Under Mountain Shadows

This book examines Kay Kershaw's tremendous influence on conservation efforts in the Pacific Northwest and on LGBTQ+ rights in the United States. Except for a short stint during WWII, Kay Kershaw spent nearly her entire life in Washington State's Yakima County. As a young woman, Kay pursued lesbian relationships as she gained local renown in sport and aviation; after the war, she established a world-famous dude ranch at Goose Prairie with her first partner, Pat Kane. This proved a fraught undertaking in a region closely associated with the John Birch Society. Operating the ranch under the guise of two "spinsters," Kershaw and her later life-partner Isabelle Lynn guarded their privacy closely, but local encroachment by the US Forest Service and the timber industry forced them into the public arena as environmentalists.

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 and, perhaps, affected his perception of the law and his precedent-setting judicial opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965). Douglas's right to privacy argument in Griswold provided the basis for major LGBTQ+ Supreme Court decisions in the twenty-first century as well as Roe v. Wade in 1973.