Barbara Washburn

On June 6, 1947, a few steps below the summit of Denali, a team member urged Barbara Washburn to take his spot leading the rope team so she would be the first to stand on the summit, since their climb would make her the first woman to ever climb Denali.

“I said, ‘Who cares a rip? I don’t care, I’m perfectly happy being number two here,'” she told an interviewer in 2010. But he insisted, so Washburn took the rope and led her team up the remaining steps to the summit. She later wrote, “I had no real feeling about being a pioneering woman on a serious Alaskan expedition. I only knew that as the only woman, I had to measure up.”

Barbara Washburn probably never would have found herself on the summit of North America’s tallest peak had she not applied for a job as a secretary at the New England Museum of Natural History at the suggestion of her mailman. The director of