Educator and history-making mountain climber Fay Fuller
There are many fine teachers who have distinguished themselves in fields outside of education. One of these is Evelyn Fay Fuller, a teacher who was the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Rainier.
Evelyn was born on October 10, 1869, in New Jersey. As a child, her family called her Fay. When young Fay was just twelve years old, her family moved to Tacoma in the state of Washington. Even as a child, Fay expressed great interest in exploring wilderness areas.
In 1885, at the end of Fay’s sophomore year, her high school closed abruptly. The fifteen-year-old continued her education on her own, while simultaneously teaching children at Tacoma’s Longfellow Elementary School.
Later Fay accepted teaching positions at Rosedale and at Yelm in Washington. While teaching in Yelm, famed mountain climber Philemon Van Trump visited her school. He had earned the distinction of being one of the first climbers to ascend nearby Mount Rainer. The pair soon became good friends.
Through Van Trump’s influence, the intrepid young teacher set herself the goal of climbing to the summit of Mount Rainier. She made her first attempt to climb the mountain in 1887. To prepare for the climb, Fay blackened her face with charcoal and wore goggles to reduce the sun’s glare. Her climbing outfit included heavy flannel underwear, a thick blue flannel bloomer suit, woolen hose, heavy calfskin boy’s shoes, and a straw hat. She later commented that her costume was assembled “at the time when bloomers were unknown, and it was considered quite immodest.”
On her first climb, Fay reached an elevation of 8,600 feet. Three years later, on August 10, 1890, the intrepid 21-year-old finally achieved her goal of reaching the summit. She was the first woman to make the climb successfully. As the story goes, the next party to climb the mountain found Fay’s hair pins on the trail and joked that the find proved a woman really had made it to the summit!
Shortly after her history-making climb, Fay left the teaching profession to go into journalism. She became the first woman reporter for the Tacoma Ledger, where she wrote a column covering mountaineering news. She also became instrumental in founding alpine clubs in Tacoma and in Portland, Oregon.
In 1900, Fay relocated to Chicago, Washington, DC, and New York City, where she continued her career as a journalist. In New York she married, and the newlyweds settled in Santa Monica, California.
This amazing educator and mountain climber passed away in Los Angeles on May 27, 1958. She was 88 years old. She is interred in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, New York. After her passing, Fay Peak in Mount Rainier National Park was named in her honor.
To read more about Fay’s climb, read this article published by the Historylink.org.
