in Aotearoa. After that, a long succession of extraordinary people encountered at crags and base camps across the world.
What strikes Lydia most now, looking back, is the directionality of mentorship. It doesn’t only travel downward, from experienced to novice. She actively learns from people younger than her. “Mentors can be older than you or younger,” she says simply. “I love it.” It’s a generous and genuinely curious way to move through a world that often calcifies with age.
If Lydia could tell every young girl or emerging adventurer one thing, she’d give them two things — because she’s pragmatic like that.
The first is vast: engage with life. Not just the spectacular or the Instagrammable, but all of it — the checkout person at the supermarket, the ordinary interactions that build real connection and a real sense of place in the world. She worries about young people not leaving home, not engaging with other people. She sees something being lost.
The second is precise: attend to the details. Make sure your harness is tied in properly. Put a knot at the end of the rope before you rappel. “The daily acts of perfection,” she says, “are what allow you to push the risk and performance level out at the other end.” Mastery lives in the mundane. Freedom lives in mastery. And then, simply: embrace opportunities. Embrace chance.
What’s Next For Lydia
Lydia is not winding down. She wants to climb several 7,000-metre peaks before age makes it impractical. She wants to rock climb in Mexico, ski tour in Norway, and work her way through the mountains of Aotearoa she hasn’t yet stood on top of. She’s recently taken up diving and wants more of that too — though she notes, with characteristic prioritisation: “But first of all I’d like to climb.”The list is long. The intention is clear. There is still so much mountain to experience.
Check out Lydia’s website here to learn more about her and her incredible feats.
