From Sea to Summit: Hiking Myself to Healing

Liberty moved back to Orcas Island in 2020 with a resting heart rate of 180 bpm, micro-clots in all ten toes, and a ME/CFS diagnosis her doctor summarized with a shrug: “Don’t exercise.” She’d been an endurance rider, a freediver, a certified mermaid instructor. The crash was total, and the distance between who she was and what her body could now do was, by any measure, humiliating.

Her recovery plan was a virtual 120-mile hiking challenge on Moran State Park’s trails — the kind of goal that sounds modest until you’re falling asleep against a tree on the first steep one while your dog waits and the forest does nothing to acknowledge your suffering. She goes home. She comes back the next week.

The Orcas Island material is the strongest thing here, and Liberty is smart enough to let the place do some of the work. She logs 200-plus orca sightings a year as a Salish Sea naturalist, giving behavioral talks while Southern Residents hunt off the bow. Park founder Robert Moran was told he had a year to live in 1911 and died decades later on the same trails she’s relearning to walk — a parallel Liberty never underlines, which is exactly why it lands. In a Norwegian fjord, a baby orca drops a fish in front of her and swims a figure-eight. Liberty calls it grace and moves on, which is the right instinct.

The childhood chapters are brutal and load-bearing. Her stepmother bought medicine for Liberty’s sick fish, refused to put it in the tank, and watched them die one by one — a detail that tells you everything about the household’s relationship to control. Liberty survived by deciding early that every adult diagnosis of her limitations was a lie, and that refusal becomes a theory of self-determination she spends the rest of the book field-testing. It’s more interesting than most trauma backstories because the stakes are legible: either she was right to disbelieve them, or she wasn’t.

The geography is the book’s real problem. Between Orcas Island and Mount Olympus, Liberty takes the reader through Alaska, Mongolia, Ethiopia, Peru, Norway, Malta, and Sicily. Each chapter is competent, but most of them add weight without adding lift, and the cumulative effect is a book that keeps interrupting its own best argument. A tighter edit — cutting half the travel sections — would make this twice the memoir it currently is. Liberty earns the Olympus summit through four years of grinding work on island trails. She doesn’t need the frequent-flier miles to prove it.

When the book finally gets to Olympus, it delivers. She trains with a pack stuffed with books, crosses the Blue Glacier before dawn in crampons, and wedges her body between two outcroppings when the handholds run out on the summit pitch. At the top, she meets a stranger who broke his leg on this same climb a year ago, got helicoptered out, and came back. They fist-bump, and it’s the clearest image in the book of what Liberty is actually arguing: that returning to the thing that broke you is the whole point, not the summit itself.

At 57,000 words, it needs a harder edit, but the core — a specific woman on specific trails, clawing back a specific life — is honest work, and honest is harder than it looks in this genre.