I have had a very interesting life, often pioneering where women were usually not allowed to go!
I spent the summer of 1966 as a grad student at the Summer Institute of Glaciological and Arctic Sciences from Michigan State University on the Juneau Icefield, Alaska, I was the first woman to apply for what had always been a men only class for 5 years. Dr. Miller was open-minded enough to accept my application, and he found 2 more women (one was an undergraduate student in meteorology from Michigan State, and the other one was a high school science teacher from Illinois.
At first he housed us together in an old raggedy tent with cots while all the men got the wooden buildings. But after a storm blew our tent away and scattered our clothes all down the glacier he moved us individually in with the men so we had a bunk bed with a thin mattress. I studded Glaciers and arctic/alpine plants on the nunatacks sticking up out of the icefield collecting flower specimens as we climbed each mountain and recorded the altitude of the plants.
I discovered the rarest plant of the summer which was an arctic dandelion, Taraxacum hyparcticum. I received my M.S. in 1967, and returned to the Juneau Icefield in 1968 as the first woman instructor.
In 1965 the National Geographic magazine had sent photographers to photo the activities of the Institute of Glaciological and Arctic Sciences, and in 1966 when I was there they sent a "ghost" writer to write about Dr. Miller's field studies program . I came in from a day of climbing and collecting plants with Dr. Beschel and the writer started writing about the rare plants, so i mentioned my dandelion find. He wrote it in the article. I am mentioned by name on page 206, in the February 1967 issue and I also appeared, along with the whole class, on TV, Tuesday, February 7, 1967, on CBS which was also about Alaska's Mighty Rivers of Ice.
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