Best Women’s Adventure Books By Female Athletes & Adventurers

Welcome to our continually-evolving list of what we consider to be the BEST women’s adventure books! We’ve been compiling this list based on books we have read and also books that our trusted community of adventure lovers rate very highly.

These female adventurers write about their experiences in a way that will inspire you to explore more and become a stronger adventurer because of it.

Mind of a Survivor: What the wild has taught me about survival and success – Megan Hine

Being chased through the jungle by armed opium farm guards, abseiling past bears and lighting fires with tampons, Megan has seen and done it all. In Mind of a Survivor she takes you along for a series of life-and-death adventures and shows you what happens to people when they are pushed to their limits.

Becoming Odyssa: Adventures on the Appalachian Trail – Jennifer Pharr-Davis

After graduating from college, Jennifer isn’t sure what she wants to do with her life. She is drawn to the Appalachian Trail, a 2175-mile footpath that stretches from Georgia to Maine. Though her friends and family think she’s crazy, she sets out alone to hike the trail, hoping it will give her time to think about what she wants to do next. The next four months are the most physically and emotionally challenging of her life.

Learning to Fly: A Memoir of Hanging On and Letting Go – Steph Davis

World-class free climber Steph Davis delivers a “thrilling and infectiously interesting” (San Francisco Book Review) memoir about rediscovering herself through love, loss, and the joy of letting go.

Steph Davis is a superstar in the climbing community and has ascended some of the world’s most awe-inspiring peaks. But when her husband makes a controversial climb in a national park, the media fallout—and the toll it takes on her marriage—suddenly leaves her without a partner, a career, a source of income…or a purpose.

A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains – Isabella L. Bird

In 1872, Isabella Bird, daughter of a clergyman, set off alone to the Antipodes ‘in search of health’ and found she had embarked on a life of adventurous travel. In 1873, wearing Hawaiian riding dress, she rode her horse through the American Wild West, a terrain only newly opened to pioneer settlement.

The letters that make up this volume were first published in 1879. They tell of magnificent, unspoiled landscapes and abundant wildlife, of encounters with rattlesnakes, wolves, pumas and grizzly bears, and her reactions to the volatile passions of the miners and pioneer settlers. A classic account of a truly astounding journey.

Alone in Antarctica – Felicity Aston

Felicity Aston, physicist and meteorologist, took two months off from all human contact as she became the first woman — and only the third person in history to ski across the entire continent of Antarctica alone. She did it, too, with the simple apparatus of cross-country, without the aids used by her predecessors, two Norwegian men,each of whom employed either parasails or kites.

Aston’s journey across the ice at the bottom of the world asked of her the extremes in terms of mental and physical bravery, as she faced the risks of unseen cracks buried in the snow so large they might engulf her and hypothermia due to brutalizing weather.

End of the Rope: Mountains, Marriage, and Motherhood – Jan Redford

As a teenager, in a fit of rage toward her father, Jan pits herself against a steep rock face near their cottage. At the top, fired up by the victory, she sets her sights on the improbable dream of climbing mountains. By age twenty, she’s a nomadic climber with a magnetic attraction to misadventures and the wrong men. That’s just the beginning.

Runner: A short story about a long run – Lizzy Hawker

Scared witless and surrounded by a sea of people, Lizzy Hawker stands in the church square at the centre of Chamonix on a late August evening, waiting for the start of the Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc. The mountains towering over the pack of runners promise a grueling 8,600 metres of ascent and descent over 158 kilometres of challenging terrain that will test the feet, legs, heart and mind.

These nervous moments before the race signal not just the beginning of nearly twenty-seven hours of effort that saw Lizzy finish as first woman, but the start of the career of one of Britain’s most successful endurance athletes. She went on to become the 100km Women’s World Champion, win the Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc an unprecedented five times, hold the world record for 24 hours road running and become the first woman to stand on the overall winners’ podium at Spartathlon.

Tracks: A Woman’s Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback – Robyn Davidson

Enduring sweltering heat, fending off poisonous snakes and lecherous men, chasing her camels when they get skittish and nursing them when they are injured, Robyn Davidson emerges as an extraordinarily courageous heroine driven by a love of Australia’s landscape, an empathy for its indigenous people, and a willingness to cast away the trappings of her former identity.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail – Cheryl Strayed

At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State—and she would do it alone.

Taking on the World : A Sailor’s Extraordinary Solo Race Around the Globe – Ellen MacArthur

A young woman describes her participation in the 2001 Vendee Globe, a single-handed, nonstop voyage around the world, in a powerful memoir of her experiences at sea.