A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains

Have been skimming a book by Isabella Bird, the first woman fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (she started traveling at age 18 on her doctor's advice, after a spinal surgery). Anyway, she spent time in this area in 1879 and wrote letters back home to her sister. This is one of her sketches, of Estes Park, which is a couple hours from here. (Last visit Bryan, Wendy, and I hiked there and I hope to go back next sunny day.) By coincidence, she had come from Hawaii to the western U.S., and she rides around in some kind of Hawaiian riding dress, comparing what she's seeing to what she saw in the Sandwich Islands. Interesting to see this place through her eyes and also imagine, through her descriptions, what I'll soon be seeing.

Anyway, Bird loved Estes Park, but Ft. Collins did not fare as well:

It gave me a strange sensation to embark upon the Plains. Plains, plains everywhere, plains generally level, but elsewhere falling in long undulations, like the waves of a sea which had fallen asleep. They are covered thinly with buff grass, the withered stalks of flowers, Spanish bayonet, and a small beehive-shaped cactus. One could gallop all over them...By the time we reached Ft. Collins I was sick and dizzy with the heat of the sun, and not disposed to be pleased with a most unpleasing place. It was a military post, but at present consists of a few frame houses put down recently on the bare and burning plain. The settlers have "great expectations," but of what?...These new settlements are altogether revolting, entirely utilitarian, given up to talk of dollars as well as to making them, with coarse speech, coarse food, coarse everything, nothing wherewith to satisfy the higher cravings if they exist...The lower floor of this inn swarms with locusts in addition to thousands of black flies. The latter cover the ground and rise buzzing from it as you walk.

Well, fortunately for me, Ft. Collins has improved in the past 100+ years.