Author Description

The watershed year of Isabella Lucy Bird's life was 1873. In autumn of that year, the forty-one-year-old English gentlewoman embarked by rail from San Francisco's east bay, bound for the Colorado Rockies. A challenging journey, it drove Bird to the utmost physical effort and initiated her life-long career in what today is called adventure travel. More than one hundred twenty years after their first publication, Isabella Bird's letters to her sister continue to thrill readers with their account of the then-untamed and largely unknown American mountain wilderness. This illustrated edition of Bird's A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains, annotated by Ernest S. Bernard, sheds fresh light on ambiguities and obscurities in Bird's letters and contains new details about the frontier Rocky Mountain West - a region Bird found so beautiful that she gently chided "nature for her close imitation of art.". In addition to a map of Bird's 1873 route and contemporary photographs, this new annotated edition includes an appendix that illustrates and charts the course of Bird's historic ascent of Longs Peak, allowing travelers - real and armchair - to share the dangers and discoveries of Isabella Lucy Bird's amazing journey.