This was one of the
books that I had to read for my graduate class on Colorado history (HIST 501
State History). It was very hard to pull information from because it was not
organized well and the information was not broken into clear parts. The
information ran together and then back peddles to topics previously covered.
Philpott could have broken the topics into clear chapters, but choose not to.
It is worth the read if you are just interested in the subject (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). Below is a detailed book analysis
that I did for the class.
Tourism
by its very nature will reshape the landscape to allow for more people to take
part in the local activities. This has held true for Colorado and the many
tourists that have been drawn to the mountains by boosters drumming up business
for ski areas and other types of outdoor recreation. William Philpott looks at
the links between the environment and tourism in his book Vacationland. He uses
a historical approach to look at not only how tourism developed in the state,
but also to show when and how people started to care about the physical changes
this had on the environment.
Philpott starts out the book
with an introduction to how tourism fits into American culture and the forms
that tourism takes in Colorado. He starts the history of tourism in Colorado
with the rise of skiing and the early major players in the industry such as
Friedl Pfeifer and Walter Paepcke. He then expanded into how skiing and images
of the mountains were used by the boosters to sell Colorado to tourists. His
second chapter went into the fight of the highways and how they could bring
life to the mountain towns that they passed in the form of tourist dollars. By
expanding roads and paving them the state would be able to offer tourists a
faster and safer way to see the mountains and access recreational areas. Then chapter
three goes into the worst aspects of the tourist industry on Colorado. This is
shown in examples like how the early fishing industry was handled and Vail’s
negative impact on both the environment (replacing nature with suburbia) and
people (unaffordable housing). Then he moves into how the Granby Dam was the
final turning point for people to see the damage that was being done to the
mountains in the name of progress. The dam choked the Colorado River to the
point that it became a trickle of what it used to be and its clear water was
replaced by muddy slime. The last chapter of the book used John Denver as an
example of a person using their celebrity status to try and make real
environmental change while blending human use of the landscape with preserving
why they are attracted to that landscape in the first place.
A lot of Philpott’s findings
could be seen as focusing on how people’s perceptions about the environment
that they use for tourism changes over time. For example, as the early ski
industry was building up, he focused on how people were conscious of the visual
image of ski areas in the form of replicating European visuals. Early tourists
treated “sightseeing as a means to cultural literacy” and their experiences as
a “ritual of citizenship”[1]. It was a conquering of
nature so that people could check life experiences of their to do list and be
able to compete with their peers in those experiences. It took repeated damage
and public outcry supported by major players, like John Denver, to get actual change
to happen. His fishing example also brought up a great point that what is done
in the hopes of improving recreation can actually damage it. With fishing he
talked about how people fishing would complain about how easy it was to catch
fish in Colorado and that the sport/fight had been removed. It had become too
easy to catch fish because of the lakes and rivers being mass stocked with tame
fish. This had been done in the hopes to make fishing better, but in making it
easier to catch fish they had taken the fun out of it. He presented this
information to show that ‘improvements’ to nature may actually upset tourists
who are coming out to experience a wild version of nature instead of a tamed
one. In his conclusion he sums up the book with his main message that in
tourism “everything happens in an environmental context”[2]. By this he means that the
environments used to sell a place in a tourism context is then affected and
shaped by that tourism.
Philpott used a wide range of
materials to for his book that allowed for a validity to his points. These
materials included archival collections, promotional materials, periodicals,
and books by other authors. Some of the archival material was very vague as to
what type it was, papers, while others such as photo collections, scrapbooks,
and loose-leaf note books could have provided interesting detailed and visual
representations of what was going on in Colorado. The promotional materials
included advertisements and brochures from air lines, cities in Colorado, and
specific businesses/organizations. The periodicals dated from 1892-1980 came
from sources that had many different specializations including mining,
business, motor, environmental, and skiing. The periodicals also provided
perspectives from different parts of Colorado. The plains were represented by
the Denver Post, the mountains had the
Aspen Times and the Glenwood Springs Sage, while the western
slop had the Daily Sentinel (Grand
Junction), and even a perspective from outside the state in the form of the Sierra Club Bulletin out of California. These
different perspectives would have helped to provide a more rounded idea tourism
in Colorado. The archival collections, promotional materials, and periodicals
gave Philpott a lot of primary source material that he used to build his
perspectives. His more recent material came in the form of books which held the
perspectives of other writers. One such book was Ski Style by Annie G. Colman
which also had a large diversity of source material including primary sources
to create it. By using these books Philpott was able to see how others used
their source material to build other perspectives on tourism in Colorado.
This book actually does
contribute to the understanding of Colorado’s history. Instead of just looking
at only a specific type of tourism, like skiing, he presented different types
of recreation and how they have evolved in the state. Many of these recreation
areas overlap and he talked about the conflicts that these competing interests
have. This was an interesting approach when compared to other books that focus
on recreation. One of them that he even used in his own research presented a
specific topic, skiing, and how both it and its images evolved through time. He
not only talked about the images and history, but went into how people
responded to the changes as they happened. He also went into the details of how
changing the environment for one type of recreation could negatively impact
another type of recreation. It was these connections that made his book so
strong and compelling. Natives to Colorado may have been aware of the different
types of recreation and maybe even the history, but how different types of
recreation impacts each other may never have been thought of by them. Overall,
Philpott was able to not only talk about tourism and the environment in
Colorado, but was able to link these with the experiences of both tourists and
locals.
[1] Philpott, William. Vacationland: Tourism and Environment in the Colorado High Country. Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press, 2013. P 9.
[2] Philpott,
William. Vacationland: Tourism and
Environment in the Colorado High Country. Seattle, Washington: University
of Washington Press, 2013. P 305.
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