Originally published in Bluebook Magazine in April 1938.
Grandmother Cynthia Sophia [Weed] Steele
1872-1963
Son was my uncle Herbert
Little Daughter was my mother Betty
You may think that the life of a ranchwoman must always be a humdrum existence. But as proof that a middle-aged farm woman, raising children and chickens, making cheese and garden, need not always go out of her way to find thrills. I offer two experiences out of my life.
Our Alta Vista Ranch takes in the mesa lying on the knees of a mountain in one of the loftiest ranges of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. Behind the ranch the mountain rises, covered with giant boulders and spruce trees with blue-green needles and gray-green sage-brush and masses of slide-rock where the wild rose and raspberry bushes cluster, and blue wild columbines bloom, and deep gulches are filled from brim to brim with snow in winter and with floods of water when the thaw comes in late spring or early summer. Continue reading