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"Adventure is worthwhile in itself."--Amelia Earhart "I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be a challenge to others."--Amelia Earhart |
By D.A. Watson
After arriving in San Francisco, Isabella immediately left for Colorado on the newly opened “Pacific Line” railway. Her first stop was Truckee, CA, where she spent a day exploring the pine forests on horseback and enjoying the mountain wildlife. She was impressed by the beauty of Lake Tahoe, calling it “A strictly North American beauty – snow-splotched mountains, huge pines, redwoods, sugar pines, silver spruce, and a pine-hung lake which mirrors all beauty on its surface.”
The next night, Isabella got back on the train, arriving the next morning in Greeley, CO. Her friend Rose Kingsly had told her that Estes Park was a place of extreme beauty. Determined to visit, she arranged to take the carriage to Fort Collins. All in all, Isabella was unhappy with what she saw during her first several days in Colorado. She wrote “These new settlements are utterly revolting…with coarse speech, coarse food, coarse everything.”
Weeks after her arrival in Colorado, Isabella had still not been able to get to Estes Park, having found no one willing to guide her there. Towards the end of September she had resigned herself to heading for home without meeting that goal. While in Longmont waiting to catch the train for New York, she told her landlord how she had longed to visit the Park. Later that night, he was able to inform her that he had found two young men who were on their way up to Estes Park. The young men, Sylvester Downer and Platt Rogers, were on a vacation from law school. Grudgingly, they consented to take Isabella with them.
As she rode towards the Park, Isabella’s opinion of Colorado improved. “Wild fantastic views opening up continually, a recurrence of surprise; the air keener with every mile.” After a full day’s ride they reached Estes Park, named after Joel Estes who had been the first to settle there with his family in 1859. Near the entrance to the Park was the home of a man known as “Rocky Mountain Jim.” The most remarkable thing about Jim Nugent was his face – or what there was left of it. Isabella described it thusly – “One eye was entirely gone, and the loss made one side of the face repulsive, while the other might have been modeled in marble. He must have been strikingly handsome. He has large grey-blue eyes, deeply set, with well-marked eyebrows, a handsome aquiline nose, a very handsome mouth." Isabella was enchanted by Nugent – excited to find an apparently chivalrous and well-spoken man here in the high mountains.
As the sun set, the party reached Estes Park, and its beauty overwhelmed Isabella. “Never, nowhere, have I seen anything to equal the view of Estes Park…Long’s Peak was aflame, the glory of the glowing heaven was given back from the earth.”
At the Park, Isabella was given a wooden cabin all her own. She rode the trails of the Park with her host, Griff Evans, and began inquiring about the possibility of climbing to “the Peak.” Long’s Peak, theh ighest mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park, rises some 14,255 feet above sea level. Only weeks earlier, Anna Dickinson, an American writer, had climbed to the top, and some area historians say the Addie Alexander had reached the summit earlier that same year.
Isabella was determined to be the next woman to climb the Peak, even though it was known to be an extremely difficult climb at the best of times, and it was now very late in the year. Hearing that Jim Nugent sometimes guided groups to the summit, Isabella immediately made the arrangements. Isabella, the two law students, and Mountain Jim left for the Peak, and Isabella soon discovered that she was not as up to the task as she’d thought. The law students complained to Jim that she was a “dangerous encumbrance,” and Isabella herself asked to be left behind on the trail while the men finished the climb.
Nugent refused to leave her behind, and more or less hauled Isabella up the mountain. Platt Rogers later wrote that “by alternately pulling and pushing her and stimulating her with snow soaked with ginger, we got her to the top.” Finally, though, on September 30th, they gained the summit, where they could see hundreds of miles in all directions.
The climb down was as horrendous as the climb up. Wrote Isabella, “Jim pulled me up by my arms or a lariat, sometimes I stood on his shoulders, or he made steps for me of his feet and hands.” When they reached camp, Isabella fell into a deep sleep, only to awaken hours later to find Nugent awake. They spent hours talking, and Isabella later wrote her sister, “For five minutes his manner was such that for a moment I thought love possible, but I put it away as vanity unpardonable in a woman of 40.”
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| Women Who Dared II |
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| American Experience: Around the World in 72 Days (1997) |
 PBS Home Video. Many called her "the best reporter in America," and Nellie Bly truly achieved amazing successes. She got herself committed to an institution to expose abuses of the mentally ill and actually did travel around the world in 72 days. Discover the woman behind these and many other astonishing feats -- a serious yet spunky celebrity who mastered life through her cunning and wit. |
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| Women of Discovery |
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| Amelia Earhart : A Biography |
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