Vacationland: Tourism and Environment in the Colorado High Country

Conclusion: How Tourism Took Place

298 ConClusIon How Tourism Took Place the eerie orange gloW that lit the PredaWn sky over vail mountain made sickeningly clear just how fraught an issue big recreation had become. When morning came on October 18, 1998, the smoke still pouring from the shambles of Two Elk Lodge made the point clearer still. The massive log, glass, and stone structure, which had commanded a grand prospect of Vail’s back bowls, lay in smoldering ruins; so did a chairlift terminal and the ski patrol headquarters. Five other buildings had burned too. It took a few days for someone to claim responsibility. The arson, declared the shadowy Earth Liberation Front (ELF), was a protest against Vail Associates’ plans to develop 885 acres of ski terrain off the back bowls, on national forest land believed to be the last Colorado habitat for the Canada lynx. “Vail, Inc. is already the largest ski operation in North America and now wants to expand it even further," said ELF in its communiqué. “Putting profits ahead of Colorado’s wildlife will not be tolerated."1 In the lead-up to the fires, a lot of people, especially in the Vail Valley itself, had been angry at Vail Associates (which is what most locals still called it, even though it had just changed its name to Vail Resorts). Besides environmentalists—nonviolent environmental groups unconnected to ELF had been fighting the proposed ski-area expansion in the courts for months—the company also faced the fury of local workers who accused VA of neglecting the need for affordable housing; local business owners who felt threatened by VA’s push into retail and restaurants; and other valley residents who felt that VA, recently bought by a New York investment group, was generally putting moneymaking too far above the needs of the conclusion 299 community. Yet an intriguing thing happened after the Two Elk arson: area residents forgot their anger and rallied around VA. Where ELF saw itself targeting a corporate behemoth, locals on all sides of the debate saw outsiders targeting the entire community. “It’s been a catalyst for all of us to take a step back," said a VA spokesman, “and remember that we all need each other." A village shopkeeper and usually vocal critic of VA agreed. The arson, he declared, was “an attack on everybody and on the lifeblood of all in the valley."2 People might not like what the company was doing to the landscape and the community, but they could not imagine the landscape or community without it. So fundamentally did recreation define this place, so fully was it ingrained into the ways people viewed and valued the local environment , lived there, and made their living, that ELF’s ecoterrorism harmed more than just VA property—it posed an existential crisis for the people and their place. The Two Elk fire sent shock waves throughout the recreational West. It came at a time when the region was already on edge. The 1990s had brought a new blitz of residential and commercial development, an explosion of the galactic pattern more extensive than anything the 1960s or 1970s had ever seen.3 Certainly not since the 1970s had popular concern over land use been so acute. It seemed like every issue of every western newspaper carried a story about some new subdivision or ski-area expansion tearing into another mountainside, chopping up another expanse of desert, meadow, or sage. Much of the coverage sounded like war reportage: stories of hard-working rural citizens battling desperately to keep hard-playing, citified invaders from seizing the western landscape and stealing its very soul. invading the West, blared the headlines. the West at War. cattlemen vs. “granola Bars." corrals vs. country cluBs. yuPPie sPraWl. Paradise Paved. Paradise lost.4 And every war story told how this “culture clash" was ravaging the land. How more roads meant snarled traffic and smog, polluted runoff and the shattering of the country quiet. How sprawl was cutting into wildlife habitat, ruining views, and making the rural West look more like everyplace else. How the new land uses conspired with newcomers ’ environmental values to crowd out traditional resource-based livelihoods , while spiraling real estate values pushed residential and recreational space beyond the means of longtime locals, service workers, and even many in the middle class. In an ironic recycling of regional lingo, some invaded communities were termed “ghost towns," where neighborhoods full of seasonal residents’ “trophy homes" sat empty much of the...