Sarah Haas, Nederland.  Linda Hurth grew up in the woods of Meqon, Wisconsin in what she calls a “Huckleberry Finn” sort of childhood.

Living just off the shores of Lake Michigan, she spent most of her days frolicking through the thick cedar forests characteristic of the Midwest. She’d wander all day, stopping to play in nature’s nooks and crannies, collecting posses of forest friends along the way. It wasn’t uncommon to see her with a raccoon or two in tow.

She remembers that her play was contingent on a tacit understanding between Wisconsinites of that time and place, one that the land, although it might be privately owned and ultimately destined for some utility or other, was always, first and foremost, for the leisure and benefit of all.

To this day, 50 some odd years later, Linda explores Colorado forests with a similar understanding of boundaries, transgressing them with a pert and rebellious, but respectful flippancy.

In part her attitude toward nature and life owes to her parents. Mainly her mom, who was one of the nation’s first environmentalists, founding the still thriving Trees for Tomorrow organization in 1944 to reforest northern Wisconsin in the wake of the lumber industry’s destructive practices. And to her father, whose mantra she recalls daily: “There are do days, and there are be days. They are equally important.”

For our interview, we walk through the forests, private and public, in Linda’s near-by Nederland backyard, down a steep hillside to North Boulder Creek. She leaves the cat and horses at home, but brings her two dogs along, one stationed loyally in front, the other at the rear. As she walks she picks summer ripe raspberries from bushes, remarks at a butterfly lumbering to flap its orange spotted wings and when we get to the creek, she fords it just to get to the meadow on the other side. There she points out a cool spot for a fort, half a dozen thick steel cars from the 20s now sinking into the earth, and a sunken wood frame house that she swears a woman used to live in, hiking in with plastic bags full of food from the grocery store. Our excursion makes me feel like a kid again, but this is just who Linda is.

Linda doesn’t just see the world, she reads it, every detail a part of the puzzle of life on Earth. Perhaps this is because of her graduate education from CU Boulder in paleo ecology, specifically mammalian osteology or, in layman’s terms, the study of mammal bones. Which is to say Linda studies life from the inside out. To her a bone found walking in the woods is not just an artifact, but a story waiting to be discerned.

Walking past an ordinary row of rocks she remarks, “These must have been ramshackle roads built by old miners. Can you imagine what life was like back then? These meadows full of human life?” Linda doesn’t just imagine it: she appreciates what once was, with a scientific understanding and an energetic one too.

It’s not that she’s eccentric, but that she’s in tune enough with nature and science to know the great mystery of the world and she’s not afraid to commune with it from time to time. Like when we pass a condemned mining shack and she stops between two trees.

“Can you feel it?” She asks, but before she did, I could, by the subtle change in my heartbeat as it suddenly skipped on to another rhythm.

“This is a special place,” she says, explaining that time and time again it’s stopped her in her tracks.

In watching Linda interact with the world I’m reminded of the Plains Indian’s story of the courting flute, an instrument used by young men to play love songs. At night, when convention did not allow girls and boys to be together, the melodies of suitors would waft through the air to their beloved who would recognize their adorer’s song. In legend, the instrument was made by the forest creatures so that man could learn to speak in the language of the heart.

Linda isn’t particularly musical. She leaves that up to her two grown daughters who sing and her husband who is an aficionado. Undoubtedly though, Linda can commune with the natural world in a language few of us can.

Back at the house, she talks about the animals she’s met during her time in the Colorado mountains. About the moose who used to walk with her and her dogs, about the lion cubs she found near starvation in the snow, and about the dozens of horses she’s had over the years who all characteristically bow in her presence. She’s nursed orphaned raccoons back to health and waited on a porch in the spring for them to pay an annual visit with their ever-growing families. It’s just who Linda is, a lover and reader of nature who considers herself a part of it all.

“I’ve learned that a joyous life is one that brings you to awe,” she says and I know she doesn’t mean in the big ways, but in the little, everyday ones, happening right now, all around us.

Mountain Folk Tales is a weekly column about locals along the Peak-to-Peak. To suggest someone for a profile please email Sarah at mountainfolktales@gmail.com.