Julia and James Holmes traveled to the Rocky Mountains in Colorado in 1858 with a group of gold miners. When the party arrived at the foot of Pikes Peak, the Holmeses decided to attempt to climb the mountain with J. D. Miller and George Peck. They reached the summit on August 5, 1858, making Julia Holmes the first woman to have climbed Pikes Peak. From the summit, she wrote in a letter to her mother: Nearly everyone tried to discourage me from attempting it, but I believed that I should succeed; and now here I am, and I feel that I would not have missed this glorious sight for anything at all.