I recently finished reading A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella L. Bird. It is a firsthand account of a middle-aged English lady traveling alone by horseback in the autumn and early winter of 1873. Widely travelled, she found Estes Park "surely one of the most entrancing spots on earth" and "no region for tourists or women" -- how things have changed! She made her way to the top of Longs Peak (only 5 years after it had first been climbed) with a one-eyed desperado named Mountain Jim as her guide. She rode her borrowed horse up and down the St Vrain from Longmont during a ferocious storm and stayed in an Estes Park log hunting cabin without chinking (can you hear the wind howling through those logs?), awakening to a fresh covering of fine snow. Her keen observations of the people she encountered and the "wild west" Colorado mountian lifestyle of another era make this book a good read for modern day armchair adventurers familiar with Estes Park and the surrounding terrain.
You can find this book on Amazon.com:
Marisue Wells
eMarketing
http://www.Estes-Park.com
http://www.RockyMountianNationalPark.com
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