“I had a pretty traumatic experience when I was 20, and so reliving and writing about a kidnapping was hard. It also provided an opportunity for me to really dive into therapy and work through a lot of things,” Beth Rodden says of her new autobiography.
When Beth Rodden set off on a hiking adventure across the world, she had no idea it would become the fight of her life.
“It was a very harrowing time. I cried almost every hour that we were there. We were freezing and starving and just really terrified the whole time,” she tells Inside Edition Digital. “About two weeks into our trip we were shot at while we were on a wall, and we went down and it was apparent that we were being taken hostage."
Rodden and the group she was on a trip to Kyrgyzstan in 2000 were kidnapped and held hostage for six days, she says. The California climber was just 20 at the time.
“I was thinking about my family, I was thinking about food, I was thinking about warmth. I was thinking about what was happening, how long were we going to be there? It was a constant blender of emotions,” she says.
Rodden and her fellow hikers relied on each other to survive. Each day, they split half a protein bar amongst the group to stretch out their rations for as long as possible. The bars lasted until about the fourth day.
"We we gave one to our captors as well," Rodden says. "The boys, which I think was really smart, thought that it would be a good tactic to try and have our captors think of us more than just human shields or ransom money or whatnot. To try and befriend them a little bit, so we shared with them."
On the sixth day, the group realized they had an opportunity to escape.
“We were supposed to meet one of our other captures at the top of this ridge," she says. "And for climbers, it was a quite easy thing to get up. It was kind of like walking on a sidewalk, but for somebody who wasn't comfortable with climbing (like their captor), he'd ask us to help push his foot up or grab his hand. And so (one of the other hikers) went up and was able to push him off at the top of the ridge, and we were able to run to safety after that.”
They ran to the U.S. Embassy. “The two friends of ours that were there with us, John and Jason, they had gone on this really big trek earlier in the trip, and they knew there was this small ramshackle military outpost quite a ways down the valley," she says. "And so we ran down there and the Kyrgyzstan military was in that outpost. And so we went from that military base to a couple other ones and eventually made it to the American Embassy in the capital of Kyrgyzstan.”
It took a year for Rodden to have the courage to hike again.
“Skirting death was a heroic thing, but admitting you were scared or having any fear was seen as a weakness. So it was something that I really struggled with because I had all this internal fear and nightmares,” she says. “I was scared of a lot of things, but I was too afraid to show it because I was afraid that I'd be made fun of in the community. So I was really ashamed of all that, and after a year or two, I just thought I needed to bury it as deep inside as possible.
Rodden revisits her past in her autobiography, “A Light Through the Cracks.” She became interested in rock climbing as a young teen after her dad took her to the gym. It was love at first sight and she became seriously invested in the sport. By 18, she was accredited with major sponsor deals.
As Rodden became more experienced, she felt there was a void in the storytelling of some athletes. “It was these celebrated successes and achievements. And yes, there's the typical hero's journey where you rise and you fall and then you rise higher," Rodden says. "But I felt like there weren't that many human stories. And so once I started going through the messiness of being a human, I thought I would've really appreciated reading more stories like that, especially in our community and our sport.”
So, she went to work to put own story to print. “I had a pretty traumatic experience when I was 20, and so reliving and writing about a kidnapping was hard. It also provided an opportunity for me to really dive into therapy and work through a lot of things,” Rodden says.
To this day, Rodden doesn’t know why they were held hostage. “We didn't speak their language and they didn't speak English. So anything that we got across was through hand gestures," she says. "But we can only guess that running across four Americans was probably a good opportunity for them.”
