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High Country Women: Pioneers of Yosemite National Park
Twenty-seven-year-old Clare Hodges gently urged her chestnut roan through a thicket of trees and brush. The horse’s hooves barely made a sound as it walked over a thick carpet of pine needles and maple leaves. Bright streams of sunlight filtered through the branches of sequoias and spilled onto the ground with brilliant intensity. A light breeze escorted rider and her ride out of the forest and deposited them at the edge of a massive emerald meadow. Jagged lofty peaks waited on the other side of the grassy area, and above it all was a cloudless, deep blue sky, verging on the color of Indigo.1
Clare surveyed Yosemite’s Kings River Canyon carefully. A park ranger for all of two months, patrolling the spectacular setting was part of her job since signing on with the National Park Service in late spring 1918. An article in the June 1, 1919, edition of the Lima, Ohio, newspaper The Lima News, reported that Clare’s love for the mountains prompted her to pursue a profession as a park ranger and that “the beauty of the region made the work a pleasure.”2
One of the many duties Clare had as a park ranger was to routinely scrutinize the bold peak of Mount Hutchings (a 10,758 foot peak overlooking Kings River Canyon) for rock climbers in trouble and the floor below the summit for hikers who had lost their way. She never encountered anyone in such a dire predicament. As she studied the vast area “the spray from the fifty foot waterfall over the steep mountain would fall on my face,” Clare recalled later in her life. “The water made a beautiful fan of foam that spread out in a turbulent, eddying mass into the roaring river below.” Apart from the herds of mule deer, eagles, a few cougars, curious chipmunks, and wolves, Clare rarely encountered any living inhabitants in her daily routine. “My life as a ranger is not as wild and woolly as it sounds,” she told The Lima News.3
To learn more about Clare Hodges and the women who helped make
Yosemite a National Park read
High Country Women: Pioneers of Yosemite National Park
