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>