Mountain Playgrounds: Recreation Tourism and Mountains in the American West

• In Event: Modern Orogenesis: Mountains and the Human Imagination

Abstract

The first tourists entered the Yosemite Valley in 1855. Many of the group hailed from the San Francisco Bay area, including publisher and booster James Mason Hutchings. Within a decade, the valley and nearby grove of giant sequoia we ceded to the state of California for “public use, resort, and recreation.” A generation later, landscape architect and former Forest Service planner Arthur Carhart noted the recreation connection between the city of Denver and its mountain hinterland, and that the city held the envied position of being the “Playground City of America.” Both the California Sierra Nevada and the Colorado Rockies flourished over the next century into playgrounds for the region’s burgeoning metropolitan populations. Focusing on the two western mountain ranges, this paper will discuss tourism’s role in shaping the region’s economy and environmental politics throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Author

• Michael Childers, Colorado State University