Mary Ellen Gilliland

By Andrew Tolve

It would be a strange season in Summit if it didn’t happen at least once. “So what’s your favorite hike?” someone will ask Mary Ellen Gilliland in the grocery store, or in the library, or on the sidewalk of any given street in any given town in the county. To be fair, the question is understandable. Twenty-three years have passed since Gilliland first published The Summit Hiker, and the book still stands as a make-shift Bible for hikers of the High Country.

And yet, Gilliland likes to note, her life has moved forward since The Summit Hiker’s publication. She has written other books about Summit County, and she does have passions beyond just plain old books: like wildflowers, skiing, and Sleepy Time tea. But the strangers just tend to listen and nod their heads, and then ask their question again — “But what’s your favorite hike?”

“The people who hike, they have this tunnel vision on The Summit Hiker,” Gilliland tells me one day in February, seated comfortably at her home in Silverthorne. She’s wearing a red sweater and blue jeans over her slight, 5-foot-3 frame, and when her short, perky, blond hair springs up, she looks just big enough to fill the living room chair in which she sits. “And then there are other people who love the historical books,” she continues, “and they just don’t even have a clue that I have a hiking guide. So it’s interesting for me to run into people and get their take on me.”

Gilliland pauses to take a sip of her Sleepytime Tea and then laughs—a high-pitched, infectious string of chuckles that surfaces often in moments like these. As we talk, the author laughs about the snow blowing horizontally past her windows; and about Moonlight Madness up on Loveland Pass; and (right now, still!) about people approaching her with hikes, and hikes alone, on their minds.

“It’s hilarious what goes on,” she says. “People are plain funny. They just are. What angling people will do and the shenanigans they will pull against each other … Some of the personalities today are as humorous as the ones yesterday. I’m always richly enjoying people.”

Which is why Gilliland writes about Summit’s past with such voracity. The mining era here was a richly entertaining time, one characterized by seamy saloons, renegade outlaws, scandalous love affairs and, most of all, booming success and then sudden bust—the highs and lows of the Wild Wild West. For a writer with an eye for comedy, it’s a homerun waiting to be hit again and again. Since 1973 (the year Gilliland arrived in Summit), she has written seven historical works about the mining years of yore, all of them filled with the type of colorful stories that make her smile. Even The Summit Hiker (1983), perhaps her most serious work, was designed as a guide to lead hikers past the relics of Summit’s quirky, bygone days.

“Warning:” she reads from the opening lines of her recent book, Rascals, Scoundrels, and No Goods (2005), “Should you decide to read this book, prepare your delicate sensibilities to be assaulted by escapades of charlatans, swindlers, seducers, rogues and imposters. Readers of noble character will find themselves forced to endure stories of depravity enacted by characters ranging from scamps to hooligans and may lament that their heretofore pristine souls are tainted by tales of the misdeeds of these reprobates. A Victorian lady would rush for her smelling salts at the first whiff of scandal—and so may you.”

Gilliland flips the book closed.

“I just love the color of the time,” she says, “and the fact that it was so human … I grew up (in Minneapolis) reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, and when she described how they made cheese or how they cut up a pig, I was fascinated. And I find in my writing of history today, I try to put in those really everyday details; like what was life like in a boarding house? What did they eat? It turns out they ate prodigious amounts of food. And there often would be three shifts a day, so one guy would get up out of the cot and the bed bugs would fly, and then you’d get in and sleep your eight hours. So just details of life that were so interesting to me as a child reading history, I always try to include them.”

Of course, reviving such everyday details from a century-old landscape can be a trying task. On a chilly morning in August 2005 — six months before I interviewed Gilliland at her home — I accompanied the author on a long hike to the base of Gray’s Peak in Keystone. It was strikingly beautiful out that day, and spending a few hours with Gilliland (who seemed to have something interesting to say about every wildflower, stream and outcrop we passed) turned out to be quite a memorable experience.

It also highlighted just how challenging her brand of historical literature can be. She was headed that morning to the Rudolf Shaft House, a rickety old miner’s cabin that both Rudolf Wurlitzer (founder of Wurlitzer Pianos) and later Max Dercum (founder of the Keystone ski area) had invested in long ago. Gilliland wanted to photograph the cabin as a prime example of the historic buildings that still stand undamaged in Summit today. Judging by the square nails she’d found in its doorframe the previous year, she surmised the structure was more than 120 years old and almost perfectly intact.

But when we reached the site in August (a year after Gilliland had first discovered it), the shaft house was in shambles, its roof blown off and its interior torn asunder. Time and another winter had finally taken its toll.

“That’s the sad part,” Gilliland tells me at her home six months later. “It’s like a fading photograph. You’ve got to catch it before it fades to indistinction.”

And that’s the mastery of her craft. Over the past two decades, Gilliland has spent days on end, year after year, gathering information from Summit old-timers who witnessed the mining days in their childhoods. For Rascals, Scoundrels, and No Goods, Chick Deming, Francis Marshal Long and Sue Chamberlain were particularly valuable resources.
“They were a wonderful source of stories,” Gilliland says, “often funny stories and anecdotes and allusions that I could then follow.”

Once Gilliland had a lead from the likes of Long or Chamberlain—say that a pug of an old lady named Jane Thomas used to break up bloody knife brawls at a saloon in Frisco—she then double-checked and broadened the insight by way of the newspapers of the day, kept on microfilm or microfiche in the Summit County Public Library. Although the Victorian papers were hesitant to report on scandal (no one, especially news reporters, was safe from the lawlessness of the times), they did document deaths and other irrefutable happenings. Thus Gilliland could gradually piece together a comprehensive snapshot of the Summit that used to be.

“I feel like I know the people from the past sometimes better than the people from the present,” Gilliland says of her research, “because I know their names and where they lived and the jobs they worked, or the businesses they operated. And I know how many children they had, and what their human weaknesses were, and when they died. Did they live to be 95 or did they die of one of those funny diseases like nephritis or apoplexy when they were 37? I feel like I know the people and the towns. And I can see their landscapes, the log buildings and the old Victorian hotels.”

As Gilliland continues on about the faces of the past and the present, I start to wonder where she fits in within the spectrum. The author sitting across from me looks and feels, on the one hand, very young. She carries a certain buoyancy about her, an enthusiasm for conversation and activity that makes her seem anything but old. On the other hand, the world she knows best has all but disappeared from our own, and her willingness to stay immersed in the past gives her an air of deeply grooved seniority.

I can’t help but ask how she dates herself.

“I have this fixation,” she laughs, momentarily hiding her face behind her cup of tea. “My mother till the day she died, we never knew how old she was. And she engrained in me that a lady does not tell her age. I just cannot.”

I press a little harder. Don’t her children know how old she is? Can she at least tell me the decade in which she was born? The ’50s? The ’40s? Perhaps back when the shysters and miscreants of her books still were wreaking havoc in Summit?

Gilliland shakes her head in refusal.

“I’ll be timeless, I guess,” she says.