Vacationland: Tourism and Environment in the Colorado High Country

Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books

by William Philpott, William Cronon (Foreword)

Winner of the Western Writers of America 2014 Spur Award for Best Western Nonfiction, Contemporary

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, American History, History, Nature

488 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2013

About the author

William Philpott is Associate Professor of History at the University of Denver. He writes and teaches on U.S. environmental history, the history of tourism and leisure, consumer culture, and the history of Colorado and the American West.

Reviews

[Kerry · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is DENSE (at times I skimmed) but mostly pretty interesting. It's the history of the Colorado high country, and how it developed into a tourist destination. Alternately inspiring and frustrating, as humans prove themselves to be . . . well, human, so mostly jerks. But it also talks about some beginnings of the environmentalist movements, so that's when humans were being cool I guess.

Recommended for fans and/or residents of CO, or for anyone interested in the history of environmentalism.

[Jessica DeWitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

At times this book is a bit dense, but overall Philpott provides a narrative that effectively navigates the interconnection of tourism history, social history, environmental history, etc. He has a lot of great insights into tourism, which will be useful in my dissertation. Particularly liked the way in which he illustrated how tourism in Colorado developed as an extension of suburbanization. Also love the way in which he highlights the social and emotional aspects of tourism as well as the complexity of the industry. Definitely worth a gander.

[Peter Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting book! Some great tidbits about the history of the high country to complement the overarching theories that make the foundation of the book, which are all pretty credible and well-argued. The depth of research is particularly impressive.

The book bills itself as a history of the high country as a vacation destination, which it lives up to pretty faithfully, but at times it felt like the book was just plumbing really deeply into three or four key elements of it without filling in all the spaces. I got a bit bored with all the analysis of the language used to promote the locations, but perhaps that’s just Communications undergrad major PTSD that I need to work through.

A few highlights: the history of I-70 is way more fascinating than it has any right to be, and the way Philpott drew out the transition from promotion to environmentalism to, basically, NIMBYism was both great reading and a terrific case study in the dynamics of emerging cities and towns. It was also interesting to see how the failed Olympic bid played into all this, though at times it felt as if that thesis were a bit exaggerated with respect to the role of keeping a low profile vs economic reasons.

Overall, would recommend to anyone who is interested in the history and geography of the high country and who can shoulder through a few pages of minutiae to get to the good stuff.

[Zach Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A 3.5 but will round up because of the middling reviews on here. Glad I picked it up nonetheless: lots of interesting material here about the Highway 40-U.S. 6 interstate drama, the building of the Eisenhower Tunnel, and the packaging of "suburbanized nature" and idealization of place ("We have gotten in the habit of shopping for such places much as consumer culture has ingrained it in us to shop for other goods: that is, we seek out not just the places that are the most practical but the pens that seem the best fit for our personalities, aesthetic sensibilities, ideals, and aspirations, and maybe also for the reputations we hope to cultivate and the self-images we want to project.")

The writing is needlessly academic and dry, though, and I got practically nothing out of the second half, which spirals into a muddled, boring history of land use, zoning and different sects of the environmentalism movement.

[Matt Nunez · Rating 2 out of 5]

As an economic development professional working on the I70 corridor with a particularly environmental bent, I was disappointed by the tone and denseness of this book. It weaves in and out of social history and political narrative, with large chunks of the book reading like meeting minutes from town council meetings over the past seventy years. While some chapters (1 & 5) are pretty interesting analyses of how modern resort communities came to be, others (2 & 4) are highly dense political ramblings full of acronyms and and forgotten political characters. I only hope that, if some madman were ever to write about the work I do for a living in this part of the state, it would not sound nearly as impersonal and cold as this book.

[Julia Bilderback · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is packed with information, but I’m trying to use this for a grad course and it is hard pulling info from it. This is because it is not organized very well and the information is not broken into clear parts, but runs together and then back peddles. Philpott could have broken things into clear chapters. It is worth the read if you are just interested in the subject (info on tourism in Colorado), but it is not very good for research or being a book that pulls people into it (so basically not a fun read).

[Ian Billick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Must read for anybody thinking about recreation and environmentalism in CO. Great history.

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most Americans only know Colorado's high country as a global tourist destination. But for most of American history that wasn't the case, and the story of how millions of people ended up flying and driving into the mountains west of Denver, a story of world warfare, immigration, technological breakthroughs and human determination, is the subject of Bill Philpott's engaging book. It weaves environmental, cultural, political and economic history into a compelling narrative - a thriller, ultimately - about whether the European chalets and tony restaurants built on a hunch by investors with the backing of powerful civic leaders would ever become the ski mecca we know today. And while we know the answer, the way we get there, through WWII, stubborn federal engineers and John Denver albums, is thoroughly fascinating.

[Kylie Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Changed rating from 4 to 5 in second read. I realize a lot of my enjoyment of this book comes from my extreme familiarity with all of the places Philpott addresses, so unsure if somebody unfamiliar with Colorado would be quite as invested in the book. That said, I feel this book has an extremely approachable and engaging writing style, telling stories to illustrate historical points.