Alma Wagen

Alma Wagen

NPS Photo

Quick Facts

Significance:

First female mountain guide in North America

Date of Birth:

1878

Date of Death:

1967

“Right here in our own historic ‘backyard’ is the final and undeniable proof that there’s no longer any limit to what women can do,“ wrote Park Superintendent Dwitt L. Reaburn in 1918, referring to the Rainier National Park Company hiring the first female mountain guide in North America.

Alma Wagen, a math teacher in Tacoma, got her start climbing windmills in her home state of Minnesota. In an interview with American Magazine, she expressed her revelation when she visited Glacier National Park in 1914, ”I…found my life’s work right in the National Parks. There were places to climb and I wanted to teach other women the joy of climbing.” She was known as a proficient guide and strong climber. She had many notable ascents of Rainier, including a notable circumnavigation of the mountain above tree line, followed by an ascent via Emmons Glacier.

Superintendent Reaburn continued about this unprecedented appointment, stating, “With the opening of [Mount Rainier] National Park this summer a new occupation is opened up to the long maligned weaker sex, and the first tourists to be entertained at Paradise Inn this year will be greeted and led on their exploring way by a woman guide. Now the mountain passes and snowy steeps are to be scaled by feminine feet where tradition has long claimed them for man’s own.”

Alma opened up career opportunities for women in the climbing world as a trailblazer for female climbing guides and rangers in national parks.

Thanks to The Mountaineer’s Northwest Mountaineering Journal article "Pretty Girls & Windmills” by Jason D. Martin.