Welcome

Hi! Thanks for visiting. Whether you're here because I shamelessly plugged or because you're interested in learning more about Estes Park, I'm glad you're here. I'll get into more of what this blog is for in a moment--but for now I'd like to introduce myself.

I'm Stephanie, and this is my fiancé, Cameron.....(we're getting married next October)

this is our dog, Brody, and our cat, Whiskey.....

and this is the Conklin House.

Right now we live in Fort Collins, Colorado, but in less than a week, we are going to be residents of the Conklin House. And the Conklin House is in Estes Park, Colorado. In case you're unfamiliar with Colorado, Estes Park is northwest of Denver and sits right at the base of Longs Peak, Rocky Mountain National Park, and the Continental Divide. It's well-known for the elk that come right into town in the autumn and for the Stanley Hotel, famous for being fantastically haunted and for being the inspiration for Stephen King's The Shining. 

Estes is situated at about 7,500 feet in elevation. Its first white visitors settled in the valley in 1859. Most cities in Colorado, especially mountain cities, were founded because they had some useful resource like gold or silver. Estes Park was founded mostly because people thought that it was paradise. And let's face it--it is! How'd you like to have this be your front yard?

That's Longs Peak in the middle. The peak just to the left of it is the Twin Sisters. Longs Peak is a whopping 14,259 feet tall. Cameron and I are making plans to ascend it sometime next summer.

In any case--we're moving to Estes Park for work. Cameron is a store manager and just got the opportunity to come to Estes to manage a store here and of course we snapped it up right away, even though we just moved to Fort Collins about 5 months ago. I'm a writer, or at least I'm trying to be. And that means that I can do what I love from wherever I want. That being said, I thought it would be a great opportunity to write about the place that we live in now, since it just begs to be documented daily. "A Year at Conklin House" refers to the fact that we believe we'll only be living in this particular house for about a year, hopefully with the intent of saving some money and finding a different and bigger place to move to after that. We got the notice that we were moving to Estes Park so fast that we didn't have a whole lot of time to look for places, and on top of that, most rentals in Estes are considered "out of season" after Labor Day and as the demand decreases, so does the selection. We figure we'll have all year to nail down a beautiful place to spend some more long-term time in after this year.

But for the time being, the Conklin House it is. We know that it was built in 1925 in a "neighborhood" that was populated mostly by rich folk from out east who used Estes as their summer getaway. And that's where we figure it got its name from. We also know that most of the interior of it is way more recent than 1925, so we are thinking that it was completely renovated when the demand for long-term housing hit the market with people who wanted to move to Estes year round. I'm going to spend some time in the local library to find out who or what Conklin refers to, and potentially try to find out what the house looked like back when it was built.

So I'll be keeping this blog updated with general goings-on around and in Estes, our adventures in Rocky Mountain National Park (one of our favorite places and where we got engaged), all the beautiful pictures we can capture, and perhaps the history I come across--I love history and Estes is chock full of it. So thanks for visiting, please add me to your follower list, and enjoy the view!