A note from Buck:

The story you're about to read is true—Isabella Bird and Rocky Mountain Jim were real people who really did meet and fall in love here in 1873. But like any good mountain tale passed down over 150 years, some details have gotten polished by time and telling. I've stuck to the facts we know from Isabella's own letters and writings, but where history left gaps, I've filled them in the way any good storyteller would. Think of it like those disclaimers on historical dramas: "Based on true events, some scenes dramatized for your reading pleasure."

When Love Means Saying No (A True Estes Park Love Story)

Valentine's Day in Estes Park looks like something off a greeting card.

Snow on the peaks. Firelight through cabin windows. Couples bundled up together watching sunset turn the granite pink.

It's the kind of place where people come to fall in love, or remember why they did.

But back in 1873, a forty-one-year-old woman stood in this valley and made the hardest Valentine's choice of her life.

She said no to a man she loved. Not because the feeling wasn't real. But because real isn't always enough.

The unlikely pair

Nobody would've picked Isabella Bird and Rocky Mountain Jim as a couple.

She was proper, educated, British. Four feet eleven inches of Victorian propriety wrapped in bloomers and carrying a revolver. She'd been sick for years with the kind of ailments doctors couldn't name, the kind that made her small and tired and easy to overlook.

He was big, scarred, one-eyed, dressed in rags held together by a knife belt. He had "desperado written in large letters all over him," she wrote. The kind of man mothers warned daughters about.

But when Jim Nugent spoke, his voice was refined. His manners courteous. He quoted poetry, discussed literature, knew the mountains better than anyone alive.

And when Isabella rode into Estes Park that September, looking for something she couldn't quite name, she found it in the last place she expected.

She found it in him.

Love at altitude

They spent weeks together that fall.

Jim guided her up Longs Peak in late September. 14,259 feet of granite and ice and moments where her life depended entirely on his strength. He hauled her up the steepest pitches "like a bale of goods," she wrote later, which sounds unromantic until you realize what it meant.

It meant he didn't let go.

They rode together through the golden aspens. Sat by the fire talking late into mountain nights. He told her about his past, pieces of it anyway. The drinking. The violence. The choices that had led him here, hiding out in Muggins Gulch.

She told him about her years of illness, her restlessness, her need to keep moving because sitting still felt like dying.

And somewhere in those conversations, something happened.

Jim fell in love with her. Completely. The kind of love that changes a man.

And Isabella, careful, observant, forty-one-year-old Isabella, fell too.

The proposal

It happened after Longs Peak.

Jim told her how he felt. He said she'd stirred something better in him, something he'd thought was dead. He didn't quite ask her to marry him, he knew better than that, but the question hung in the cold November air between them.

Isabella was tempted. She admitted it later to her sister. He was brave, devoted, fascinating. He'd shown her parts of himself no one else saw. The tenderness beneath the rough exterior, the intelligence beneath the desperado reputation.

For a moment, she let herself imagine it. A cabin in the mountains. A life with this complicated, damaged, brilliant man.

But she couldn't ignore what else she saw.

The choice

Isabella Bird had spent her life watching people. She'd traveled alone through places most men feared. She'd learned to trust her instincts, especially when those instincts whispered uncomfortable truths.

She knew about Jim's drinking. The blackout rages. The violence that followed whiskey like thunder follows lightning. The disputes that had turned bloody.

She understood that intensity isn't the same as stability. That fascination isn't the same as safety.

That a man can be everything you're drawn to and still be someone you can't build a life with.

So she wrote the line history remembers: "a man any woman might love, but no sane woman would marry."

It was the most honest Valentine she ever gave him.

She said no.

What year did Isabella Bird climb Longs Peak, and how old was she when she made the ascent?

Alpenglow Beauty: Skincare That Handles Winter and Whatever February Throws At It.

Winter doesn’t let up just because the calendar flips to February.
Cold air, wind, and dry mountain conditions tend to linger, and skin feels it.

Alpenglow Beauty is made for life at elevation, where winter isn’t a season. It’s just part of the routine. Their clean, nourishing formulas help keep skin balanced without overcomplicating things.

 

If winter has left your skin feeling tight, dry, or irritated, their Whipped Tallow Balm is especially worth a look. Simple. Effective. Made to hold up out here.

Explore the collection at AlpenglowBeauty.com and enjoy 20% off with code WINDY20.

DID YOU KNOW? 

Three Facts About Isabella Bird & Rocky Mountain Jim:

• Isabella Bird was a bestselling author. Her book A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains became an international sensation when it was published in 1879 and is still in print today, over 145 years later.
• Jim Nugent's grizzly attack was legendary. In 1871, a bear mauled him so badly that a doctor had to sew up fifty wounds. The attack cost him his eye, part of his scalp, and left his arm badly damaged, but he survived and went right back to the mountains.
• Isabella Bird became the first woman elected to the Royal Geographical Society in 1892, at age 60. She spent her later years traveling through Asia, establishing hospitals, and riding horses across the Atlas Mountains of Morocco well into her 70s. The woman could not sit still.

Buck's Joke Of The Day

Why did Rocky Mountain Jim never win at poker?

Because everyone could see he only had one card up his sleeve... and they knew exactly which eye to watch.

(Too soon? It's been 150 years, folks.)

Isabella Bird climbed Longs Peak in September 1873, just two weeks before her 42nd birthday. She made the ascent wearing a tattered Hawaiian blouse, Turkish bloomers, and worn-through shoes, guided by Rocky Mountain Jim through ice and granite to the 14,259-foot summit.