Mention the Colorado high country today and vacation imagery
springs immediately to mind: mountain scenery, camping, hiking,
skiing, and world-renowned resorts like Aspen and Vail. But not so
long ago, the high country was isolated and little visited.
"Vacationland" tells the story of the region's dramatic
transformation in the decades after World War II, when a loose
coalition of tourist boosters fashioned alluring images of nature
in the high country and a multitude of local, state, and federal
actors built the infrastructure for high-volume tourism: ski
mountains, stocked trout streams, motels, resort villages, and
highway improvements that culminated in an entirely new corridor
through the Rockies, Interstate 70.
"Vacationland" is more than just the tale of one tourist region.
It is a case study of how the consumerism of the postwar years
rearranged landscapes and revolutionized American environmental
attitudes. Postwar tourists pioneered new ways of relating to
nature, forging surprisingly strong personal connections to their
landscapes of leisure and in many cases reinventing their
lifestyles and identities to make vacationland their permanent
home. They sparked not just a population boom in popular tourist
destinations like Colorado but also a new kind of environmental
politics, as they demanded protection for the aesthetic and
recreational qualities of place that promoters had sold them. Those
demands energized the American environmental movement-but also gave
it blind spots that still plague it today.
Peopled with colorful characters, richly evocative of the Rocky
Mountain landscape, Vacationland forces us to consider how
profoundly tourism changed Colorado and America and to grapple with
both the potential and the problems of our familiar ways of
relating to environment, nature, and place.
William Philpott grew up in the Denver suburbs and teaches
history at the University of Denver. He formerly taught at Illinois
State University.
"This history of the Colorado high country and the I-70 corridor
will be indispensable in understanding how consumer culture and
tourism shaped environmental politics and postwar landscapes.
Vacationland is a smart analysis that's thoroughly researched and
also fun to read." -Annie Gilbert Coleman, author of "Ski Style:
Sport and Culture in the Rockies "
"Written in a lively style and peopled by characters like
balladeer John Denver and gonzo jounalist Hunter S. Thompson,
"Vacationland" is a must-read for those interested in the
environmental movement, modern tourism, and the power of the state
in building the twentieth-century West." -Susan S. Rugh, author of
"Are We There Yet? The Golden Age of American Family Vacations
"
""Vacationland" is a wonderfully written book that brings new
insights to environmental and Western history by emphasizing how
modern tourism redefined Americans' sense of place. 'Vacationland'
is more than the resorts to which we travel; it is also the place
we call home." -John M. Findlay, coauthor of "Atomic Frontier Days:
Hanford and the American West"
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