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.
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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.
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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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