Florence's father was James Mason Hutchings, one of Yosemite's earliest and most energetic promoters. Hutchings had arrived in the valley in 1855 and spent decades publishing, lobbying, and building hotels to draw visitors to a place he considered the most beautiful on Earth. Florence was born in his Upper Hotel and grew up surrounded by the contradictions of frontier hospitality - wilderness marketed to civilization. Her mother Elvira endured the isolation of valley life less enthusiastically than her husband, but Florence took to it without reservation. The log cabin built in 1865 on the north side of the valley, near the base of Yosemite Falls, was her world. She grew up knowing the trails, the animals, the seasons, and the visitors who arrived expecting wilderness and found a girl in trousers who knew the place better than they ever would.

Florence's reputation traveled well beyond the valley. She was famous for defying every convention available to a girl in the 1870s. She complained openly that she had not been born a boy - not from self-pity but from practical frustration with the limitations imposed on her gender. She rode bareback, hiked alone into the backcountry, and greeted tourists with the unselfconscious authority of someone who had never lived anywhere else. John Muir, who knew the valley as well as anyone alive, watched her with a naturalist's delight. "Your Squirrel is very happy," he wrote. "She is a rare creature." The word choice is revealing - Muir saw her the way he saw the valley's other wild things, as something native and perfectly adapted to its habitat. Florence also cared for the then-new Yosemite Valley Chapel, sweeping, dusting, decorating it with wildflowers, laying out hymn books, and ringing the bell when a minister visited.

Florence was seventeen when she was asked to guide a party to Glacier Point via the Ledge Trail. The trail was steep and exposed, following a route that climbed from the valley floor to the rim along narrow ledges with significant drop-offs. According to accounts of the incident, a large boulder came loose above the trail and struck her. She died from the injuries. The abruptness of her death - a young woman who had spent her entire life navigating Yosemite's terrain, killed by the rock itself - gave the loss a particular cruelty. She was buried in the Yosemite Cemetery, a small plot shaded by oaks just east of Yosemite Falls. Her headstone is one of the cemetery's most visited, though many of the tourists who find it know nothing of her story until they read the dates: 1864 to 1881. Seventeen years, all of them in the valley.

After her death, John Muir proposed a memorial that matched the scale of the place she had called home. "Let us give the girl, for her own and her father's sake, some graceful mountain height," he said, "and let it be called Mount Florence." The peak that bears her name stands 12,567 feet above sea level in the Sierra Nevada, southeast of Yosemite Valley. It is not one of the range's most famous summits, but it is a real mountain - granite, snow, exposure - and naming it for a girl who played with lizards and rolled her own cigarettes feels exactly right. Florence Hutchings lived her entire brief life in one of the most beautiful places on Earth, and the mountain that carries her name ensures that some part of the valley's wildness will always belong to her.