When I was 18 and first worked as a river guide, I assumed I had to be as tough — or even tougher — than the guys I worked with.
It was the early 2000s, when few women were guiding. Though I loved being on the river, I often felt isolated, thinking I had to work harder than anyone else to be taken seriously. I believed that in part because I didn’t know the stories of women who had come before me.
Little by little, I began to hear about Georgie White, the first female guide on the Colorado River through Grand Canyon. She started Georgie’s Royal River Rats in the early 1950s and made a name for herself running huge motorboats — stocked with Coors and manned exclusively by Los Angeles firemen. Her trips were known to be raucous and so were her outfits, leopard prints preferred. But the stories sometimes made her seem more like a caricature, a wild and outrageous woman.
I was curious about her deeper story. After reading what I could find about her, I learned that White’s story was complicated. She was definitely a trailblazer who brought more visitors down the canyon than anyone else at the time. She was also one of the first people to run both rubber boats with oars and boats with motors.
White loved the Colorado River, and in her dogged pursuit of whitewater showed other people the Grand Canyon so they might love and want to protect it, too. She also foresaw the drought we’re living with now, writing that harnessing the river beyond its natural capacity would curse us in the long run.
She wasn’t perfect. She could act recklessly on the river, was sometimes stubborn and even mean, and she had a habit of dismissing the abilities of other women. But Georgie White cracked a world that had been dominated by men, changing it forever.
If I’d known this story when I was a teenager, I might have felt braver and more confident. Maybe I wouldn’t have tried to constantly prove myself.
Experts call this feeling of fighting for legitimacy the “Superwoman Myth,” and it pervades the outdoor world as well as many other male-dominated spaces. As women or those of any minority, we tend to think we have to be the best or the boldest because the narrative is that there’s limited space. You could say that White herself was caught in the myth.
Her boats were painted with the phrase “Woman of the River,” and the story told is that she thought there was room on the Colorado River for only one woman — herself. That idea, wrong though it may be, has stuck in part because we don’t know much about people on the fringes, like Georgie White.
American history seems to have a pioneer bias that relishes stories of people breaking records, forging paths or becoming the “first” with no help from anyone. But chances are that all of us retread paths that people have walked before, often with help from family, friends and mentors. A lot gets missed when we don’t know the details of our own history.
We need to know more about people not traditionally centered so we can break down the superwoman myth. After realizing what I’d missed not knowing about Georgie White, I wrote a book, Fierce Country, about her and two other groundbreaking women in the outdoor world — Anne LaBastille, a mountain guide and early climate scientist, and Dolores LaChapelle, a deep ecologist as well as a deep powder skier. Their accomplishments were not widely known.
It’s my hope that a lot of people will see themselves in the stories of these three women, and feel that they, too, belong on a river or mountain trail. I know I’m hopeful when I see the number of working women out on the river and in the backcountry today. They all look like they belong.
Heather Hansman is a contributor to Writers on the Range, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. A writer and the author of several books, the lives in Durango, Colorado.
Georgie White running the Grand Canyon in the 1950s
