Woman on the Rocks: The Mountaineering Letters of Ruth Dyar Mendenhall

Edited by Valerie Mendenhall Cohen

$18.95 ISBN 1893343154
Introduction by Royal Robbins

One of California's first women mountain climbers

“In 1969, over the July 4th weekend, I was camped at Long Lake up in Little Lakes Valley next to the RCS group when in late afternoon John and Ruth returned from a climb. You would have thought it was some famous movie stars the way everyone stood and welcomed them into camp. It was a scene I have never forgotten.” — Mark Goebel, The Ski Mountaineers

In the early 1930s, the opportunities for women to climb, or join men on their mountaineering expeditions, were essentially non-existent. Ruth Dyar Mendenhall broke that barrier to become one of California, and America's, first and most important women mountain climbers. Though her name is immortalized on mountain routes and summits, Mendenhall is unknown to most Americans. However, her climbing career began in the mid 1930s with a visit to Independence where she saw the Sierra Nevada for the first time.

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Ansel Adams

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Peter Croft, Glen Dawson

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Norman Clyde

Death Valley to Yosemite: Frontier Mining Camps and Ghost Towns
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High and Wild: Essays and Photographs on Wilderness Adventure
Galen Rowell

Mojave Desert Trails
Florine Lawlor

Out From Las Vegas
Florine Lawlor

The Secret Sierra: The Alpine World Above the Trees
David Gilligan

Robert Clunie: Plein Air Painter of the Sierra
Richard Coons

The letters collected in Woman on the Rocks: The Mountaineering Letters of Ruth Dyar Mendenhall (published by Spotted Dog Press, Bishop CA) document Mendenhall’s fifty-year mountaineering career. Though her desire to become an accomplished mountain climber was often at odds with the traditional role of wife and mother, Ruth and husband, John Mendenhall, made numerous first ascents in North America including what are now considered to be some of the Sierra Nevada's most classic climbs: the Swiss Arete, Mount Sill (1938), Third Needle, Mount Whitney (1939), North Peak, Temple Crag (1940), Southeast Buttress, Mount Whitney (1941), Lower Cathedral Spire, Yosemite (1948), the North Face of Mount Williamson (1957) and Mt. Mendenhall. (12,227-ft). During those years, the competition with other climbers to establish new routes was so great, that secrecy was paramount. The couple often left directions to their locations in sealed envelopes, instructing their young daughters that under no circumstance were the envelopes to be opened unless the Mendenhalls did not return by a certain date.

Chapter introductions set the scene by providing an in depth and historical look at Mendenhall's life within the California climbing community during the Depression and World War II. Born In 1912, south of Spokane, Ruth Dyar traced her ancestry to Stephen Hopkins, whose first voyage to the New World ended in shipwreck in Bermuda, and inspired Shakespeare's The Tempest. Eventually Hopkins made it on the Mayflower and helped settle the Plymouth Colony. Ruth graduated from the University of Washington, magna cum laude, in journalism at the height of the Great Depression. Unable to find work in Washington, she moved to Los Angeles with "$40 dollars borrowed from relatives and 25 cents of my own cash." She and a cousin joined the Sierra Club's Ski Mountaineers and Rock Climbing Section, where she eventually met John Mendenhall, son of Walter Mendenhall, the "colorful" editor and president of The Van Nuys News, predecessor to today's Daily News of Los Angeles.

For forty years, Ruth edited the Ski Mountaineers’ newsletter, Mugelnoos, and for several years, the American Alpine Club News. She was elected to the American Alpine Club’s board in 1974, and was awarded the Angelo Heilprin Citation for Service.

In 1987, Ruth wrote, Women on the Rocks, Way Back Then, an article about the history of women climbers in California. She noted that with the passage of time, she had advanced in status from climber to pioneer woman climber, writing: “We didn’t think of ourselves as women climbers, but as women who liked to climb.”
--Wynne Benti