MOON - Key Persons
I came to Santa Fe to work for a cheminformatics startup named Bioreason. Dr. Ruth Nutt had been lured out of retirement to serve as the company's lead medicinal chemist. She had so many accomplishments to her name that she could have been arrogant and dismissive to my lowly B.S. C.S. self. Instead she was friendly and welcoming, a compact and bright figure with white hair, a perfect white smile, and a slight German accent.
It didn't take long to learn that, in her spare time, Ruth was a mean tennis player and an avid hiker. She loved the mountains, especially the Truchas Peaks. Her eyes would light up as she described their alpine meadows filled with summer wildflowers.
Ruth tempered her descriptions of Truchas with a warning: the nearest trailhead had a bad reputation. If you went there, it should be in a beat-up old car that contained nothing valuable.
A search for "Elliott Barker author" turned up several books, including "Beatty's Cabin". I bought a copy from Amazon, started reading, and soon discovered that Mr. Barker was much more than a humble old man on the back of a horse.
He had worked for Aldo Leopold.
He seemed so familiar with Gifford Pinchot as to have known him personally.
He wrote proudly about Forest Service policies whose goals sound familiar today: stop big companies from raping the land; issue permits in a sustainable way, to help the poor, not the wealthy.
"Beatty's Cabin" wasn't entirely Mr. Barker's personal story. He also retold stories from others who had known the Pecos just before his time.
One such story, derived from the "Camp-fires of a Naturalist," by Clarence E. Edwords, was itself extracted from the journals of an L. L. Dyche. It painted vivid pictures of the Pecos in the 1880s, when grizzlies occupied the top of the food chain.
It seems Professor Dyche's adventures in the Pecos came very early in his career, since 1882 is given as the first year in which he collected specimens for the university.