Vacationland: Tourism and Environment in the Colorado High Country

Chapter 1: Selling the Scene

25 CHaPter 1 Selling the Scene after months of Planning and PreParation, the tenth mountain Division invaded Aspen in early June 1943. The Third Platoon of the Tenth Recon spearheaded the attack. Striking out from Camp Hale, some twenty miles away, the elite unit traversed the steep-sided Williams Range, crested Red Mountain, and descended its southern face to Hunter Creek. Just beyond huddled vulnerable little Aspen, with its few hundred unarmed residents. The troops met no resistance as they forded the creek and advanced on the town. In fact, scores of townspeople turned out to cheer the invaders as they marched down the main street. The “invasion,” of course, was a training exercise, and the people of Aspen had met and befriended many of these Tenth Mountain men before. When the whole maneuver was over, trainees and townspeople went together for beers at the Hotel Jerome. That evening, after the soldiers had pitched camp, the socializing resumed, beers giving way to stiffer drinks. Hotel owner Laurence Elisha mixed glass after glass of the house specialty —a thick milkshake generously spiked with whiskey, lovingly dubbed the “Aspen crud.”1 For most of the men, memories of the experience probably dissolved quickly into a crud-induced haze. But at least one soldier—Corporal Friedrich “Friedl” Pfeifer—remembered that sunny June day for the rest of his life. Even fifty years later, he vividly recalled how he felt as his platoon marched down Hunter Creek and came upon Aspen. He felt like he had stumbled upon his hometown, the Austrian ski hamlet of St. Anton am Arlberg, 26 chaPter 1 re-created in the Colorado Rockies. Here, halfway around the globe, he saw the same alpine meadows, the same hardy little mountain-bound town, the same steep slopes running right down to the streets, that he had known as a child. It was a revelatory moment for Pfeifer, one that “would change my life,” he later said.2 Because it was then that he first dreamt of making Aspen a “skiing community”: an American St. Anton, where locals and visitors alike would take to the slopes, children would grow up on skis, and the sport would shape people’s identities and everyday lives. The whole thing seemed almost predestined, as Pfeifer looked upon Aspen that day in June 1943. “It’s made for skiing, it’s just a creation for skiing,” he later said of Aspen’s alpine setting. “God must have created it just for this.”3 Pfeifer’s revelatory first sight marked a critical moment in Aspen’s history , for it set in motion the town’s reinvention as one of the world’s leading ski resorts. But it also carried historical importance far beyond this one community. The Austrian’s vision of Aspen and its mountain-meadow surroundings presaged the new ways of seeing the Colorado high country that would assume increasing power after World War II. Most earlier comers had thought this mountainous middle section of Colorado was “created” or “made for” mining, ranching, and other forms of production and extraction. But more and more in the prosperous decades after the war, people would look at the high country through different eyes. They would reassess the environment in light of the booming demand for commercial leisure, and they would decide that the region’s most valuable resources were no longer its minerals, timber, or grazing range, but its scenery, climate, recreational amenities, and rustic atmosphere. And they would work to recast the high country in the public imagination, drawing new attention to settings that had gone little noticed or little visited, reimagining them as vacationlands naturally suited for play. Aspen would go first. With the arrival of Pfeifer and like-minded thinkers in the 1940s, it would become the first former mining town to undergo a near-complete conversion to a tourist economy, tourist landscape, and tourist-oriented way of life, setting a precedent for other places to follow. To be sure, not everyone shared in the grand visions of tourist development . There were still plenty of investors, policy makers, boosters, “expert” observers, and ordinary citizens who scoffed at the idea that mere play would ever bring much wealth to the stagnant high country. They felt sure, based on historical precedent, that only mines and ranches could make a thriving countryside, only factories and processing plants could make prosperous chaPter 1 27 towns. Extraction and production...