Rocky Mountain National Park's Roads: How Motor Tourism Shaped a Park

"Where the Rockies Reign Supreme": a 1913 Union Pacific brochure. Promotions of the region often pictured its roads. Union Pacific Railroad; Rocky Mountain National Park collection.

The question

How have roads and road building shaped the history and landscape of Rocky Mountain National Park?

When Congress created the park in 1915, Americans were falling for the automobile. Leaders of the new National Park Service rightly predicted that love of the parks and love of cars would go together. They found allies:

• local businessmen, who saw that good roads would bring tourists and trade;
• the Union Pacific Railroad, which saw that families would ride the train to the region and then travel by road to the places it advertised.

Together this coalition pushed for good roads in the park. Did it work?

The research

For his doctoral dissertation at the University of Kansas, Jerritt Frank used environmental history — the study of how people and environment interact over time — to examine how tourism was marketed as the park was founded and developed. He read the literature on automobile tourism in the American West and original documents: guidebooks, brochures, advertisements, newspapers and official reports, tracing how the lobby for better roads grew and how the roads were improved to connect tourists with nature.

What he found

The campaign worked. The Park Service, the railroads and businesses such as the Rocky Mountain Transportation Company made driving through the park not only possible but desirable. They saw political and economic gain in luring tourists, giving them a satisfying trip and leaving families wanting to return.

Building the road was only the first step. To make the drive look natural, the park:

• covered old routes;
• thinned trees to open views;
• cleaned up roadsides;
• removed structures.

Erasing signs of people beyond the road let visitors experience what looked like an untouched landscape. The coalition's advertising, often showing motoring tourists, set the expectation of what a park visit was.

Unintended consequences. After World War II, visits to the park spiked, and visitors used the roads to reach nature. But the roads and the promotion behind them encouraged visitor behavior that would later threaten the pristine parkscape the coalition had worked to create.

Sources

Based on "A Vast Moving Caravan: Roads and Tourism," by Bert Cushing and Cheri Yost, Rocky Mountain National Park, National Park Service (2009), summarizing Jerritt Frank's University of Kansas doctoral dissertation. The summary is not a statement of park policy. A work of the United States government in the public domain; the 1913 brochure is in the public domain by age.