(Really) High Art

Miners and ranchers might have won the West, but artists like Albert Bierstadt captured it. In the 1850s and ’60s, Bierstadt (yes, the namesake of the peak) crafted detailed landscape paintings that introduced New York City and Boston audiences to Colorado’s Longs Peak. Inspired by Bierstadt and other pioneering artists, acrylic painter Lisa Dianne Martin set out in 2014 to put brush to canvas atop all of Colorado’s fourteeners. The Fruita native is scheduled to complete her mission late this summer at a summit (Mount of the Holy Cross) captured in 1875 by another trailblazing painter—Thomas Moran.