Making Rocky Mountain National Park: The Environmental History of an American Treasure by Jerry J. Frank (review)

Making Rocky Mountain National Park questions both the assumption that tourism provides western states with a harmless alternative to extractive industry and the presumption that the science of ecology is a force for restoration and regeneration. In his historical study of Colorado’s iconic national park, Frank finds both ideologies flawed in practice. The tourist culture that touts the experience of “pristine” nature in Rocky Mountain National Park (rmnp) also permits extensive harm to the Park’s natural resources. The ecological outlook has emerged as an alternative to tourism, though in Frank’s view, its proponents have neither defined their goal of “restoration” with any clarity nor offered certain steps toward reaching it. According to Frank, Park managers have largely sidestepped this conflict of ideologies, especially since the 1960s, by managing the Park’s front country for tourists and the backcountry for ecologists. Frank views the stewards of rmnp as failing to “come to terms” with the competing and problematical interests at work within the Park’s borders (205).

The first chapter of this book examines the rise of tourism in Colorado and the founding of rmnp (1915) in an area accessible to people who took urban amenities for granted. Subsequent chapters explore key human activities in the Park—hiking, horseback riding, wildlife viewing, fishing, skiing, and, with increasing importance, driving—and the issues related to resource management that each of these activities provoked. The earliest supporters of the Park—members of the business community in Denver and Estes Park—believed the preservation of nature to be fully compatible with urbanization and tourism (25). When Trail Ridge Road was completed in the 1930s, visitors could enjoy spectacular vistas while sitting comfortably in their cars, oblivious to the fact that the road’s view sheds had been produced through the manipulation and destruction of nature. Similarly, the Park reduced the risks for hikers, climbers, and horseback riders in the backcountry by providing trails, signs, rescue caches, phones, privies, and emergency shelters to protect them from encounters with “wild” nature. All the while, the feet, hands, horses, campsites, and waste of these would-be adventurers wreaked havoc with the Park’s fragile biomes.

Eager to satisfy visitors, the National Park Service instituted a policy of total fire suppression in the rmnp from the 1920s to the 1960s. It also restored the elk population and showed favor to other large ungulates that were popular with tourists (such as bighorn sheep and deer) by eliminating their predators; stocked streams and lakes with nonnative species; and established a ski resort, complete with rope tows and ski lifts. By the 1960s, escalating resource degradation impelled scientists and rangers to challenge all of these decisions. Yet, solutions have been difficult to implement, given that resource protection in accord with sound ecological principles is often perceived as undermining visitor satisfaction, at least in the short term.

Frank indirectly challenges Richard Sellars, whose Preserving Nature in the National Parks (New Haven, 2009; orig. pub.1997) faults the National Park Service for investing insufficiently in the scientific and ecological management of Park resources. Frank’s claim is that the cultures of tourism and ecology were both flawed. “Both shared the belief that humans were not a part of nature. The proponents of tourism sought to hide the human hands that had shaped the park to maintain a façade of the pristine; the ecologists sought to still those very same hands” (56). Unfortunately, because Frank never fully develops this argument, his examination of ecology is superficial, and his methodology falls short of genuine interdisciplinarity. His environmental history of the rmnp offers valuable evidence of the many missteps in resource management, and of competition between tourist and ecological viewpoints. But he does not provide adequate analysis of park managers’ recent substantive efforts to develop a system of ecosystem management that accepts humans’ presence in the park, acknowledges the necessity of adaptation...