The Getting Epically Lost on South Mountain Artistic Rock Cairn Award

"The Getting-Epically-Lost-on-South-Mountain Artistic-Rock-Cairn Award" continues Christiansen's adventures into the hills and into my sixties. These were the best two years of Christiansen's sport climbing days, exploring and trail building in short anecdotal chapters grouped by locale. Stories are not confined to sport climbing but include all aspects of the outdoors from rattlesnakes to hurricanes to sunsets encountered in the outdoors.

his is a series of generally separate stories about climbing locally. But each one says something about how one continues, getting better, even stronger, even into one's sixties. The key is to ignore the age bashing and naysayers who want to convince you to give up yourself. Most climbers are once and done, but I keep coming back and digging further and it never gets old.

Christiansen graduated from Cornell University in 1983 with a B.S. in Biochemistry. She started but did not complete a doctoral program in Pharmacology at Cornell, finally leaving upstate New York for the sunny climate of California in 1989. After several years of a nomadic existence as itinerant bike racer and triathlon junkie, she settled into software engineering and earned a respectable living for the next twenty-five years. She retired in May 2020 and immediately reverted to being an outdoor junkie, this time as climber and trail builder.