Meet mountaineer Tina Bowman, 2012 Francis Farquar Award winner

Tina Bowman doesn’t just bag peaks, she conquers long lists of peaks.

The mountaineer, climber, Sierra Club leader and Angeles Chapter member received the Club’s Francis P. Farquhar Mountaineering Award that honors people who make significant contributions to mountaineering and “enhancement of the Club’s prestige in this field.”

Bowman, longtime resident of Long Beach and a retired instructor at Cal State Long Beach, more than exemplifies the climbing spirit. She is the second of only two mountaineers in the Angeles Chapter to have twice completed the three major peak climbing lists: the Sierra Peaks Section list of 248 peaks in the Sierra Nevada, the desert Peaks Section list of 99 peaks in the desert Southwest and the Hundred Peaks Section list of 275 peaks in Southern California higher than 5,000 feet in elevation.

Bowman became the first quadruple list finisher in 1998 with her completion of the Lower Peaks Committee list of 81 (then 58) peaks under 5,000 feet in Southern California.

Bowman also completed the “triple-double” list in her unique style: climbing the final peak of each list on the same day , Oct. 7, 2006. Her list-finish summit was Independence Peak, followed by an exuberant celebration at her second home in Independence, Calif., which, incidentally was where naturalist and author Mary Austin penned “Land of Little Rain.”

Like most motivated climbers, she’s done plenty of non-list peaks too, such as Mt. Kilimanjaro: 19,340 feet) and of South America (Mt. Aconcagua: 22,841 feet).

And among these achievements, Bowman has found time to guide others on their own peak quests. She has been and continues to be a very popular and prolific mountaineering leader for both the Sierra Peaks Section (SPS) and Desert Peaks Section (DPS), leading excursions ranging from comparatively easy to very hard peaks.

Earlier this year she was recognized by the DPS for having led more than 50 of their 99 peaks. She has also assisted on two weeklong National trips in the Sierra Nevada as a climbing leader.
She has helped train future leaders as the Leadership Training Committee Chair (LTC) for the Angeles Chapter since 2002. Bowman has also been co-editor, with her husband Tom, of the Leader’s Reference Book (LRB) for three editions. The LRB is the primary reference and training material for Angeles Chapter leaders and has helped develop many hundreds of leaders as well as countless mountaineers.

She has held a variety of other leadership roles over the years, including chair of the national Mountaineering Oversight Committee, DPS Outings Chair, SPS Mountain Records Chair, Wilderness Travel Course lecturer on mountain travel and conditioning, etc.

Prior to the Francis P. Farquhar Mountaineering Award, Bowman in the past has won top Chapter awards too: the Chester Versteeg Outings Award and the Bill T. Russell Mountaineering Award. The former is the Angeles Chapter’s highest outings award, while the latter was given by the DPS in recognition of her extensive mountaineering accomplishments as well as her wider service to the Sierra Club. All three awards recognize her tremendous impact on and off the mountain, paying tribute to someone who is not only an accomplished mountaineer but who is, more generally, an amazing individual.

Does she have a favorite Sierra peak? “Perhaps Mt. Whitney would be my favorite peak or climb because it was my first when I was 15 with my dad and a cousin, and because I climbed the East Face in 2007, thanks to Doug Mantle and Marcelo Altamirano,” she says. “I’ve been to the summit four times now. “

Bowman joins climbing legends Normal Clyde and Allen Steck (1970), Jules Eichorn (1973), Glen Dawson (1973), the late Galen Rowell (1977) and mountaineer Arlene Blum (1982) in being an awardee. She received her award Aug. 4 at the Sierra Club’s Annual Awards event in San Francisco, not too terribly far from the peaks that have distinguished her climbing career.

Emma Smith is a Southern Sierran intern in her junior year at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. Information for this story was provided by Chapter entities.