BY KATE BRADSHAW
JANUARY 13, 2022
Driven by tales from her family history, Traci Bliss quit academia to document the overlooked female activists behind the founding of one of America’s most iconic parks.
Traci Bliss, whose family has for generations called the Santa Cruz area home, was an education professor at Idaho State University when a story she’d heard as a kid lured her back to Santa Cruz. Her great-great-aunt, nearly a centenarian when Traci was a child, had told her that women had been heavily involved in the work of advocating for the creation of Big Basin Redwoods State Park, established in 1902.