"Midlife crisis is something I highly recommend," says Laura Willumsen, whose own crisis took her to the top of Mt. Shuksan in Washington's Cascade Mountains in 2004. Click photo for larger image.

Nine thousand feet up in the Cascade Mountains, Laura Willumsen dangled from a rope next to a sheer wall of rock. Six hundred feet above was the summit; below was nothing but air.

The 49-year-old suburban wife, mother and marketing director for the Pittsburgh Opera had never been fond of heights. Yet there she was, defying gravity with a 50-pound pack on her back.

At that moment she looked around and wondered: "What am I doing?!" But only for an instant, until the answer she already knew rushed to the fore. She was savoring the fruits of her midlife crisis.

The convulsion was touched off three years earlier when she was fired from her job as executive director of the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.

"I was let go in a very public and humiliating way," Willumsen recalled. "Suddenly 90 percent of my identity was gone. At the same time, my older son was off to college and the younger one was getting closer to that age. I realized I had to have something that couldn't be removed from the outside."

Forced to figure out what would happen next, she set out on the path that led to the mountaintop.

"It was scary, but it was also a gift," she said. "Midlife crisis is something I highly recommend."

The journey, as it happens, is one she shares with a growing number of American women who are remaking their lives in a way, and at an age, that their grandmothers could have scarcely imagined.

The details are legion, but the templates are pretty much the same: settled woman in her middle years, operating largely on automatic pilot, realizes she is discontented. She yearns for something different -- more adventure or fulfillment, more intimacy or independence -- and resolves to do something about it before it's too late.

It might mean changing careers, leaving her marriage, going back to school, starting a novel or spiritual quest, opening a business, taking up extreme sports or joining the Peace Corps.

The triggers tend to involve some combination of family (death, divorce, empty nest), work (layoff, burnout, boredom) and a dawning sense of mortality. The path may lead to moderate adjustment, wondrous rebirth or unmitigated disaster. But whatever the outcome, the urge to change and, more significantly, the ability to act on the urge, are redefining the concept of middle age for many American women.

The phenomenon is captured by Sue Shellenbarger in her book, "The Breaking Point: How Female Midlife Crisis Is Transforming Today's Women."

The author, who is the work and family columnist of the Wall Street Journal, plunged into her own "dark comedy" after her father died and her 20-year marriage ended. Soon she was careening down wilderness trails on an all-terrain vehicle and landing in the hospital with a broken collarbone. Her columns about the experience struck a chord with readers and launched the book about a subject she calls "the upheaval that has no name."

Sue Shellenbarger Click photo for larger image.

Shellenbarger marshals evidence of a seismic shift in women's views of midlife. And with more than 40 million American women between the ages of 40 and 60, that's a powerful lot of shifting. Among her points:

Some 15 million baby boom-era women report having a midlife crisis, vs. fewer than 14 million men.

The change has little to do with "the change" -- fewer than 1 percent of women attribute their turmoil to menopause.

Today's middle-aged women have, on average, another 30 years ahead of them. More than 60 percent feel younger than they are by an average of seven years. Many are in better shape than previous generations were at that age, and their desire to affirm their attractiveness is, in the author's word, "epidemic." They are also far more optimistic than men about remaining vigorous as they age.

Stress is a major factor -- a third more middle-aged women than in the previous generation say life is too complicated, and employed mothers report having half as much time for themselves as their own mothers did.

Education and financial wherewithal play a big roll. Women today earn 58 percent of all college degrees; women's earnings have risen 17 percent in the past 15 years while men's have fallen slightly; nearly a third of wives now out-earn their husbands; and the proportion of women earning more than $100,000 tripled in the past decade.

"In a sense, women are having midlife crises now because they can," writes Shellenbarger. And when they do, she says, they tend to fall into archetypes: adventurer, lover, leader, artist, gardener, seeker.

Not all the crises turn out for the better, she notes. Some women take ruinous leaps that leave them more regretful than reborn. But many are able to navigate change in a positive, hopeful way.

Willumsen, for example, fit the "adventurer" category. So, it turned out, did her next-door neighbor in Upper St. Clair -- who, like Willumsen, at first thought she might be losing her mind. Susan Roberts, a lawyer, wife and mother of two, had taken up sky diving and now considers herself hooked. Mountain climbing is next on her list.

Both say their husbands are handling the changes pretty well -- "He's humoring me," said Roberts -- but neither woman may have realized how much midlife crisis company she has in her own hometown.

In Squirrel Hill, psychologist Stacey Wettstein, a married mother of two teens, is about to open the shop she's wanted since she was 5 years old. Her decision was prompted by tragedies close to home.

"Three or four people I knew in seemingly great health died out of the clear blue," Wettstein said. "I thought, if I'm going to do this, it should be now because you never know how long you have."

Not wanting to give up her practice, she hired a manager for her knitting shop, Knit One, scheduled to open on Murray Avenue later this month, and plans to spend her off-hours there.

Cheryl Weissberg of Shadyside already has a shop, Cheryl W. on Forbes Avenue, but left it in the hands of trusted employees so she could move to Rome for two years with the man she's been living with since 2003.

Twice divorced and with two grown daughters, Weissberg, 51, said she's always looked for adventure. But now, with her daughters settled in Colorado, the timing was right to jump. Living in Italy, she said via phone from her penthouse apartment, "is the ice cream on the cake."

"I'm in my dining room overlooking the entire city, with a view that goes on for miles, having dinner with friends visiting from Ireland, and I cannot believe this is actually my life," Weissberg said.

Eva Kaplan of East Liberty grabbed an early retirement offer from Verizon, went to graduate school for elementary education and will begin student teaching at Linden Academy this fall.

"It was either that or stand-up comedy, which didn't seem quite as realistic," said Kaplan, who had been a mid-level executive. "I've had a pretty good life. This was an opportunity to put something back into the community. I realized if I didn't take it, I'd regret it later."

At 49, Alice Leich of Ben Avon quit her lucrative but stressful engineering job to attend culinary school. Now 55, she's a pastry chef who describes herself as "much happier," despite the drop in income.

"I spent five years thinking about this," Leich said. "The economics were difficult, and the idea of becoming a beginner again. But not having a family made it much easier. I didn't have to worry about supporting anyone else."

Preceding them all on this path was Mary Parks, who 15 years ago quit her job as a TV news reporter in Johnstown to become a nun. At age 35, she was on the young edge of midlife. Now 50 and a Sister of St. Joseph, she's executive director of Girls Hope, working with at-risk adolescents who have college potential.

"Midlife crisis is one name for the realization we'd all better come to that we only have so much time, and what are we doing with it?" said Parks. "Some face that question and can't stand it so they run away, buy a car, wreck their home life or do something destructive. But you can also do something productive."

Of course, not everyone who'd like to have a midlife crisis is in a position to do so. Plenty of women have too few financial resources, too much fear of the unknown or too many people depending on them.

Valire Copeland, a University of Pittsburgh professor of social work, fits the last description. She's at the right age but the wrong stage -- 50 years old, divorced and the mother of 11-year-old twins.

"I'd like to leave Pittsburgh, develop a private practice and find something else to do with the rest of my life," said Copeland of Highland Park. "But I can't make any major changes right now. My children are entering middle school. I can't sacrifice their need for a relationship with their father. So instead I'm focusing on my current research and teaching."

She's also working on staying healthy and getting back into the dating game.

"I need to take care of myself so I can see them finish high school and, if I'm lucky, college. At the same time, I'm trying to figure out what the next 30 years will be like. A lot of single professional women find it difficult to have a meaningful social life here. This is a family town, and if you're not married, it's hard."

Those who feel able to remake their lives in some fashion say the turbulence is often worth it.

Willumsen said her job loss drove her to reconnect with the interests of her youth. Both her college degrees were in violin, and she began playing again. She meditated every day, went back to vegetarianism, started running, trained for a marathon.

With her sons turning 16 and 21, she signed the three of them up for that glacier mountaineering trip and spent the next six months preparing with rock climbing, weight training and endurance work.

The two-week trip involved the three family members and a guide who became a spiritual mentor. "He was so in tune with nature and wise beyond his years," she said. "I felt I was undergoing a conversion experience."

More weight training and two more mountain climbing trips have followed. In March, Willumsen competed in the Arnold Classic in Columbus, Ohio, billed as the second-largest bodybuilding event in the world, and finished 57th out of 100 women in her event. Now she's training for the Chicago Triathlon on Aug. 26 and signing up sponsors to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

She's also looking forward to turning 50, for a reason she never would have imagined: "It will put me into a new level of competition where I'll have an advantage," she said. "For the first time, I saw age as an opportunity.

"If I hadn't lost my job, I could have spent the rest of my life at high speed, never looking for a way to rediscover challenges or ask more significant questions that require deeper answers. I would have missed out on a lot."

Not the least of which is her son's new name for his mother.

"He calls me 'Momzilla,' " she said, looking somewhat amazed. "I like that."