Dear editor:
Valerie Pierson’s recent allegations of gender discrimination at “the Crandall Ranger Station” couldn’t be further from the truth.
Her claim that she was told when trying to get a job at Crandall, “Well, women don't work in the woods. You can make us coffee or answer our phone,” is as substantiated as a campfire ghost story — compelling, perhaps, but entirely untethered from reality.
Sexual discrimination is, and was, taken seriously — especially in the years since the supposed incident.
Yet, with one offhand sentence embedded in Wendy Corr’s May 16, 2026, article about Mount St. Helens, Pierson manages to undermine not only her own credibility but the integrity of the entire piece.
If only fact-checking were as fashionable as retrospective outrage.
My father was the ranger at Crandall when this alleged discrimination supposedly transpired. The image of a bustling office coffee pot is pure fantasy — there wasn’t one.
The so-called "office" was a cramped cabin beside our home, used by my father only when he wasn’t out doing actual work.
My mother, ever the gracious host, always had coffee brewing for anyone who dropped by — hardly a revolutionary act, but certainly a kind one.
After thirty years as a forest service wife, she knew hospitality wasn’t a gendered duty; it was just good manners.
The crew, for their part, brewed their own coffee and packed their thermoses for long days in the woods.
Contrary to Pierson’s narrative, nobody was waiting around the ranger station for a woman to materialize with caffeine.
The workforce was tight-knit, nearly half of it made up of women I knew personally — many of whom now lend their voices and factual accounts to my book, Over Dead Indian, chronicling those formative years in the Forest Service.
As for the phone, there was certainly no receptionist languishing behind a desk, filing her nails and watching the clock.
In reality, if anyone answered, it was my mother or me — simply because the phone was in our house and everyone else was out actually working.
The phone rang so infrequently, it was practically a novelty, not the center of some imagined gender battle.
Anyone who actually knew my father would agree: he wasn’t the type to utter such nonsense.
As a woman who worked for the Forest Service in the 70s and a 46-year veteran of wildland fire myself, I’ll be the first to admit that gender-based attitudes existed — just not at Crandall, and certainly not from him.
He was far too busy scraping volcanic ash off every conceivable surface to worry about the chromosomes of his window-washing crew.
Reality, it seems, is a much harder sell than drama.
Sincerely,
Nelda St. Clair,
Carson City, Nevada
