Jones died in 2000; Lindsay in 2001. McSaveney, the fourth member of the group, is also speaking at the symposium this week, along with 23 other female scientists from both Ohio State and around the world, including Ellen Mosley-Thompson, distinguished university professor in Ohio State’s Department of Geography.

“A lot of press people were around, and there were headlines about how we were invading the last bastion of male supremacy on Earth,” Tickhill Terrel says now with a chuckle. “But we were really trying to show that women were not defective men. And I think we proved that women could certainly stand the rigors of Antarctica.”

From October 1969 to mid-February 1970, they collected rock samples from Antarctica’s Taylor Valley – a place NASA calls “one of the most remote and geologically exotic places on the planet.” They explored the Wright Valley, another dry valley in Antarctica, and slept in tents for months. They reached the South Pole – becoming the first female scientists to do so – where temperatures dropped to minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

Tickhill Terrel hauled rocks from the valleys to their camps. She chopped ice for water. She broke rocks for analysis. It was grueling work, but she loved it.

“When I was in Antarctica, I had been searching around for what I wanted to do,” she says. “And I realized that it didn’t matter what I did, but that it needed to be research. I really loved research.”

The months in Antarctica changed her – she returned to Columbus just as college campuses around the country, including Ohio State, were erupting in protests and riots over the Vietnam War. Tickhill Terrel decided to pursue a degree in botany, and moved into an apartment on Neil Avenue with a few friends.

“When I got back, people didn’t treat me differently, but I was a different person,” she says. “My time in Antarctica was pure joy, from the moment I got up in the morning until the moment I fell in bed each night.”

And though she never returned to Antarctica, she did devote her life to research: Tickhill Terrel went on to earn a PhD in ecology from the University of Georgia, to teach at the University of Wyoming, and to lead research efforts in the Rocky Mountain National Park. Even now in retirement, she said, she is a researcher, studying the history of textiles and quilting, and publishing her findings in peer-reviewed journals.

And though there still is not gender equity in funding and opportunities for scientific research, that first all-female team broke through a barrier for women in science, setting the stage for future students and researchers to visit remote areas of the planet and ask their own questions.

A group of Ohio State students are planning a research trip to Antarctica this winter, during Antarctica’s summer, and around half of the students are women. Tickhill Terrel had advice for them: “Pack your sense of awe,” she said. “It is an awesome place – take time to stand and take in the awe of it, take it into the core of your being. It is an experience I’ve never forgotten.”