In her hospital bed on the morning of May 8, 2017, Melissa Strong asked her husband, Adam, for a pen. She could barely grip it; her fingers hardly resembled fingers, more like dark and swollen nubs after tense, reconstructive surgeries and three weeks at UCHealth Anschutz in Aurora. 

Finally, the bulky bandages were off. And the first thing Strong thought to do was write. 

“These are my first words written with my new hands,” she scratched on the paper. “One day I will climb again. I will probably cry a lot along the way, which is okay.” 

Nearly nine years later, both predictions have come true. 

Against the odds, Strong is climbing again around her Estes Park home and beyond. And yes, she has cried a lot along the way. 

The tears come to her now with a memory. “A memory I hadn’t had in a while,” she says. 

Months after her return from the hospital, she found herself alone at home. She had encouraged Adam to go to their beloved bouldering area in Texas, Hueco Tanks, where they spent winters guiding. Strong would not be going. She was tormented by the thought of never going again, of never climbing with these mangled hands she did not recognize. 

“So I’m staying back in Estes alone. That was obviously a real challenging time for me,” she says. “I was like, OK, I’m going to write the book now.”

The book, “Climbing Through,” is coming out in March. 

Strong’s story has been told in parts; media accounts followed the electrocution that almost killed the woman who went on to open one of Estes Park’s finest restaurants, Bird and Jim.

But now Strong is telling her story herself, the full story ー everything from her rebellious youth, to the sponsored climber she became, to the restaurant dream she achieved while grappling with a new life. 

That’s how Strong describes life after her near-death experience. In the book, she recounts her words to Adam as they drove away from the hospital that day in 2017: “I am beginning my second life.”

It would be a life of tears, yes. A life of healing.

“I needed to write this to help me continue to heal,” Strong says of the book, “and to just kind of explore and dig a little deeper.” 

To “open those boxes and face some of the things I put away,” she says. And to rediscover herself. 

“I had to rediscover me,” she says, “because that me kind of died a little bit that day.” 

She returns to that day in the first chapter of the book. The chapter is titled “As I Stand Dying.”

In her driveway, Strong was standing over a contraption built to burn elegant designs into her restaurant’s tables. It was a contraption involving a microwave transformer and jumper cables ー not to be touched when plugged in, she was warned. 

She had forgotten it was plugged in around the time she felt “a prickling sensation,” she writes. This became a “tingling that intensified.” 

Then burning. Then the thought to let go. 

“The current grew stronger and my grip only tightened,” Strong writes. 

She could not let go, nor could she scream for help ー like “nightmares where I desperately needed to call out for help but couldn’t. Difference was, this time I knew I was awake.” 

And then she wasn’t. She fell unconscious there in the driveway. 

She remembers waking and stumbling into Adam’s arms, remembers him rushing her to the hospital. As recounted in the book, she remembers looking at her hands on the way: “charred, pointed, jagged bones jutting out of melted skin” ー skin that was “incinerated, vaporized,” bones that were “black from combustion.” 

Strong would soon learn she was lucky to be alive, thanks only to the breaker that was tripped. She would learn about a complicated, science fiction-sounding procedure that would save what was left of her fingers, following three weeks of her arms stitched together for blood flow and recovery.

In “Climbing Through,” Strong writes of the ordeal in agonizing detail. And she writes of agonizing doubt: “I would never be able to climb again.” 

Climbing became her joy after moving to Estes Park in 1996, fresh out of college with wanderlust and a degree in literature. She started as a hostess at a restaurant. There she found the early seeds of a dream that grew to open her own restaurant. Also at that first job, she found friends who climbed.

They introduced her to the heart-pounding thrill, the physical and mental challenge, the natural beauty. “I quickly became aware that the world was full of distinct rocks … which made me want to travel more,” Strong writes in her book. 

Off she went to California, Utah, Canada, France, South Africa, Australia and elsewhere. She’d go with Adam, who was living in a Subaru when they first met in Estes, living with few concerns beyond climbing, like her. He introduced her to Hueco Tanks, that Texas outpost of archaeological and geologic wonder that became their “home away from home,” Strong writes. 

She writes of leaving there the winter before her accident: “If I had known those would be my last days to climb with all of my fingers and thumbs, I would have cherished each day and stayed longer.”

It has been one lesson in her second life, to cherish the days. “To slow down,” she says. 

But that was impossible to do after returning home from the hospital in 2017.

That fateful, electric contraption was to help design tables ー among furniture that was needed at her yet-to-open restaurant, along with major construction. Just before the accident, financing had been secured. Sacrifices had been made. There was no turning back, Strong knew. 

“I had to open the restaurant,” she says. “It was just keep pushing, keep pushing, keep pushing.” 

She pushed through the years, working as a restaurant owner does ー working “several full-time jobs,” as she writes in the book about handling payroll, ordering inventory, paying bills, scheduling, marketing and addressing any problem that might arise any hour. 

Strong kept pushing and pushing, until more recent years. She noticed migraines mounting. Her head spun; it was hard to drive or do much else. “I wasn’t really able to function because of all the stress,” she says. 

She hired a general manager. She calls herself a “hands-off owner” now. 

The restaurant was a dream. And yet “it took away as opposed to adding to who I was,” she says. “That’s when I decided I needed to reel it in and get back to me and the person I was before the accident. And writing the book really helped me to do that.” 

Writing always helped, going back to the hospital room, when the bandages were removed and she put pen to paper. 

“That was step one,” she says. “Putting words down like that and for the book … it really is powerful.” 

All the more so because she was doing it with her hands, these altered hands she once saw as her weakness, now typing the words that gave her strength, healing. 

She feels stronger than ever now. She is reminded of that when she climbs. Recently at Hueco Tanks, she was battling a V10 route ー “amazing at 52,” she recognized, “let alone without my hands.”

Her condition dictates other conditions, she says: “You have to pull harder, you have to be stronger. You have to try harder than ever to compensate for it.” 

She wishes that wasn’t the case. She often longs for the hands she lost. 

And she often longs for the child she never had. “It wasn’t meant to be,” she writes in one poignant, difficult chapter in the book, chronicling her pregnancy struggles and IVF attempts. 

Life has not been without more difficult chapters. A few years after her accident, Strong’s younger brother died from a heart attack. A year after that, she lost her father.

“Healing and learning will never end,” Strong writes toward the end of her book. “Joy and hardship continuously flow into our lives.” 

Joy and hardship flowed in the process of the book. “As I Stand Dying” was a particularly hard chapter to write ー that first chapter Strong started when she found herself alone at home.

It was a cold, winter evening. Strong looked out to the driveway, that spot where she woke to a life forever changed. She went out to it. 

“I fell on the ground right where I opened my eyes again,” she says. And there she made a snow angel. 

Details

“Climbing Through: A Courageous Story of Grit, Healing and Second Chances,” by Melissa Strong. Available on Amazon starting March 3. Published by Falcon Guides, 278 pages, $20. melissastrong.com

Book signings

Melissa Strong will be sharing her story and signing books March 5 at Tattered Cover Book Store, 2526 E. Colfax Ave. in Denver. Event starts at 6 p.m., advanced tickets required at eventbrite.com. More events listed at melissastrong.com