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

11: The Years After Roger Toll: Rocky Mountain National Park, 1929–1941

327 The Years After Roger Toll Chapter 11  The Years After Roger Toll: Rocky Mountain National Park, 1929–1941 SUCCEEDING ROGER TOLL was not an easy assignment. Toll was the only park superintendent to have a memorial and a mountain named in his honor and his departure for Yellowstone in 1929 concluded a period of considerable activity climaxed by the successful resolution of the controversy over road jurisdiction that had clouded the park’s existence for a decade. Ironically, however, it was during the Great Depression of the 1930s after Roger Toll’s departure that Rocky Mountain National Park enjoyed its greatest growth and development. Edmund Rogers, Thomas Allen, and David Canfield may well have lacked the polished presence, political adroitness, and easy self-confidence of their predecessor and none, with the possible exception of Canfield who went out of his way to engage the local community , enjoyed Toll’s near-universal popularity. Yet thanks to the availability of emergency federal funding and the young men who passed through the park’s CCC camps, more progress was made during the dozen years between 1929 and 1941 in road and trail construction, visitor services, scenic preservation , and wildlife management than in any similar period before or since. These years also brought with them the largest boundary expansion in park history. In July 1930 President Hoover signed a bill adding the Never Summer Range. Containing both the headwaters of the Colorado River and 327 328 The Years After Roger Toll 11.1 Rocky Mountain National Park in 1934. Courtesy National Park Service–Rocky Mountain National Park 329 The Years After Roger Toll the old 1879 mining town of Lulu City, this area of just over twenty-two square miles increased recreational activities on the less-visited west side and allowed Trail Ridge Road to be completed entirely within the park over a comparatively easy grade. In 1931 and 1932, federal funding made it possible for the Park Service to eliminate many of the hotels, lodges, camps, and cottages located on privately patented land, adding to the park more than nine thousand acres in Beaver Meadows, Horseshoe and Moraine Parks, and along the drainage of the Big Thompson. Although these purchases would continue beyond World War II, by the end of the 1930s significant progress had been made in returning large sections of the park to their natural condition. All of this made Rocky Mountain National Park in the 1930s a busy place. Added to the normal administrative burden of operating the park with limited resources—resources reduced by a 15 percent mandatory cut in regular appropriations during the early years of the Depression—were the oversight and coordination responsibilities that came with the various New Deal emergency aid programs. Although many of these activities, including roadwork and trail-building, were scheduled for the off-season when the park was relatively free of visitors, there were inevitably times during the summer months when roads and trails were crowded with men and equipment , causing delays and irritation on the part of those who had come to the national park precisely to escape such things. For those capable of a longer view, the activity of these years was exhilarating.  Edmund Burrell Rogers (1891–1972), who became superintendent in February 1929, was cut out of the much same cloth as the man he succeeded. Born in Denver and the last of five children of a pioneer surgeon, Rogers was the younger brother of James Grafton Rogers, one of the founding members of the Colorado Mountain Club and the lawyer who drafted the legislation establishing Rocky Mountain National Park. Like the sons and daughters of many well-to-do Denverites, Rogers went east to college, first to Cornell University and then to Yale where he graduated in 1915 with a degree in botany and geology. Following service in World War I as an artillery officer, he came home to Denver, settled into a comfortable career as a trust officer with the Colorado National Bank, and in 1926 married into the prominent Vaille family. Edmund Rogers also had a long-standing relationship with Rocky Mountain National Park. An avid outdoorsman, Rogers grew up hiking and climbing with the Toll brothers. A charter member and twice president of the 330 The Years After Roger Toll Colorado Mountain Club, Rogers spent many of his weekends tramping the high country around Estes Park often in the company of Roger...