Edwina Fay Fuller was born in New Jersey in 1869, and when she was twelve her family moved to Tacoma, Washington — a city then at the foot of an enormous, glacier-covered volcano that would define the next decade of her life. She began teaching school at fifteen and eventually took a post in Yelm, Washington, where her classroom was visited by P. B. Van Trump, one of the first men ever to ascend Mount Rainier. Van Trump’s stories of the mountain fixed her ambition: she vowed, she later wrote, to "climb to the summit of the great peak."
Her first attempt came in 1887, when she was eighteen. She reached an elevation of approximately 8,600 feet before turning back, but the goal held. In 1890, Van Trump invited her to join a climbing party for a second attempt. On the afternoon of August 10, Fuller and four teammates reached Columbia Crest, Rainier’s highest point, making her the first woman known to have stood on the summit of the mountain. She had climbed in heavy woolen skirts, heavy boots fitted with cleats, and an alpenstock; the next party on the route found her hairpins on the snow and joked that this was proof "a woman really had made it to the summit."
Fuller gave up teaching after the climb and followed her father — an editor at several Tacoma papers — into journalism. She became the first female reporter at the Tacoma Ledger, where she was given a column she called "Mountain Murmurs," covering mountaineering events near Paradise, Washington, and publishing firsthand accounts by earlier climbers of Rainier. The column made her the Pacific Northwest’s most prominent chronicler of the sport she had just helped redefine. She did not stop there: she helped found the Washington Alpine Club in 1891, the Tacoma Alpine Club in 1893, and — traveling south to Portland — the Mazamas mountaineering club in 1894, one of the oldest such organizations in the country. By the time she left Tacoma in 1900 to continue her journalism career in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New York City, she had done more than any other individual to build a mountaineering culture in the Pacific Northwest.
In New York she met and married Fritz von Briesen, an attorney whose father, Arthur von Briesen, was a prominent civic figure on Staten Island. The couple eventually settled in Santa Monica, California, where Fuller died in 1958 at the age of eighty-eight. Fay Peak in Mount Rainier National Park was named in her honor; she was inducted into the Tacoma-Pierce County Sports Hall of Fame in 2021.
A Shelter in the Bennington Hills
In 1930, the Bennington Section of the Green Mountain Club built a stone camp shelter near Bennington, Vermont, six miles from town along a driveable dirt road near Hell Hollow. The donor was Fritz von Briesen — Fay Fuller’s husband — and the camp was named for his wife: the woman who had stood on the summit of Mount Rainier forty years before and spent much of the intervening decades writing about mountains and organizing the people who climbed them. It was an apt tribute, even if the connection between a Pacific Northwest mountaineer and a Vermont hillside camp required some explanation.
The original structure was substantial: bunks for twelve, two fireplaces, a stove, and good water from a stream to the west. Early guidebooks listed the capacity as twelve; later editions reduced it to ten.
Decline, Renovation, and Closure
The camp’s condition deteriorated through the late 1930s, and by 1939 the Bennington Section was fielding complaints about theft and vandalism. In 1941 the Section undertook a thorough renovation: the open front was closed in, a new entrance was built at the rear, additional windows were cut, the bunk count was reduced to ten, a concrete floor was poured, and a new stove was installed. The work transformed a camp that had been sliding toward disuse into a serviceable shelter again.
Fay Fuller Camp remained a base for hiking and section outings through the 1950s and 1960s, hosting the GMC’s intersectional gathering in 1953. But as the Long Trail was relocated in the early 1970s away from the camp’s vicinity, foot traffic dwindled. In 1972, the Selectmen of Woodford formally requested that the Green Mountain Club close the camp, threatening Board of Health enforcement if the Club did not act. The Club complied. The structure was closed and demolished at the end of May 1972, forty-two years after Fritz von Briesen built it in honor of his wife.
Sources
Fay Fuller — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fay_Fuller.
Tacoma Public Library. "Fay Fuller." 2002. Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20181120075721/http://mtn.tpl.lib.wa.us/climbs/climbing/people/fuller.asp.
Hamilton, Charles. "Fay Fuller becomes the first woman known to reach the summit of Mount Rainier on August 10, 1890." HistoryLink, May 29, 2006. http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=7786.
Bragg, Lynn. More than Petticoats: Remarkable Washington Women. 2nd ed. Globe Pequot, 2010.
"Long Trail News," December 1930. Green Mountain Club.
Long Trail Guide Book, 1937. Green Mountain Club. P. 17.
"Long Trail News," June 1939. Green Mountain Club.
Long Trail Guide Book, 1940. Green Mountain Club. P. 17.
Long Trail News, 1941. Green Mountain Club. P. 16.
"Long Trail News," August 1941. Green Mountain Club.
Smoke and Blazes (Killington), no. 5 (1952). Killington Section, Green Mountain Club. P. 32.
Long Trail News, 1958. Green Mountain Club. P. 2.
Long Trail News, 1967. Green Mountain Club. P. 5.
Long Trail Guide Book, 20th ed. Green Mountain Club, 1971.
"Long Trail News," November 1972. Green Mountain Club.
Long Trail News, 1973. Green Mountain Club. P. 7.
Long Trail Guide Book, 13th ed. Green Mountain Club. P. 14.
Long Trail Guide Book, 19th ed. Green Mountain Club. P. 21.
