On finding Aunt Clara Brown Hill

After my research into Clara Brown (see this post) -- and my discovery of Aunt Clara Brown Hill, a mountain in Central City (re-named from its previous, racist, name in 2012) -- I had to climb the hill.  My mother-in-law, Elaine, and my daughter and I drove to Central City and then above it, following Eureka Street, which becomes Upper Apex Road and leads to several historic cemeteries.  We parked on the side of the road in view of the Central City Cemetery -- and in view, just through the wrought-iron arch, of Aunt Clara Brown Hill.

Aunt Clara Brown Hill, 9,088 ft, is the gentle rise just visible through the cemetery gate.

To reach the top of the hill, we had to walk through the cemetery, which Mitike did not appreciate, imagining ghosts, skeletal hands reaching, haunted souls. Elaine reassured her, saying that these quiet stones resting in the wildflowers and long grasses were stories waiting for us to listen.

We followed criss-crossing and increasingly steep mining roads no more than 1/2 mile to the hill's summit, passing sunken holes and abandoned mining equipment and taking care to keep our dogs and ourselves on the solid road.  People have fallen into forgotten mine shafts in these kinds of places.

And then, suddenly, we stepped onto the summit of Aunt Clara Brown Hill.  It's a restful place in the aspens, red paintbrush growing beside sage and cinquefoil, a view of the mining country and, beyond, Mount Evans and Mount Rosalie.  We talked awhile, the three of us, about how we wished for a plaque or a stone to commemorate Clara Brown, and we talked of how both the words "aunt" and "hill" cheapen the honor.  We privately renamed the place Mount Clara Brown, wondering what that tough, persistent pioneer would have thought of any summit that bore her name on maps.

Paintbrush on the summit of Aunt Clara Brown Hill

The view of the Evans massif from Aunt Clara Brown Hill

Indeed, what would Clara Brown have made of two white women and a child adopted from Ethiopia, picking their way among the stones on a mountain named for her?  What would she have said to us?  What would she have thought of my confident, grinning daughter in her pink New Balance tennis shoes and her purple rain jacket, of how she spread her arms to the world she could see from the summit of Aunt Clara Brown Hill?

The worn and lichened gravestones in the cemetery did not answer our questions.  Only the wind whispered in the grasses there, and the wild rose and the paintbrush and the bluebells nodded.

Mitike on Aunt Clara Brown Hill -- July 8, 2017