Born: May 19 1896, Canada
Died: November 23 1997
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Hulda Crooks earned the nickname “Grandma Whitney” for climbing the continental U.S.’s tallest peak, Mount Whitney, 23 times between 1962 and 1991. She was 66 during her first ascent. She also climbed Japan’s Mount Fuji in 1987, becoming the oldest woman to scale it at age 91. In 1991, the U.S. Congress named a peak south of Mount Whitney Crooks Peak in her honor. Crooks’ 1996 memoir was aptly titled Conquering Life’s Mountains. “It’s been a great inspiration for me,” she said of Mount Whitney. “When I come down from the mountain, I feel like I can battle in the valley again.”
Crooks had turned to hiking and camping to cope with the death of her husband in 1950, and later that of her son in 1969. She scaled the 11,502-foot Mount Gorgonio 20 times before tackling Mount Whitney’s 14,505-foot summit. She backpacked the 212-mile John Muir Trail, hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and walked the Sierra Nevada 80 miles from west to east. She took up jogging at 72 because “it made climbing so much easier.” At 82, she set a world record at the Senior Olympics for the 80 to 85 age group, running 1,500 meters in just under 11 minutes. She continued to walk two miles a day well into her 90s. “Exercise you enjoy does you more good than exercise that you do because you think that you have to do it,” she said. “You say, ‘I’m going to do this. I have to do it. I’m going to do it if it kills me.’ And maybe it will, if you do it that way.”