Scaling new heights
Three miles high on the West Buttress of North America’s tallest mountain, Heather Thamm and Betsy Young are the shining faces of the new feminism. The recent graduates from Alaska Pacific University don’t make a big deal about what women can do or what men might say women shouldn’t do. They simply embrace the freedom to follow their dreams.
You’ve seen the bumper sticker: “Alaska girls kick ass.”
The 24-year-old Thamm and 26-year-old Young are the reality.
“I pretty much wanted to come to Alaska right out of high school,” said Thamm, who grew up in the Inland Northwest and attended Lake City High School in Coeur d’Alene. “When I was little, I read a lot of books like ‘White Fang.’ ”
Author Jack London lured the two young women north with the same tales of adventure that have seduced so many adventurous young men over the years. How far American women have come in breaking down gender roles today is evidenced by how closely the histories of Thamm and Young parallel those of so many young males.
London’s books and short stories led the two women to fall in love with the idea of Alaska. They came north looking for the challenge of America’s last remaining wilderness. They discovered London was really a Californian and became a little disillusioned about literature, but Alaska turned out to be everything of which they’d dreamed.
APU’s department of environmental sciences and outdoor studies hooked them up with adventure, and there’s been no looking back. They’re still not sure what they want to do with their lives in the long term. But they know that in the short term they enjoy the challenge of trudging toward the 20,320-foot summit of this mountain, overcoming the obstacles of howling windstorms and bitter cold, dodging potentially deadly crevasses, dancing along in cramponed feet over blue ice above precipitous drops.
Climbing McKinley was an idea that arose during the long Alaska winter when Thamm was enjoying her first stint on the ski patrol at Alyeska Resort in Girdwood and Young was working for the Anchorage School District.
Early in May, they packed their climbing gear, caught a Bush plane out of Talkeetna, landed at the Kahiltna Glacier base camp and started hauling a month’s worth of supplies up the mountain. They took plenty of food, plenty of fuel for melting snow for water, and plenty of willingness to wait out the inevitable storms for a chance at the summit.
“We’re just kind of playing it day by day,” Young said as the duo rested in a camp near the base of a long slope called Ski Hill. Just a little farther along the trail up the West Buttress was the apex of masculinity — the camp of a party of pararescue jumpers from Kulis Air National Guard Base.
By law, the combat-trained PJs are part of one of the U.S. military’s male-only units. But the men who make their living jumping into danger to rescue others had nothing but praise for the performance of Thamm and Young.
“They’re doing it right,” said PJ Dave Schuman, who noted the safety-conscious glacier travel techniques employed by Young and Thamm, along with the seeming ease with which they rolled with the punches delivered by the mountain’s notorious weather.
No matter how inhospitable the mountain’s environment, they appeared comfortable in it. Likewise for Evie Marcolini, a Maine doctor who shared the thirst for adventure of the two younger women. Marcolini, however, was old enough to remember when running off to the mountains was the sort of thing women just didn’t do.
She grew up in the Midwest. Went to college in the 1980s. Got a degree in economics. Took a job in a bank. And found it all stifling.
“I was totally bored with banking,” she said.
On a whim, she took an adventure course from Outward Bound. She became an Outward Bound instructor, married another Outward Bound employee, Paul, and led adventures until deciding to go back to medical school and become a doctor.
She was on the mountain in May with Paul and George Armstrong, the East Coast leader of Outward Bound, who could recall how that fabled outdoor-adventure organization started as a program for men and continued that way for a decade.
“They just sort of figured women didn’t want to do this stuff,” Armstrong said. All of that started to change in the 1970s, he added, and has been changing ever since.
The story seems the same everywhere. In May on the West Buttress route up this mountain, there were dozens of women climbers, although overall, women make up only about 10 percent of McKinley mountaineers every season, Denali National Park and Preserve climbing ranger Meg Perdue said.
But there is more evidence of change.
For the first time last year, the Canadian Outdoor Market Report concluded, the number of women involved in “athletic and traditional outdoor activities” in that country topped the number of men.
APU outdoor studies director David McGivern said he has been watching the same trend develop in Alaska for several years. McGivern is one of the instructors who taught Thamm and Young, and he says they are but the leading edge on a new wave of women heading into the outdoors.
“I think it’s been coming and building for a long time,” McGivern said. “We are seeing more women. In fact, for the last six years, (former director) Paul Twardock and I have made a huge effort to have a woman instructor on each of our instructor teams because we have women students enrolling in all of our field courses.”
McGivern believes a handful of pioneering women like Marcolini or Anchorage’s Dolly Lefever set the stage for growing numbers of younger women like Young and Thamm. The first women, he said, are now mentors and role models who have altered expectations.
Margaret Timmerman, who has taught at APU, said she recalls doing search-and-rescue classes in which all the students were men, but “the last couple it has been about 50-50.”
“I think the momentum in the outdoor field now is overwhelming,” McGivern said. “There’s an expectation that this is no longer a good-ol’-boy network. We feel an obligation to the women interested in our programs.
“And let’s face it. It’s been a long and uphill battle for women in the workplace in general and in this area in particular. I don’t think this is something that happened last weekend. This is something that has been building slowly and steadily over the last 30 years.”
Mountaineering Club of Alaska president Jayme Mack, another recent APU grad who is now working as the merchandise manager at Alaska Mountaineering & Hiking in Anchorage, credits the changes not only to pioneering women mountaineers but to steadily shifting societal views on women in athletics.
Thamm, for example, played volleyball at Lake City High.
Once expected to be prim and proper, women athletes have increasingly been celebrated for being sweaty and buff. Outdoor clothing manufacturers such as Patagonia now market heavily to women using catalogs stuffed with muscular females hanging off cliffs or paddling big water.
“Part of it’s the X-Games mentality,” Mack said. “There’s been an influx of women starting to step into the (mountaineering) club. I have some girlfriends who just went through instructor training” for the National Outdoor Leadership School.
Alaska has been a place where women challenged gender barriers largely by ignoring them. Barbara Washburn became the first woman to climb this mountain in 1947 because, she said in her memoirs, she wanted to spend time with husband Brad.
Libby Riddles became the first woman to win the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race back in 1985, because it was her turn to race the dog team she shared with then-partner Joe Garnie. Susan Butcher proceeded to win the next three Iditarods, and another in 1990, because there was nothing she enjoyed more than training dogs.
Now, women are doing anything and everything in the Alaska outdoors. McGivern confesses it no longer comes as a surprise to him when he runs into women who are technically better rock climbers.
“We’ve grown up professionally with this change,” he said. “We’re not surprised seeing women out there anymore.”
The war between the sexes might not have ended, officially, everywhere, but in the mountains of Alaska it certainly seems to have drawn to a close.