Rocky Mountain National Park: The First 100 Years

Celebrate Rocky’s centennial with Rocky Mountain National Park: The First 100 Years. Award-winning author Mary Taylor Young tells a story that stretches from the dawn of time into the future. Journey back to witness the rise, fall, and rise again of mountains. Meet ancient people who built rock game drives still visible atop Trail Ridge, and Utes and Arapaho who left behind only their names for many Park features. Discover explorers lured by the mountains’ call, and adventurers consumed with conquering Longs Peak’s soaring summit. Find out why life in the Park’s lush valleys forced settlers like Joel and Patsey Estes and Abner and Alberta Sprague to turn from ranching to tourism. And how a young man named Enos Mills became a passionate advocate for this mountain wonderland and devoted his life to preserving it as a national park. Meet engineers sculpting Trail Ridge Road and CCC crews building trails, intrepid rangers rescuing lost hikers and researchers preserving the fragile tundra. Learn how the Park’s elk were nearly wiped out, then restored to become one of America’s premier wildlife sights. Relive the visits of millions of Americans, blessed with ‘money, kids, and cars,’ who flocked to this beloved national park through the 20th century, forming lifelong attachments to this special place. Discover how a changing climate may greatly alter Rocky in its next 100 years. Rocky Mountain National Park: The First 100 Years braids these stories and more into one grand tale, exquisitely illustrated with more than 250 historical and landscape images, including photographs by William Henry Jackson, John Fielder, and Erik Stensland, and paintings by Charles Partridge Adams and Birger Sandzen.