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almost always written about together in histories of Alaskan conservationism. Both were born and raised in Washington state; they had conservationist values instilled in them when they were girls; they opened Camp Denali together to promote what is now called ecotourism; and in the late 1950s they fought dramatically to save Arctic Alaska as a U.S. National Wildlife Refuge. “Do we really want,” Ginny would ask, “to make Alaska over in the image of Los Angeles?”34

The WASPs represented those can-do outfits that later led the journalist Tom Brokaw to call the World War II generation the “greatest.” After Pearl Harbor there had been a serious shortage of pilots for small planes. General Hap Arnold, chief of the army air forces, decided to recruit women pilots. The idea was to train women to do all the domestic aviation—transporting cargo from warehouses to bases, for example—while the men engaged in combat missions in the European and Pacific theaters. Both Hunter and Hill entered the program. “We became known as flyer girls,” Hill recalled. “We towed targets for live air-to-air gunnery, testing aircraft . . . whatever we were asked to do.”35

Luckily for historians, Hill kept a marvelous scrapbook of her experiences in WASP. It was filled with newspaper clippings, postcards from Texas and California, and photos of the women pilots. One document confirms that she got her pilot’s license on March 31, 1943; earned $1,800 annually; and was affiliated with the 319 AAFFTD. There is a Life cover story about women in the sky, and there are lots of letters home. “Something new in army discipline—a girl in our platoon was reprimanded by the C.O. for knitting while she marched,” Hill wrote on February 19, 1943. “She had a ball of yarn stuffed in the leg pocket of her ‘zoot suit’ and was blithely knitting on, purling too, while she marched to and from mess. We are treated and trained just like the Air Corps Cadets but once in a while signs of the feminine gender pop up.”36

Hill was a cutup, always spoofing the WASPs, doodling for fun, and writing racy (for those days) doggerel. Ginny couldn’t stand to be bored. She liked to joke that she and Celia were “Daring Young Girls” on the “Flying Trapeze.” But the scrapbooks also revealed Hill to be an excellent organizer. Every scrap of paper she saved was pasted in her fat maroon book and perfectly aligned. And she was considered one hell of a pilot. She was a master of the fundamentals of aviation, and cockpit procedure was second nature to her: fasten seat belts . . . unlock controls . . . check gas . . . Hill would usually fly out of Seattle to Portland, Yakima, and Spokane. The Northwest was her official beat. Walt Disney had published a WASP songbook for which he drew the cover cartoon himself: it was a wide-eyed little girl with aviator goggles. Hill knew all of Disney’s tunes by heart, singing her way up and down the Pacific Coast. “Usually there was nothing down below,” she said, “but mountains, forests, or water.”37

Both Hill and Hunter were annoyed by a weird law that wouldn’t allow women pilots out of Seattle to ferry military planes any farther north than Great Falls, Montana. “We ferried them from factories clear across the U.S.,” Hunter recalled, “but ‘sorry, gals, turn them over to the men here’ and they got to fly them on the Northwest Staging Route through Edmonton, Fort Nelson, Watson Lake, and Whitehorse to Fairbanks.”

The male pilots, rubbing in the sexist rule, used to tease Hill and Hunter by saying that Alaska was for real pilots, that the fog and sleet were not for the fainthearted female. These taunts stuck in the women’s craw. After the war, Hunter and Hill concocted a scheme to borrow two planes and fly to Fairbanks. They were like mountain climbers wanting to reach the top of Mount McKinley. Alaska . . . all that space below . . . the “great land” from the bird’s-eye view of the cockpit. Even though Hill’s plane was not really airworthy, they named the aircraft Lil’ Igloo and took off for the wild blue yonder. It took them twenty-seven days to fly from Puget Sound