"Important milestone events deserve celebration. This is certainly true of the one hundredth anniversary of the establishment of Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP), which was formally dedicated on September 3, 1915. Centennial events are scheduled to begin later this year and continue on into next. Mary Taylor Young's Rocky Mountain National Park: The First 100 Years, published by Farcountry Press in partnership with the Rocky Mountain Conservancy (formerly the Rocky Mountain Nature Association), provides a most appropriate context for the retrospective that is to follow.

Books tend to be shaped by the audience for whom they are intended. Taylor's intended audience is the three million plus people who visit RMNP each summer, and the millions more who over the years have developed a personal relationship with one of America's most visited national parks and would like to know more. They will not be disappointed. Mary Taylor Young, who has authored some fifteen books on the landscape, wildlife, and cultural heritage of Colorado and the West, and in 2012 spent a memorable two weeks living in the William Allen White Cabin as Artist-in-Residence, is a most able and amiable guide. In thirteen topical chapters she provides a comprehensive, fact-filled overview of the park and its history.

Young begins with the park's geologic story and its prehistory, for we now know from the gathered evidence that ice-age hunters visited the area at least 11,000 years ago. From there she traces the park's human history through Arapaho times to its first Euro-American visitors, including Joel Estes, an inveterate wanderer from Kentucky, who first visited the Estes Valley in October of 1859 and then gave the place his name. Other chapters deal with the rise of tourism, the hard-fought six-year campaign that led to the park's creation and the influential role that the automobile played in its early development, and the ups and downs of the Depression and World War II years. The final chapters bring the park's story down to the present, including a discussion of the issues and challenges, ecological and otherwise, which the park faces today and will face tomorrow. In the process we learn a great deal about the men and women who shaped the park's history, some well known but others not. A number of these are neatly dealt with in set-off sidebar cameos. Taylor is an engaging writer and the book's narrative flow is flawless, a real achievement in a book that tells so much in so few pages.

The book itself is visually stunning. Its text is supplemented by some 250 illustrations, including historic black-and-white photographs by William Henry Jackson, Willis T. Lee, and Fred Clatworthy; full-page color contemporary photographs by Erik Stensland, John Fielder, Glenn Randall, Lee Kline, and Steve Mohlenkamp; and color reproductions of the work of landscape artists Charles Partridge Adams, Birger Sandzen, and Dave Stirling, to cite but a few...."

-James H. Pickering, professor of English emeritus, University of Houston, writing for the Center for Colorado and the West at Auria Library's Colorado Book Review