From Mountains to Medicine chronicles Elliott’s journey to finding her true life’s purpose. It begins on the snowy peak of a volcano in Ecuador, where Elliott, battling hypoxia and extreme exhaustion, asks herself:
Why have I put myself in this precarious situation? Why in the world do I want to climb thesee mountains so badly? What is the point of all this? Am I going to get out of here alive? And if Ido get out alive, what is it I am really supposed to be doing with my life?
The book presses on to answer that question, continuing through Elliott’s experiences at Antioch where she met her husband, who she married at age 19. (They later divorced.) It covers her emotional breakdown and subsequent self-awakening, her childhood years spent as part of a military family that lived for short periods in Kansas, England, Germany, and Texas, her summer in Switzerland with her Uncle Ernst, her time spent as a schoolteacher on a Navajo reservation in Arizona, and her Peace Corps experience in Ecuador, which is where climbing mountains began to reveal to her a glimpse of her future.
“It was difficult to fully convey to my compatriots in the Peace Corps what had happened on the mountain,” Elliott writes of how she felt after completing her first climb of the Cotopaxi volcano near Quito. “I’d experienced a rarefied world high in the sky that few people knew about in those days.”