Woman on the Rocks: The Mountaineering Letters of Ruth Dyar Mendenhall

In 1937, climbing mountains was thought to be an activity reserved for men. Ruth Dyar Mendenhall broke that barrier to become one of California's first and most important women mountain climbers.

The letters collected in Woman on the Rocks: The Mountaineering Letters of Ruth Dyar Mendenhall (Spotted Dog Press 2007), edited by Valerie Mendenhall Cohen, document her amazing fifty-year mountaineering career.

Valerie Mendenhall Cohen grew up in Pasadena, California, and spent summers during college in Yosemite s Camp 4. She completed B.A. and M.A. degrees in English at the University of California. Woman on the Rocks: The Mountaineering Letters of Ruth Dyar Mendenhall is her first book.

She was a Law Enforcement Ranger in Yosemite and Grand Teton National Parks, and has also worked as a typesetter, illustrator, writer, ski patroller, and mother. After living in Southern Utah for nearly thirty years, she moved to Nevada

Cohen became a full-time artist in the mid-1980s, studying with Milford Zornes, Katherine Chang Liu, and Christopher Schink. She has painted in Mexico, Yugoslavia, the Sierra Nevada, and throughout the Southwest.

Cohen has had a number of one-person exhibits, and her watercolors have appeared in national and international juried shows, including San Diego Watercolor Society, Arizona Aqueous, Watercolor West, and Taos National.

Here are some visual influences on her life: snow, rock, anything above timberline. Deserts and oceans. Navajo weavings (which are really landscapes). The beautiful skeletons of dead trees. A look at this list demonstrates the attraction to stark designs that came out of her family. Her mother, Ruth, climbed desert peaks: Cohen paints Great Basin deserts, following the family tradition of going to places where one confronts the Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is (Wallace Stevens).

She lives with her husband, the writer Michael P. Cohen, in Reno, Nevada.