Professional Documents
Culture Documents
FOREWORD BY
WI LLIA M C RO N O N
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William Philpott
Foreword by
William Cronon
U n i v e r s i t y of Wa s h i n g t on P r e s s
Seattle and London
Frontispiece: Cover of the Colorado state lure book," published by the state's Division
of Commerce and Development, ca. 1964. Courtesy Colorado Tourism Office.
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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For
Mom, Dad, and Kath
Shelby, Carly, and Peter
and in memory of
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Contents
List of Illustrationsviii
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Notes307
Bibliography408
Acknowledgments451
Index459
Illustrations
Maps
1. The Colorado high country todayxvi
2. Evolution of the Interstate 70 corridor91
3. Routes studied for possible interstate location119
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viiiIllustrations
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3.2.Buttermilk Mountain,
characteristic postwar ski landscape, 1960s147
3.3.Picturesque Georgetown, Victorian ambiance, early 1960s155
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3.7.Pete Seibert with his scale model of Vail Mountain, ca. 1960174
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xIllustrations
Foreword
William Cronon
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Americans have long had a love-hate relationship with tourism. The impulse to leave home to experience for oneself the length and
breadth of this vast land has been a quintessential part of our national heritage since the earliest days of the Republic. From the nineteenth century
forward, the wonders of wild places and natural landscapes have exercised
an especially powerful attraction, encouraging journeys for growing numbers of travelers first by coach or horseback, then by railroad, and eventually
by automobile and jet plane. Given how important such experiences have
been to American national identity, especially as increasing numbers of citizens have had the time and money to make such trips, one might almost say
that we have become a nation of tourists.
But there also has been a long-standing tendency for Americans to resist
counting themselves among the tourist hordes. In the nineteenth century,
a visit to Niagara Falls became de rigueur for well-to-do travelers on both
sides of the Atlantic, so much so that in the decades following the Civil
War, there were more and more laments that crowds on the banks of the
Niagara River were detracting from the very sublimity they had come to
see. Such concerns were so great that when the Washburn-Langford-Doane
Expedition visited Yellowstone in 1870, followed by the Hayden Expedition
a year later, the tourist excesses of Niagara were invoked as the reason why
that wondrous landscape of geysers and hot springs should be set aside as
the first national park in 1872. And yet not much time had to pass before
successful marketing efforts, first by the Northern Pacific Railroad and then
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by the National Park Service, yielded the same complaints about tourist
crowds at Old Faithful that had bedeviled Niagara.
Here, then, is one of the chief paradoxes of tourism: by identifying mustsee destinations and encouraging travelers to construct itineraries to visit
them, promoters attract (and profit from) the very crowds those travelers
hope to flee. There are other paradoxes as well. Although the industry often
marketed natural wonders and wild landscapes, ranging from the Adirondacks to Niagara to the Great Smokies to Yellowstone to Grand Canyon to
Yosemite, it also required the creation of what amounted to urban infrastructures in these places to service all the people who came to see them.
Great resort hotels like Grand Canyons El Tovar and Yosemites Ahwahnee
were constructed, along with highly engineered roads and campgrounds;
elaborate water supplies, electrical distribution networks, and sewage systems; and all the other amenities that marked tourist landscapes as being
not so different from the semi-urban, semi-natural suburbs that growing
numbers of tourists called home. To maintain all this infrastructure and
to provide the services travelers expected to find, large numbers of workers
had to be hired, who themselves required housing and amenities, thereby
becoming residents in places most people only visited. Many tolerated low
wages and difficult living conditions because they loved the beauty and the
recreational opportunities as much as the tourists did. What emerged were
hybrid landscapes and communities influenced and defined by the tourist
experiences they fostered.
Few areas of the country better illustrate these paradoxical tendencies
than Colorado, especially in the decades following World War II. Tourists
had begun discovering the Rocky Mountains in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries with the help of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad, the emergence of resort communities like Estes Park and Colorado
Springs, and the opening of Rocky Mountain National Park in 1915. But
the transformation of Colorado into one of the nations most iconic tourist landscapes really accelerated during the middle decades of the twentieth
century, when the states mountainous terrain became more accessible than
ever before. Diesel engines, electric motors, and cables on pulleys made it
possible to transport people with wooden, metal, or fiberglass planks on
their feet to the tops of mountains, saving them the trouble of the upward
climb so they could concentrate instead on the downward schuss. The first
mechanized rope tow for Colorado skiers, constructed west of Denver on
Berthoud Pass in 1937, was followed after the war by much larger and more
xiiForeword
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ambitious ventures. To bring tourists en masse to these new ski areas, two
other innovations proved indispensible. Air transport, first with propeller
planes and then with jets, made it possible for travelers from faraway places
to reach the mountains for relatively short visits, even during the winter.
Automobiles proved just as essential, aided and abetted by the construction
of high-speed four-lane highways made possible by the National Interstate
and Defense Highways Act of 1956.
Without skis, jets, cars, and highways, Colorado would never have
become the tourist playground that it is today. This remarkable transformation is the subject of William Philpotts fine new environmental history, Vacationland: Tourism and Environment in the Colorado High Country.
It combines meticulous scholarship with deep interpretive insight and
genuine literary grace to tell fascinating stories about places many Americans visit without ever really knowing them very well. Wearing his erudition lightly, Philpott helps us understand how veterans associated with the
U.S. Armys Tenth Mountain Division, trained to fight in craggy terrain
under arctic conditions, played key roles in applying their alpine know-how
from the Italian theater of the war to tourist destinations in the Rockies.
Thus, the down-on-its-heels silver-mining town of Aspen, which had barely
seven hundred inhabitants in 1930, was remade when Friedl Pfeifer of the
Tenth Mountain Division partnered with the Chicago industrialist Walter
Paepcke to redevelop the community into an upscale ski resort and cultural
center. Likewise, it was the Tenth Mountain Divisions Pete Seibert who
teamed up with a Colorado local, Earl Eaton, to recruit a group of investors
to finance and build the equally successful ski resort of Vail.
The role of these army veterans in promoting winter sports in postwar
America is well known to those familiar with the history of skiing in the
United States. What Philpott adds to the story is a far more systematic
overview of the many other elements that had to join together before the
Colorado high country could become one of Americas most popular playgrounds. In particular, he demonstrates and explores in fascinating detail
the crucial role of new forms of transportation, especially Interstate 70,
in opening up remote mountain valleys that had been all but inaccessible
during the winter. Aspens growth, for instance, initially benefited from
the private airstrip that Walter Paepcke constructed there in 1946, which
was later supplemented by the Glenwood Springs exit of I-70. The founders of Vail chose its site in full anticipation of the interstates construction,
developing their ski resort on the slopes immediately above and adjacent
Foreword xiii
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Foreword xv
Eagle
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PITKIN
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Georgetown
Loveland Pass
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GILPIN
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Vail Pass
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White River
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Fryingpan River
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Aspen
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Map 1.
The Colorado
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I.1 To see the land like tourists. In ads like this in the 1950s, Colorados state publicity
committee tried to sell local residents on the economic value of tourism. But even more, the
ads encouraged locals to see the high country from a tourists point of viewand to learn to
sell it accordingly. Courtesy Colorado Tourism Office.
INTRODUCTION
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The allure of living where tourists played was far from the only factor fueling these states population boom, but it was a significant one.
So instead of defining tourism narrowly, I use the word loosely. I apply
it to short-term visiting and sightseeing, of course, but also to seasonal residency, second-home-owning, and other phenomena that saw people staying
in place longer than conventional tourists do. I apply it to vacationers who
returned to the same resort or dude ranch every year, even though tourists
are not usually seen as bonding closely to any one place. And I apply it to
sports like skiing and fly-fishing, whose serious devotees are surely loath to
see themselves as tourists. I do this in part because I want to get beyond
the cartoonish stigmas so often attached to tourism. But even more, I want
to underscore just how pervasively tourism has shaded into other realms,
including the ways we spend our leisure time when not on vacation and the
ways we interact on an everyday basis with the outdoors.
Another problem: what do we mean when we talk of a tourist industry? This is another term I use often, for simplicitys sake. But in fact the
tourist industry is not a single industry at all. It is a crazy quilt of airlines,
car-rental firms, hotels, motels, resorts, restaurants, travel agents, tour operators, theme parks, makers and sellers of recreational equipment and souvenirs, and many other private enterprises that serve tourists. (And few of
these businesses cater exclusively to leisure travelers, making it even harder
to assess the scope and impact of the industry.) Then there are countless
public or quasi-public entities that variously deal with tourists: chambers of
commerce, publicity bureaus, recreation districts, land-management agencies, planning commissions, highway departments, and many more, all of
whose roles we must weigh as we trace the rise of large-scale tourism as a
historical phenomenon.9
And the economic effects of tourism are by no means limited to its
industry. In fact, it is arguable that tourist dynamics unleashed an entirely
new model of economic growth. One thing that struckand sometimes
exhilarated, sometimes alarmedpeople in Colorado was the way their
vacationland kept growing and growing, in both prosperity and population.
It was not clear how this happened. Conventional economic-development
wisdom said that people followed jobs, so you needed some sort of job generatora mine or factory, for exampleto spur growth. But the vacationland did not seem to live by the same rules. Certainly some of its population
explosion could be credited to jobs in the thriving tourist industry itself or
to the research- and defense-related industries in the Denver metro area.
Introduction 7
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But more and more people moving into the region seemed not to be following jobs at all. Instead, they came for the environmental and recreational
amenities, the quality of life. And they brought their businesses with them,
or started new ones, or freelanced, or telecommuted (once that technology
came about), or simply lived off their pensions or trusts. In other words, in
defiance of all existing economic models, the high countrys environmental
qualities seemed to be generating growth on their own.10 While this remains
a somewhat controversial concept, it is a growth scenario much more familiar to us now, and once again it shows how tourisms economic influence
reached far beyond the industry itself.
Beyond its economic impacts, tourism brings people into contact who
might otherwise never meet, which means its history is also profoundly
social. In places where it takes root, it brings not just tourists themselves
but also investors, promoters, entrepreneurs, and workers, who end up
altering their destinations demographics, social dynamics, and relations of
property and power. Not to mention relations of employment and labor, for
the production of tourist experiences takes a lot of work, often by immigrant or indigenous workers of low incomes, who may find themselves
serving or performing for people of very different value systems, histories,
cultural identities, class statuses, and races. Tourism may draw such people together, furthering friendship and understanding. But it may just as
easily trade on stereotypes or exotic or derogatory notions of the other,
driving people apart. In the process, it can bring shattering change. Many
observers have pointed to tourisms colonial or imperial tendenciesnot
just in the economic and social senses, but in the cultural sense too. And the
changes do not just affect the people being visited or toured.11 Cultural
impacts rebound the other direction too, as tourists gain exposure to new
outlooks and lifeways and may be moved to rethink their own as a result.12
In Colorado, the vacation mystique that came to surround the high country
inspired many people to reshape their lives, identities, and politics around
the states leisure amenities.
But if the history of tourism is about human contact and conflict, at its
very heart it is also about the interaction between people and place. After
all, tourism is an utterly landscape-specific phenomenon. At its most basic
level, it involves people laying claim to certain kinds of physical settings
for their own or their customers pleasure. Many of the social and cultural
conflicts mentioned in the previous paragraph boil down to this: Who gets
to live, work, or play in this landscape? Profit off it? Claim belonging to it?
8 Introduction
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Define its beauty, its value, or the ways it will be owned, altered, or used? So
tourism raises issues that are not just social and cultural but deeply environmental. They are the issues at the heart of this book.
Crucial to this inquiry is the history of how landscapes were framed,
explained, and made meaningful for touristsfor example, through advertising, guidebooks, literary and pictorial representations, or prior visitors
travel accounts. Of course, tourists did not necessarily see places exactly
as they were taught to, nor did they attach exactly the same meanings to
them that, say, ad writers or poets did. But ad writers and poets are children
of cultural context, and they write for others who are toowhich suggests
that, by looking for patterns in how tourist scenes in a given era were interpreted and framed, we can learn a great deal about the environmental ideals
of that time.13 And while it is treacherous to generalize about such things,
it is possible to discern a broad shift from the nineteenth century, when
tourist landscapes were purveyed and portrayed primarily in terms of their
collective value; to the mid-twentieth century, by which time the emphasis
had moved noticeably toward the emotional benefits that tourist landscapes
could bring to the individual.
There is a rich literature on travel in the nineteenth-century United
States, and most of it underscores the collective nature of tourismthat is,
that tourists in those times were pointed toward natural settings that supposedly bore significance for the wider culture. Wealthy antebellum tourists
were encouraged to treat sightseeing as a means to cultural literacy: there
emerged a canon of picturesque sights, and visiting and learning to read
them helped tourists gain membership in a shared elite culture. Even more,
collecting these sights was a means to assemble and assert a shared national
culture. The most renowned and revered scenic monuments were those that
supposedly demonstrated the young nations distinctiveness from Europe
and its superiority, particularly its favored position in the eyes of God.14
The notion that tourists could collectively affirm an American national
identity did not stop with elite eastern sightseers of the early republic. It
was an important reason for tourism spreading west to iconic landscapes
like Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Rockies after the Civil War; it carried
over to the middle-class tourists who began taking to the rails later in the
Gilded Age; and it persisted for decades into the twentieth century. For
middle-class tourists, seeing Americas great natural places became a ritual
of citizenship, as historian Marguerite Shaffer puts it, in a time when disconcerting changes seemed to challenge national unity and order. In other
Introduction 9
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the state. Politically, my high country includes all or part of the counties of
Clear Creek, Grand, Summit, Lake, Eagle, Garfield, and Pitkin. Unusually
for American political jurisdictions, these counties boundaries generally
correspond to watershed boundaries, so that hydrologically my high country takes in the basins of Clear Creek and the Fraser, Blue, extreme upper
Arkansas, Eagle, Roaring Fork, and Fryingpan Rivers. Topographically,
it includes these river valleys along with the intervening mountainsthe
Gore, Sawatch, Williams Fork, and Tenmile ranges and some of the many
ridges and peaks that are usually lumped together as the Front Range.
Today these counties, watersheds, valleys, and mountains have at least
one key thing in common: if you drive to any of them from Denver, you
will likely find yourself taking Interstate 70 at least part of the way. In fact,
much of the region I write about may properly be called the I70 corridor.
But that name is anachronistic for much of the history this book covers. It
was not even clear that there would be an I70 west of Denver until 1957;
even then, it took another three years to decide what exact route it would
take. Actual construction took over thirty years more. Still, Interstate 70
is a decisive part of the story I tell. All of the counties I cover either ended
up on the interstate or could have, had the planning and politicking gone
another way. That planning and politicking plays a key part in this story.
It is no exaggeration to say that the moment the planning and politicking
gave way to actual construction, I70 began to reshape this regions geography. The superhighway slashed directly across the supposedly impenetrable
north-south ranges, ending the relative isolation of the valleys and towns
in between, tying them to each other and to Denver in a single corridor: a
cohesive geographical unit where none had existed before. I70s ability to
handleand channellarge numbers of leisure seekers along this corridor
would have historic consequences.
And that is why I pick this region to explore the making of a vacationland. Before 1945 this region was obscure, hard to reach, little visited. But
in the ensuing decades, it underwent rapid, extensive tourist development
and gained international repute as a vacationland. By the 1970s people were
pouring into the high country for its scenery and for skiing, fishing, hiking, camping, boating, and other outdoor recreation. They were flocking to
Aspen, Vail, and the other resorts that had appeared across the area, like
Breckenridge, Keystone, Copper Mountain, Dillon, and Winter Park. They
were descending on the regions two national forests, placing them both
among the nations top ten for recreational use. And they were speeding
12 Introduction
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along the regions highways, especially Interstate 70, the high-volume, highspeed artery that fed vacationers into the high country and tied it all
together. The scale and speed of the high countrys tourist transformation
makes it an ideal place to study the origins and effects of such a change.
Colorado was actually already on the tourist map long before World
War II. But not the high country itselfand certainly not on such a popular
scale. Earlier tourism was restricted socially to a more elite clientele. And
it was restricted spatially, rarely ever venturing into the heart of the high
country.
Already in the 1860s, American and European visitors were exalting Colorados scenery. The scenery was natural, in a sense, but it also
required some cultural constructionand a good dose of boosterism. The
cultural part was the abiding nineteenth-century popularity of the picturesque. The booster part involved people like William Byers, the founding
editor of Denvers first newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News. In the 1860s
Byers led dignitaries on jaunts around the mountains, showing them the
spots that most lived up to picturesque standards, knowing his guests
would then convey the charms of the scenery back East. It worked. When
the influential Massachusetts newspaperman Samuel Bowles, for example,
published an evocative account of his tour with Byers, or when celebrated
landscape painter Albert Bierstadt exhibited his theatrical canvases based
on the alpine vistas Byers had taken him to see, they helped build Colorados image as Americas new scenic wonderlandthe Switzerland of
America, as Bowles christened it.21
In 1870 Colorado got its first rail link to the rest of the country; soon
after, it got the first of its many pleasure resorts. They were only for the
very rich, though. Only the rich could afford the long, costly rail journey
to Colorado; and in any case, Colorados promoters, like most in the West,
preferred to cater to the investor class, because they were the ones who
might come back to help capitalize the territorys growth.22 It is also significant for our story that those early resorts were not up in the high country.
Instead, they clung to the easternmost edge of the Rockiesas in the case
of Manitou and Colorado Springs, the fashionable spas the Denver & Rio
Grande Railway (D&RG) built at the base of Pikes Peak.23
There was a legend of a creature that lived deeper in the mountains,
where few flatlanders dared to go. Mountainfolk liked to tell tourists of the
slide-rock bolter, a monstrous whalelike beast with a hooked tail and a
cavernous, scooplike mouth. The beast would hook its tail over the crest of
Introduction 13
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a ridgeso went the storyand wait quietly for tourists, with their telltale
clothing and guidebooks, to wander into the valley below. Then the bolter
would suddenly release its tail, swoop down the mountainside on its belly
like a toboggan, and scoop the hapless tourists into its gaping maw.24 It was
a classic stupid tourist story, purportedly explaining those scars up on
steep slopes that were actually left by avalanches or rockslides. But it was
also a tale that played on perceptions of the high country as primeval and
wild, a bit too rough for visitors to risk.
Probably few were gullible enough to believe in the slide-rock bolter.
Still, the high country kept its reputation for remoteness and inhospitableness: few Victorian tourists ventured into the region, and those who did
went few places therein. Access was severely limited by the reach of the
railroads. Many visitors did take day trips up Clear Creek to marvel at the
pitted minescape around Central City, dip into the mineral waters at Idaho
Springs, or ride the famous Georgetown Loop, a spectacular spiral of track
about forty miles west of Denver.25 But that was as far into the mountains
as rails reached in the 1870s. The early 1880s finally brought railroad access
to the heart of the high country, as two lines beat their way to Leadville,
the latest boomtown. But even as the Cloud City mines and great belching smelters became another popular sightseeing excursion, Leadville
could hardly be called a tourist town. The sightseers rarely tarried for long,
retreating quickly to their accommodations in Denver, Manitou, or Colorado Springs. And popular perceptions still held the high country to be
impenetrable. Even with rail service to Leadville (and by the late 1880s to
the newest silver boomtown of Aspen), there was still no route straight west
from Denver. Instead, the tracks to Aspen and Leadville took circuitous
paths, swinging far to the south to avoid the daunting ranges directly to
Denvers west. Grand County, though a short distance from Denver, just
on the other side of the Front Range, had no rail access at all. William Byers
spent years trying to establish a luxury spa thereHot Sulphur Springs, his
would-be Saratoga Westbut without a railroad to reach it, the resort
languished in obscurity.
To say the railroads limited tourist access, though, is too deterministic.
Again, what ultimately dictated the travel patterns of the day was culture.
Victorian visitors could have chosen to leave the rail corridors behind and
plunge into the rugged middle of Coloradobut few did, because it was not
the Victorian taste to do so. Wealthy Victorian travelers preferred to spend
their days on the verandas and carriage paths or in the pavilions, casinos,
14 Introduction
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and ballrooms of Manitou and Colorado Springsresorts that, like Saratoga, Carlsbad, and other eastern and European forebears, styled themselves
as enclaves of comfort and sophistication, sheltered from the harshness of
the elements.26 It is revealing that when western Colorado finally got its first
major leisure destinationGlenwood Springs, a railroad spa developed in
the 1880s and 1890s with capital from Aspen, Colorado Springs, and Englandit adhered to this same formula, an island of luxury amid the rugged Rockies, with its bathhouse-casino echoing Viennese architecture, its
resort hotel modeled after Romes Villa Medici, and its golf course and polo
grounds evoking an English estate.27
Vacationers who took the waters at Manitou or Glenwood were exhilarated by the proximity of the Rocky Mountains and often took short, easy
walks, rides, or excursions to scenic spots close by. But before the 1890s, at
least, they showed little interest in foraying any farther, in leaving behind
the comfort of their little resort islands to truly immerse themselves in the
outdoors. This cautious keeping of distance echoed another elite travel convention of the day: scenic sightseeing. Here again, the pattern had been set
in Europe and the East, with generations of genteel travelers visiting places
like the Swiss Alps, the English Lake District, the Hudson River valley,
and Niagara Falls. Such travels were supposed to demonstrate tourists cultural refinement, their ability to understand and appreciate scenery. Interest focused especially on landscapes that met the aesthetic standards of the
sublime or the picturesque, mentioned earlier.28 Importantly, these aesthetic ideals served to minimize sightseers physical contact with the landscapes they visited, privileging instead the act of gazing from a distance.29
Instead of actually venturing into the Rockies, then, Victorian tourists usually stopped at prescribed viewpoints that properly framed distant vistas
for them. Or if they did venture deeper into the mountains, they did so by
train, confining themselves to the safety of the coach and letting the window frame the views.30 Either way, they contemplated the peaks passively,
from afar, much as they might regard a Bierstadt canvas on a gallery wall.
If tourists did not spread much into the high country in the nineteenth
century, there were hints of change by the early twentieth. Fears of excessive
urbanization and overcivilization began to push elite leisure tastes toward
more rustic settings and active pursuits. Passive landscape contemplation
lost ground to vigorous outdoor activities that were supposed to build body
and character, like camping, hunting, and fishing. Remote, rough landscapes that elites had shunned came into favor. And growing numbers of
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the elites, especially male outdoor enthusiasts, began venturing deep into
the high country. Theodore Roosevelt, champion of the strenuous life,
drew publicity to the area when he went on a 1905 bear hunt in the primitive areas near Glenwood Springs.31
But the foothills and mountains closest to Denver drew the most new
interest, as affluent Denverites seeking the strenuous life began heading to
the hills. Three pastimes in particularscenic motoring, mountain climbing, and the newly introduced Norwegian skisportcaught on with
Denvers wealthy.32 All three spawned organizations that doubled as both
social clubs and promotional groups for their pet pastimes. The Colorado
Automobile Club pushed for scenic roads in the foothills and mountains
near Denver, laying the groundwork for future automobile tourism.33 The
Colorado Mountain Club sponsored hiking and climbing trips and worked
to spread appreciation and enjoyment of the Rockies.34 And by the mid1910s, Denvers first ski clubs, together with members of the Mountain Club
who also had taken up skiing, were organizing ski outings and carnivals. By
the late 1910s, they were building ski jumps at spots like Genesee Mountain,
twenty miles from Denver. By the early 1930s, Denvers Arlberg Club would
lead a shift away from Nordic to Alpine skiing and help develop some of
Colorados first primitive downhill ski areas.35
With leisure travel becoming a larger and more middle-class phenomenon from 1900 through the 1910s, the push for recreational facilities won
new allies: Denver officials and business boosters, who were realizing that
the city could make a mint off automobile tourists if it could position itself as
a gateway to the emerging mountain playground. An important result was
the decision, in 1912, to start developing a system of city-owned mountain
parks, mostly in the foothills, linked to each other and to Denver by scenic
drives.36 Boosters also joined recreational enthusiasts in lobbying for two
new national parks near Denver: Denver National Park, which would have
enshrined the spectacular lake-and-peak landscape around Mount Evans
scenery that Bierstadt had made famousand Rocky Mountain National
Park, which would encompass the Front Range around Longs Peak, northwest of the city. The first park never became reality, but the second did in
1915.37 The growth of the national park system, in turn, compelled the U.S.
Forest Service to begin serving recreational interests too. In 1919 the Forest
Service hired its first recreation engineer, Arthur Carhart, whose initial
charge was to devise a plan to handle the burgeoning demand for recreation
around Mount Evans.38 Remember Carharts name, for while his time with
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the Forest Service was brief, he would reemerge after World War II as one
of the nations leading advocates for recreation planning and so would help
usher in a new era of environmental politics in Colorado.
In the late 1930s came another major precedent for postwar tourism: the
high countrys first mechanized ski mountains. In 1937 the Colorado Winter Sports Council, a group made up of Denver ski club members and businessmen, built the states first public rope tow about fifty-three miles west of
Denver, atop Berthoud Pass. The next year, Denver parks and improvements
manager George Cranmer began planning a city-owned ski area fourteen
miles farther down the road, at the west portal of the Moffat railroad tunnel
in Grand County. Already at this location, the Arlberg Club, Forest Service, and Civilian Conservation Corps had cleared some ski trails and built
a shelter. Now Cranmer, using city workers, Arlberg and Colorado Mountain Club volunteers, and funding from private donations, city coffers, and
the federal Public Works Administration, got more trails cleared, a J-bar (ski
tow) installed, and a warming house built at the base. Winter Park opened in
January 1940 and quickly became a favorite weekend retreat for Denverites,
particularly Denver children learning to ski.39 Winter Park and Berthoud
Pass owed their popularity in large measure to their mechanical lifts, which
made the uphill part of downhill skiing much less taxing. But convenience
to Denver figured heavily too. Both ski areas sat right on U.S. Highway 40
(and by fortuitous timing, paving of Highway 40 over Berthoud Pass was
completed in 1938, further easing the drive from Denver). Even better, Winter Parks location at the west portal of the Moffat Tunnel meant high-country skiing was now just a quick train trip from Denver. Over the next several
decades, thousands upon thousands of Denverites, especially youngsters,
would make that train trip for a Saturday or Sunday on the slopes.
Despite such developments, recreations impact on the high country
remained rather limited. Given the growing demand from Denverites, the
greatest impact came in the foothills and mountains nearest the city. The
rest of the high country remained little visited, especially by leisure seekers
from out of state. This was especially true of the high countrys old mining
towns. These, for the most part, languished in a state of long-term depression and decay, as they had ever since the catastrophic silver market crash
of 1893. As yet, tourists showed scant interest in visiting these old towns,
nor boosters in getting them to. The one exception proved the rule: Central
City, the old gold-mining town, was discovered by Denver socialites in the
1930s and partially rehabilitated as a summer opera and theater venue. But
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I.2Denvers mountain playground. At the city-owned Winter Park ski area, seen here in
the late 1940s, skiers navigate the practice slope, while others line up in front of the warming
shelters at the base to ride the J-bar tow back up. Behind the shelters, the ski train, which
many Denverites rode to and from Winter Park, emerges from the Moffat Tunnel, belching
smoke. The pipeline running down the mountain (in shadow, at right) carries water destined
for Denver, suggesting another claim that the citys residents placed on the high country
environment. Courtesy Sanborn Ltd.
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Central sat just forty miles from downtown Denver, and it was promoted
as an extension of the citys cultural and high-society scene.40 So, like Berthoud Pass and Winter Park, it fit the pattern of Denver-driven recreational
development near the city rather than signaling a trend toward more extensive tourist development throughout the entire high country.
Still, there were rumblings of what would happen after the war. Ongoing efforts to improve the U.S. and state highways, like U.S. 40, were beginning to make long-isolated pockets of the high country more accessible.
The 1930s fascination with local and folk heritage was beginning to spark
interest in historic buildings and townscapes that minings collapse had
left neglected.41 And residents in some high-country towns were, like their
Denver counterparts, beginning to show heightened interest in outdoor
recreation. In the 1910s and 1920s, ski jumps appeared in Dillon, Steamboat
Springs, and Hot Sulphur Springs, and ski clubs popped up in many mountain communities, including Steamboat Springs, Leadville, Frisco, and
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Grand Lake. Aspens ski club launched in 1937, and one of its first initiatives
was to clear Aspen Mountains first ski run and build a primitive ski tow.
Tows also appeared on town ski hills in Climax, Glenwood Springs, and
Steamboat Springs, and at Hoosier Pass near Breckenridge, in the years and
months before the war.42
Perhaps most significantly, World War II brought a big new crowd of ski
enthusiasts to Coloradobased not in Denver this time but in the heart of
the high country itself. It happened when the army stationed its new Tenth
Mountain Division, a select unit training in skiing and other mountain military skills, at Camp Hale near Leadville. Many soldiers of the Tenth fell in
love with the high country; many resolved to return after the warand as
we will soon see, many of them did return, helping to build the postwar ski
industry.43
Before wars end, then, there were already hints of what the high country
would become. But while ski enthusiasts in some towns began to see the
potential economic benefits of skiing, local boosters did not yet see tourism
or outdoor recreation as anything to base an entire local or regional economy on, nor were many tourists themselves yet sold on the high country as a
destination. Only in the aftermath of World War II did that begin to change
in a serious way, as boosters figured out how to package and promote the
high country to a new generation of leisure seekers, and as tourism in the
region began to burgeon on a scale that virtually no one, before the war,
would have ever thought possible.
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family bonds. The overarching messagethat you could achieve self-fulfillment and social definition by consuming this productwas the message that,
more than any other, characterized twentieth-century advertising (and still
drives advertising today). It was the same way that consumers were being
taught to think about almost everything they bought, from cars to clothes
to detergents to deodorants. So to say that high-country boosters used this
approach is not to argue they were onto anything original. It is, instead,
to suggest that they made an unfamiliar place accessible and desirable by
translating it into familiar, mainstream termsterms that any American
consumer could understand.
Paralleling efforts to craft a tourist-friendly image were efforts to build
tourist-friendly infrastructure. In a very real sense, infrastructure packaged
new places for tourists. Whenever motels appeared in an old mining town,
campground facilities in a forest, or an entire resort village in a former sheep
pasture, a setting that had been unremarkable or unwelcoming to vacationers gained the ability to attract and accommodate them. Suddenly the setting became an entry in travel guides, a spot on the tourist map. True, place
making involved much more than just infrastructure. A place takes shape
also from the ways in which people perceive, portray, and promote it; connect personally to it; and play out their cultural values, social dynamics, and
relations of power within it.46 Still, places are, by definition, physical, geographical entities, so when it came to packaging new places for recreational
visitors, creating the necessary physical infrastructure was an indispensable
step.
Again, a whole host of independent actors did this work. And again,
instead of being especially innovative, they mostly drew on tried-and-true
marketing themes. This time, the favored theme was convenience. Whether
elaborate (like mechanical ski lifts) or simple (like marked hiking trails),
recreational infrastructure was almost always designed to facilitate peoples
access to outdoor leisure while minimizing discomfort, difficulty, and risk.
Defined this way, the most essential infrastructure was a good road, and the
surest way to package a place for postwar tourists was to build a modern
paved highway to it. In the high country, the ultimate highway was Interstate 70 itself. Planning for the interstate, which began in the 1950s, called
for tunnels, shelves, cuts and fills, rock blasting, relocated streams, and
other heavy-handed interventions, so visitors would be able to speed into
the high country without worrying too much about snow, steep inclines,
sharp curves, or other hazards. They could even feel safe enough to enjoy
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the scenery along the way. I70 packaged a place, all right: it created an
entirely new corridor, tying together a motley collection of rural settings
that tourists had once shunned, tugging them directly into the mass-market
mainstream. Of all the image and infrastructure building going on in the
high country, it was the planning and construction of I70 that most decisively rearranged the regions geography and readied its nature for tourists
to consume. It, more than any other factor, made tourism big business and
thrust the high country into the popular consciousness as a place where
people went on vacation.
Thus my title: vacationland. It is an almost throwaway clich, the kind
of word youd see in a postcard caption or magazine ad and never give a second thought to. But like all the advertising catchwords in this book, vacationland turns out to be a multivalent term, containing much more than it
first appears to. When we call someplace a vacationland, we buy into efforts
to brand that land and link it to escapist and other exciting consumer fantasies. We let the marketing of land shape our sense of region and place. At
the same time, when we talk of a vacationland, we are expressing a set of
environmental values. We are asserting that this landscape finds its highest worth in being pretty to look at or nice to play inthat it is more valuable to us for aesthetic, atmospheric, or recreational qualities than for any
resources it may yield. Finally, vacationland evokes a certain kind of spatial arrangement, a certain regional geography, a way of ordering the land.
No one would use the word to refer to a city. Instead, it suggests an expanse
of territory outside any metropolitan area, where there are resorts and other
recreational clusters, but in between, lots of pretty scenery and open, lightly
developed or natural space. By making vacationland my title, then, I
mean to suggest that the true significance of tourist developmentand of
the wider phenomenon of packaging and marketing placeslies in the new
kinds of landscapes it has created and the new environmental values and
outdoor-oriented living patterns it has instilled.
We have learned to see the land like tourists. But does that mean we
relate to our surroundings more superficially than before, as tourists are so
often assumed to do? In Colorados case, many people who bought into the
marketing of recreation forged surprisingly strong bonds with the places
that were marketed to them. Many ended up making the vacationland
their home, reorienting their living patterns, their family lives, their personal identities, and even their politics around it.47 This, in turn, brought
about broader shifts, as recreational profits created an incentive to care for
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the beauty and integrity of the mountains and as popular support surged
for certain kinds of environmental protection.48 But the result was no environmental utopia. The new development patterns proved ecologically troubling in their own ways, and the new environmental politics inherited blind
spots and weaknesses from the leisure mind-set that had given it rise.
All of that is part of our story. To tour the postwar history of the high
country is to see the sometimes perplexing new landscape of American consumerism take shape, not just in physical form but in our eyes and minds.
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