Ynés Mexía

Ynés Mexía was born in Washington in 1870, the daughter of a Mexican diplomat, and grew up between the two countries in a family that fell apart. Her first husband died; her second was a much younger man who ran her poultry business into the ground, and the marriage ended in divorce. By her late thirties she was in San Francisco, in poor mental health and under a doctor's care, doing social work.

What changed her life was the Sierra Club. Hiking in the California mountains she found she was happiest outdoors, and in 1921, at 51, she enrolled at the University of California to study natural science. She never took a degree. In 1925 she joined a collecting trip to Mexico, fell off a cliff, broke several ribs, and came home with a plan to go back on her own.

She did, and then kept going. Over the next thirteen years she collected across Mexico, up Mount McKinley in Alaska, and through Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Argentina and Chile, spending two and a half years in the Amazon basin, travelling by canoe with local guides and drying specimens on a raft. She financed the trips by selling the specimens to herbaria. She was often ill, often alone, and by her own account entirely content.

The total came to around 150,000 specimens, including some 500 species new to science, dozens of which now carry her name. She died of lung cancer in 1938, a few weeks after coming home from Mexico.