BAKER CITY — Lisa Jo Frech has swum with dolphins, climbed to the top of Oregon and paddled a kayak through Washington’s San Juan Islands.

And that’s just a smattering of her outdoor adventures over more than half a century.

Frech had written about those and dozens of other experiences in a journal she started when she was 13.

But she had never compiled any of those descriptions into a book.

Until this year.

In September, Frech, who lives near Medical Springs in southern Union County, self-published “The Pearly Gates, Before & After: 42 Brief Escapes.”

The 230-page book, which is available on Amazon and at the Baker City and soon the La Grande public libraries, features a sampling of short essays chronicling some of Frech’s favorite visits to mountains, forests, oceans and other places where civilization gives way to nature.

Frech, 67, credits her mother, who was a journalist, with encouraging her to write her thoughts lest they fade into fuzzy fragments of memory.

“She cared a lot about words and writing,” Frech said of her mother.

Frech’s affinity for the outdoors started even before she jotted the first words in her journal, though.

She grew up with five brothers on a rural property at the base of a small mountain in Pennsylvania.

This modest eminence, in a bit of geographic foreshadowing considering where Frech lives now, is called Blue Mountain.

The Appalachian Trail, the first of America’s great long-distance hiking paths, meanders across Blue Mountain.

The mountain, Frech said, was “our playground.”

“We were just wild kids on the mountain and in the woods,” she said. “Lots of exploration and adventure. It was an inspiring and magical way to grow up.”

Coming to Oregon

Frech worked for 35 years to promote environmental issues, in particular preserving wild places.

She first visited Oregon in the late 1970s when her brother, Kevin John Frech, bought a 16-acre property along Big Creek, a tributary of the Powder River that starts in the Wallowa Mountains east of Medical Springs.

“He was very happy,” she said. “It is a healing place.”

Frech was living in Maryland, on the Chesapeake Bay, when she decided to move to Oregon in 2001.

“I wish I’d come sooner,” she said.

Frech said she waited to leave the East Coast because she wanted to make sure that a nonprofit environmental protection consortium she had started was on a solid footing.

In Oregon she lived on Chehalem Mountain near Hillsboro. She worked on a Christmas tree farm.

And, just as she had done as a child, she explored.

Frech climbed several Cascade volcanoes, including Mount Adams and Mount St. Helens in Washington, and the South Sister and Mount Hood in Oregon.

The latter, at 11,249 feet, is Oregon’s highest peak.

The mountain gave Frech one of the stories in her book as well as its title.

The Pearly Gates is the name climbers affixed to a rock and ice formation near the summit that mountaineers pass through on the most popular route to the top, on Hood’s south flank.

Frech reached the summit on her second attempt, about a year after moving to Oregon.

She had to navigate “styrofoam snow” — a climbers’ term for unconsolidated, grainy snow that can easily slide.

Frech called the climb “a turning point in my life.”

In “The Pearly Gates” she writes of other trips that were similarly meaningful.

“When you climb a snow-capped peak, or snorkel in foreign waters, or hike across a state line, you’re changed by that,” she said.

Among the adventures Frech writes about are riding a train in Yugoslavia, sailing in the Grenadines in the Caribbean, riding her bike in the Columbia River Gorge and various skiing trips, both downhill and cross-country.

Frech also writes about her introduction to fly fishing, as well as what she calls a “pilgrimage” — a return to her childhood home in November 2000.

“Very, very emotional,” she said.

Settling on Big Creek

Frech bought the 16-acre property where her brother lived about five years ago.

After Kevin died, she decided she “couldn’t bear to let this property go.”

Frech said her home, the last before the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest boundary, is a sanctuary.

“I like that it’s quiet,” she said. “I’ve had wolves, cougars, elk and bear on my property, all within the first year. It is a very special piece of property.”

Having recently retired, Frech has more time to fill the pages of her journal with new adventures.

She enjoys hiking and riding her bicycle in the nearby national forest.

But her favorite place in the area — other than her own property, with its basalt cliffs and Big Creek flowing through — is the Eagle Cap Wilderness.

It’s Oregon’s biggest federal wilderness, at 360,000 acres, and it starts just several miles from Frech’s home.

“I’m really in love with the Eagle Cap Wilderness,” she said. “I’m a big fan of true wilderness and the Eagle Cap is truly magnificent.”

Another book?

Although “The Pearly Gates” is the first book Frech has published, it’s not the first she’s authored.

A year or so after she moved to Oregon, Frech decided to hike the whole of the Pacific Crest Trail in Oregon and Washington, a span of about 1,000 miles. The trail, known as the PCT, is the younger, but longer, counterpart to the Appalachian Trail that Frech hiked as a youngster in Pennsylvania. The PCT runs from the Mexican border to the Canadian, following the mountainous spines of California, Oregon and Washington, including the Sierra and Cascade mountain ranges.

Frech finished her “section hike” of the Oregon and Washington sections of the PCT in 11 years.

(A section hike is distinct from a “thru hike,” the latter being an attempt to hike an entire trail in a single year.)

She wrote a book about her experiences on the PCT but couldn’t arrange a publishing deal.

Then, after moving to Big Creek, she got to thinking about the hundreds of pages of journal entries, dating back to her first year as a teenager.

“I’ve got all these stories,” Frech said. “Why not put them in a book?”

“The Pearly Gates” is just a small selection of those stories, she said — the ones that had a particularly powerful effect on her life.

Perhaps her favorite involves dolphins.

Frech was living in Virginia, near the Atlantic coast, and one day she went to a beach that was otherwise empty.

She saw a pod of dolphins swimming offshore.

She swam through the breakers and into the calmer water beyond. Suddenly she was in the midst of the sleek, graceful dolphins.

She touched one, felt the rough barnacles on its skin and looked into its eyes.

“It was just incredible,” Frech said. “That one was the most intimate experience.”

“When you climb a snow-capped peak, or snorkel in foreign waters, or hike across a state line, you’re changed by that.”

— Lisa Jo Frech, author of “The Pearly Gates,” a chronicle of some of her favorite outdoor adventures