Bud was reading a book by Zane Gray telling about the Mormons struggles in their quest to travel west to Salt Lake City when he remembered three abandoned cabins in a meadow on Ryley Ridge (below Ryley Peak), in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, just above a mountain home Pat and he had built in the 1970’s. This memory gave him an idea for a story about pioneers from the 1870’s and the 1970’s experiences in a meadow, in the area of Conifer Colorado, called Piano Meadows.
Bud started his research on the Mormon’s quest to travel from their homes in Illinois to Salt Lake City in the 1870’s through Colorado. He also was remembering his own families experiences while living in an area called Shiloh in Conifer after moving up there from the suburb of Wheatridge, Colorado.
Bud, on a sunny day this spring, invited his wife Pat and their three daughters – Bridget, Shauna, and Wendy to meet for lunch, requesting them to list their memories of living in their mountain home in Shiloh near Conifer, Colorado. The results being a flood of memories they each had experienced while living in Shiloh, in a mountain home their parents had built. The Mormon research, and the family memory lists, were the seeds developing a historical fiction story about the 1870’s and 1970’s pioneers while living in this special place in the mountains of Colorado. After this first meeting Pat, Bud’s wife and partner of 60 years, suggested the girls write individual short fictional stories about their visits to “Piano Meadows” up on Ryley Ridge, relative to their treasures found in this beautiful meadow. Bud has included their individual short stories in his new book, “Piano Meadows.”
Now, after collecting all of this information about the Pioneers from the 1870’s and the 1970’s, Bud developed this Historical Fiction novel called “Pioneer Meadows.” The premise of the story was to share with his readers these pioneer experiences in three separate sections within each chapter of this book. The story is now complete and the proof copies are on the way, with publication through CreateSpace, and placement on Amazon destined to happen this month of October 2015… 45 years after this family lived in Shiloh, near Conifer, Colorado.
The two pictures shown below were taken in September 2015 on a nostalgia trip back to Piano Meadows in Conifer Colorado. On the left is Ryley Peak and on the right is what we remembered to be the start of Piano Meadows.
