Colorado Outings

Colorado in the 1880s, before highways and ski resorts, before the crowds. James W. Steele recorded his journeys through a land still wild, still unnamed in the ways we know it now. This is not a modern travel guide but something rarer: a witness to the American West before it transformed. Steele climbs peaks, crosses passes, and describes landscapes with the astonishment of a man seeing them for the first time. His prose carries that peculiar 19th-century reverence for the sublime, yet it is shot through with practical wisdom for travelers and a quiet insistence that this land deserves protection. For readers who want to understand Colorado not as a destination but as a place with a past, or who simply want to walk through mountains with a thoughtful companion, this book is a door back to a wilder time.