-Go out into the wilderness and meet yourself,”
advised Enos Mills, called the father of Colorado’s Rocky Mountain
National Park. “If any normal person under 50 cannot enjoy being in
a storm in the wilds, he ought to reform at once.” Radiant Days:
Writings by Enos Mills contains the work of this naturalist and
activist who routinely outsold contemporaries John Muir and John
Burroughs during the early part of this century. Fourteen-year-old
Mills left his parents’ Kansas home in 1884 to settle near Longs
Peak, now protected by the national park. Five years later, Mills
met Muir, who urged him to write about his wilderness experiences,
and soon Mills was publishing in national magazines such as
Harper’s and Saturday Evening Post. Much of the material for his
quick-paced, sometimes humorous, essays came from his 300 treks up
14,255-feet Longs Peak, 40 times solo. Radiant Days features 19
essays that range from the history of a 1,000-year-old pine tree to
tracking and being tracked by a grizzly bear. Edited by John
Dotson, Radiant Days includes a brief foreword by writer Bill
McKibben.
University of Utah Press, Salt Lake
City. 1994. $15.95, paperback. 248
pages.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Rocky Mountain Naturalist.
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