Memoirs of trauma: Resilience and grit in the female climbing community

In 2020, Brittany Pack was at a crossroads. Working towards a master’s degree in theatre directing, she started climbing as a way to blow off steam. Then COVID-19 hit and theatres started closing. Climbing kept her going through an uncertain time. 

“It totally changed my world,” says Pack, MFA’21. “As I left that theatre space, I found this creativity in the mountains. In theatre, your whole identity is your job, so I was really searching for a community, and something that would challenge me in the same way. I found that in climbing.”

Through an MFA colleague, Pack was introduced to the work of Dr. Angelique Jenney, PhD, an associate professor in the Faculty of Social Work, and was inspired to pursue a social work degree. Two days after submitting her application, tragedy struck. Pack had a climbing accident and suffered a severe concussion. 

“I was looking around my community, and seeing that trauma is experienced differently in climbing, and my feeling was that it had something to do with narrative. It's not if we get injured in an accident, it's when," Pack says. "Trauma is a part of the climbing narrative; it's part of the identity.”

Turning an idea into research

In 2024, Pack approached Jenney with an idea for a research project. She wanted to write about women who had experienced trauma in the mountains, just like she and many of her friends had. With the support of the Program for Undergraduate Research Experience (PURE), Pack decided to explore narratives of climbing trauma through memoir. For her, books about climbing are an important way that mountaineering has been shared and communicated, contributing to the growth of the culture.

Using her background in narrative and practice-based research, Pack chose five women’s climbing memoirs to analyze, looking at themes of perception of self, community and climbing. 

“What I realized, as I was reading the books, is they’re not actually writing about their traumatic experience. All of these women are going through such extensive effort to try and explain what the phenomenology of the experience of climbing is,” she says.

At the same time, Pack was still recovering from her own injury. Journalling became an important reflexive part of the research, capturing her reactions and related experience in real time as she worked on the project.

“It was tough because I was reading about death and injury and all of these women's experiences, and then I was still going out and climbing," she says. "So, as I'm climbing, this research is in my head; these stories are in my body. The research ended up affecting me in every aspect of my life.”

Climbing community grit

One important theme stood out in all the memoirs: resilience. 

“I think about the fact that climbers get up and they keep going. They persevere in horrific conditions,” Pack says.

But alongside Jenney, her supervisor, Pack started to question the dominant narrative of resilience in the climbing community: What if it isn’t "resilience" that keeps climbers going in the face of death and injury? Instead, she found a new word to apply to her community: grit. And, over the course of the research project, Pack reflected on her own relationship to resilience and grit, and, through the process, found empathy for herself in her own recovery.

Doing an undergraduate research summer studentship gave Pack a chance to breathe and pursue research for research sake in the midst of the everyday demands of university. And coming back to school from fine arts research to the undergrad social work program opened her up to new methodologies and rigour.

“It was so cool to come up with an idea, find support and then be surrounded by a community of researchers," she says. "It’s such a beautiful way to experience academia and research, and also be able to pay your bills at the same time.”