All In: Saranac Lake lands Peruvian mountaineer for “Kickass” festival – Times Union
The Adirondack Center for Writing in Saranac Lake is holding its Inaugural “Kickass Writers Festival” and the organization’s featured guest is the very definition of a badass.
Peruvian mountaineer and social activist Silvia Vásquez-Lavado will be promoting her book, “In the Shadow of the Mountain” (Henry Holt, 2022), a memoir. Her story is being adapted into a movie starring Selena Gomez.
Vásquez-Lavado, who has climbed the Seven Summits, will be making her first trip to the Adirondacks. Her story is one of overcoming sexual abuse as a child, alcoholism as an adult, and finding her true self.
Vasquez-Lavado’s talk on Saturday at 5 p.m. at Saranac Lake High School will be the centerpiece of Saturday’s festival schedule. She also will lead an early morning hike up Baker Mountain for festival attendees; participants will meet at the Baker Mountain trailhead at 7 a.m.
“My talk will be all about my journey,” Vásquez-Lavado said in a phone interview, adding that the feedback and reception she has received on her book tour has been “a beautiful opportunity.”
Her journey is fascinating. After graduating from a small college in Lancaster, Penn., her life in the United States was spiraling out of control. “I became a raging alcoholic,” she said, adding that her first job out of college was working for a vodka distributor. A native of Lima, Peru, she came to the United States on an academic scholarship, but her childhood demons were not left behind in her homeland.
She asked her parents in Peru for help.
Vasquez-Lavado, 47, said she returned home and took the potent hallucinogen ayahuasca, administered by her physician cousin, with her mother. During the trip, she was overcome by a vision of herself as a young girl in ponytails, hand in hand with her adult self, in an endless valley surrounded by mountains.
After years of training as a mountaineer, she became the first Peruvian woman to summit Everest. She climbed all Seven Summits (the highest peak on each continent), something only about 500 people — and a small minority of them women — have accomplished. She also came out as a gay woman.
“I am a firm believer that being in nature is incredibly healing,” she said.
Those personal achievements led to her current mission of helping women who are survivors of human trafficking and sexual abuse. She founded the nonprofit Courageous Girls with the goal of healing through nature. In late 2014, she and other mountaineers trained a group of young survivors of girl trafficking in Nepal during a trek to the Everest Base Camp. The women were trafficked to India in their early teens and even as young as 12. The women had escaped and returned home to Nepal. Trained to be skilled mountaineers, they now work as guides to the many western clients on the Himalayan peaks.
Women can learn to empower themselves at any age.
“It’s never, never, never too late to follow a journey, especially in nature, which can be so rewarding,” Vásquez-Lavado said.
“Whenever people meet me, they realize I have a contagious energy,” she said. “All you need to do is just move your little legs, move your feet. You’ll find everything is doable, everything is possible.”
For more information and tickets to the book festival, with programs Friday and Sunday, go to adirondack center for writing.org.
Joyceb10bassett@gmail.com • @joyceb10bassett • timesunion.com/author/joyce-bassett
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