289: The River Ladies of the Grand Canyon.

National Park After Dark

Audioboom Studios

True Crime, Places & Travel, Wilderness, Society & Culture, Sports

4.8 • 4.6K Ratings

🗓️ 31 March 2025

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter changed the stereotype of women in botany when they found a love for not the delicate flowers, but the cacti with thorns and the vegetation that thrived in the most inhospitable environments. They set out to do something that had never been done before, to be the first women to boat the entirety of the Colorado River and map out the flora of the Grand Canyon. If successful, they would be the first women to ever survive the trip.

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Sources:
Book: Brave the Wild River: Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon.

Women in Science at Grand Canyon (U.S. National Park Service)

These Two Botanists Put Their Lives on the Line on the Colorado River All for Their Science

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'd like you to picture a scientist.
0:04.0	What are they wearing?
0:06.0	What are they doing?
0:08.0	What equipment do they have?
0:10.0	When you first pictured that scientist,
0:13.0	did you envision a man or a woman?
0:16.0	In the year 1966, a man by the name of David Wade Chambers who studied history and cultural sciences began conducting an experiment that lasted until 1977.
0:27.6	It was titled, the Draw a Scientist's Test.
0:31.6	In this experiment, Chambers asked 4,807 elementary school students in three different countries, one being the
0:40.5	United States, to draw a picture of a scientist. He was intrigued to find that almost every image drawn
0:47.4	depicted a bearded man working inside a laboratory, often wearing a lab coat and glasses. In fact, of those 4,807 children,
0:57.7	less than 50 of them drew a woman as a scientist, equating to less than 1% of his subjects.
1:05.4	Those numbers have since changed. A similar study in 2016 found that 28% of children, when asked to draw a scientist, portrayed a woman.
1:15.5	It is certainly an improvement, but now I ask you again.
1:19.0	When I first asked you to envision a scientist, did you see a man or a woman?
1:24.8	After hearing the story I'm about to tell you, the next time you're asked this question,
1:29.8	maybe you will envision a woman, and maybe you'll see Alzadea Clover and Lois Jodder.
1:37.7	Welcome to National Park After Dark.
1:56.6	Music after dark. One of your best intros to date.
2:02.9	I loved it.
2:04.0	I really, it was thought-provoking and to answer that question, I envisioned the show lessons
2:12.9	from chemistry, lessons of chemistry.
	...

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