Author Heather Hansman's previous books have explored the Rocky Mountain West through the stories of rivers and ski towns. In Downriver: Into the Future of Water in the West, she examined the region's water challenges through the story of a rafting trip down the Green River. In Powder Days, she took a close look at ski towns and ski culture.
Now, the journalist and former river guide turns to history. In her latest book, Fierce Country: The Untold Story of Three Women Who Ignited America's Love for the Wild, Hansman tells the stories of three women whose lives helped shape the Rocky Mountain West and America's conservation movement.
Hansman spoke with Rocky Mountain Community Radio Managing Editor Maeve Conran about the book, the women at its center and why their stories matter today.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Maeve Conran: Let's start with Dolores LaChapelle, because she was a powder skier. You wrote about her in your previous book, “Powder Days.” Tell us about Dolores.
Heather Hansman: So, I knew Dolores. She was one of these early days big mountain powder skiers. She was around the beginning of when Aspen was just starting, when Alta was just starting, and she wrote this book called “Deep Powder Snow,” which is this cult classic amongst skiers. It's this little tiny book, probably three by five or something, and you can't find it anymore. You have to look deep in the bowels of eBay. And so I had thought of her as this skiing guru, but it turns out that for her, skiing was a way to understand philosophy.
She was a big deal in this movement that's called deep ecology, which is a big part of foundations of environmental philosophy. She had been one of the early thinkers in this movement, her writings shaped a lot of the radical environmental movement of the '70s, and are still showing up in our most modern conversations about how to take care of ecosystems. Ideas like should rivers have rights. So her thoughts were really progressive and ahead of time, but she'd been niched into this narrow space where people would listen to her voice.
Conran: So what reaction did people have to her back then? Because you said she was put into this very narrow space, but she had very progressive ideas for back then, so what reaction was she actually getting when she was talking about all of this?
Hansman: I think she was not taken seriously or brushed aside. She was really frustrated, I think, that the men she was in conversation with and going over ideas with, their ideas became pretty widespread and hers didn't. And so I think there was a pretty clear marker for how she wasn't being taken seriously, and the same was true of all these other women.
Anne (LaBastille), who had been a guide but was also an ecologist, was one of the first women to teach in the Environmental Studies Department at Cornell. But when she was publishing, she found that oftentimes her papers wouldn't get accepted, and she ran an experiment where she submitted papers under the name A. LaBastille instead of Anne LaBastille, and those papers got accepted.
So there are some pretty clear break points for how these women's work didn't get pushed out into the broader world.
Conran: Okay, let's talk a little bit more then about Anne LaBastille. She was a wilderness guide. She was pioneering, and she was really, many decades ago, paying attention to what was happening with climate change, and she was in this off-grid cabin in the Adirondacks. So what was she talking about long before other people were?
Hansman: I first found Anne because I loved that idea of being off the grid in the cabin, I think I have these fantasies about what that might be like. But from her cabin in the woods, she was monitoring early air pollution and water pollution. She was one of the first people to really track acid rain pollution, which led to the passing of the Clean Air Act.
Because she lived out in this place where she was really paying attention, and as a scientist, tracking data and running experiments and following how things were changing, she had a pretty clear data set for how the lake that she lived on was changing, how temperatures were changing. So she was really early to this kind of movement to track climate.
Conran: So the third woman that you talk about in your book is Georgie White. You mentioned that she was a river guide through the Grand Canyon, but back in the 1940s when she was doing that, not very many people had actually even gone through the Grand Canyon on a boat. So tell us about Georgie White.
Hansman: Georgie White is really, for me, she's the epitome of pegging your life around a landscape that you love and adventure. And as you mentioned, Georgie was one of the first documented white American people to run the Grand Canyon in boats, and she was also one of the first people to guide it commercially. She was the first woman to do it, and the only woman down there for decades.
So she came to the canyon, and she actually swam through the Grand Canyon before she rafted it, which is totally bananas. And it was before the Glen Canyon Dam had gone in, in the spring, so the water was huge. But she came down and immersed herself in this landscape and fell in love with it and then wanted to get down there as much as possible, and then wanted to bring other people down, both so she had a reason to get down there and so she could show this place that she loved to as many people as possible.
So she really spearheaded the guiding industry there and how people see places like that. She was really paying attention to that landscape. She saw how much things changed when the dam went in. She was really cognizant of how much this place that she loved was changing.
Conran: This book is coming out during the year that America's celebrating its 250th anniversary, and there's so much storytelling that's going on about what this country is and what the history is.
Now, at the same time, we have this whole political climate where stories are actually being actively erased. We're seeing this in our national park system, and in stories of indigenous people, stories of women, stories of people who are not white men, essentially. What are your thoughts about publishing this book against that whole backdrop?
Hansman: It feels really important to make sure this is recorded and make sure these stories don't disappear from the record. These women have all passed away. Many of the people who knew them have also passed away, so it felt like I hit it at a tipping point where I can still talk to people who knew them and grasp that.
I thought a lot in writing this book about how things might have been different for me if I had heard stories earlier of women who were in these spaces or had models for what my work and my life could have been like. So I think that to me feels really important, to add to those stories and correct the record a little bit, and to show that these people were there, they were just as valid. And I think this is true of so many people whose stories have been erased out of kind of the clean, slim narrative of what American history can be.
And I think we're all missing out on that. It's not just people who might identify with how those people look. I think history is so much richer if we have all these different strands braided together.
Conran: Heather Hansman's new book is Fierce Country: The Untold Story of Three Women Who Ignited America's Love for the Wild.
Heather, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today.
Hansman: Oh, thanks so much for chatting with me. It's so nice.
Heather Hansman will be speaking about Fierce Country at Explore Books in Aspen on August 12, 2026.
Copyright 2026 Rocky Mountain Community Radio. This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including Aspen Public Radio.
