My grandmother, Marjorie Crimmings McBride, was a consummate naturalist and enthusiastic birder. She is was a significant influence in my decision to study birds and pursue museum-based research.
She prepared specimens for the Cornell Museum of Vertebrates when she was an undergraduate at Cornell in the early 1950s, and her diary entries of a summer trip she took in 1950 with graduate student Frances Lowell Burnett are a joy to read. She and Frances traveled over 15,000 miles around the western United States and Canada that summer and prepared many specimens of both birds and mammals from road strike mortalities. Gram's nickname in college was "Rugged," and I think it is an apt testament to her grit and fearlessness.
Gram had many incredible adventures that summer, and recorded it all in a daily diary she later typed up on a typewriter. Below are excerpts of her diary, including her impressions of the Grand Canyon, an account of hiking deep into Yellowstone National Park with park rangers, and more. I love to think of her and Frances--two women on their own in 1950--exploring the beautiful, wild places of our country.
Yellowstone National Park.
August 29, 1950 (continued)
...Drove toward East Rim and found a splendid campsite, right on a point overlooking the great Canyon and the Colorado River a mile down. We finished supper and then watched again as the sunset set fire to the rocks and the chasm settled into dusk. I lay down for the night, partially under a bent and twisted Pinon Pine, with my head only a couple of feet from the rim (safely wedged between two rocks, I should add, so I could not roll off). I watched the moon in the Canyon. It rose as a great orange ball, then ascended higher in the sky, illuminating the tops of the rock towers and castles and turning the distant river into a streak of silver. All the while the crickets (or Western equivalent thereof) were playing their marimbas, and a Barred Owl hooted low at intervals. No single over sound disturbed the tremendous silent grandeur of the scene.
June 27. 1950 Tuesday
...In the afternoon we sat in on papers for a while, after which I decided to return home and line up list of specimens and do other paper work. Who should drive up in the little pickup truck but Dennis and the other ranger, Mack. "Want to go fishing?" and I raced back to meetings to ask F. for the use of her rod, then to house to wait for them, meanwhile donning jeans, pacs, woold socks, etc.
We drove down same road as last night for quite a distance, then parked and started hiking. They just located the pond by the lay of the mountains, then started straight for it--wading through sagebrush, climbing hills and crossing snowbanks, through timber and across creeks. The first creek we encountered was crossed precariously on a log, but there didn't happen to be a log at the next so to my open-mouthed amazement they both just walked through it, jeans, boots, and all. (I followed.) By this time, I was all pooped out, but we kept on. More hills; moose, elk and buffalo sign; an antelope voiced its loud alarm note (like grass squeaked between thumbs). After an hour and a half of this rapid walking, we sighted our lake. Not even as big as Beebe, but it glistened there in the setting sun amid its lovely surroundings -- great stands of pine, hills of sage on one side, Electric Peak rising behind the dark wooded slopes. I did not draw or photograph it, but I shall surely never forget its beauty. Ruffed grouse were drumming, Steller's Jay seen and heard; and shortly we heard an ELK bugling--a shrill wild whistle that reverberated from the hillsides. More started calling; some whistles were short, other longer and ascending in pitch. The rangers speculated that maybe a grizzly was disturbing the herd to excited them so.
Another beautiful sound was the plop as those big fish jumped out of the water. We started in fishing, I with a worm-baited hook--no luck with that. Soon Dennis hooked one, let me reel it in to get the feel of it--a big one too!--then gave me a fly, brown hackle with a red tail, and I was off! Found myself a partially submerged log extending out into the lake, hooked one, landed him--tremendous! A shining bright colored big Brook Trout. The sensation of feeling a fish strike the end of your line and the fight to bring him in are like nothing I ever felt before. I kept at it; hooked another one and at that point, the reel fell off the rod--between that and the fish pulling and the slippery log, I inevitably fell in. Sat right down in the cold, cold water, amusing the rangers no end. (They were laughing and hollering at me "Ride 'em!"). Kept fishing though; kept catching them too.