Let Them Be

Colorado naturalist and outdoor guide Enos Mills invites his close friends John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt to the September 1915 opening of the Rocky Mountain National Park. They recount life adventures while camping in Wild Basin and squabble over the meaning of the new conservation movement. Mills and Muir try to stop Teddy from killing grizzlies. A century later, in September of 2015, five youthful thrill seekers hike the same area, trying to find Mills’ lost journal and perhaps the state’s last grizzly. Instead, they encounter the wrong kind of thrills—armed militants who’ve been tracking them. Part Two follows the Post-Covid 19 adventures of two young women who open a wild bird sanctuary after witnessing the brutal killing of a Rocky Mountain Sheep on the Park’s famous Trail Ridge Road. These women are indirectly connected to another historical character of Part One, Farrington Carpenter, a well-known Colorado rancher FDR picked to head up the agency that later became the Bureau of Land Management. Other interesting Colorado characters include the English lady Isabella Bird who allures Mountain Jim Nugent while riding her horse all over the front range, the unscrupulous English earl Dunraven, who grabs the best land around Estes Park, already becoming a tourist destination, and Freelan Stanley (of the Stanley Steamer automobile and Estes “Shining” hotel). The novel dramatizes different ways humans relate to nature: how practical, economic, and spiritual motives affect human relationships as well as the health of the natural world.