A hundred years ago, it was considered by most to be foolish, absurd, unthinkable for two women to travel on their own, especially to an undeveloped place like Death Valley. A hundred years later, anyone who thinks that idea is foolish – well, they are the ones considered absurd now.

A hundred years ago, in the early 1920s, Edna Brush Perkins and Charlotte Hannahs Jordan, both in their early 40s, went to find the heart of the desert in Death Valley. A hundred years later, in the early 2020s, I, on the verge of 40, found the book Edna wrote about the experience, The White Heart of Mojave. As I devoured it, I wondered why it didn’t have a more prominent spot on the shelf of adventure classics. This is my attempt to make that book and these two women more widely known and to modernize this classic adventure narrative on the centennial of its publication. This is Backtracks, a special series from Road Tripping in America.

Do you know someone who would enjoy this story but who doesn’t do podcasts? The White Heart of Mojave (Annotated), by Lisa McNamara and Edna Brush Perkins, is available on Amazon as an ebook or paperback. For the print version of the story, I dug a little deeper and found even more interesting info, like who Old Johnnie really was. You can find the print version here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09XV5JGFT

S4:E1 – Back West