Georgie White, Anne LaBastille, and Dolores LaChapelle helped shape modern conservation, outdoor recreation, and America’s relationship with wild places. Yet their names remain largely unknown. In her latest book, Heather Hansman brings these overlooked pioneers back into the outdoor canon.
By Hannah Truby
"I don't want to do a girl book."
That was Heather Hansman's initial reaction when her editor first pitched the idea for Fierce Country.
The Durango-based writer had just published Powder Days, an exploration of ski culture, ski towns, and the future of the sport in a warming climate, and her editor pointed out that some of the book’s most compelling chapters centered on trailblazing outdoorswomen. Why not make them the focus of her next project?
She resisted, not because she lacked admiration for the women who had defied sexism to forge extraordinary lives (she very much did), but because she feared a story centered on gender would reduce them to a familiar trope: women overcoming barriers. Still, she began the research, and as she dug deeper, skepticism gave way to curiosity. The result, five years later, is an intimate portrait that restores three overlooked women to the outdoor canon and challenges us to reconsider whose stories have shaped the history of outdoor recreation.
Fierce Country: The Untold Story of Three Women Who Ignited America’s Outdoor Recreation follows the lives of three largely unknown outdoor icons: Georgie White, the first woman guide in the Grand Canyon and a pioneer who transformed commercial river travel through the canyon; Anne LaBastille, a trailblazing ecologist, conservationist, and author whose solitary life in the Adirondack wilderness redefined what was possible for women in the outdoors; and Dolores LaChapelle, the “Godmother of Powder Skiing,” whose groundbreaking writing and philosophy reshaped ski culture by connecting the pursuit of deep snow with ecology, spirituality, and a reverence for the natural world.
But Fierce Country is more than a historical portrait. Through the lives of these three women, Hansman explores larger questions about our relationship with wild places: Why do we seek them out? How we care for them? Whose stories become part of outdoor history?
“In some ways, this is stuff I've been thinking about since I was a teenager,” she said. “I went in looking for role models and I came out with a story about land use policy and philosophy and relationships and climate science and independence.”
With a healthy dose of wild first descents and big adventures, Fierce Country is ultimately a reflection on our relationship with wild places and how we choose to care for them. We talked to Hansman to ask deeper questions about the book and the women in it.
Hannah Truby: You went into this project looking for role models, but these women’s lives opened up much bigger questions about land, adventure, stewardship, and our relationship with wild places. When did you realize this was becoming something larger than a book about three individuals?
Heather Hansman: When I was thinking about the idea of heroes and role models, looking at somebody who was just straight adventure loses some of the depth for me. I wanted to look at that and then beyond. So part of it is these wild adventure stories. They had these crazy things happen to them, but there’s also a backbone of: What’s our responsibility now? Why do we care?
For someone like Georgie, who was driven by adrenaline, her story at first glance is all adventure. She was one of the first Grand Canyon guides—the only woman down there for decades—but part of what was so interesting to me was how totally obsessed with the canyon she was. Beyond the adventure, there was this real connection to place and sense of care that came through in her story. That question of why being outside is so important was one of the things I was trying to figure out too.
Anne was living off the grid as a mountain guide and was also doing all this conservation work, and to me, she’s the bridge between: Why do we get outside? Why is it so important? And how do we do it well? And Dolores, who was a pioneering backcountry skier, was also a philosopher thinking about the ethics of how it’s all connected and why we want to do it.
To me, their stories form this arc from straight adventure into the bigger questions: How do we care about it? Why is it important? Those stickier questions.
These women loved wild places, and each of them was a game changer in the outdoor world in her own way , but they didn’t all define that relationship the same way. As you spent time with their stories, did you find them in conversation—or even in conflict—with one another about what it means to love and protect a landscape?
It's funny. At my first book event somebody asked, "Do you think they would have been friends?" I was like, absolutely not. Not so much that their ethic for protecting places was different—although Georgie could be myopic about her particular place, and Anne could be really stubborn about wanting things the way she wanted them—but they were all really hardlined in their own ways. They could be hard on other women, too, and be really exclusive, which, I think, is partially because of the environment that they were working in. But, ultimately, they were moving in the same direction.
I appreciate that you don't shy away from these women's flaws or contradictions. Why was it important to paint a fuller picture, even if it was a complicated one?
It took me a while to get there because I had to fight with them in my own head to see the good parts sometimes. Part of this book is interrogating the idea of heroes and the people I looked up to in the outdoor world. A lot of those people were not perfect, but sometimes we hold people up on a pedestal and only tell the good parts. I think that's starting to fall apart a little bit. In the wake of #MeToo, there's been a lot of work looking at the ways some old heroes were racist or mistreated Indigenous people.
The idea that you only show the shiny sides of somebody and that makes them a hero is inherently flawed—and also kind of uninteresting. To make it a true story, and to show what they were up against and what they were working with, I had to show the ugly parts too. I'm not perfect. It feels more true.
These women were pivotal in shaping how we think about conservation and recreation, but their stories have largely gone untold. What happens to our understanding of history, outdoors or otherwise, when the people who shaped it are left out of the narrative?
I think the most important piece is that other people don't see themselves reflected. If you don't look like the one white dude whose story you're told, maybe you don't see a place for yourself.
We're at a time when the federal government is actively trying to erase pieces of history from national parks and places like that, so it feels really important to tell stories that are bigger than that, bring in different voices, and show how complicated it all was.
If these women had been recognized alongside names like John Muir or Edward Abbey, do you think our understanding of the American outdoors would look different today?
It's hard to crystal-ball it, but somebody like Dolores was a peer of Abbey's. They ran in the same circles. Abbey has been pivotal in my understanding of the desert, but he's the half-hearted environmentalist who's going to protect the recreation he wants to protect. His view is really narrow.
Those are things we're coming around to more now, but if she'd been taken as seriously in the ’70s as he was, we might have gotten there earlier. We might be thinking much more holistically about these landscapes.
What responsibilities come with telling someone else's story? Did you encounter any challenges or surprises in trying to portray these women as they really were?
I felt a pretty big responsibility to get it right. My background is in journalism, so usually I get to interview the people I'm writing about, but all these women are dead. So I had to rely on primary sources, things they'd written, which was hard because Georgie was known for not telling the truth—even her own writing had to be fact-checked. I also went to their places, tried to talk to the people who really knew them, and just really tried to get a sense of the texture of their lives before I wrote about them.
People also have really strong feelings about them. Even though they're dead, they've become immortalized in some ways, so if you shake that up, it can piss people off.
What do you think these women’s stories reveal about the questions we’re still wrestling with today?
We're still wrestling with the things they were wrestling with. Whether that's how we treat women in positions of power, how land management changes depending on who's in charge, or the debate between private and public lands. Going back and getting that context made me feel a little less crazy. It helped put what's happening now into perspective.
You said these women probably wouldn’t have been friends had they all met. So if Georgie, Anne, and Dolores all met around a campfire, what do you think they'd argue about?
There'd probably be some hard-man jockeying over who was the toughest. I think they could all be hard on other women because they felt like they had to protect their place. One of Dolores' friends told me she was way harder on women than men because she thought men were kind of disposable. As a woman, you had to really be up to snuff. I don’t know, maybe they'd connect over the things that annoyed them.
You spent years immersed in these women's lives. If you had to distill it down, what's one lesson or idea from each of them that you’ll carry with you?
The thing that stuck with me the most—and this is true of all of them—is that they all had these really core senses of what they thought was important. They didn't cave on that, even when people said they were crazy or it was unpopular. They knew what they wanted their lives to look like, and they fought for that, even when they were up against the federal government or people were threatening them. Especially when it comes to environmental protection, they were really convicted—and they ended up being on the right side of history. To me, there's something in that about knowing your gut and trusting it, even though it can be hard to do.
Anne LaBastille, photo courtesy of Heather Hansman.
Heather Hansman is an award-winning freelance writer and the author of “Powder Days: Ski Bums, Ski Towns and the Future of Chasing Snow” and “Downriver: Into the Future of Water in the West.” Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic and Outside, among others. She lives in Durango, Colorado, right by the river.
