Enos made his first ascent of Colorado’s “Longs Peak,” when he was fifteen, no easy feat for a kid who’d had tuberculosis, and Longs Peak is the state’s 13th highest mountain at 14,255-feet.  He would make the trip forty more times by himself over his life, and about 300 more times as a guide.

In 1887,  health restored, he moved to Butte, Montana where he lived and worked intermittently until 1902, spending most summers traveling through the US, and Europe. In 1889, he had a chance meeting with famed naturalist, John Muir, on a San Francisco beach, and became a conservation activist from that point on. He went back to Colorado in 1902 and bought the Longs Peak House in Estes Park which he turned into an inn. Over the next few years, he served as government lecturer on forestry, authored several articles and books on nature and the Estes Park area, and lead the fight to preserve the area. It was Mills to whom we can credit the establishment of Rocky Mountain National Park in 1915 by the US Congress, and for this, he’s been called the “Father of Rocky Mountain National Park.” He died relatively young – age 52 – in 1922, and in his honor, Mills Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park was named after him.

The life-sized sculpture is found in a small park across from Estes Park’s Town Hall. Created in 2003 by local artist Bonnie J. Fulford, the piece shows Mills with his steady companion, “Scotch,” a Border Collie.  We admire the artist who knows the importance of a canine companion to a public figure, and includes the dog in the rendering.