ABSTRACT
Long’s Peak, the 14,259-foot mountain in what is now Rocky Mountain National Park, was reportedly first climbed in 1873. Only five years after this first recorded Euro-American ascent, Isabella Bird, the forty-two-year-old Edinburgh-born traveller and writer, ascended to the summit, joined and assisted by several companions. Her account of these events serves as the climactic moment in her 1879 travel narrative A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains and remains a striking account of what is still a physically prohibitive undertaking for most people. Describing her experiences along the way, she carefully documents the changing topography, flora, and fauna she encounters as she climbs: the spruces, the “Lava Beds” boulder field, the changing oxygen levels, the wolves in the distance, and the movement through canyon to open alpine. Far from romanticizing her climb through this extraordinary environment, though, Bird carefully describes its difficulty, admitting to having “no head and no ankles,” and remembering the “trembling, slipping, straining,” the “faltering, grasping from the exhausting toil in the rarified air, with throbbing hearts and panting lungs” as they climb (94-6). Bird’s description of the ascent is highly localized in two ways: She emphasizes her immediate, surrounding environment and her own body’s reaction to it.
