The East River carves a perfect “S” just before it flows between the base of Gothic Mountain and a treehouse named “Bean Pod.” Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) scientists constructed this treehouse one year after the organization was founded in 1928. The 5-by-10-foot shack clings to a small hill on one end and two spruce trees on the other. Inside sits a small desk and a simple twin bed, under an archway of Christmas lights. A window over the bed frames an idyllic view of Gothic Mountain’s lower crags. 

Facilities Manager Benn Schmatz brought me here in my new role as director of storytelling for RMBL. I am already daunted by the countless stories that have shaped this place. Like a watershed with many tributaries, RMBL is a storyshed. Every being here — across millennia, cultures, and species — offers its own tributary, its own story. Bean Pod is no exception, with hundreds of users reaching back to when, according to a RMBL publication, “a ‘Miss Bean’ was the first person to spend the summer in it.”

Stream ecologist Bobbi Peckarsky stayed in Bean Pod for three summers, 1976-1978. She says she remembers when the lab’s then-director (Chris Johnson, son of founders Vera Adams Johnson and John C. Johnson) first showed her the shack. 

“He was kind of embarrassed,” Peckarsky tells me. “He thought I was going to think it was awful. I went right through the cabin to the deck, and I looked out. I thought, ‘This is awesome! There’s Gothic Mountain. There’s the East River.’ I loved it.” 

Peckarsky and three colleagues later held “the first women’s happy hour on that deck, which probably was very unsafe,” she recalls. “Four of us went out on that deck with gin and tonics.” She has since returned to Gothic every summer for her work on interactions among stream invertebrates, especially mayflies, and the extent to which they thrive and nourish life as temperatures warm. Peckarsky’s team studying “the Benthos” (Greek for watery bottom-dwellers) was known as “The Sensuous Benthettes.” 

“We had these wonderful black knee-high boots that a colleague joked looked very sensuous,” she says. “We used to wear them in the Fourth of July parade and twirl our bug-catching nets.” 

Peckarsky’s RMBL experience contrasted with her life back at Cornell, where she was the first woman hired in the entomology department. 

“For a woman scientist to have kids, it was, ‘How are you going to maintain your academic excellence while you’re a mom?’ Just watch me,” she says  

I ask Peckarsky why RMBL was so much more inclusive. 

“Something about the shared simple lifestyle selects for the kind of people that are inclusive and accepting,” she replies.

Carol Boggs adds to Peckarsky’s answer. Boggs first arrived to study butterflies in 1978. She has missed only two summers since. 

“RMBL is not associated with a university, so people have to work together to keep it going,” Boggs says. “That has meant including women as partners. Wives of early researchers helped keep the lab running day-to-day. RMBL is founded on caring for each other, caring about science, together.” 

Harriet Barclay joined RMBL in its earliest days. Her herbarium now holds almost 12,000 specimens from the Gunnison Basin, dating back to 1929. Plant ecologist Jean Langenheim — the second female president of the Ecological Society of America — conducted research at RMBL.

From 1958 through the late twentieth century, Ruth “Scottie” Willey (one of Harvard’s first female PhDs in biology) worked as an aquatic biologist at RMBL. According to former RMBL Executive Director Ian Billick, she and her husband, Bob, along with attorney Pete Klingsmith, developed the concept of non-consumptive water rights, “for which RMBL stream ecologists and Colorado fly fishermen will be forever grateful,” Billick says.  

Willey famously climbed into the cab of a bulldozer and convinced the driver not to dig into the Mexican Cut Preserve. Billick adds that this history runs deeper than RMBL, with a “strong tradition” of women in botany that dated back to the 1800s. 

“They had to work at field stations because there was less support structure for women at universities,” Billick says.  

The legacy of leadership continues. Jennie Reithel has been RMBL’s science director since 2007, and arrived at the lab in 1993. Jeni Blacklock is the new executive director, and is developing collaborations within RMBL and with other organizations that advance science and research. 

“It’s inspiring to see how generations of women have shaped RMBL through collaboration, curiosity, and leadership,” Blacklock says. “Their legacy continues to guide how we build inclusive spaces for science to thrive — today and for the next 100 years.”

 Mairead Brogan studied under Peckarsky at RMBL for six years, starting when she graduated from high school in 2018. Now a PhD student at Northern Arizona University, Brogan finds the number of women in their sixth decade of research at RMBL to be part of the field station’s secret. 

“You have quite a few strong, later-career women who have been very successful in science,” she says. “That representation matters, and it is empowering.” 

After reflecting on Brogan’s next-generation commitment to place-based, policy-informing science, I can’t help but think of a 1996 Langenheim article on women in ecology, in which Langenheim hoped “that there would be no further need to discuss the contributions of women ecologists because we would be recognized just as ecologists.” 

Have we, partly because of RMBL, reached that point in science and society?

I want my daughters to feel this tradition of empowerment. So Atalaya, then 17, and I head to Bean Pod. Atalaya’s eyes open wide at how the tiny shack stands against the massive Gothic Mountain backdrop. She starts taking photos of Bean Pod from all angles. I give her space as she walks down to the river to photograph Bean Pod from below. 

I enter the treehouse and am drawn to a bit of writing penciled on the white plaster wall: “She was here.” 

— John Hausdoerffer
Director of Story and Advancement
Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory

(A version of this article first appeared in the Gunnison Country Times online, May 28, 2025)