America's Switzerland: Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park, the Growth Years

8: Rocky Mountain National Park: The Toll Years, 1921–1929

209 Rocky Mountain National Park: The Toll Years, 1921–1929 Chapter 8
Rocky Mountain National Park: The Toll Years, 1921–1929 L.C. WAY’S SUCCESSOR, Roger Wescott Toll (1883–1936), was superbly qualified for his assignment. A member of the first generation of Stephen Mather’s Park Service, he was among the remarkable group of rising professionals whose sense of pride and purpose would mark them forever as “Mather’s Men.” Of equal, if not greater, importance, Toll was a Coloradan, the son of a wealthy and socially prominent Denver family with long-standing ties to the Estes Park region and to Rocky Mountain National Park.1 Mountains and mountaineering were Roger Toll’s first loves. “A climb in the mountains,” Toll would later write in an idiom reminiscent of John Muir and Enos Mills, builds up one’s strength and adds new thoughts, new interests, and new information. It gives one a feeling of accomplishment in the very fact of having overcome the difficulties that intervened between the foot of the mountain and its summit and it affords many pleasant recollections for the afterdays. . . . In the open, one learns the character of his companions with more rapidity and certainty than in the more conventional life of cities. A friend is defined as one with whom you would like to go camping again. Strong and weak characteristics rapidly develop. Selfishness can not be hidden. True and lasting friendship is often built up in a short time.2 209 210 Rocky Mountain National Park: The Toll Years, 1921–1929 8.1 Superintendent Roger Wescott Toll, 1921–1929. Courtesy National Park Service–Rocky Mountain National Park Toll had begun early. Boyhood summers were spent with his three brothers, Charles, Henry, and Oliver, near Tolland west of Denver, where his father, Charles Hanson Toll, a prominent lawyer who served as Colorado’s attorney general, owned land and had a mountain retreat. The Toll brothers also came to Estes Park. On August 22, 1894, at age eighteen, Roger Toll added his name to the registry at Lamb’s Longs Peak House before, presumably, hiking the Longs Peak Trail. Even in winter , the mountains were not far away. From the windows of the large family home on Race Street overlooking Cheeseman Park were views of Longs Peak, Mount Evans, and Pikes Peak, the state’s most prominent “fourteeners.” Like his brothers, Roger Toll went east to college. Then, after receiving a civil engineering degree from Columbia in 1906, Toll embarked on a romantic interlude during which he spent a year traveling the world with his brother Carl, stopping off in Switzerland long enough to climb Mount Rosa and several lesser peaks. There was also a six-month tour of duty with the Coast and Geodetic Survey, which sent Toll to Alaska to help chart and survey the coastline in the southern half of Cook Inlet. By fall 1908 Toll was back in Denver where he worked for the next seven years for the Denver City Tramway Company, one of his father’s clients—the last three as chief engineer. Toll was also a charter member of Colorado Mountain Club and before going off to World War I became one of its most active participants. Among Toll’s earliest contributions was the CMC’s famous mountain register, a weatherproof cast-bronze cylinder with a hinged top and spring fastening, holding pencil and registration book, which he invented in 1915 and then helped to place on many of Colorado’s peaks. Four years later, in 1919, Toll took the lead in culling CMC records and gathering other information for Mountaineering in the Rocky Mountain National Park, the park’s first modern climbing 211 Rocky Mountain National Park: The Toll Years, 1921–1929 guide, published in 1919 by the National Park Service. It would later be said that Toll was “probably the only person who has climbed all of the 50 mountain peaks in Rocky Mountain National Park.”3 Given his background and inclinations, it was perhaps inevitable that Toll should give up the often sedentary life of an engineer for a career with Mather’s new National Park Service. While stationed in Washington as a major with the Ordinance Department during World War I, the personable Toll happened one day to drop by the Department of the Interior to talk about parks. Horace Albright was in. The two met, liked each other, and kept...