Breaking Trails: How Claire Marie Hodges became Yosemite’s first female ranger

In 1918, the National Park Service faced a serious staffing shortage. 

In April of 1917, President Woodrow Wilson — who had signed legislation creating the National Park Service less than a year earlier — led the United States into WWI. Thousands of able bodied young men were enlisted and shipped overseas to fight for America in the “Great War.”

Across the nation, the sudden departure of men in their prime working age left many jobs unfilled — including in the national parks. Like in other industries, women filled in the gaps, supporting the war effort on the home front. 

At the start of the 1918 season, a young woman overheard rangers in Yosemite National Park complaining about the lack of staff. As someone who had long loved Yosemite Valley, she made the bold decision to apply, thinking it would be swiftly rejected. To her surprise, she was promptly hired — and made history as a result. 

Claire Marie Hodges

The spring of 1918 wasn’t Claire Marie Hodges first time in Yosemite Valley. She had first visited as a girl in 1904, riding on horseback through the Sierra Nevada? to reach the national park. As she grew into an adult, she visited that park many times. Eventually, she took a job teaching the Yosemite Valley School in 1916. 

Her job at the Yosemite Valley School allowed her to become deeply immersed in the landscape. In many ways, her experiences were like those of the great sage of Yosemite, John Muir. Muir had been enraptured by natural history, particularly geology; Hodges had a passion for botany. Muir’s writing on the valley were world famous, eloquently describing the features of the valley and the spiritual effect it had on him. Similarly, Hodges wrote poetry to express her deep feeling about the natural setting.

Claire Marie Hodges thought her desire to work for the park was a fanciful wish-dream. Superintendent Washington B. Lewis saw it differently. “It’s been in my mind for some time to put a woman on one of these patrols — only I couldn’t find the right one before.” He hired her for the summer season, with a salary of $900. In 2025, Hodges salary would have been approximately $18,000 — not a bad summer gig for a teacher. 

Though she was not the first female ranger in the National Park Service, Claire Marie Hodges made history nonetheless. The first women ever hired as rangers were Esther and Elizabeth Burrell. They worked in Rocky Mountain National Park as “nature guides,” the modern equivalent to interpretative rangers. They gave talks on flora and fauna, and guided visitors to the top of Longs Peak. 

Unlike the Burrell sisters (and the majority of other women who would work for the NPS in its early years) Hodges was not a “nature guide.” She performed a wide range of duties. Today, we might think of her as a combination law enforcement or backcountry ranger. Her duties included regular overnight horseback rides bringing down gate receipts from Tuolumne Meadows, permitting cars and registering campers, sealing firearms, and a host of other administrative tasks. 

The Difficult Duties of a Park Ranger

In 1918, the Times Herald ran a short story and image of Hodges titled “Who’ll trade jobs with her?” From the perspective of the newspaper, the work of a national park ranger is all sunsets and birdsong — “one perennial vacation.”

Five years later, NPS founder Horace Albright described the work of a park ranger very differently. He recorded a notice posted for rangers to apply in his autobiography, The Founding of the National Park Service: 

“The duties are exacting and require the utmost patience and tact at all times. A ranger’s job is no place for a nervous, quick-tempered man, nor for the laggard, nor for one who is unaccustomed to hard work. If you cannot work hard ten to twelve hours a day, and always with patience and a smile on your face, don’t [apply].

“You have perhaps believed Government jobs to be “soft” and “easy.” Most of them are not, and certainly there are no such jobs in the National Park Service.

If you want a summer in the Park as an experience in outdoor activity amid forests and a fine invigorating atmosphere, apply if you are qualified. Otherwise, please plan to visit as a tourist.”

Claire Marie Hodges only worked for Yosemite National Park for a few months, but she is certain to have experienced both these realities. Long rides through harsh terrain were accompanied by jaw-dropping views. The benefit of working in a scenic environment brought along the annoyances of tourists. Undoubtedly, Hodges must have grown tired of answering repetitive questions and providing the same directions to countless visitors.

When Claire Marie Hodges worked the 1918 season, the concept of what a park ranger should be was only just beginning to form. There are many concepts that would eventually coalesce into what Horace Albright called “the ranger mystique” — and the work of Hodges and the Burrell sisters was part of that. Today, thousands of women have followed behind them, filling roles at all levels, from maintenance workers to wildland firefighters to director of the National Park Service.

For more information on the history of women in the National Park Service, check out Woman’s Voice in the National Parks by Polly Kaufman.