Georgia Jipp Blizzard Pilot

2025 Spur Award for Best Western Children's Picture Book

Bronze Medal for Best Illustrator in the 2024 Moonbeam Children's Book Awards

2025 WILLA Literary Award for Best Children's Picture Book

Gold Medallion for Western Non-fiction / Young Readers / Illustrated Book at the 2025 Will Rogers Medallion Awards

GEORGIA JIPP MIGHT BE SMALL, BUT SHE WAS BRAVE, FLYING 150 MERCY MISSIONS FOR THE AMERICAN RED CROSS DURING THE WINTER OF 1949.

Georgia Hoyt Jipp (1926–1987) spent her childhood in and around small airplanes in western South Dakota. She loved flying. Despite her petite size, she earned her pilot's license at age nineteen. In 1948, at age twenty-two, she married Richard Jipp. Their wedding took place in an airplane circling above Philip, South Dakota, while wedding guests listened in on the radio.

A blizzard struck on January 2, 1949, ushering in three months of snowstorms that ranked as the worst in the state's history. Georgia answered the desperate pleas of ranchers, parents of sick children, and the American Red Cross, flying over 150 rescue missions during those three long months of snowstorms—more than anyone else in the state. She was a blizzard pilot hero!

Laura Beth Dean was born into a dairy farming family in Cooperstown, New York, and grew up relishing blizzard and sheep ranching stories told by her South Dakota relatives. When she was two months old, her parents took her on her first flight to Brazil. As a little girl, Laura loved flying in all sizes of airplanes, ranging from a Helio Courier propeller plane, to a Boeing 747 “Jumbo Jet.” After an adventuresome childhood in five countries on four continents, she earned a B.S. in Nursing before settling down with her husband and three children in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of Southwest Virginia. Surrounded by farms and ranches, Laura appreciates quiet and blizzard-free adventures as a home health nurse. She is the author of the children's book,Sweet Potato Moon.