At age 80, Vicky Hoover has worn through many pairs of hiking boots since 1967 when she took her first outdoor hiking trip with the Sierra Club. She found out about the Club while car camping in Death Valley with her then husband. She recalls, as an East Coast girl from Washington, D.C., their immediate infatuation with the looming mountains of the West. So, when a neighboring camper sporting a new pair of Vibram-soled hiking boots who seemed to “know it all” in terms of hiking told her about the Sierra Club’s trips to the mountains, they leapt at the chance to become familiar with the peaks, ridges, and crags that had been calling to them from afar.
When Hoover first joined the Sierra Club, newbies had to be endorsed by two current members in order to be accepted into the club. For the new outdoor enthusiast, “getting in” was like being given a key that unlocked an entire world of adventures and knowledge. “My family excitedly ordered all of our new REI gear, and we were off and running,” she remembers. The young family’s first Sierra Club Outing was a tumultuous trip into the High Sierra with burros to carry their gear. Their youngest daughter was just 4 ½— barely old enough to pass the age requirements to attend, but exuberant to be out in nature. Hoover warm-heartedly recounts tales of lost burros, search parties, and sleepless nights that accompanied that first, transformative experience. At the end of the trip, the leader turned to Hoover and her husband and asked them if they would like to lead their own Sierra Club trips.
Well, why not?
The very next summer the couple led their first family-friendly trip. Since then, Hoover has held countless different positions with Sierra Club Outings and has dedicated her time to caring for the land she loves and informing others so that they might do the same.
Hoover admits that It was not until the mid 1980’s that she really began to get involved in the conservation side of the Sierra Club. But once she got a taste for this work, she dove in head first and has barely come up for air since. Shortly after joining the San Francisco Bay Chapter’s Wilderness Committee, Hoover became instrumental in the passage of the proposed California Desert Protection Act. The act defined 69 distinct areas as wilderness, boosted the status of Death Valley and Joshua Tree National Monuments to national parks, and created the Mojave National Preserve on 1.6 million acres of land owned by the Bureau of Land Management.
When asked if she was particularly inclined towards the outdoors as a young person, Hoover immediately responds, “well my parents were European.” She has fond memories of hiking in the area surrounding the rustic cabin that her parents would rent in Virginia’s Shenandoah Mountains each summer, picnicking in Rock Creek Park near her home in D.C. or “rock scrambling” along the Potomac River. For the outdoors woman, the Sierra Club’s philosophy of enjoying and appreciating the wild, and learning about the issues surrounding it and how to keep it special, proved to be exactly the vibe that she is looking for. When leading an outing, Hoover infuses her own values and knowledge with the Club’s ethos to teach her troops about how politics and land conservation are inherently tied together. As a leader, she encourages people to “stand up for what they stand on” and connect with elected officials to lobby for and vote in the best interest of the environment.
After the November 8 presidential election, Hoover says that even though she thinks of herself as retired, “no one can really retire in a time like this.” She has set in motion both proactive and defensive strategies to mitigate the effects of the new political reality on the environment. Currently, she is focusing on the reauthorization of the Land and Conservation Fund, a program established in 1965 to provide funds and matching grants to federal, state, and local governments for the acquisition of land and water, and easements on land and water. The fund is mostly focused on recreation and protecting national parks, forest and wilderness areas. Hoover believes that because of its very broad bipartisan support, this bill could be one of the few lands-protection causes we can successfully promote right now.
Hoover is also concerned about a new congressional push to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plain to oil exploitation. As an active volunteer for the Alaska Chapter, even though she lives in San Francisco, Hoover is concerned about other matters that could threaten the integrity of the concept of “wilderness” that she knows and loves. She will be focusing increased energy on issues like restricting mountain biking through natural areas—which she explains can easily lead to the acceptance of other “wheeled transportation” types on the same terrain. She is also hot on the heels of Alaska’s Senator Lisa Murkowski. Murkowski is seeking to implement a land exchange for non-wilderness lands in Alaska in order to build a road through present-designated wilderness in the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge in southwest Alaska.
Hoover finds hope in the idea that people see Alaska as a symbol for pristine, protected lands in the U.S. The key, she says, is keeping people informed about the issue. “If you don’t know about a place,” she says, “you can’t really be passionate about it and want to fight for it.” How do we instill a sense of responsibility in our fellow Americans for land that they have not personally come into contact with? Hoover is still working to answer this very question. She hopes that some good will come out of the election in that people will be jolted into action and pushed to collaborate in new ways.
Hoover can seem almost superhuman. She and her family have climbed each of the 247 peaks on the Sierra Club Angeles Chapter's Sierra Peaks Section List of High Sierra mountaintops--some more than once. She has wandered through and enjoyed the beauty of Alaska’s highlands and rivers, the Sierra Nevada’s mountaintops, California’s desert lands, and the vast expanses of Utah and Nevada. She has solo-tripped for 8 days straight with nothing save a pack on her back and a compass and map for guidance, hiking 19 mile days to see as much as possible before camping under the stars and enjoying their cosmic beauty. Although based in Oakland, Hoover worked from 1986 up until 2009 on Alaska issues for the Alaska Chapter. She also worked as personal assistant to Dr. Edgar Wayburn, then-chairman of the Club's Alaska Task Force.
Hoover has been presented with the “Wilderness-Forever Future” award—honoring her decades of leadership and volunteer work to connect countless individuals with the great outdoors. Currently she is the volunteer editor of two Sierra Club newsletters: Words of the Wild and Sierra Borealis: Alaska Report. In 2016 she celebrated her 50th year of backpacking with the Sierra Club with a hike to the John Muir Hut, situated at 11,955 feet in King’s Canyon National Park in the Sierra Nevada, to place it on the National Register of Historic Places.
To this day, this incredible woman can rarely be found behind a desk. She is either out hiking or hard at work ensuring that the wild places she holds dear stay wild and beautiful.
