Barbara Washburn’s sec-
ond ever hike was up the
13,628-foot Mount Hayes,
in 1941. Six years later
she gazed over the Denali
Pass (left), near North
America’s highest peak.
BRADFORD WASHBURN (BOTH)
‘I HAD NO REAL FEELING
ABOUT BEING A PIONEERING
WOMAN ON A SERIOUS
ALASKAN EXPEDITION.
I ONLY KNEW THAT AS
THE ONLY WOMAN, I HAD
TO MEASURE UP.’BARBARA
WASHBURN
1914-2014
First woman to summit Denali;
with husband Bradford Washburn,
mapped the Grand CanyonBarbara Washburn’s life atop the
world’s highest peaks began with a
job tip from her mail carrier in 1939.
The position he recommended—as a
secretary for Bradford Washburn, the
director of the New England Museum
of Natural History—did not appeal to
her. “I don’t want to work in that stuffy
old museum,” she recalled thinking,
“and I certainly wouldn’t want to work
for a crazy mountain climber.”
A year later, the young woman who’d
never been camping was standing atop
10,151-foot Mount Bertha in Alaska. She
had married that mountain climber.
One year after that, the couple,
along with their team, became the
first to successfully summit 13,628-foot
Mount Hayes. She wore men’s cold-
weather gear because none was made
for women then. Along a particularly
treacherous ridge, Barbara took the
lead because the team felt she’d be
light enough to haul up if the ground
crumbled beneath her. In 1947, Barbara
and Bradford left their three children at
home to climb Mount McKinley (now
called Denali). After nearly two months
of trekking, Barbara stood on the sum-
mit as the first woman to look out from
North America’s highest point.
Bradford was a trained cartographer,
and the pair took on ambitious map-
ping projects. Starting in 1970, they
used aerial photography, laser mea-
surement tools, and a wheel-mounted
odometer to fully map the Grand Can-
yon for National Geographic. The proj-
ect took seven years and nearly 700
helicopter trips. They also mapped the
White Mountains in New Hampshire
and Mount Denali. In 1988, the couple
were among 15 explorers—including
Edmund Hillary, Jacques-Yves Cous-
teau, and Mary and Richard Leakey—
to receive the National Geographic
Centennial Award. Into their later
years, the Washburns still applied for
grants from National Geographic for
projects such as a snow-depth survey
on Mount Everest.
Barbara died in 2014, seven years
after her husband and just two months
shy of her 100th birthday. She said she
never understood the fuss about her
gender, describing herself instead as
“an accidental mountaineer.”TRAILBLAZERS 127