A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella L. Bird

genre: travelogue, non-fiction

Isabella Bird is my kind of woman.  She is an adventurer, a real life Wander Woman, who in the 1870s makes a solo trek into the wilds of the Rocky Mountains and writes to her sister all about it.  This book is a compilation of the letters she wrote home and sometimes it is too crazy to believe.  Isabella, in her petticoats and taffeta, rides her beloved horse for hundreds of miles through snow storms, she finds shelter by the fires of strangers and climbs icy peaks IN HER DRESS.  This woman is not dissuaded by freezing cold or by serious discomfort.  She wants to climb all the heights.  She wants to see all the views.  While staying in a hand built cabin in what will become Estes Park, she becomes besties with a literal outlaw mountain man who, I researched afterwards, is completely real and legit.

I find the weirdest and most fascinating books at the thrift store sometimes!  I bet I would have never learned about Isabella if I hadn't been captured by the title on the shelf.  She is so adventurous and such a flexible thinker - her way of seeking and experiencing and then recording her exploits was so well done that she ended up becoming the first women to be made a Fellow at the Royal Geographical Society!  Who knew?  Now, you should know that Isabella uses 100 words when 10 would suffice.  She absolutely has racist and colonialist views.  Sometimes this book drags so much.  But then other times I was absolutely in awe of what she managed to survive.  I loved seeing, once again, the way that hospitality worked out West during this time period, how truly everyone would watch out for everyone else, assuming that sometime they would need the same courtesy.  This way of life just feels so foreign, just letting random strangers come and sleep in your house on a freezing night, it is hard to imagine that this world she is describing was all that so many women EVER knew.  

Also, if you love descriptions of beautiful places, you will appreciate her keen eye.  Isabella Bird is now a name that I know and I love the image I have of her in my mind, all alone, on her horse Birdie, her dress billowing as she rides up a canyon in the falling snow, literally just guessing her path based on some directions that a random beaver hunter gave her ten miles back. And she always makes it through.  Tenacious Isabella.  Well done.