In Breaking Rocks and Barriers, she narrates her many adventures as a geologist studying and doing fieldwork in remote areas around the world--from unexpected encounters with snakes in the Jaduguda mines of Bihar and trekking across a 'black glacier' in Norway to being engulfed by a thundercloud in Sweden and being greeted by a flock of penguins in Antarctica. In between are memorable mountaineering experiences, whether it is the first women's expedition to Ronti peak in the Himalayas in 1967 or the all-women expedition to an unexplored peak, which they were the first to climb and name.