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[ 156 ] For Americans ready to tour the country after World War II, the West was the prime vacation destination. In 1949 those who responded to the Gallup Poll’s question asking what was the most desirable place to visit if one could go anywhere in the world (all expenses paid) listed California as their top choice, with Colorado second. Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Canyon were ranked fifth and sixth as choice destinations, and the western states of Arizona, Washington, and New Mexico were all in the top twenty.1 A specialized literature catered to western tourists, explaining how to survive desert driving or how to find scenic sites for snapshots.2 The increase in paid vacation benefits, the expansion of car travel on the new interstates, and the popularization of the national parks helped create the postwar tourism boom in the West.3 The lure of the West can also be explained by Americans’ increased desire to participate in outdoor activities or enjoy scenery rather than visit cities on vacation . About one-third of those who took vacations in 1962 visited a federal or state park; of those, three-fourths stated that “being outdoors close to nature” was the reason they visited the park. The western population boom also contributed to nature tourism, since nearly half of those who visited national parks lived in the West. Furthermore, westerners were two or three times as likely to camp outdoors as people from other regions. The rest of the country viewed the West as the national playground with its grand and scenic national parks.4 After World War II (during which the parks were essentially mothballed), the national parks offered a utopian alternative to the West’s expensive dude ranches and commercialized amusement parks. The leading women’s magazine, Ladies’ Family Travel, National Parks, and the Cold War West s u s a n s . r u g h f a m i ly t r a v e l , n at i o n a l p a r k s , a n d t h e c o l d w a r w e s t [ 157 ] Home Journal, promoted the park as an idyllic retreat from the pressures of modern life. “Today the parks hold for you a promise of release from the tensions of modern living. They do not stress the latest in manmade diversion (tile-lined swimming pools, dance pavilions, movies around the corner) but rather its antidote , untouched nature, with the hope that you may gain from it serenity and knowledge.”5 Not only did a visit to the parks promise “untouched nature,” but it also offered a chance to return to the democracy of the frontier West. “In the lure of their rivers , in steep-walled glacier valleys, the parks hold our tradition of westering. Theirs are the stories our fathers fashioned of pioneers. Of women in bonnets and men in buckskins.” Going to the parks was thus a western adventure all in itself, where “this wilderness, this grandeur still await discovery in the national parks system.” And because it was “free to all, preserved for all,” visiting a national park was a good choice for budget-minded families on summer vacations. Indeed, the parks provided a wilderness utopia, “a magic haven from the traffic and tension of everyday routine.”6 Those who promoted camping in the national parks might have toned down their rhetoric if they had been among the millions who visited the parks after the war. Caught off-guard by the flood of campers, in 1956 the National Park Service (nps) undertook Mission 66, a ten-year program to improve their facilities, while the U.S. Forest Service launched Operation Outdoors to increase the number of its campsites from 41,000 to 125,000.7 Complaint letters from visitors to Yellowstone National Park reveal the reality of camping, with crowded campgrounds, stinking toilets, cafeteria lines, bear attacks, and even death. The tension between preservation and use—preserving wilderness and serving the needs of visitors—made visiting the national parks far from idyllic for many American families in search of a western vacation utopia. Utopian Visions In July 1954 the Ladies’ Home Journal featured a story about how a fireman’s family was able to afford a two-week vacation camping in Yosemite National Park in California. Dick and Geegee Williams took their two children, Dickie (age five) and Leslie (age seven), on their first vacation in six years. The...

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