Esther Burnell Mills

Esther Burnell Mills (August 1889–April 8, 1964) was an American pioneer and homesteader in Estes Park, Colorado. Esther Burnell and her sister became the National Park Service's first certified nature guides. She edited and published three post-humous volumes and additional works by Enos Mills. With Hildegarde Hawthorne, she co-authored Enos Mills of the Rockies.

Early life and education Esther A. Burnell, born in August 1889 in Eureka, Kansas, Arthur was also a minister.

Her siblings, born about every two years, were older brother Eugene, older sister Elizabeth (Bessie), and younger sister Bernice. Burnell studied at Lake Erie College in Cleveland, Ohio, and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. The National Park Service now calls this the Field of Interpretation. Dedicated in 1916, the park is located near Estes Park, Colorado.

Burnell extended her vacation to remain in Colorado. She homesteaded 120 acres near MacGregor Pass alongside Horseshoe Park. Burnell designed a five-room cabin and worked on the construction of her home, which she named Keewaydin. She built some of the furniture for her home and established a garden. Deer, mountain sheep, and birds visited her property.

Burnell's closest neighbors were the Fall River Lodge and Horseshoe Inn, about from her land. Fellow homesteaders lived two or more miles away. Burnell walked east to town to visit friends, pick up her mail, and purchase groceries and supplies that she carried back to her cabin. She embraced the outdoor life, hiking in the day or night. She made long treks, wearing snowshoes in the winter, up to away on the Ute and North Inlet trails. Sometimes, she camped outdoors, like when she met at a midway point of the distance between her cabin and Katherine Garetson's cabin. Katherine Garetson began homesteading two years before Burnell.

Burnell wrote poems and stories that Mills reviewed for her, and she typed pages for Your National Parks that he was writing. She made presentations about wildflowers at Long Peak Inn. Elizabeth visited in the summer of 1917 and took a sabbatical to spend a year in 1918 (Brulliard states that Burnell became a nature guide in the summer of 1917.)

Enos Mills had been sick, complicated by stress, for months in the summer and early fall of 1922. He then had an abscess that required surgery in his mouth and jaw, the infection brought on blood poisoning that stopped his heart in the early morning of September 21, 1922. Enos was engaged in disputes with the Rocky Mountain National Park about access to the park. Mills took on the fight after her husband's death.