A note from Buck:

The broad outline of what follows is documented history. The Denver Post coverage was real. The crowd of nearly 2,000 people was real. Enos Mills shaking hands with a young woman in a leopard-skin tunic before she walked into the woods, that photograph exists. The details of this story come from contemporary Denver Post accounts, the National Parks Conservation Association's feature "Paradise Found?" (Fall 2022), Curt Buchholtz's 1983 book "Rocky Mountain National Park: A History," and the Loveland Reporter-Herald's Colorado History column by Kenneth Jessen. Where gaps exist in the record, I've filled them with reasonable inference and the instincts of a man who has watched a lot of people try to pull things off in this valley.

The Woman in the Leopard Skin, the Crowd That Believed Her, and the Greatest Publicity Stunt in RMNP History

Rocky Mountain National Park was two years old in the summer of 1917. The mountains were spectacular. The trails were there. What the park didn't yet have was enough people coming to see any of it.

A Denver Post editor named A.G. Birch decided to fix that.

Birch was not just a newspaper man. He kept a cabin on a rocky ridge above downtown Estes Park, knew the valley and the people in it, and understood exactly what kind of story would travel across the country. He found a young woman named Hazel Eighmy working as a receptionist at a Denver photography studio. He gave her a new name. Agnes Lowe. He gave her a backstory. College student, age twenty, from the University of Michigan, fed up with the artificialities of modern city life and ready to return to something primitive. Then he called Enos Mills.

Mills was the man who had spent a decade fighting to create this park. Its most famous advocate. Its public face. The person whose name meant everything Rocky Mountain National Park stood for. On a Sunday morning in August 1917, he stood outside the Longs Peak Inn, which he owned, and shook hands with Hazel Eighmy, now Agnes Lowe, in front of nearly two thousand people. Reporters. Photographers. Park officials. Curious tourists. All of them there to watch a barefoot young woman in a leopard-skin tunic walk into the wilderness with no food, no matches, no tools, and no weapons of any kind.

Mills walked with her into the trees for a stretch, then sent her off alone toward Thunder Lake in the remote southeastern corner of the park.

The Denver Post ran her story every day for weeks.

Agnes Lowe's send-off drew nearly 2,000 people to the Longs Peak Inn in August 1917. Who owned that inn, was present at the send-off, and is still known today as the Father of

Rocky Mountain National Park?

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DID YOU KNOW? 

Four Facts About The Eve Of Estes

• George Desouris was not the only man inspired by the Agnes Lowe story. A Denver man named Perry Adams was reportedly spotted wandering a city street wearing only cabbage leaves, declaring his intention to join her in the wilderness. The historical record does not say whether he followed through.
• Rocky Mountain National Park visitation more than doubled in 1917, the same year as the Agnes Lowe stunt. Historians still debate how much of the increase came from the publicity versus improved road access and summer weather.
• The Longs Peak Inn, where Agnes Lowe's send-off took place and where she returned to sixty-four marriage proposals, was owned and operated by Enos Mills himself. It sat at the base of Longs Peak and served as a gathering place for naturalists, writers, and early park advocates.
• This was not Agnes Lowe's first attempt at surviving in the park. She tried it in late July 1917 and quit after two days of thunderstorms. Her reported reaction: "Nothing less than a short and ugly word could describe the sensation." She went back in August. In a cabin, but still.
•  

Buck's Joke Of The Day

A woman survived a week alone in the Rocky Mountain wilderness and came home to dinner at the Stanley Hotel, a dance at a lodge, and sixty-four marriage proposals.

Enos Mills called it a lesson in human resilience.

(I've told this story to four people this week. All four said the same thing: she was smarter than everyone in that room. I'm starting to agree.)

Enos Mills. He owned the Longs Peak Inn, stood in the crowd at Agnes Lowe's send-off, and walked her partway into the park himself on that August morning in 1917. Mills had spent roughly a decade campaigning for the creation of RMNP before it officially opened in 1915. He died in 1922, seven years after seeing it established..

CLOSING FROM BUCK

Two thousand people watched a woman in a leopard-skin tunic walk into those trees and believed every word of it for a week.

The mountains knew what was going on. They always do. They just kept their opinions to themselves, which is more than most of us manage.

Whatever Birch and Mills and Hazel Eighmy were selling in 1917, the product turned out to be worth buying. People are still coming up here to stand in those mountains and feel something real. The stunt was fake. The park wasn't.

Moe took the last of the coffee on his way out and said he was going to look up Knoll-Willows on his lunch break. Go find what's left of Birch's old cabin.I told him to take a good look at the view from that old porch line. Longs Peak, straight on. Some things they got right.

Stay smart, stay safe, and leave the mountains more honest than the story that got you here.

— Buck Timber Estes Park, Colorado