The Last Climb by Shannon Skaer
Imagine your living room starts shaking.
Not like it would in an earthquake. It’s a tremble, more than a shake, a movement so gentle that you don’t recall when it began. But it’s certainly not your imagination—the dog whines and attempts to crawl under the sofa, even though he hasn’t fit under there for five years. The smell of dust fills the air as books and houseplants begin to vibrate.
You step out the door, and that’s when you hear a low, angry roar in the distance. As you try to figure out what to do, minutes pass, and the shaking and noise get worse—slightly. Over fifteen minutes pass, and then twenty. The sense of urgency begins to fade. And that’s when disaster hits.
The scenario above isn’t fantasy; it’s history—all except the houseplants and sofa. Because this disaster happened, not in a modern suburban neighborhood, but during the Ice Age.
I grew up in the path of the Missoula Flood, an Ice Age disaster that spanned four states and changed the landscape where I live forever. It would have covered my childhood home in hundreds of feet of water, and even if I began running as soon as the earth began shaking, I wouldn’t have made it to high ground in time. That’s not a commentary on my fitness level; the wave was 400 ft tall in places and reached speeds of over 60 mph.
That’s four times the highest wave we saw in Tibet and Nepal on August 26th, 2026.
If you were the size of a LEGO minifigure, the wave would be higher than a standard 8 ft ceiling.
I wrote The Last Climb with the help of multiple geologists, fact-checking as many details as possible, because I wanted to come as close as I could to experiencing this cataclysm myself—without actually getting wet.
If you’re keen on ancient history, you should check it out! You can find a free copy at the link below.
Download a free digital copy at https://shannonskaer.com/freebook/
Or check out the paperback on Amazon https://a.co/d/0stlITe
About Shannon
Shannon is a homeschool mom and ancient history science nerd. She lives in a small logging town in Oregon with her very own hero and their ten children.
Her life could best be described as a love affair with beauty, which explains the number of babies, and her greatest joy is to know God, from whom all beauty comes.
In 2026, Shannon won the Aurora Award for Science Fiction and the ACFW Genesis Award for Historical Fiction. In 2025, she won the Vision Christian Writers Most Promising Writer award and semi-finaled in ACFW’s Genesis award. She has also been longlisted in History through Fiction.
Shannon is represented by Bob Hostetler of the Steve Laube Agency.
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