"...persistent searches were made for the mine, but each time were abandoned until this spring when a cultured woman of the new age appeared in the person of Mrs. Ida M. Strobridge, in company with a young man lately employed on her father’s ranch near Humboldt. She is a most remarkably bright woman, and will climb a precipitous cliff where the average man would not dare to venture. In addition to mining she looks after the business of her father’s cattle ranch, and is quite a sportswoman and would probably carry off first prize in a shooting tournament, as she brings down her game every time. She wears a handsome brown denim costume, which she dons in climbing the very steep and rugged cliffs of the Humboldt Mountains. She has located five claims on the lode, laid out a new camp and named it after her father, "Meacham," and reorganized the district anew as the "Humboldt"; she has four men to work and is superintending operations herself. She has also located the water and springs flowing over her claims, which are nine miles east of the Central Pacific Railroad, at the Humboldt House. She is the New New Woman...Mrs. Strobridge is now engaged running a tunnel under the shaft where the vein is showing up finely, and if the present appearance is maintained the New Woman will in due time be reckoned a millionairess, and all by her indomitable will and perseverance. She is now sacking ores for shipment."

     The luck predicted did not occur, and possibly to make ends meet, Idah began two other projects at her ranch house. One was the Artemisia Bindery, a book binding business established in the attic of her ranch home. The other was to begin writing at the age of forty, first under the pseudonym of "George W. Craiger." She published three volumes of books, most based on her experiences and love of the desert. Editors of Sagebrush Trilogy, a compilation of those works, call her "Nevada’s first woman of letters."

     By May of 1901, she was finished with the ranching and mining phase of her life. She sold her property and moved to Los Angeles with her parents. Here she embarked on a totally different lifestyle among the cultural leaders of Southern California. Among her friends were authors like Mary Austin, and Charles Fletcher Lummis, publisher of the literary magazine Land of Sunshine, later renamed Out West.

Actually, she stopped writing at age fifty-four and spent the last twenty-two years of her life working on civic clubs and genealogical societies in the Los Angeles area. She was a member of the Friday Morning Club, the Southern California Press Club, and the League of American Pen Women, as well as the National Genealogical Society and its state organizations in California, Connecticut and New Jersey.

Although she lived her final years among the coastal cultural crowd of Southern California, she apparently never lost her love of the desert solitude. She created a special retreat in San Pedro called "The Wickieup" which she described to a Los Angeles Examiner reporter in 1904:

"It is not alone the open which attracts me and the untrammeled natures of the people. It is the life utterly without pretense. I am not a city woman, neither do I like that country life which savors of the city. I despise the suburb. An existence wholly away from those conventional things hampered by man is what I long for. It is the life on the desert wholly apart from everything of pretense. I cannot give it up entirely and so I have furnished in fitting manner the 'Wickieup,' my substitute for the desert... "

Idah died on February 8, 1932, leaving only two cousins, one of whom she made a home with in Los Angeles. She is buried in Oakland’s Mountain View cemetery next to her parents, husband and sons.