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.
