Hulda Hoehn Crooks scaled Mount Fuji in 1987
When I was discharged from the Navy I engaged a running program which was vastly successful. My athletic days ended when I returned from Southern California in the early 1980s. There I ate chicken breast with pineapple and ran every day. Here I resumed smoking cigarettes and eating fried chicken and laying around. The stressors associated with early career and ambitions simply outdid me.Athleticism not withstanding, I was able to eek out a career after a lot of false startups and misdirected efforts. Others on the planet have been much more athletically successful than I ever was ... though I did envision myself as this 'jock' at different times in my life. My sports career just never materialized in that reality into which I found myself immersed.
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Hulda Hoehn was born in Saskatchewan, Canada to a farming couple who had 18 children on May 19, 1896. She passed away on November 23, 1997. She was an American mountaineer and came to be known as "Grandma Whitney" among her climbing cohorts.
She climed the 14,505-foot Mount Whitney some 23 times between the ages of 65 and 91. During this period she had climed 97 other peaks.
She enrolled at Pacific Union College north of San Francisco at age 18 and later at Loma Linda University where she met and married Dr Samuel Crooks. She did not begin climbing til 1950, after the death of her husband. He had encouraged her to start after she suffered a bout of pneumonia.
On July 24, 1987, at the age of 91, she became the oldest woman to climb Mount Fujiyama in Japan.
She hiked the entire 212 mile John Muir Trail incrementally over a five year span.
Hulda Crooks was a long-time resident of Loma Linda, California. She often spent time with children in the community, encouraging them to appreciate nature and stay active. In 1990 the peak Day Needle in the Mount Whitney range was renamed Crooks Peak in her honor. In 1991 Hulda Crooks Park below the south hills at Loma Linda was dedicated.
She died in 1997, aged 101.
Old, but not obsolete.