The first summit team, comprising Vera Komarkova and Irene Miller (now Beardsley) and Sherpas Mingma Tsering and Chewang Ringjing, reached the top at 3:30 p.m. on October 15, 1978.

She then made what she called the "Great Himalayan Traverse", a two-thousand-mile journey adjacent to beautiful peaks of the Himalayas from Bhutan to India with treker Hugh Swift.

[9] As a graduate student at UC Berkeley, Blum predicted the correct three-dimensional structure for transfer RNA, an essential building block in all organisms, by stringing hippie beads for the nine known tRNA sequences in four colors to represent the four nucleic acid bases, pairing the bases, and folding them into a logical structure.

[10] While a post doc in the Stanford biochemistry department, she discovered the first physical evidence for intermediate states in the folding of protein molecules[11] doing "temperature jump NMR," a technique she imagined while watching water melting from a glacier in Central Asia.

Her Stanford advisor, Robert Baldwin, stated in his oral history[12] that this work was a first step towards solving the problem of the mechanism of protein folding.

Blum's research with biochemist Bruce Ames at the UC Berkeley found that the flame retardant called Tris, used at high levels in most children's pajamas in the middle of the 1970s, was a mutagen and likely carcinogen.

[14] After a 26-year long hiatus, Blum returned to science and policy work in 2006—when her daughter started college—and her memoir Breaking Trail: A Climbing Life [15] was published.

[3] Blum and her team collaborate with scientists on policy-relevant research projects and translate scientific information to educate decision makers, the press, and the public.

Her award-winning memoir, Breaking Trail: A Climbing Life tells the story of how Blum realized improbable dreams among the world's highest mountains, in the chemistry laboratory, and in public policy.

She holds a Gold Medal from the Society of Woman Geographers,[24] an honor previously given to only eight other women including Amelia Earhart, Margaret Mead, and Mary Leakey.

"[26] In 2014 she was inducted into the Alameda County Women's Hall of Fame for Science, Engineering and Technology and received the Benjamin Ide Wheeler Medal as the city of Berkeley's "most useful citizen.