Vacationland: Tourism and Environment in the Colorado High Country

Foreword

xi Foreword At Home and at Play in the High Country William Cronon 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 xii foreWord 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 Canyon’s El Tovar and Yosemite’s 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 nation’s most iconic tourist landscapes really accelerated during the middle decades of the twentieth century, when the state’s 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 foreWord xiii 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...