Spotted Dog Press of Bishop announced a soon-to-be-pblished memoir of Sierra mountaineer Ruth Dyar Mendenhall:
1937, climbing mountains was thought to be an activity reserved for men only. Ruth Dyar Mendenhall broke that barrier to become one of California’s first and most important women mountain climbers. The letters collected in this book document her fifty-year mountaineering career. Mendenhall first saw the Sierra Nevada from the Eastern California town of Independence. Looking west, she was enthralled by the powerful eastern scarp of the Sierra. She imagined what one might find on those seemingly impenetrable granite walls, little realizing that she would make
many of the first ascents of those very mountains and that mountain climbing would become her life’s passion.