Meet the woman climbing mountains in homage to pioneer female adventurers

There's a saying that you don’t know someone unless you have “walked a mile in their shoes”. Adventurer Elise Wortley, who follows in the footsteps of female explorers of the past, not only wears their shoes, she braves the elements dressed in period clothes, ditches modern safety gadgets in favour of vintage equipment and travels by historically accurate modes of transportation to ensure she gets the full experience – risks and all.

This means that when she followed in the snowy footprints of pioneering mountaineer Dorothy Pilley, who scaled Corsica’s tallest peak in 1922, she was wading through waist deep snow in woollen knickerbockers, a silk blouse and leather boots with hobnails.

For safety’s sake, her feet were strapped into a pair of metal crampons for much of the arduous climb to the 8,878ft-high summit of Monte Cinto.

The mountain sits on the GR20, a hiking trail across the French island which is recognised as one of the toughest treks in Europe.

Most people who make the journey do it during the climbing season which lasts from May to October. Elise and her companions did so last week in the depths of winter when snow and ice made the route not just demanding but at times reduced visibility to virtually zero.#

They climbed the equivalent of 360 flights of stairs before starting their descent back down to sea level in Bastia. The terrain on the trek went from rugged to ridiculous.

They had to walk in single file taking it one step at a time, the leader stomping down the snow so it was firm enough for those following. Near the summit the white snow merged invisibly into the white cloud making it easy to lose your bearings.

The purpose of the trek was to recognise the achievement of Pilley on the 90th anniversary of the publication of her groundbreaking memoir Climbing Days.

The book recounted her adventures climbing in Europe and North America at a time when female climbers were often regarded by their male counterparts as little more than irritating excess baggage. This book helped change that and for a while made Pilley a famous name in the world of outdoor activities.

She was a co-founder of the Pinnacle Club, one of the first organisations for women rock climbers which still exists today, and made many climbs with her husband the literary critic and scholar I.A. Richards.

She died in 1986 at the age of 92, five years before Elise was born. Elise, who is the founder of the website Women with Altitude which she set up to celebrate the achievements of female explorers, wants everyone to remember that while far less well known than their male counterparts, female explorers were no less enterprising.

Among the other women whose journeys Elise has followed are Alexandra David-Néel, the first westerner of either gender to make it to Lhasa the capital of Tibet; Henriette d’Angeville, who in 1838 became the first woman to reach the summit of Mont Blanc, Europe’s tallest mountain; and Freya Stark who made a solo expedition on a donkey through Iran’s fabled Valley of the Assassins in the 1930s.

Elise’s self-imposed purdah from the 21st century means she only uses paper maps and materials that would have been available to her heroines. Her climbing companions in Corsica were Edurne Pasaban from Spain, the first woman to climb all 14 of the world’s peaks over 8,000m or 26,247ft, and former Miss Finland turned endurance athlete and high-altitude climber Lotta Hintsa. Both wore modern hi-tech gear while Elise struggled with head scarves and heavy woollen shawls.

Alongside the two vastly more experienced climbers, Elise also had the handicap of not only wearing the vintage clothing but having to carry the heavy gear when she got too hot to wear it. She admitted: “I was in old gear and crampons going very slowly at the back. I had to wear crampons or I’d have just slipped.

“The snow was three to four feet deep so our feet were really going into it which made it quite a bit more tricky. In summer the GR20 is a popular trek but we were the only people on the mountain. My legs still hurt now. I was struggling to keep up. When Pilley came here in 1922 she wouldn’t have known much about it. It was her first trip outside England and nothing like the Lake District and Snowdonia she was used to. It’s not like now when we can see anywhere in the world on our phones.

“This place really inspired her for the rest of her climbing career. She writes about it so beautifully. The book feels really modern still. The way she writes it opened the path for other women. She was sharing her knowledge so other people could do it too. She makes it very accessible.

“Pilley’s husband was her climbing partner. Lotta says even today when you are in the mountains with a man that people assume you must have been taken there by them because you are a woman.

“Pilley writes about that as well but she was in charge, she was the one doing it all. He was just kind of there with her on this big adventure.”

But on this expedition Elise broke her rule of not using technology unavailable to the woman whose route she was following.

The trek was sponsored by the tech company OnePlus whose latest phone was designed with explorers in mind. Besides being rugged and waterproof the OnePlus 13 was able to record the expedition with sufficient quality to make a documentary for television after their return.

Tracing Pilley’s footsteps in virtually the same footwear led Elise to feel a close companionship that spanned the decades. Today’s footware would have insulated Elise’s feet from the cold and kept her toes dry, severing her connection to Dorothy.

Elise said: “Modern-day climbing boots hold your foot in place whereas in mine it rolls over the edge. My foot was just rolling as I went down and it was also full of water so it was very heavy. I fell over a lot.”

Her mission to draw attention to the contribution of female explorers is motivated by more than just the fact that many were ignored or overlooked. She said: “With lots of the early explorers it was about being the first to reach a particular place but the women I’m interested in spent a really long time with local people and getting to know the place. The men didn’t immerse themselves in the culture.

“That’s why the accounts left by women are far more culturally rich. Freya Stark who I followed in Iran spent two years living there. Women were never given as much coverage as the men so people don’t know as much about them.

“Nothing much has changed in the outdoor space. There are always far more men than women.

“On Mont Blanc last September we were the only three women in a hut with maybe 50 male climbers.”

Elise is now planning to return to Mont Blanc in June to finish a climb cut short by a storm that claimed the lives of five climbers. This time she is following in the footsteps of 19th-century pioneer Henriette D’Angeville.

Henriette reached the summit with the help of half a dozen male guides to carry her supplies which included 18 bottles of wine and 26 roast chickens.

Elise dressed in pantaloons, an ankle-length woollen coat and a feather boa to emulate her predecessor.

She is also looking for a 16th-century galley to recreate the voyage of the legendary pirate queen Grace O’Malley from Clare Island in Ireland to Greenwich where she had an audience with Queen Elizabeth.

The full saying that began this piece is: “Never criticise anyone until you have walked a mile in their shoes. Then they are a mile away and you have their shoes.”

Elise has nothing but admiration for the women she is emulating and has a list of 150 others whose shoes she wants to walk in.