In 'Fierce Country,' author finds role models in 3 complicated women who loved the wild outdoors

Heather Hansman has spent her career in the outdoors. Hansman spent years as a river guide and skier in Maine and then Colorado, living her life in the outdoors and loving it.

But, she never had a lot of women to look up to — heroines whose stories she could emulate in recreation and conservation. So, she found them — and wrote about their trailblazing stories. It’s called "Fierce Country; The Untold Story of Three Women Who Ignited America’s Love for the Wild," and The Show spoke with her more about it.

Full conversation

HEATHER HANSMAN: Being a river guide was really like my first real job. I started guiding when I was 18. I went to college in Maine and there’s some really great rivers there and I worked there. And then I actually moved West because of a guy that I river guided with who got me a job in the mountains of Colorado.

So those kind of — working on the river in the summer and then working on the ski mountain in the winter was sort of like my initial line into the outdoor world and the way that recreation and then kind of taking care of all these places really tangled together.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Yeah. OK, so in this book, which is your third, you are profiling three kind of trailblazing, no pun intended, women in the outdoors, right? You’ve got this Grand Canyon river runner, Georgie White; a powder skier, Dolores LaChapelle, which was very interesting; and also this ecologist and writer, Anne LaBastille.

I want to talk a little bit about how you chose these women and what you were drawn to about each of them.

HEATHER HANSMAN: In some ways, I think — and there are so many women that I think I could have written about or talked about. One of the gists of the story is that we don’t tell hero stories about women in the outdoor world and they kind of get left out of the narrative.

But these three women in particular kind of kept showing up in my life in ways that I didn’t even realize until after I’d kind of looked back on them. Dolores is in my last book, Georgie showed up in the research for my first book, which is about water in the West. So they’d been kind of like sitting below the surface in a lot of ways.

And then, you know, the book is about these women and they have these wild — they all have these totally wild adventure stories. Like, Georgie swam through the Grand Canyon before people were really rafting it. But they also have this kind of underlying line of taking care of the place.

You know, Anne LaBastille was — she was a mountain guide, she was kind of taking people into the wilderness in upstate New York, but she was also an ecologist. She was pretty pivotal in the Clean Air Act. She had this endangered bird that she kind of ran this whole campaign to protect. They were really dedicating their lives to being outside and the physical side of things, but they also had this kind of like deeper ethic of care. So taken together, their stories kind of gave me this complete picture.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. And as you say there, you probably could have chosen a lot of women whose stories have not been told here.

I want to ask about the story of Georgie White in particular, since this is an Arizona story and she was in the Grand Canyon. And you, you know, probably felt a personal connection to this one, right? As someone who has done river rafting in the past. Tell us about her. Like, swimming through the Grand Canyon is a pretty wild thing to do, and I’m sure back then it was as well.

HEATHER HANSMAN: I had heard about Georgie, you know, since I started guiding in Maine before I moved West. But even there, the Grand Canyon has this like mystique. You know, that’s like the place where it’s like the biggest, longest trip, the biggest water. So I kind of was hearing Grand Canyon stories from the get-go, and Georgie’s story kind of came up in that, but it was always as a novelty. Like, she had this larger-than-life persona. She was known — she always wore leopard print, she only hired, you know, hot firefighters as her guides. Like, she had this kind of like novelty things that she did.

So I kind of had heard that, and then as I started thinking about it more, and also, you know, one of the other underlying questions of this book was like, why didn’t I have heroes and role models and who could those people have been?

And so I started really looking more into Georgie, and she was kind of this big personality. She was pretty bullheaded, but she also, you know, had been one of the first people down there. She was the only woman guiding down there for decades. She had taken the most people through the canyon for a really long time. Like, she was running trips more than anyone else. She was really pivotal in kind of thinking about tourism and how we promote getting people into wild places.

I think because she — I mean, part of it was like, she just wanted to be down there as much as possible, and she figured out that if she guided people, she could go way more often. But she also really wanted to show people this place that she loved so that they could love it, too.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Yeah. I wonder, like, for all of these women, how radical was it for them to be in the outdoors in the way that they were, and like, how unheard of?

HEATHER HANSMAN: I mean, I think pretty dang unheard of. You know, the fact that Georgie was the only one down there for a long time working and guiding — and it’s not that there weren’t other people rafting or going on trips, but she was really the one — the only one running a business. And that feels pretty progressive to me.

And part of Anne LaBastille’s story is that she — she becomes a guide, and then she moved to this cabin in the woods and kind of like did all of her research there. She was like Thoreau, but actually living in the woods. And she — and that was like before women could get credit cards or, like, pay down a home loan living there by herself. So there’s all these sort of like micro-barriers that they were facing along the way.

One of the other really interesting strands of this for me was like how much of this stuff still exists and how — how different and not different are things now.

LAUREN GILGER: Have you experienced that in your own experience as a river guide and as a woman, you know, in this field?

HEATHER HANSMAN: Yeah. And there have been many — like, I was on staff at a magazine and I was — it was a skiing magazine, and I was the only woman on staff. And what stories I was handed and what I covered was specific because of that.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So I mean, doing this, like devoting this book to these three women who, you know, did it anyway, did you find yourself some role models, even if it’s a little later on?

HEATHER HANSMAN: Yes. And also, I think, you know, part of what was really interesting about this is that these women are all really complicated, too. Like, Georgie, for instance, was something of a pathological liar. So that made the reporting for this really interesting because I had to kind of go back and fact check all of it. And people told me she was really exclusive to other women. You know, there’s — there’s also some like bad behavior, too. Like, these weren’t uncomplicated people. That made them sort of more interesting and more relatable in a lot of ways to me.

I think so often it’s easy to like put a hero up on a pedestal and never want to hear about why they’re not great. And I think we’ve in the outdoor world, we’ve done that for a long time, and that’s sort of crumbled in the past, you know, 10 years or so since the #MeToo movement. Like we now know that somebody like John Muir wasn’t perfect.

But I think like I’m really inspired by these people, and I also am kind of like — I feel like they have given me — they’ve shown me like the pieces of how I want to build a life outside.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. All right. Heather Hansman, freelance writer, author of the new book “Fierce Country: The Untold Story of Three Women Who Ignited America’s Love for the Wild.” Heather, thank you very much for coming on The Show. Thank you for telling us about yourself and about the book.

HEATHER HANSMAN: Oh, thanks. It was so fun to talk to you.

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