Adelaide "Su-Lin" Young, the first American woman to explore the rugged Himalayas in the 1930s and for whom the first giant panda brought to the United States was named, died April 17 of cardiopulmonary arrest at a home-care facility in the Bay Area community of Hercules. She was 96.
An unlikely explorer, the pampered and glamorous daughter of a New York nightclub owner probed the arduous territory of southwest China as a newlywed in 1934. She was accompanied by her husband, brother-in-law and an ever-changing cast of local porters. She shot a bear for food, preserved botanical specimens for the American Museum of Natural History and slept with a loaded pistol under her pillow as protection against bandits.
Although her only previous outdoor experience was as a summer camp counselor in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, Young adapted. She learned to gather her own food, cook over a campfire and politely turn down invitations to visit flea-infested yurts. Bathing or brushing her teeth drew curious onlookers; trying to discard tattered clothing was useless, one of her daughters said, because the group's porters kept retrieving it and putting it in her saddlebags. As the sole woman in the company of men, she was an object of fascination and was considered a foreigner by the native Chinese.
"In Tibet, Su-Lin had sometimes stayed in yak-hair tents, drinking yak-butter tea, warmed over a yak-dung fire," Vicki Croke wrote in "The Lady and the Panda" (2005). "Everything she ate was suffused with stray strands of yak hair. The smell of it all was unfortunately unforgettable to her."
Early in the trip, she shot a large bear but almost immediately expressed regret.
"It wasn't just the killing of the bear that upset her," said one of her three daughters, Jolly King of Honolulu. "After she did it, she realized [the bear] had two cubs. It was still disturbing to her in her mid-80s."
As a result of the incident, she persuaded her family to stop collecting dead animal specimens and instead bring live exotic animals back to museums and zoos.
After the expedition, the trio withdrew to Shanghai, where Young worked as a reporter for several newspapers, including the China Journal and the North China Daily News. There she met Ruth Harkness, another American woman, who captured, named and transported the first giant panda to the United States.
