When I worked at Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska, my colleagues and I spoke daily of John Muir. Often called the father of US national parks, Muir is famed for his plant knowledge, his passion for the wild places of America, his writing, and his conversations with great men of the day, like President Theodore Roosevelt, which led to the founding of some of America’s earliest parks.
Muir is less well-known as an Alaskan explorer, but explore there he did. He traveled to Glacier Bay with a scientific expedition in 1879, where he marveled at the bay’s massive glaciers, one of which was named for him.
He wrote about his Alaskan adventures, including in a piece where he declared himself the discoverer of Glacier Bay. (Though it was local Tlingit guides–very familiar with the area–who showed it to him.)
“John Muir helped found our park!” is a thing I told countless Glacier Bay visitors. We were proud to tell people that the park was enshrined in National Park Service lore by the Park-Father himself.
But what I never spoke of while working there, mostly because I knew almost nothing about it, was a glacier tucked away in a hidden inlet. Both inlet and glacier are named for a woman maybe just as influential in the founding of the park as Muir, though unlike Muir, today her story is rarely mentioned.
The stories of women and their influence on history are often overlooked; this trend is the same in the history of US conservation. But whether they are lauded today or not, women have shaped the history of parks around the world and how we relate to our environment.
Women like Harriet Tubman–conductor on the Underground Railroad–mastered the wilderness. The safest time for slave escapes to the north was winter, ideally during a storm, when slave-hunters were less likely to venture out.
Tubman led her often underclad and underfed charges through icy rivers and streams to avoid leaving tracks in snow. She navigated the wilderness under cloudy skies. And she never lost a soul.
Tubman, over Muir or the other famous outdoorsmen, is my pick for greatest outdoorsperson of the modern era. She proved that women belonged outside. Today she, like Muir, has national parks named in her honor, but she, unlike Muir and other male naturalists, is rarely remembered for her mastery of nature.
And then there are the women who advocated for the protection of their environment. The Mothers of East LA, a collection of women in the 1980s who organized to prevent a prison from being built in their community and then took on environmental threats, like a proposed toxic waste incinerator and an oil pipeline.
There are the women who have fought for the protection of natural spaces, like Lucille Vinyard, known as the Mother of the Redwoods. She and other women like her used their collective voices to protect countless places, species, and ecosystems around the world.
There are the women who have worked in parks and public lands, doing the hard work to care for precious places, women like Una Lee Roberts, the first woman to ever be superintendent of a US national park.
Women who came before us, most of them forgotten, fought so that we could live in healthy environments and have public parks where women are free to recreate and even build careers.
I–a woman who worked in national parks–think a lot about their legacy. A legacy I am still learning. Like that of Eliza Scidmoore (pronounced Sid-moor), who traveled to Glacier Bay like Muir and was a writer and traveler like me.
Eliza Scidmoore first ventured to Alaska in 1883, just a few years after Muir. She published articles about her time there and wrote the first complete guidebook about Alaska, with descriptions of the region’s people and customs.
Years before the gold rushes that would drive settlers into the region, Scidmoore’s writing embedded the myth of Alaska–its wild beauty, cold, and culture–into the American consciousness.
Her Alaskan adventures were the part of her story that would impact my life (since her descriptions of Glacier Bay are part of why it became a national park), but they were by no means the end of her story.
Working for the National Geographic Society, Scidmoore became the institution’s first woman journalist, photographer, board member, associate editor, and overseas ambassador. A travel influencer a hundred years before Instagram was even an idea, Scidmoore got paid to travel the world and write about it.
Today Scidmoore’s most well-known legacy (though still not known enough) is the cherry blossoms in Washington DC. Having fallen in love with the trees while in Japan, Scidmoore came up with the idea that they should be planted in the US capital. She fought for almost 25 years to see them take root, and now those trees are one of the biggest attractions in the city.
There are many women like Scidmoore, who’s stories and impact are overlooked in history. I see in her a fellow nomad and writer who was also a woman like me, and I find her inspiring. But even I–once a ranger in a park that bears her name–hadn’t heard her story until recently.
How many more stories are there of women who could inspire the women of today if history hadn’t forgotten them?
Perhaps there is someone of your gender or your race or your ethnicity or your sexual-orientation or who is like you in the ways that matter who went out and did the things that you want to do before you. Perhaps you are not alone. You just need to learn their story.
And if they don’t exist, if you are the first of your kind, then make sure to share your own story. So that someday someone can be inspired by you.
Read more about how women shaped our environment and women’s contributions to US national parks.