Attempts to summit Kilimanjaro by Europeans had begun in the 1860s, but it was one of the most treacherous of any climbs — even more so than today, when climate change has reduced the risk of sudden blizzards. When Benham set out, a passing unit of German soldiers warned her that the climb hadn’t been completed “by any Britisher, man or woman, and very seldom by anyone else,” wrote Ray J. Howgego, Benham’s biographer and the author of “Encyclopedia of Exploration 1850 to 1940: The Oceans, Islands & Polar Regions.”

Benham’s party later passed a heap of skeletons, and the porters turned back, fearing that the bones were a sign of “evil spirits,” Howgego wrote. Benham finished the climb on her own.

To her, the views from the summit had been worth the risk.

“My first feeling up there was that of being absolutely on top of the world,” she told The Daily Mail in Britain in 1928.

Benham’s thrill for climbing and enjoyment of the outdoors started at a young age.

Gertrude Emily Benham, or Truda for short, was born in July 1867 in the Marylebone section of London, the youngest of six children of Frederick and Emily Benham. Her father was an iron manufacturer.

Throughout her childhood she accompanied him on summer trips to the Alps. After roving the Swiss countryside and trekking up the Matterhorn, she was “bitten with a love of mountains,” she told Marjorie Hessell Tiltman, the author of “Women in Modern Adventure” (1938). It was a feeling that would stay with her for the rest of her life.