Superpower: Compassion for nature and animals
Conservationist
A love of hiking became a life’s mission for Helen McGinnis.
As a zoology student at the University of California, Berkeley, she spent weekends exploring the Sierra Nevada with the university hiking club. After graduate studies in paleontology, she moved east to work at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where a fellow member of the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club invited her on a backpacking trip to Dolly Sods Wilderness.
“I’ve just really loved exploring wild places for as long as I can remember,” she says. “I was very, very blown away when I first visited Dolly Sods. It had incredible scenery and this great variety of plants and habitats that you don’t find in the mountains of the West.”
Her first visit came during a pivotal moment in American conservation, when many believed Eastern forests were too altered by logging to qualify as federally protected wilderness. McGinnis joined a movement that successfully challenged that thinking, becoming one of the effort’s researchers and planners. She created hand-drawn maps of Dolly Sods, helped draft wilderness proposals for Dolly Sods and Otter Creek, and contributed to what became today’s Monongahela National Forest Hiking Guide. The effort culminated in the Eastern Wilderness Act of 1975, permanently protecting Dolly Sods, Otter Creek, and other treasured lands across the East.
Today, hikers continue to experience the same remarkable landscape that first inspired McGinnis, though she is quick to share the credit. “There were many, many, many of us working together, and we wanted it very badly,” she says. “I don’t think anyone could have deterred us.”
Although she has completed countless solo backpacking trips across the country, McGinnis counts helping protect Dolly Sods among her proudest accomplishments.
Her advice to young women is simple: “Get some good maps, find a group that shares your interests, gain the knowledge you need to take care of yourself, and just get out there. You never know what you’re going to find.”
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