On September 4, 1915, hundreds of people gathered in Estes Park,
Colorado, to celebrate the creation of Rocky Mountain National
Park. This new nature preserve held the promise of peace, solitude,
and rapture that many city dwellers craved. As Jerry Frank
demonstrates, however, the park is much more than a lovely place.
Rocky Mountain National Park was a keystone in broader efforts
to create the National Park Service, and its history tells us a
great deal about Colorado, tourism, and ecology in the American
West. To Frank, the tensions between tourism and ecology have
played out across a natural stage that is anything but passive. At
nearly every turn the National Park Service found itself
face-to-face with an environment that was difficult to
anticipate--and impossible to control.
Frank first takes readers back to the late nineteenth century,
when Colorado boosters--already touting the Rocky Mountains'
restorative power for lung patients--set out to attract more
tourists and generate revenue for the state. He then describes how
an ecological perspective came to Rocky in fits and starts,
offering a new way of imagining the park that did not sit
comfortably with an entrenched management paradigm devoted to
visitor recreation and comfort.
Frank examines a wide range of popular activities including
driving, hiking, skiing, fishing, and wildlife viewing to consider
how they have impacted the park's flora and fauna, often leaving
widespread transformation in their wake. He subjects the decisions
of park officials to close but evenhanded scrutiny, showing how in
their zeal to return the park to what they understood as its
natural state, they have tinkered with its features--sometimes with
less than desirable results.
Today's Rocky Mountain National Park serves both competing
visions, maintaining accessible roads and vistas for the
convenience of tourists while guarding its backcountry to preserve
ecological values. As the park prepares to celebrate its
centennial, Frank's book advances our understanding of its past
while also providing an important touchstone for addressing its
problems in the present and future.
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