Under Mountain Shadows

<p> From her world-famous dude ranch in Washington state''s Yakima County, Kay Kershaw exerted tremendous influence on conservation efforts in the Pacific Northwest and, tangentially, on LGBTQ+ rights in the United States. After gaining local renown in sports and aviation, she established the ranch at Goose Prairie with her first partner, Pat Kane--a fraught undertaking in a region closely associated with the John Birch Society. Operating under the guise of two "spinsters," Kershaw and her later life-partner Isabelle Lynn guarded their privacy closely, but local encroachment by the U.S. Forest Service and the timber industry forced them into the public arena as environmentalists. </p><p> In partnership with Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, Kershaw and Lynn spearheaded a decades-long campaign to save the ancient forests and ecosystem of Washington''s Cascade Range. In the process, Kay and Isabelle''s devoted relationship proved a marked contrast to Justice Douglas'' own turbulent love life, perhaps affecting his perception of the law and his precedent-setting judicial opinion in <I>Griswold v. Connecticut</I> (1965), which provided the basis for major LGBTQ+ Supreme Court decisions in the twenty-first century as well as <I>Roe v. Wade</I> in 1973.</p>