Vacationland: Tourism and Environment in the Colorado High Country

Notes

307 notes introduction: seeing like a tourist 1. Colorado State Advertising and Publicity Committee, ad in Aspen Times, May 24, 1956, 2. 2. Hafen and Hafen, Our State, esp. chap. 1 (textbook quotation p. 25); T. K. Kelley, Living in Colorado, esp. chaps. 9 and 10; Athearn and Ubbelohde, Centennial Colorado; Bancroft, Colorful Colorado. 3. The “Colorado” entry in the Book of the Year, an annual supplement to the Encyclop ædia Britannica, was written by Pearl Anoe, feature writer for the state publicity office, every year from 1948 to 1952, and by Hal Haney, assistant state advertising and publicity director, from 1954 to 1963. From 1941 to 1946, the director of the State Planning Commission wrote the entry, the commission being in charge of publicity before the legislature established the separate Advertising and Publicity Committee. See Walter Yust, letters to Hal Haney, 1953–56, FFs 1 and 2, Box 1, Hal Haney Papers. By the early 1960s, the annual Colorado Year Book, the definitive reference for information about Colorado government, demographics, resources, counties and towns, business, and the like, had also adopted a much more vivid, promotional tone than in the past, in part because some of its material was submitted by local chambers of commerce (Colorado State Planning Division, Colorado Year Book, 1962–1964, iv). 4. In Gallup polls in 1948, 1950, and 1956, Colorado ranked third, fourth, and third as the state where respondents would most like to take a summer vacation. It ranked a bit lower for winter trips (warm-weather states being the most sought-after winter destinations ), but still finished sixth in that category in 1954, eighth in 1955, and seventh in 1956. Occasionally Gallup also surveyed Americans’ scenic preferences: in 1948, respondents named Colorado the second “most scenic” state, and in 1956 Colorado ranked as the second “most beautiful” state. Gallup polls no. 414T (March 5–10, 1948), questions 4b and 4c; no. 456 (June 4–9, 1950), question 1a; no. 541 (December 31, 1954–January 5, 1955), question 1; no. 557 (December 6, 1955), question 14c; no. 575 (November 20, 1956), questions 55a and 56b; all data on Gallup Brain website, www.institution.gallup.com (accessed March 12, 2009). 5. The phrase “republic of consumers” is inspired by L. Cohen, Consumers’ Republic. 6. See World Tourism Organization, Resolutions of International Conference on Travel and Tourism. Textbooks encourage the next generation of tourism professionals to 308 notes to the introduction embrace these same rigid definitions; see, for example, Nickerson, Foundations of Tourism , 2–3. 7. At least since the 1980s, geographers of leisure have recognized that tourism and recreation could not be neatly separated, that they had similar social and spatial effects and should be subjected to similar theoretical analyses. See, for instance, JansenVerbeke and Dietvorst, “Leisure, Recreation, Tourism: A Geographic View on Integration ”; and Carr, “Tourism-Leisure Behavioural Continuum.” Yet geographers, like policy makers, still tend to define tourism in ways that stress its distinctiveness from other kinds of recreation and leisure. See, for example, Hall and Page, Geography of Tourism and Recreation. The authors note the growing realization that tourism, leisure, and recreation are overlapping categories (3–5), but in the next chapter (58–61), they propose structural, technical definitions of tourism that differentiate it from other types of leisure , again based on the notion that tourists are temporary visitors and seek leisure in places spatially separated from where they ordinarily live and work. 8. Rugh, in Are We There Yet?, comes to a similar conclusion, arguing that Americans went on family vacations to realize everyday aspirations: strengthening family bonds, cementing middle-class status, and forging a stronger sense of American citizenship. 9. For an interesting effort to delineate the “industry,” see S. L. J. Smith, “Tourism Product.” 10. In this sense, vacationlands like Colorado’s arguably pioneered the phenomenon that is at the heart of today’s “New West School” of thinking. The New West School is geographer William R. Travis’s name for a cohort of economists, geographers, demographers , and others who argue that footloose individuals and companies, who choose their locations largely on the basis of quality of life and environmental factors, instead of traditional considerations like nearness to resources, have increasingly come to drive the West’s economic growth. See Travis, New Geographies of the American West, 22–32, 44–67, 137–39; Gober, McHugh, and Leclerc, “Job-Rich but Housing-Poor”; Snepenger, Johnson, and Rasker, “Travel-Stimulated Entrepreneurial Migration”; Power, Lost Landscapes and Failed Economies; Nelson and...