Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Heather Hansman is a journalist and storyteller based in Durango, Colorado, about 30 minutes away from where I live in southwest Colorado. I’ve read and loved both of her previous books over the years, Downriver – about a trip down the Green River used to tell the story of water in the West, and Powder Days – about ski culture, ski towns and the future of the sport.
Heather and I met up at a local bookstore to have a conversation about her newest book, Fierce Country: The Untold Story of Three Women Who Ignited America’s Outdoor Recreation, out on July 14th.
The book, which I devoured before our conversation, details the complex lives of three women in the mid 20th century, all game changers in the outdoors in their own ways. Georgie White was one of the first women to raft the Grand Canyon and paved the way for the rubber boats and outfitters that take people down the river today. Anne LaBastille spent her life as a “hermit” and mountain guide in New York’s Adirondack mountains. And Dolores LaChapelle pioneered big mountain powder skiing and became a founding member of the deep ecology movement in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains (where Heather and I both live).
The whole book hit close to home for me in more ways than just location. I’ve covered women in the outdoor industry and recreation economies extensively since the very beginning of my journalism career. I had a great time chatting with Heather about nostalgia, heroes, and changing the world. Enjoy!
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Daily Yonder: Tell me about the time period that you wrote this book. How did you personally change through the process of getting to know these women?
Heather Hansman: I really started specifically focusing on this book in 2019 after Powder Days had come out. I think the core nugget of the [new] book is how to be a good person in the world, and who can we look at for pathways to follow. I kind of got hooked into this idea of heroes. These women became these archetypes, or channels for the things that I was trying to think about. Georgie is the “what do we do outside, why do we get obsessed? Why does that feel important?” Anne is the “how do you combine that stuff with caring about places and trying to make an impact?” and Dolores is the “why” behind it all, like what’s the like ethic of it all? The interesting thing about writing a book is you think it’s one story and then it becomes something totally different as you start to dig in. So, I think that question about how I changed is a really interesting one, because I think my perception of [these women] changed as I worked on it. They were all pretty complicated, so I had to really wrangle with this. Are these people good role models? Are they good feminists? Were they really creating the world that we want to live in? And then also, how am I being hard on people? How am I being hard on myself? What does it mean to, like, kind of carve out a path that feels good? So, I think that, over time, I had to be a little more generous to them, and then I had to do that for myself too. I feel like that’s the biggest change to me, but it’s also like this story changes so much as you dig in, and a lot of this book was historical research, I had to kind of go in and be like I could write a book about the history of the Grand Canyon, but I have to narrow it down and figure out what to write about them.
DY: Yeah, and I think you did a really good job. I loved that you included so much of that, grappling with the complexities of these really full, really complicated people. And throughout that process, you are grappling with their less than perfect legacies, while still giving a full picture of their strength. What does it mean to you to be the one holding their stories? How did you take on that responsibility of sharing them with the world?
HH: That’s a cool question. I think that it’s natural to me to push back on all these people that we’ve held up as heroes. That idea of imperfect heroes was something that was interesting to me, and I wanted to tell the whole story. I also think we’re doing a disservice when we tell these hero stories that are just, “and then the guy went and climbed to the top of the mountain, and it was great” – that’s not helpful for people coming after, and that’s not, ultimately, interesting. I also think, especially if you’re the only woman in a specific place, you get held to this standard of you have to be better than the guys, or perfect, or even more confident and capable. I think we put people in these boxes that are pretty unfair. Of course, nobody’s perfect, and a lot of [the women in Fierce Country’s] bad behavior was, I think, fairly protective – them trying to keep the elbows out, because they were scared that they weren’t gonna be able to keep doing the thing that they were doing.
DY: Part of this question just comes from my own journalistic experiences, where I feel sometimes that I’m entrusted with a story, that without me as a storyteller, the story isn’t going to get told. And especially while telling a story where your subjects are dead, you’re not going to be beholden to their reaction or the feedback. How did it feel to kind of work with the people that loved them or that were in their lives and kind of balance that?
HH: Yeah, that’s been sort of scary, because when you’re reporting on somebody and you can go talk to them and get their like quotes and know that it’s their voice in the story. I mean, I don’t know if I always want the person to like the story, but I want it to be true and accurate.I think especially after people die, there can be kind of a cult of personality thing that builds up too. Leslie, who’s sort of the keeper of Anne’s estate, was saying that when she was cleaning out Anne’s cabin, people would come and post pictures on Facebook and get mad at her for cleaning things up or moving things. But the people who were really close to them, the sources that I really talked to, I think everybody was pretty aware of the goods and the bads. I went to this event for Dolores in Silverton [Colorado] three or four years ago now, and some of her people, who were kind of her disciples, almost got into a fight at this event because they were like “no, she’s like this,” “no, she was like that.” There is doing justice to the actual person, and then there is doing justice to the story.
DY: One of the themes that really comes up with all of the women that you’re featuring in this book, is the theme of nostalgia, and how a lot of these environmental movements have this underpinning of nostalgic memory and trying to keep place the way it was, maintaining it as it once was, whether or not that’s actually for the benefit of anyone. Do you find yourself doing this to any places personally, and what are the positives and negatives of looking at a place with this lens of nostalgia?
HH: Oh, that’s such a big question. I think about that all the time. It’s this sense of, “oh it would have been so cool to like be on the Grand Canyon in the 60s.”I went on a run with a friend this morning, and she was like, “When I first moved to Durango, we didn’t have to turn on the air conditioning.” It’s like that kind of thing, especially when it feels like things are moving in a way that isn’t good or isn’t protective of these places. Nowhere is untouched now because of air pollution and light pollution, and how we exist in the world. But things were also bad in the 60s before we had the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, but I think it’s easy to fantasize that that was like this more “pure: time. But we also can’t get back there, so I think you have to be working in the frame of right now. What’s interesting about Anne [LaBastille], in particular, is that she was really good at tracking that stuff and being like, “I can show on the ground how things have changed, what they were like before”. She was really involved in the Clean Air Act, that is net good. But something like the Wilderness Act, where you know there is this idea about like we’re trying to like preserve environments, but we’re also totally negating Indigenous history, and what came before, it gets complicated, so I think it’s sort of like – what are you looking back at, and what are you trying to work toward?
DY: I’ve done a lot of reporting around recreation economies in rural communities, and so much outdoor recreation happens in rural areas. In the book, you talked a little bit about how Silverton and how the economy has changed from mining to recreation, and a little bit about some other communities. How do you see recreation affecting and changing the communities that you know and love, both positively and negatively?
HH: I think a lot of it comes back to what are you trying to value and manage for, and like how do you regulate it and put bounds around it, and I also think who are you managing for? I think Silverton’s a really interesting example of this, and the Adirondacks, where Anne was, is interesting too. Are we trying to set up the system for visitors, so we can bring in an economy, or are we trying to set up the system for the people who live there, and then the economic stuff might be an add on. I think since I’ve been working in this world, this idea of a recreation economy has kind of been held up as this golden, shiny star we’re gonna work towards. That it’s going to bring back these mining towns. Bring recreation in, and it’s gonna be fine. I think it’s really hard to hit a good middle ground on that. Places like Moab, where, when that economy transitioned from mining to recreation, biking, RV, national parks, it kind of got blown out, and now it’s really hard for people to live there. A lot of that landscape is pretty damaged.The opposite side of that, is maybe Gallup, New Mexico, which has tried to do something sort of similar and bring in bike tourism, and there’s not quite enough infrastructure. It hasn’t quite taken off. Silverton is kind of like that too, it’s like a real feast or famine, you kind of get these punches in the summer where there’s a ton of people there, and in winter it’s hard for businesses to stay open. I think it’s really hard. I’m trying to think of anywhere I know that’s really doing it right, that’s created an economy that also has retained a community and been a place where people can live well.
DY: Yeah I literally spent a year researching places for my podcast series and that was basically the giant question behind it all. Heather, thank you so much for chatting and I’m excited for people to read this newest book!
You can find Heather Hansman’s newest book, Fierce Country: The Untold Story of Three Women Who Ignited America’s Love for the Wild, in bookstores as of July 14, 2026.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.