Women Set Sights On The Top

Women are finding their way to the top of all sorts of outdoor sports and accomplishment. A sampling of some close to home include:

Sara Bombard, 17, a skydiver, softball pitcher, part-time worker, honors student - and a hot shot.

While maintaining a 3.89 grade-point average at Bethel High, where she’s a junior, she plays clarinet and oboe in the high school band.

And she swings a shotgun like you wouldn’t believe.

She lives with her grandparents near Tacoma, and she’s just been awarded Distinguished Expert status by the National Rifle Association for her skill with a scattergun.

Frank Strickland is her shooting coach, and a master of understatement.

“She’s quite an extraordinary person,” he said.

Although she took up the sport just 2 years ago, she serves as an instructor in a trap and skeet class. On Tuesdays she shoots. Thursdays and Sundays she works on the trap range at the Tacoma Sportsmen’s Club, where she pulls for other shooters.

To achieve Distinguished Expert, she had to break an average of at least 23 clay targets out of every 25 for 12 rounds. At least three rounds had to be perfect. She shot over several weeks, at a rate of three or four rounds a week.

Sara started sky diving as soon as she turned 16.

“Now she’s had eight dives, and she’s into free-falls,” her grandmother said. “She just loves it. She has no fear.”

Some day, she would like to fly for the military.

Lynn Hill, one of the world’s top rock climbers, will be in Spokane to give a video presentation March 14, 7 p.m. at The Met.

Hill was the first woman to lead tough grade 5.14 rock ascents. In 1993, she became the first person to free climb The Nose route on El Capitan in Yosemite, the world’s tallest free standing monolith.

More impressive was her one-day free climb of The Nose the following year.

Hill is the five-time winner of the Rock Master Invitation climbing competition in Italy and won the Climbing World Cup in 1990.

Tickets are $6, available at Mountain Gear, 325-9000, and G&B Select-a-Seat, 325-7328.

Lisa Pelly, landscape designer from Battle Ground, Wash., is the first woman to chair the Washington state Fish and Wildlife Commission. Gender doesn’t have any effect on her position on the nine-member panel, she said, “primarily because this commission works so well as a team.”

But being a woman has had its lonesome moments in other outdoor pursuits.

She noticed a void for a sisterhood when she was working in a fly-fishing shop in the 1980s.

“It’s funny, but when women would occasionally come in, we’d talk and invariably say we should get together to go fishing sometime,” Pelly said.

“We all seemed to feel a need to connect with other women who thought the same way about fishing and conservation.”

She founded the Northwest Women Flyfishers in 1987. “Last year on Earth Day, I remember watching (Interior secretary) Bruce Babbitt on CNN,” she said. “There were three top government environmental or wildlife leaders behind him waiting their turn to talk - and they were all women. I thought ‘this is tremendous. This is really fun.’

“Somebody asked me if I had kids. No. But I put that passion into natural resources. I think women connect with wildlife. It’s our instinct.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Color Photos