"America's Switzerland, a companion volume to "This Blue Hollow," is the first comprehensive history of Rocky Mountain National Park and its neighboring town, Estes Park, during the decades when travel became a middle-class rite of summer. Drawing on a wide variety of primary sources and extensive archival research, James H. Pickering reveals how the evolution of tourism and America's fascination with the "western experience" shaped the park and town...

""This Blue Hollow" is the first comprehensive account of the early history of Estes Park, Colorado, the "gem of the Rockies." In this enthralling narrative, James H. Pickering traces the development of Estes Park as a mountain resort community from 1859, when Joel Estes first saw it, to the establishment of Rocky Mountain National Park in 1915. Though Estes and his family stayed only briefly, others quickly followed: hunters, homesteading settlers,...

Estes Park was hardly more than a post office in 1899, when young Joe Mills first saw Colorado's Front Range. A would-be Robinson Crusoe, Joe scaled peaks, watched wild animals, hunted and trapped, and generally roughed it in the region that would become Rocky Mountain National Park in 1915.A Mountain Boyhood, the true story of his adventures there, is as rich in human as in natural history. Joe meets a colorful bunch of early settlers, living for...