Kitty (Katherine Milmine) grew up in New England but saw the Rocky Mountains in about 1950 at age 12. Going west was then the goal. But her geology degrees from Bryn Mawr and Harvard came with no fieldwork at all. She married a fellow grad student (Bruce Reed) and, in 1962, moved to California, where she soon started a career in tech editing with the USGS. Eventually, the family settled in Anchorage, AK. Summers often found them in remote field camps. She came to Olympia, WA, in 1986 to edit for what is now the Washington Geological Survey (now a division of the DNR). After 12 years of that, she became a contract editor. She married Geologist Jerry Thorsen in 1999 and moved to Port Townsend, where they started a geology study group HQ’d at the Marine Science Center at Fort Worden.
Kitty started out in vertebrate paleontology (insectivores), but picked up working with conodonts and, in 1982, joined a USGS scientist to look into Paleozoic radiolarian biostratigraphy. (Her rule: the harder it is to get to the outcrop, the worse the samples will be.) She also worked with paleobotanists at Republic, WA, where she was honored to have a fossil plant species named for her (see Note 1). She hopes to get the local beach geology figured out in the next decade. (Updated Oct. 2021)
Note 1: Corylopsis reedae
Radtke, M.G., Pigg, K.B, and Wehr, W.C., 2005, Fossil Corylopsis and Fothergillia leaves (Hamamelidaceae) from the lower Eocene flora of Republic, Washington, U.S.A., and their evolutionary and biogeographic significance: International Journal of Plant Science, v. 166, no. 2, p 347-356.