When she couldn't find hiking boots that fit, Laura White Brunner
explored Yosemite backcountry barefoot, and at times alone, in an
era when grizzly bears still roamed the park. When told she
couldn't hike in pants, she pinned up her skirt. Brunner showed
admirable pluck, but, more remarkably, she did it as a teenager in
the 1910s-and she wrote it all down. Her memoir, recovered from the
Yosemite archives and published here for the first time, recounts
two summers spent working and hiking in Yosemite Valley during a
time of great change-in the park and in the world beyond. In
captivating prose Brunner describes her unlikely adventures in the
summers of 1915 and 1917, as well as what she calls "the interlude"
between them. Sometimes funny, sometimes painful, always engaging,
her account captures the "trails" and tribulations of a young woman
coming of age in America's most beautiful national park. Lightly
edited and put into biographical, geographical, and historical
context by Jared N. Champion, the book is also illustrated with
historic photographs, many taken by Brunner herself. It provides an
indelible picture of a bygone time, of awakening young womanhood in
a pristine natural world just opening to tourism on a grand scale.
Late in life, Laura White Brunner (1899-1973) told a reporter that
she had always wanted to be a national park ranger, but, sadly, was
"born too soon." Nonetheless she made Yosemite her own-in her
hiking, photographs, and memoir, but also in a practical sense,
when her ascent of Half Dome by the "Clothes-Line Rope" inspired
the park administration, who feared more women might summit the
monolith, to install the iconic "Cables on Half Dome" route that
remains in place today. Brunner went on to a career in journalism
and though she tried for decades to publish her memoir, this is its
first appearance in print.
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