Susan Billingsley - Grand Canyon River Guides

Susan descending on a hike – 1969.Oh gosh, I think I probably had the best childhood ofanybody in the world. I grew up in Custer, SouthDakota, which is in the Black Hills—a little town, twoolder bothers that were twins, and a younger sister. Welived right on the edge of this little town so I had lotsof… The Black Hills are all granite outcrops, hugegranite outcrops, so we just had rocks: our own huge,ten-acre outcrops of granite to play on. So that waspretty wonderful. My dad and a friend of his, built thefirst speedboat up there. Early on, we used to go out tothis little lake and go waterskiing. You could go four, fivetimes around before you were tired. The water was socold, we learned how to take off jumpin’ off the dockand landing on the dock, we never got in the water.(laughs) People would come out from town and justwatch because they just couldn’t imagine anybody wouldwant to do that. We had wetsuits in the spring…prettybizarre. My mom came from Mississippi, so we’d go downand spend some summers with my grandparents inMississippi, and that was always a treat because myfamily down there is so much fun to be around.We moved to Tempe in 1961. I went to high schooldown there. Probably the worst time in my whole life—Ican’t think of anybody who had a worse high schoolexperience than I did. I hated it. I hated it. I hatedbeing down there, it was just awful. I was the worst nerdin the world. My brothers wouldn’t even say hi to me inthe hall. (laughs) …I read, probably two full books a day.That’s all I did those four years, was read books. I wasjust in denial of ever having left South Dakota. Then Istarted going back up as soon as I made enough moneyfor plane tickets. I’d go up and work in the state parktaking people out on horseback rides—in Custer StatePark, which along with having Mount Rushmore and allthat, they also had a buffalo herd of about 1,500 head upthere. So we’d take Jeep rides out to the buffalo herdsand take horseback rides and it was pretty fun, prettynice. Then I wanted to go to college up there and myparents said, “Well no, you can’t do that, but Flagstaffhas trees, so you can go up to Flagstaff if you want.” Sothat’s how I ended up here.Steiger: You wanted to go to college in SouthDakota?Billingsley: Yeah. Too far. Too far from home. AndI had no idea what I wanted to take. I got out of highschool barely taking enough to even get out of highschool. I came up here and I had no idea of what Iwanted to do, so I looked at all the options and they hadforestry, so I said, “Gosh, that’s what I’ll do.” But nobodytold me that’s not something women did. So I get there,and if one of the forestry teachers, even one of them hadtaken me aside and said, “You know, there’s no womenin forestry. It’s going to be really hard. You’re not goingto like it.” I would have gone, “Oh, okay.” But theydidn’t. Then, I got in there and I find out that theyreally didn’t want me there, but then I found out I reallyliked it, so I stayed. It was really uncomfortable at timesbecause Dr. Minor, who was the dean of Forestry, hadjust flat out said that as long as he was dean, there wouldbe no women graduating in Forestry at nau. So, timeswere changing really fast at that point.page 28grand canyon river guides