Historical Badass: Plumbing the Depths

The snow bridge collapsed without warning. Dolores Greenwell was walking across a glacier in the Canadian Rockies in 1948 and then suddenly she wasn’t—she was falling, falling toward the bottom of the glacier, falling toward the center of the earth, falling into a crevasse of unknown depth and composition, with her stomach in her throat and her thoughts racing toward the inevitable stop.

Just twenty-two, Greenwell was already a veteran climber and skier. She’d summited all of Colorado’s fourteen-thousand-foot peaks by age twenty (there are fifty-four). After earning her history degree from Denver University, she moved to Aspen to teach public school, because Aspen was the only place in Colorado with a chairlift. The next summer break, she studied at the University of Washington in Seattle for half a semester and became friends with the Whittaker twins, Jim and Lou, the former of whom would become the first American atop Everest in 1963. The brothers accompanied her to the summit of Mt. Rainier, where