The woman in the helmet and red silk cape

[lorelai]

Any ideas/headcannons as to who this person, mentioned in TSS in reference to snow gnats, might be? With the advent of ATWQ I've seen some people put forth Theodora as a posssibility, while others have suggested R's mother, I guess because silk can be linked to nobility. If this has been discussed before, I missed it and am sorry for cluttering.

[Dante]

This is TSS pages 36 to 37, for those who don't recall, by the way.

As for my answer... I'm inclined to think it doesn't matter in the slightest and am surprised to find it a hidden bone of contention. The context suggests it might be someone older than Lemony, but there's so little to go on that I'm not inclined to put forth a candidate.

[Hermes]

I can see it being a matter of contention when TSS first came out, since at that time many people thought everything was a clue to the Grand Solution. Now we know there is no Grand Solution, only the Large and Mysterious World, it becomes less significant. But I think some people are still trying to read it the old way; certainly people hoped ATWQ would tell us about the sugar bowl.

In any case, it would be an interesting idea for fanfic. Of course, dating the mountain climbing expedition is now hard, since ATWQ has messed up our ideas about the dating of TBL - would L have known Theodora then? Hard to say.

[lorelai]

Personally, I am curious for fanfic purposes and do not find it a bone of contention, though what spurred me to ask whether than quietly ponder was stumbling across people talking about it on tumblr; I've yet to determine why.
As to whether Theodora and Lemony knew each other, you could always solve that problem by having the climb occur post ATWQ, just to make a dangerous situation even more uncomfortable. But by the same token it could be Lois Dressing--the star of "Vanished Message" in FU13--who puts on the gear, whenever you determine the event occured.