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

Introduction

1 Introduction Introduction
AS EDITOR BOWLES OF THE Springfield Republican made his way through Colorado’s parks and mountains during his memorable 1868 visit and recorded his impressions, the comparison he repeatedly made was to the Swiss Alps. “We saw enough of it in our stage ride across the Continent in 1865,” he wrote in his preface, “to suggest that it would become the Switzerland of America . . . ; and now, after a new visit . . . we find our original enthusiasm more than rekindled, or original thought confirmed.” Not surprisingly , such a prediction struck a responsive chord in the popular imagination of the nation and, in the years that immediately followed, Bowles’s book played an important role in promoting the scenic wonders of Colorado and the Rocky Mountain West. Within a decade of Bowles’s visit, Colorado’s parks became a favorite destination for those seeking pleasure and health. For many of these visitors, the destination of choice was not Colorado Springs and nearby Manitou Springs—the “Saratoga of the West,” where the fashionable found, or at least pretended to find, a social scene comparable to anything in the East or even Europe—but the upland valley of Estes Park, some seventy miles northwest of Denver. The Denver press had decided by 1880 that this valley was “the gem of the mountains,” a place easy of access and without social pretension . . . and yet I am greatly mistaken if the verdict of more familiar acquaintance by the American people with America is not, that here,—among these central ranges of continental mountains and these great companion parks, within this wedded circle of majestic hill and majestic plain, under these skies of purity, and in this atmosphere of elixir, lies the pleasure-ground and health-home of the nation. —SAMUEL BOWLES, The Switzerland of America: A Summer Vacation in the Parks and Mountains of Colorado (1869) 1 2 Introduction where Americans of all ranks could feel at home. This has not changed. For nearly a century and a half the Estes Valley has been one of Colorado and the West’s most visited places. For ninety years the village of Estes Park has served as the eastern gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park, from its beginning the most popular national park west of the Mississippi. This book is concerned with this special region of north-central Colorado—town, valley , and national park during their years of greatest growth and development , from 1903 to 1945—a story I began in “This Blue Hollow”: Estes Park, The Early Years, 1859–1915 (1999) and Mr. Stanley of Estes Park (2000). Occupying an area of nearly six square miles, Estes Park, Colorado, is a world apart. The town sits at 7,500 feet above sea level in a semi-arid 32square -mile upland meadow that also bears its name. To the east across twenty miles of undulating foothills and winding valleys and canyons are the historic railroad towns of Lyons and Loveland. Fort Collins, the county seat, lies forty miles to the northeast. The Estes Valley is watered by two major rivers and their tributaries, Fall River and the Big Thompson River, which rise in the high country to the west. The geologic story of Estes Park is a complex one. Yet, thanks to the forces of uplift and erosion that created the Rocky Mountains, Estes Park is surrounded by scenic beauty that few North American towns can rival. To the south towers 14,256-foot Longs Peak, flanked by Mount Meeker and Mount Lady Washington; to the west and the northwest along the Continental Divide are the spectacular peaks, jagged knobs, and rugged projections of the Front Range and the Mummy Range. The sub-alpine portion of this mountain world is one of U-shaped valleys, rocky amphitheaters, and crystal clear lakes. Its flowering meadows are separated by heavily wooded stands of ponderosa and lodgepole pine, douglas fir and engelmann spruce, intermixed with aspen and willow of shimmering green or gold. Since 1915 some 417 square miles of this wilderness west of Estes Park has been set aside in Rocky Mountain National Park, a full third of which lies above 11,500 feet in harsh, wind-swept tundra. Across the Divide, on the park’s western slope, rise streams that form the Colorado River. My narrative begins on September 4, 1915, with the dedication of Rocky Mountain National Park, a day of new beginnings, and provides a brief summary of the discovery and early development of the...