Having served the park for more than thirty years, “the first female full-time mounted wilderness ranger” and a decade as “Yosemite’s first female wilderness manager,” Boyers recounts her life in a two-part memoir, “Across Yosemite’s Wilderness: A Trailblazing Woman’s Career Protecting The Park’s Backcountry” ($22.95 in paperback from Falcon Guides; also for Amazon Kindle).
Dozens of photographs celebrate the park’s grandeur and its dedicated workers, with artwork by brother Lex Munson, who lives outside Nevada City. Boyers herself still lives in the park with husband Darell but writes me that “my nephew, his wife, son and daughter (named Laurel Ann after me) live in Cottonwood.”
The book’s first part is “a telling of my last wilderness patrol, an expedition across the entire length of Yosemite National Park in 2007, when a group of us took a 10-day backcountry journey all the way across the park.” Part two “holds essays about the years that led up to that remarkable patrol … caring for that part of the park that is beyond Yosemite Valley.”
Though she recounts scary experiences leading horses and mules in slippery environments and hearing strange sounds when she is all alone in a backcountry cabin, Boyers focuses on what she calls the timeless benefits of the wilderness: “witnessing the wonder of nature, of intact ecosystems, of living and breathing and enjoying open space and wildness with one another, or even while alone.”
Just as Chicoans do with Bidwell Park, she wrestles with just how human-accessible to make Yosemite’s backcountry. “We need to maintain humility and understand that we don’t have all the answers,” yet “we need to eliminate the impact of humanity’s presence on the nonhuman world as much as possible to allow these systems … to evolve naturally. Our future may depend on it.”
