Nobody thought much of it when twelve-year-old Robert Baldeshwiler hiked out ahead of his family on the Flat-top Mountain Trail. But he would never be seen alive again. Each year, millions of people like the Baldeshwiler family come to Rocky Mountain National Park expecting nothing but a fine vacation. However, between the years of 1884 and 2009, almost three hundred people have died in the park. From taking sudden falls off steep trails, to sliding down treacherous snow fields to deadly rocks below, visitors have found out the hard way that the park is still a wild place full of potential hazards. Book jacket.

This blooming guide features 95 wildflowers of the Rocky Mountains that will most likely be seen by visitors, and features quotes from early frontier explorers and naturalists who wrote about them. 177 photos. 8 maps.

Cases in which all investigative leads appear to be exhausted are frustrating for both investigators and victims families. Cold cases can range from those only a few months old to others that go back for decades. Presenting profiles and actual case histories, Cold Case Research: Resources for Unidentified, Missing and Cold Homicide Cases illustrat

At 14,259 feet, Longs Peak towers over Colorado’s northern Front Range. A prized location for mountaineering since the 1870s, Longs has been a place of astonishing climbing feats—and, unsurprisingly, of significant risk and harm. Careless and unlucky climbers have experienced serious injury and death on the peak, while their activities, equipment, and trash have damaged fragile alpine resources. As a site of outdoor adventure attracting mostly white people, Longs has mirrored the United States’ tenacious racial divides, even into the twenty-first century. In telling the history of Longs Peak and its climbers, Ruth M. Alexander shows how Rocky Mountain National Park, like the National Park Service (NPS), has struggled to contend with three fundamental obligations—to facilitate visitor enjoyment, protect natural resources, and manage the park as a site of democracy. Too often, it has treated these obligations as competing rather than complementary commitments, reflecting national discord over their meaning and value. Yet the history of Longs also shows us how, over time, climbers, the park, and the NPS have attempted to align these obligations in policy and practice. By putting mountain climbers and their relationship to Longs Peak and its rangers at the center of the story of Rocky Mountain National Park, Alexander exposes the significant role outdoor recreationists have had—as both citizens and privileged adventurers—in shaping the peak’s meaning, use, and management. Since 2000, the park has promoted climber enjoyment and safety, helped preserve the environment, facilitated tribal connections to the park, and attracted a more diverse group of visitors and climbers. Yet, Alexander argues, more work needs to be done. Alexander’s nuanced account of Longs Peak reveals the dangers of undermining national parks’ fundamental obligations and presents a powerful appeal to meet them fairly and fully.

“An immensely valuable and substantial addition to 10th Mountain literature and to the history of skiing in the United States.” —International Ski History Association The Boys of Winter tells the true story of three young American ski champions and their brutal, heroic, and fateful transformation from athletes to infantrymen with the 10th Mountain Division. Charles J. Sanders’s fast-paced narrative draws on dozens of interviews and extensive research to trace these boys’ lives from childhood to championships and from training at Mount Rainier and in the Colorado Rockies to battles against the Nazis. “The Boys of Winter perfectly captures the spirit of the men who made the division what it was, as well as the spirit of those troopers who survived to help shape the postwar world.” —John Imbrie, 10th Mountain Division historian and coeditor of Good Times and Bad Times “Focusing on the lives, and the deaths, of three young men from vastly different backgrounds, Sanders traces the history of the U.S. Army’s Tenth Mountain Division from its inception, training in Washington and Colorado, first blooding in the Aleutians, and finally, to deployment to Italy in 1945 . . . The Boys of Winter is a sensitive tribute.” —Western Historical Quarterly “Sanders distills the complicated and years-long saga of the creation of America’s ski troops into an intensely personal story . . . [And] doesn’t shy away from a question that haunts the survivors of the division, and the families of those who never returned.” —The Durango Herald