Barbara Washburn, wife of the late mountaineer Bradford Washburn and the first woman to climb Mount McKinley died on Sept. 25 in Lexington, Massachusetts. She was 99.
Washburn, nee Polk, was born Nov. 10, 1914, in the Boston area. She married Washburn in 1940 and they honeymooned by making the first ascent of 10,200 foot Mount Bertha near Glacier Bay. In 1941 they led the party of climbers who made the first ascent of Mount Hayes, the highest mountain in the eastern Alaska Range.
In 1947 the RKO movie company arranged to send a camera crew with Bradford Washburn on his second ascent of Mount McKinley. Barbara, who had by then become the mother of three children, accompanied him. On June 6 of that year, she became the first woman to reach the summit of North America's tallest peak. She quipped that she got in shape for the climb by pushing a baby carriage.
The Washburns continued to work as a team doing scientific and cartographic work for the next half century. Among other accomplishments, they produced detailed maps of Mount Everest and the Grand Canyon. They received the Alexander Graham Bell Medal from the National Geographic Society in 1980. Barbara also received the society's Centennial Award in 1988; she shared the honors with such notable explorers as Edmund Hillary, Jacques Cousteau and John Glenn.
The couple made a number of subsequent trips and photographic expeditions to Alaska. In 1991 they made the keynote address at the 26th annual Alaska Surveying and Mapping Conference. In 1999 they took part in the grand opening of the Talkeetna Alaskan Lodge hotel. But age began to wear. In 2000 they canceled an appearance at a meeting of the Anchorage Museum Association and sent a video greeting instead.
Bradford Washburn died in 2007.