Culture, Landscape & the Making of the Colorado Ski Industry
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CULTURE, LANDSCAPE, AND THE MAKING OF THE COLORADO SKI INDUSTRY by ANNE GILBERT COLEMAN B.A., Williams College, 1987 M.A., University of Colorado, 1992 A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of History 1996 This thesis for the Doctor of Philosophy degree by Anne Gilbert Coleman has been approved for the Department of History by Patricia Nelson Limerick Philip J. Deloria Date ACKNOWLEDGMENTS When people hear the topic of my dissertation, they often give me a knowing smile and ask if I am a skier. I say "I was a skier in my life before graduate school, when I had more time and a paycheck." This project has allowed me to explore Colorado's ski areas from the inside out, through their history, design, and marketing as well as their lifts, lodges, and trails. In the process I have met dozens of interesting people and incurred a number of debts. This project received financial support from the American Historical Association's Albert J. Beveridge Research Grant, the University of Colorado History Department's Douglas A. Bean Memorial Faculty Research Stipend and Pile Fellowship, the Roaring Fork Research Scholarship funded by Ruth Whyte, and from Dr. Giles D. Toll. I would like to thank all the people who helped me research this project, including Charlie Langdon at the Durango Herald, Mary Walker and Ingrid Schierllng Burnett at the Tread of Pioneers Museum, Sue Spearing at the Grand County Historical Society, all of the people at the University of Colorado Archives and the Colorado Historical Society, and Lisa Hancock, Jody Phillips McCabe, and my other friends at the Aspen Historical Society. Their experience and support helped me tremendously. Thank you, especially, to all of the men and women who so generously shared their experiences and perspectives with me on tape. Interviewing them was my favorite part of this project and I feel honored to have met them all. My heartfelt thanks go to my advisor Patty Limerick, for her guidance and her perseverance in teaching me to write clearly. Phil Deloria has devoted time, energy, and thought to this project above and beyond the call of duty, and I am grateful to him for it. Thanks to Lee Chambers:Schilier for her support and inspiring comments; to Bill Riebsame for his enthusiasm and geographical perspective; and to Julie Greene for jumping into the history of the ski industry so cheerfully. Thanks also to my soccer-playing friends in Boulder and Denver, whose company gave me a much-needed respite from graduate schooL My parents have given me nothing but constant, cheerful, energetic support from the moment I began this project, even though they were skeptical that skiing actually deserved historical analysis. I could not have finished this without them. Finally, my husband Jon lent his creative mind, his wit, and his immense titie-making talents to this work, for which it is much the better. While it certainly helps to have a spouse who is a western historian, I appreciate also his unending patience with me while I was in the throes of dissertation writing, his unselfish support of my work, and his fondness for Basset Hounds. vi Anne Gilbert Coleman (Ph.D., History) Culture, Landscape, and the Making of the Colorado Ski Industry Thesis directed by Professor Patricia Nelson Limerick This project is a cultural and environmental history of skiing in Colorado, from 1860 to 1990. It focuses on the ways in which skiers have understood and altered Colorado's mountain landscape, and on the relationship between downhill skiing and constructions of class, gender, and ethnicity. Nineteenth-century mountain community residents used "Norwegian snowshoes" to travel and recreate in Colorado's Rockies. While these men and women understood their mountain landscape as Isolating and often dangerous, wealthy tourists and outdoor enthusiasts saw it as scenic. During the 1920s and '30s a new kind of skiing came to Colorado, associated with European resorts, competition, and cosmopolitan tourism. Alpine skiing's urban enthusiasts used the Rockies as their playground while mountain town residents incorporated the sport into their communities by forming local clubs and developing a regional circuit of competitions. For both groups skiing proved to be a critical site for defining masculinity and femininity. Colorado ski areas sprouted up in the 1930s with the help of local communities, transportation networks, and the U.S. Forest Service. These areas remained local, however, until America's post-war consumer and leisure culture took shape. Veterans of the Army's Tenth Mountain Division, elite outdoorsmen who trained at Colorado's Camp Hale, took advantage of this new economic and cultural context to form the core of Colorado's ski industry. With the contradictory goals of creating a scenic, personal experience for as many people as possible, ski area designers developed increasingly constructed resort landscapes. They pushed local residents to the periphery and crafted resort towns as mythical alpine villages, Victorian mining towns, western cowtowns, or some mixture of each. By the end of the 1960s destination resorts such as Aspen, Vail, and Steamboat Springs had their own distinct culture characterized by whiteness, wealth, fashion, fame, and sexiness. Destination resorts, moreover, have successfully coopted critiques from environmentalists, minority skiers, and snowboarders by incorporating their interests into resort landscapes and culture. iv Introduction Skiing at the Beach 1 Chapter One Skiilng, Mobility, and Landscape in Colorado's Rocky Mountains 18 Chapter Two On Edge: Masculinity, Femininity, and Downhill Skiing 66 Chapter Three The Networks Behind Colorado Skiing to 1945 121 Chapter Four Call of the Mild: Constructed Landscapes for Skier-Tourists 173 Chapter Five Skier-Tourist-Consumers Meet Colorado's Resort Towns 234 Chapter Six From Ski Bunnies to Shred Bettys: Colorado's Destination Resort Culture.....281 Conclusion From Europe to Colorado and Back 339 Bibiiography ................................................................................358 FIGURES Colorado Ghost Towns and Mining Camps, 1953 39 Ladies' Home Journal, 1929 105 Franklin Automobile advertisement, 1931 106 Saturday Evening Post, 1931 108 Paved Roads in Colorado, 1940 135 Colorado Ski Areas 175 Chrysler Motors Corp. advertisement. 1963 235 Streeter and Quarles advertlsement. 254 Scandinavian Ski Shops advertisement. 1959 290 Dolomite advertisement, 1968 295 Calvin and Hobbes, 1993 318 Cafe Angst, 1996 330 INTRODUCTION Skiing at the Beach In 1995, Disney broke into the ski business in true Disney fashion. Their new Blizzard Beach has its own peaks, a chairlift, snow, and even a warming hut. Ciad only in bathing suits, visitors ride a chair lift up the 120-foot "mountain" at the center of this water park. Below Mount Gushmore, the Disney travel guide promised, "waits a winter wonderland of water, fun and sun." Once at the top of Mount Gushmore, vacationers can descend on toboggan slides, flumes, inner tube chutes, or the Summit Plummet, a simulated ski jump on which sliding bathers can reach 60 miles an hour. Disney's imagineers "thought people would enjoy themselves in a ski resort atmosphere," so they built their own in Florida and brought downhill skiing to the beach. 1 And their instincts were right; Disney's unlikely winter wonderland, with its promises of water, fun, and sun, has consistently attracted crowds of tourists since its opening. Well before Disney introduced skiing to the beach, surfers had brought their sport to the mountains. One California surfer, for instance, found himself living in Colorado's Rockies in 1985. He longed for "bikinis, convertibles, and Los Siete Burritos on Mission Beach." "But mostly," he wrote, "I wanted to surf."2 He bought a snowboard and later became an instructor, teaching transplanted Californians like himself and native Coloradans how to surf snowy mountain waves. 1Janet Nelson, "How Disney Does It," Ski Area Management, 34 (July 1995), 41; Walt Disney Travel Co., Inc., 1997 Walt Disney World Vacations, 12. 2Gavin Forbes Ehringer, "It's Tough to Ignore All These Dinosaurs on Snowboards, Dude," Rocky Mountain News, 5 December, 1994, 20B. These developments raised some eyebrows among recreational skiers. Since the growth of America's ski industry after World War Two, downhili skiers have enjoyed an almost exclusive relationship with mountain ski resort landscapes. Surfers stuck to the ocean, with its beaches and watery waves, and skiers remained in the snow-covered mountains. Colorado, especialiy, has become known as the center of a billion-doliar industry that encompasses ski areas themselves, related real estate development, associated restaurants, hotels, and retail stores, as weli as the ski equipment and ski fashion industries. At the root of the ski industry--and at the heart of Colorado's tourist economy--is the sport of skiing itself. Since the nineteenth century skiers have described the experience as one of exhilaration and thrill. They have also described the experience as one that creates a kind of personal, physical relationship between skier and mountain beyond mere enjoyment of the scenery. Colorado's destination ski resorts have prided themselves on their ability to provide this kind of experience to miliions of skiers a year, and to do so in a compeliing landscape that is at once safe and adventuresome, wild and comfortable, visualiypristine and fuliy developed. Indeed, Colorado's big ski areas consistently rank among the best and most popular ski resorts in North America; and one of the biggest reasons for their success is the extent to which they incorporate their skiing tourists into the Rocky Mountain landscape. These experiences and landscapes have been seamlessly constructed by a 100 year history of interaction between humans and the land itself. By transplanting skiing to the beach and surfing to the mountains, Blizzard Beach and snowboarding have threatened to expose the highly constructed relationship between skiers and their remote mountain landscapes.