The Guardians
Enos Mills, the father of Rocky Mountain National Park, was a champion of wilderness. Enda, his only daughter, is a champion of her father.

Enda Mills Kiley peers out from the cabin her father, naturalist Enos Mills, built near Estes Park more than a century ago. Kiley, 79, keeps her father's memory alive with the museum she runs in the cabin. Mills led the drive to establish Rocky Mountain National Park. "We don't cater to the drop-by tourist," she says. "We want people who are ready for the whole story."

W alk up the winding trail toward the old cabin. Listen to the aspen leaves rustle in the breeze.

Go ahead -- listen. The sign insists.

Another Colorado naturalist: John Otto

There are other signs that command your attention along the way to the real story: "Caution! Ants Hard at Work!" "Make Each Day Extraordinary!" "Smell the Bark!"

Finally, the cabin. Before, when there was a big sign out on the highway in the shadow of Longs Peak, a hundred people a week stopped to visit. Too many were in a hurry, though, simply collecting tourist stops. So when a fierce wind blew the big sign down, a smaller one was lashed, inconspicuously, to a barbed wire fence. Now, far fewer people stop. And that's fine.

"We don't cater to the drop-by tourist. We want people who are ready for the whole story," says 79-year-old Enda Mills Kiley, the cabin's lone occupant, the 5-foot-3-inch protector of the flame. "It's really a much more profound story than people realize."

Indeed.

The story begins with Enda's father, Enos Mills, one of America's early and most influential conservationists.

Mills was a sickly 14-year-old Kansas farmboy when he moved to Colorado in 1884, hoping the clean mountain air would improve his constitution. The prescription worked: Mills became a naturalist and explorer, a writer and photographer, a protege of John Muir and a tireless promoter of Rocky Mountain National Park, which he helped get established in 1915.

But of all the people Mills influenced with his passion for wilderness, none would be more taken with the man than the four generations of women who have kept his ideas -- and his story -- alive.

Esther Burnell was the first. She was a city girl from Ohio, an interior decorator, when she and her sister, Elizabeth, came to Estes Park for a vacation in 1916. Esther never left.

She stayed on at Mills' Longs Peak Inn, working as his typist. She became enamored with his work, his self-taught understanding of nature, his belief that a life outdoors could restore and invigorate the human soul.

She quickly fell in love with Colorado, taking to the backcountry, climbing mountains and homesteading a place herself. Mills trained Esther as a guide and wooed her with his enthusiasm and his mind.

When they married in 1918, she was 28, he 48. Enda, their only child, was 3 when Enos Mills died in 1922.

Some advised Esther to remarry and move on with her life. "She had chances," Enda says. "But that wasn't her focus. She did what she thought was signficant with her life. She had a vision about his vision."

For the next 42 years, Esther devoted her life to her late husband. She kept Mills' books in print, co-authored a biography and published three works collected from his magazine articles. She opened a bookstore across the road from the Longs Peak Inn.

Esther ran the inn until 1946, many of those years with the help of her sister, who had come to Estes Park to become a student of Enos' and a mountain guide.

"They were so understanding of his philosophy," Enda says of her mother and aunt. "They didn't do their own thing. They just identified with his frame of mind."

They ran the inn exactly the way Enos did, as a refuge from urban life. Guests were encouraged to fully experience nature, and the house rules set the tone: No music. No dancing. No card playing.

Enda grew up at the inn, and although she has no memory of her father, his spirit permeated the air and his books brought his experiences to life.

"They used to call me the nature nut when I was in school," Enda says. "I learned to just laugh it off."

After Esther died in 1964, Enda, her husband and their children moved from Denver back to the family homestead, where she turned Enos' cabin into a one-room monument to the man.

"She is responsible for our having the legacy," Enda says of her mother. "She continued it so we could pick it up and keep it alive."

Esther's work was done. Enda's was just beginning.

She sits in the darkened cabin surrounded by her father: Photos and newspaper clippings. Framed letters from Helen Keller, John D. Rockefeller, Theodore Roosevelt and Muir.

This is his museum -- her museum, really.

For more than 30 years, Enda has escorted visitors on paths peppered with hand-made signs marking rocks and plants. Those who seem interested -- the serious ones -- tour the cabin, where Enda tells them the whole story.

It's a job she now shares: With another Elizabeth, her 42-year-old daughter, who maintains Enos' photos, and with Eryn, her 20-year-old granddaughter, who runs the bookshop.

"No other jobs have held my fancy," says Eryn, who legally changed her last name from Kiley to Mills in junior high school. "It's the family business."

It's a business that Enda's two sons have no interest in, much to their mother's disappointment. "Their perspective is so incomplete," she says. "Is that polite?"

In today's Gore-Tex wrapped backcountry, Enos Mills would have certainly stood out. He hiked in street shoes, long socks and knickers; hired to measure the snowpack, he trudged into the wilderness wearing a suit.

The boom in outdoor recreation he helped inspire -- the boom that has so changed Colorado this past century -- would have left Enos Mills wondering where the solitude of his beloved backcountry had gone.

"He would have been disappointed to say the very least," Enda says. And so is she -- by mountain bikes zooming down trails, by the crowds, by hikers shouting or talking too loudly. "He always said that it was better to go gracefully than to arrive."

Outside, the aspens rustle in the breeze. Go ahead -- listen. Enos and Esther and Enda and Elizabeth and Eryn insist on it.

Colorado Millennium 2000 is a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society
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