She spent eight years as a legislator, 11 years as the state's second-in-command and a year as governor — two decades so filled with appointments and hurrying that she was known to dry her hair by sticking her head out the car window on the way to work.

Now, finally, Olene Walker is a woman of leisure. Sort of.

Since returning from a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to New York City last winter, Walker now lives on a golf course in St. George. Some days she plays 27 holes — because, even though she has slowed down some, the 76-year-old former governor still has more energy than her children, says daughter Lori Waltman. Walker serves on a dozen boards and is still an advocate for causes such as education, affordable housing and public lands.

Always a bit of an insomniac, she gets up at 4 a.m. to read newspapers online and catch up on e-mail, including messages from some of the 90 ambassadors she met while serving an LDS public affairs mission to the United Nations. The mission call came just months after she stepped down as governor, leaving no time in between to do much more than sell her house in Salt Lake City, take a deep breath and start her new life.

"Olene has a lot of vitality and energy, it's just part of her personality," says her husband, Myron. Walker's health — she has idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis — has sent the couple to the lower altitude of southern Utah. But two or three times a month they drive up to Salt Lake City for one of her many meetings. She is on the boards of state and national organizations whose purview ranges from education to election databases, from national park conservation to the future of the state.

"She still feels like she has a kind of a mission in life," says daughter Nena Slighting. "She still has a lot to contribute."

Utah's first female governor says she is writing her life history "in snitches and snatches." Straight-talking and self-effacing as always, when asked if she's a good writer her answer is an immediate "no." She tries to work on the memoir every day, she says, starting with some of her earliest memories of growing up on a farm near Ogden. Recently she's been thinking about summers in the late 1930s when her father would load the family up in the car and drive across the desert to California, where he worked on his Ph.D.

Walker herself got a master's at Stanford, and a Ph.D. at the University of Utah in education administration when she was nearly 50. Since she was also working then for the Salt Lake School District and had some of her seven children still living at home, she wrote her dissertation between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m.

Now that she's no longer an elected official and is home from the church mission, Walker has more time to visit with her 25 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. Through her example, Slighting says, she's taught them how to help others, "to look beyond the church to serve in a civic capacity."