You’ve probably run into Leslie Brodhead. Lorena and I met her at Mud Lake, where she was a seasonal Educational and Outreach Specialist. Leslie has worked at Rocky Mountain National Park and the Mining Museum as well. She’s been a retail manager at Eldora, and she was the face of Wildfire Partners.

Leslie grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, where the summers are miserably hot and muggy. It was pre internet, so she was outside all the time. Kickball, softball, walking through the woods to and from school. Her dad took her to Cardinals’ baseball games. “If you’re from St. Louis, you love Cardinal baseball!”

To get away from the heat and humidity, Leslie’s family often took summer car trips to Colorado. Even then, she felt spiritually connected to the mountains. She left St. Louis after high school to attend The College of William and Mary. In Williamsburg, Virginia, it is the second oldest college in the United States. Her mother pushed her to study something practical, so she majored in Business Management. When she graduated, she worked as a manager for a large department store chain in Alexandria.

This was when she had her quarterlife crisis: “I had gone skiing for the first time in college, I was completely captivated by it. I met a ski bum and decided that’s what I really wanted to be. I sold all my furniture, loaded up my car, and moved to Mammoth Lakes, California.” She worked a season at the ski shop of the local resort. “I was a poor, but deliriously happy ski bum.”

Leslie was lured back to the workaday world, doing office temp work in San Francisco. For three years, anyway: “One day I was driving down a street, when I suddenly saw cars racing in the opposite direction, fleeing whatever I was approaching. It was a shoot-out, with bullets flying everywhere! That was it, I realized I’m not meant to be in a city. I packed it all up and moved to Lake Tahoe.”

She worked at a Lake Tahoe ski resort in the winter season, and for a summer she worked as a manager in concessions at Sequoia National Park. People told her she would be a great park ranger, so she applied and got the job. That began a 17-year career with the National Park Service, seven national parks around the country, including Sequoia, Oregon Caves National Monument, Cape Cod National Seashore, Independence Historical Park in Philadelphia (home of the Liberty Bell), and C&O National Historical Park.

The C&O is a long, linear park that starts in Washington, DC and runs 185 miles to Cumberland, Maryland, parallel to the Potomac River. “I learned how to till a canal boat and move it through a lock. We dressed in period costumes, hitched up mules to the boat, and gave the public rides. We told stories about life on the C&O canal in the 1800s.”

Maryland is also where she met her husband, Bryon. An outdoorsy guy, he once hiked the entire Appalachian Trail. He is a meteorologist, you may have seen his local weather blog, www.indianpeaksweather.net. When Bryon and Leslie met, he was working for the National Weather Service, where someone once asked him if he’d ever get married. “I’m kind of a single guy”, he said, to which the co-worker replied, “Well, you never know, maybe you’ll meet a nice park ranger someday.”

And he did, he met Leslie. A year later they took a seven-day hike on the High Sierra Trail. It was the first time they had backpacked together, and it went well. Having established that they were good to go, they married a week later. The ceremony took place at an old fire lookout, overlooking Lake Tahoe.

In 2010, Bryon got a new job with the National Weather Service in Grand Junction. Leslie took a job at Capitol Reef National Park in Utah, three hours away from Grand Junction. “The drive took me through Green River, Utah. It’s not much of a town, but they can grow melons there like nobody’s business. Weird melons that you’ve never heard of in your life, weird colors. I’d always pick up a few.”

Melons are great, but they’re not mountains. It didn’t take Leslie long to figure out that if she loved the mountains so much, she ought to live in them. “I called Bryon one night and said, my God, we’ve got to buy land in the mountains! We started looking for places on the Front Range. Somebody mentioned Nederland, so we looked online and called a realtor. She showed us four houses; when we walked into the last one, a log home with a beautiful mountain view, I knew we had found our house. We didn’t even have jobs here, but I knew it was for us.”

And it is. She’s got great neighbors and she’s in a wonderful neighborhood with trails down to Boulder Creek from her house, elk out her back window, bobcats on her front porch, and columbines blooming all around. And then there’s the town itself: “I love the kind of laid back, quirky nature of Ned.”

I think Leslie’s here to stay. She and Bryon have settled in with puppies Shawnee and Logan, and kitties Simba and Dora. She’s working in wildfire mitigation, and for the last four years she has volunteered at the Boulder Humane Society. Leslie and Bryon both volunteer with the Forest Service, doing year-round trail patrols in the Indian Peaks Wilderness.

It took her a while to get here, but not long at all to figure out mountain living. So much so that she writes about it in her blog at www.nederlandliving.com. You will enjoy it.

[BELLA LORENA: Sarò felice per il resto della mia vita, con la mia ragazza cannella.]