Rome To Roseburg

Born in Bavaria in 1938, Hilde Baughman remembers fearful nights in a bomb shelter during World War Two. As a peacetime teenager she visited cities across Europe: Brussels, Amsterdam, Geneva, Vienna, Paris, Rome. In 1961, married to an American, she found herself in San Francisco, where she became a model at evening fashion shows. When the family moved to southern Oregon in 1966 a remarkable transformation began. A lovely European woman accustomed to a prescribed and urbane life learned to love wildlife and untamed country. She fly-fished for summer steelhead; hunted Oregon's rugged country for mountain quail; backpacked, cross-country skied and mountain-biked. Because she trained for and ran marathons, she was fit enough to outrun a northern California wildfire. In recent years she's won two bouts with cancer. As John Muir aptly put it, nature became her manifestation of God.