By Eli Wallace. Image: Buffalo Peaks Ranch (property of Rocky Mountain Land Library).
A good library is a little universe, or, in the words of Mark Twain, “In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.”
The Rocky Mountain Land Library unites a passion for the written word with another of Colorado’s passions: the land. With books on beekeeping, birding, land studies and other natural history topics, the land library seeks to further root the people of Colorado with the land we live on.
The collection has become something of a news item, having now been written up in The New York Times and The Huffington Post. Perhaps this interest has been drummed up from the library’s scale and location on the beautiful Buffalo Peaks Ranch in South Park, Colorado, or perhaps from the dedication and hard work of the library’s founders, Jeff Lee and Ann Martin.
The pair have squirreled away their savings from working at Denver’s Tattered Cover to curate a collection of 32,000 books, which now call the Buffalo Peaks Ranch their home. The library is opening slowly as the pair restore the run-down ranch. In the end, the founders hope to build a research institution, artists’ residences, studios, and an urban location in Denver with a kid’s library.
For more information on the project, visit their website.
