Learning to Fly: An Uncommon Memoir of Human Flight, Unexpected Love, and One Amazing Dog

Steph Davis is a superstar in the climbing community. She’s ascended some of the world’s most awe-inspiring peaks and was the first woman to free climb the Salathé Wall in Yosemite and to free solo the Longs Peak Diamond. But when her husband made a controversial climb in a national park, the media fallout—and the toll it took on her marriage—suddenly left Davis without a partner, a career, a source of income…or a purpose.

In the company of only her beloved dog Fletch, Davis sets off on a search for a new identity, and discovers skydiving. Though falling out of an airplane is completely antithetical to the climber’s control she’d practiced for so long, Davis turns each daring jump into an opportunity to fly, first as a skydiver, then as a BASE jumper, and finds herself indelibly changed.

As she opens herself to falling, she also finds the strength to open herself to love again, even in the wake of heartbreaking loss. And before too long, she fortuitously meets someone who shares her passions for extreme sports. Learning to Fly is Davis’s fascinating account of her transformation; from her early tentative skydives, to zipping into her first wingsuit, to surviving devastating accidents against the background of breathtaking cliffs, to soaring beyond her past limits by climbing huge walls without a rope. In the tradition of such bestsellers as Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert and Tales of a Female Nomad by Rita Golden Gelman, Davis’s memoir isn’t just an adventure story, but a woman’s story of risk-taking and self-discovery, with love at its heart.