By Brandt Mannchen
On February 9, 2016, Lorraine G. Bonney died in Chase, British Columbia, Canada, at the age of 93. Lorraine, along with her husband Orrin, was an original founder of the Sierra Club’s Lone Star Chapter and the Houston Regional Group. The Lone Star Chapter's highest award is named the “Orrin Bonney Award.” It could just as well have been named the “Lorraine Bonney Award.”
In 1965, when the Lone Star Chapter was founded, there were no regional groups. Many of the original founders and volunteers of the Lone Star Chapter lived in the Houston area, like Brom Wilkin and Emil Kindshey. Lorraine and Orrin lived in Houston but also had a homestead in Conroe, Texas (“Happy Oaks”) that was forested, wild, and filled with wildlife.
Lorraine and Orrin were a team, partners. They argued like “cats and dogs” but were united in their love for each other, the wild country, and the need for a Sierra Club in Texas and elsewhere to protect and advocate for wilderness and wild lands.
Lorraine was born in the City of Edmonton in Alberta, Canada. She and Orrin met in Canada, and as the story goes, when Orrin, an attorney, saved Lorraine from severe injury or death in a fall while he was teaching a course in technical mountain climbing, in gratitude, as Lorraine said, she agreed to marry him. This was in the mid-1950s. They not only shared a love for mountains and mountain climbing but also wilderness and wild lands and had a summer home in Kelly, Wyoming, in the shadow the Grand Tetons, which they willed to Grand Teton National Park after their deaths.
Lorraine was also an accomplished writer and wrote or co-wrote with Orrin many books, including “The Grand Controversy” (about who first climbed the Grand Teton), “The Big Thicket Guidebook” (which literally took 40 years to complete and anyone who wants to explore the Big Thicket should not be without), “Battle Drums and Geysers” (about the first army expedition to Yellowstone), “The Teton Range and Gros Ventre Range”, “Bonney's Guide to Jackson's Hole and Grand Teton National Park”, “Yellowstone Park and the Absaroka Range”, and other books.
When Orrin died in the late 1970s, Lorraine did not stop exploring. Lorraine rode a bicycle across East Africa, climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, and conducted trail work at Lake Baikal in Russian Siberia.
I best remember her when she gave a presentation in the early 1990s to the Houston Regional Group about her trip to Antarctica where she was hired on as a driver of a snow machine that shuttled scientists back and forth across that frozen continent. As she finished reading each page of the presentation, she dropped them on the floor from the podium. I raced to pick each page up and Lorraine kidded me in front of the standing room only crowd as I did so.
Lorraine was principled to the point of pigheadedness. If she believed in something and thought her position was right, not God, the mountains, or the Sierra Club could sway her. I remember vividly at a Lone Star Chapter meeting in 1978, with Orrin ill and by her side, how she told off the Chapter Executive Committee based on her perception of its weakness with regard to clear cutting and wilderness in the National Forests of Texas.
Lorraine's friendship with Big Thicket doyens Maxine Johnston and Geraldine Watson was firm and long. When these three strong women got together there was no telling what would happen in addition to laughter and high spirits. Lorraine, unfortunately, was under recognized in the Sierra Club and the wider conservation community for her efforts to stop clear cutting and protect wild forests and wilderness.
It is without a doubt a “sad day” that Lorraine no longer is with us. She is the last of the Lone Star Chapter's founders to depart. As longtime Sierra Club forest activist Tom Maddux said, “It's the End of an Era.” Long live Lorraine Bonney's name and her cause!