Claire Gabriel Dunne

After graduating with an English degree from Stanford (alongside Anita Newman) I worked for five summers for the US Forest Service as a YCC Youth Conservation Corps leader in the Wasatch and worked in the ski areas in the winter. That left springs and falls free to travel to Bolinas and to camp in Escalante. After a stint at the Herbarium at the University, I joined Native Plants, Inc. and collected and germinated seed of native trees and shrubs for revegetation projects. After four years in the nursery, I started the seed division of NPI leaving in 1983 to marry Richard "Rick" Dunne, South High '65, and move to Wyoming to plant 200 acres of seed orchards of wildflowers and sagebrush for seed production. We arrived as novice farmers and learned it is hard to even make water run downhill! To market our seeds, we formed a company called Wind River Seed, supplying native seed for revegetation of coal mines, highways, mountain cabins. After my dear Rick died in 2014 I sold the farm to a neighbor who converted it to cow food. For 30 years in our small town of Worland, I ran Tree Board, Master Gardeners, Wyoming Council of the Humanities book discussion, and the Rotary youth exchange student program. Rick helped design our $16 mil private museum called Washakie Museum and Cultural center, where we talk about the origins of the landforms, changing climate, and paleoIndians, (what it was like to make a living in the Big Horns 15,000 years ago). You will know it by the 20 foot tall bronze of a Columbian mammoth out front www.washakiemuseum.org.
On April Fools Day 2017 I left Wyoming for a house on a creek in Auburndale, Mass. The draw, of course, was grandchildren. Through Match I met a second wonderful man, David, and are enjoying our grandkids together.

I arrived in Salt Lake by train from Illinois in 1965 (full of soldiers heading to Vietnam) in time to start our junior year; my family moved over later that fall. Mostly I hung out with the other Unitarians, the philosophy club, math club, learned some Arabic from one teacher (anyone remember her name?) and Russian from our Finnish teacher.