A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
In 1873 a forty-two-year-old Englishwoman with a bad back and a worse temper rode alone into the Colorado Rockies on a borrowed pony. She was not on a tour. She was travelling, mostly by herself, through mining camps, blizzards, and mountain passes that most men of her era would not have attempted unaccompanied. These are the letters she wrote home to her sister.

Isabella Bird's account is immediate in a way that later travel writing rarely is. She describes the cold, the altitude, the appalling food, the kindness of strangers, and the strange freedom of being a woman nobody expected to survive the trip. She climbs Longs Peak — a first ascent by a woman in skirts and without a guide — and nearly dies of exposure doing it. She falls in love with a one-eyed outlaw called Mountain Jim, and writes about him with a directness that shocked her Victorian readers.

What makes the book last is the voice: curious, unimpressed by danger, dryly funny, and completely without self-pity. She is not performing bravery. She is simply going, because she went.

This edition reads the complete text of the original 1879 letters, in order, including the descriptions of Estes Park, the mountain towns, and the long winter ride that nearly ended her life.

Narrated in a single voice at a steady pace, for long listening sessions.