campaign 2014 has one outstanding race yet to be decided. louisiana senate. democratic incumbent mary landrieu is up against republican bill cassidy. that's live at 8:00 p.m. eastern on our companion network, c-span2. congress is in recess for the thanksgiving holiday. when they return, lawmakers will work on extending government funding past december 11th when the current spending deal runs out. in the house, members will consider how to proceed on immigration after the president's executive action. in the in the senate, votes are scheduled on nominees beards to argentina and hungary. and work on a spending deal to continue funding the government. live coverage when congress returns monday at 2:00 p.m. eastern, the house on c-span and the senate on c-span2. this thanksgiving week, c-span is featuring interviews from retiring members of congress. watch thursday at 8:00 p.m. eastern. >> i was elected in 1980, came in in '81. if you look at my newsletters from '81 to '84, there's no mention of human rights and religious freedom. congressman, tony hall, who was a democratic member from ohio who is my best friend in the congress, we've been in a little group together for 32 years. he asked me to go to ethiopia during the famine. and i went up there. i just got on the appropriations and said, can i go to ethiopia, they said sure. it was a very bad famine. and i got in a camp up at alamata run by world vision and the embassy didn't want me to spend the night. i said i want to spend a night. the guy said if you spend the night, i'll spend the night and right next to his camp was a camp run by mother theresa and we spent the night, in a little hut. and it rained the next day and a plane couldn't come back. it was a life-changing experience. we saw -- i mean in the morning people died and we saw things that just -- that trip -- i mean, in '85, tony took me to romania to chel ches ka, evil, bulldozing churches and i saw people persecuted for their faiths. those two trips were bookends, human rights the poor, the hungry and religious freedom. since that time -- >> and also on thursday, thanksgiving day, we'll take an american history tour of various native american tribes. that's at 10:00 a.m. eastern following "washington journal" then at 10:30, the ground breaking ceremony with formers secretary of state. and supreme court justices clarence thomas, sonia sotomayor at 8:30 p.m. eastern. that's this thanksgiving week on c-span. for our complete schedule, go to c-span.org. up next, a look at the politics and history of how tourism developed in the colorado rockies, along what is now interstate 70. william philpott is a university of denver history professor and author of "vacationland: tourism and environmental transformation in the high country." from the history colorado center in denver, this is just over an hour. [ applause ]. thanks, sean for that introduction and thanks to all of you for being here. i am really sincerely really o honored to be speaking here at history colorado. i have a strong personal attachment to this place that goes all the way back to the days in the old dust pan shaped building up on 13th avenue. just a real quick story if you can indulge me here. many years ago i was looking for a summer job. i got the genius idea of wandering into the old colorado heritage center one morning and asking the first random person i saw who was the lobby security guard if there were any internships available. and obviously i had no clue going about doing this. the lobby and security guard said, why don't you go up to the manuscripts department and see if they need any help. that's how i first met the cure rater, unforgettable character and unbelievable storehouse of knowledge and enthusiasm and fun surrounding colorado history. for the rest of that summer and over the next several years stan did more than i can ever say to help get my resorj on colorado history off the ground and ultimately my wider career as a historian. now, sadly stan has since passed but i would like to publicly dedicate this evening's talk to him and express my deep gratitude for all he did to help me over the years. also like to thank everybody at history of colorado for all the work that you do at history colorado to build greater awareness and concern for the heritage of our state and preservation of our heritage and thank all of you for being here and taking time out of your week to talk vacation land with me today. so, i'll get started with that. vacationland, the book that sean mentioned that i'll be drawing the material for tonight's talk from, it's a history of tourism and recreational development in the colorado high country in the decades after world war ii. mostly focussing on the period 1945 to the 1970s. it tells a story of how part of the southern rockies, a few decades a very short pierd of time, remote and little visited back water to one of the most celebrated and heavily visited vacation destination in the united states. one core question i asked in the book, how did the high country come to become a vacationland, but much more broadly the book is an effort to get much bigger issues, ones that go way beyond high country and colorado. it's an effort to figure out how when tourism became such a big business in the decades after world war ii, when americans came to seek out and value landscapes like the colorado high country for lee sure, personal fulfillment, for pleasure and when they on some level or another bought into the way these landscapes were being marketed to them and packaged for them, what implications did all of that carry for the ways americans related to place, environment, nature. when so many people learned to consume recreational landscapes and depend on them as a fundamental part of their lifestyle, really what consequences did that carry for american environmental politics, popular environmental culture. in the broadest sense then what "vacationland" is to ruminate on the environmental consequences of mass consumer culture, not just how our acts of consumption have physically changed the land but also how they've changed our minds. and in terms of teaching us without our really even realizing it to think in new ways about nature and place. so, i thought i would give you a taste of the book tonight by focussing my talk on what was really the centerpiece of tourist development in the high country and that was a development of modern paved highways culminating in interstate 70. i've kind of loaded the dice here by really jacking up interstate 70 on this map. this is the region that i focus on in the book. high country is a vaguely defined term. but i use it basically to focus on the areas west of denver that could have been and eventually did become the interstate 70 corridor. hopefully it will be clear what i mean in just a moment. i'm going to begin by focussing on the very first section of interstate 70 to be built west of denver. and that was the four-lane bypass above and around the old mining town of colorado springs. bypassing colorado springs was something that state highway officials was eager to do. it had become a notorious bottleneck. u.s. 6 and 40 were forced together in this narrow valley where idaho springs is located and forced to go right through the middle of town, past all the caves, past the motels, past the gas stations, people turning on and off the road really slowing traffic down where it became known as the turtle route and known to truckers and travelers as one of the most congested stretch of highway in all of rural america. state highway planners determined to build a four-lane limited access bypass, which i showed you before, on the mountain side just above town on the south. the construction began in late 1957 and in february 1958 with the bypass almost completed state highway officials led chamber of commerce types on a tour of this new road. the business owners were pretty excited about this spanking modern road with its smooth sweeping four lanes and controlled access on and off ramps and its big signs pointing to idaho springs, they were excited until they actually got up there on the bypass and looked down at their town and were completely horrified by what they saw. with the old turtle route i showed you before, you know, with the highway 6 and 40 running right through the middle of town, business owners had learned to attract tourists by sprucing up the fronts of their buildings and lots. so, restaurants had flower boxes, motels had a little patch of lawn and maybe some flowers and bushes and the like, but up on the new bypass the locals found themselves looking down on their town from a totally different perspective and it was not a pretty sight. they realized that tourists passing through this valley would not see the fronts of the their buildings anymore but their backs. they were unplanted, unpainted, piled high with old junk. it made idaho springs look like an old ghost town in the process of decay. this was not a good first impression for unsuspecting visitors. for small town boosters and business owners trying to capitalize on the exploding post-war automobile vacation industry, it would no longer be enough, now they had to take a tourist-eye view of their own hometown to consider what kind of landscape and atmosphere would be needed to attract vacationers and to compete with other communities that were trying to do exactly the same thing. so in short, already with this very first stretch of i-70 to be built up in high country, we can already see a hint of how large scale post tourist development would change people's view of the land the way people related to place and the ways they saw fit to take care of it. so, i'll dive into this story now as sort of a condensed version of the story i tell in "vacationland" about how tourism came to be in this region. really, making the high country seem like a great place for a vacation would mean fundamentally changing how most people thought of this region. if that sounds weird to you because of the ways we think of this region now, then keep in mind that before the post-war period, the high country was a pretty obscure place. it was a mining region, a region of extremely rugged, daunting topography of very severe climate especially in the winter, not the kind of place most people would think to take a vacation. now, of course, there was tourism in colorado in the late 19th century and you might know for example colorado gained a reputation of the quote switzerland of america and the like. there were people coming to railroad resorts, mineral spas, scenic excursions on railroads and so forth. the key thing to keep in mind is that for the most part very few of these tourists were venn dhuring deep in the high country and if they were, they weren't spending very long there. they weren't lingering. as of world war ii, those high ranges as i mentioned before in the middle of state west of denver was, as i said, a remote very little known, very little visited part of the united states. now, i spent part of the book explaining how many different groups in colorado worked in their own ways to change this impression. state and local efficieofficial railroads and airlines, game and fish department, the state publicity bureau, american automobile bureau and not least, skiers, mountain climbers, fly fishers and their various clubs and organizations all of them working not together i wouldn't say but sort of at the same time in their own ways to revamp the popular impression of colorado high country so it would seem like a natural place for vacations. they started doing this by trying to fashion a vacation friendly image and they did this by using the eye-grabbing graphics of really colorful vivid colors and language of modern advertising. not that they were doing anything remotely original. they were borrowing the stock and trade of modern advertising, the emotional appeal the bright colors, the slogan like colorful colorado or ski country usa. in particular, the photographs, these brightly colored photographs, extremely cliched photographs over and over showing similar views of high country meadows of alpine lakes of craigy often snow-covered peaks again and again and again as a form of cliches reproduced in over and over different things, postcards, magazine articles and so on and so forth until they became logos instantly recognizable for the standing for the state. the cover of my book is a scenic cliche of this. at the same time, all of these different groups of people working at the same time for their own purposes, not together, were working to develop tourist friendly infrastructure. that can include everything from motels, to resort villages, campgrounds and not at least mechanical chair lifts which were very rare before world war ii but came to dominate the ski landscape after world war ii. the classic example of what i mean by packaging the landscape. some sort of facility, physical inf infrastructure make it easier, more convenient, more comfortable that gave tourists new-found access to scenic or remote or wild areas nature at a minimum of difficulty or risk. if you think about it, that's exactly what ski lifts did. so, in effect, the inf infrastructure served to package the high country forever larger numbers of tourists to consume. but, the single most important way of packaging high country landscapes or any landscapes anywhere in america for tourists was to link those landscapes up to a network of modern paved highways. paved highways had an extraordinarily powerful channelling effect on the flow of tourists because by mid century american tourists were traveling by car overwhelmingly. by the freedom of automobiles, they were confining themselves to paved roads. there was even a saying among highway planners that tourists will drive 100 miles out of their way to avoid 5 miles of dirt road. at a time when many rural western roads including many in colorado were still dirt or gravel, local boosters lobbied endlessly to channel tourists their way. delegations would make this ritual trip to denver to bow down before the state highway commission, to present their wish lists of projects of highway improvements that they wanted funded for that year. and if you read the highway commission's records, you discover that again and again the explanation these local delegations from the high country gave for why they so urgently wanted highway improvements was that they wanted to foster tourism. now, before i move on, let me back up for a moment to talk a little bit about what the highway geography of the high country was like before world war ii, before the war. it was u.s. 40, as you can see, did not take a direct route west of denver but took a crooked route more or less to the northwest before heading off into utah. it did this to skirt basically the high itself mountain ranges and to take advantage of several river valleys along the way. by contrast, the route directly west of denver where i-70 now runs didn't exist. it just simply didn't exist. this is a strip map from the book. and what i'm trying to show here is how, if you wanted to get from denver to either of the counties the high country counties that are directly west of it beyond clear cleek, summit county and eagle county. summit county is about 55 miles or so from denver as the crow flies. before world war ii, to get to summit county, you had to drive about 100 miles and you had to go over a couple passes along the way. this pass here and free mont pass before you dropped down into brackenridge and into the blue river valley. to get to eagle county which is 70 miles away from denver, you had to drive about 170 miles. and you had to go over -- again, several very high passes along the way, hoosier pass, freemont pass, tennessee pass before you get dumped down into the eagle river valley. so, the obvious reason for this kind of very indirect route were those very high ranges. i'll go back to this map because it really emphasizes how high those ranges were, running north and south directly west of denver that basically deflected highway routes to the north and south rather than letting them cut directly west. this is another picture i think is interesting. this is a picture of the upper end of the creek valley, this is where vale is now located. back in the 1940s, as you can see, what would later become interstate 70 was an oiled gravel road and the range basically was an impassable wall almost that walled off eagle county from summit county on the other side and from denver beyond that. so, topography is an obvious reason why these counties were so remote and why there wasn't a direct route to them from denver, but it wasn't just geography it was also history. summit and eagle counties were mining counties, yeah, but they were never as big a deal as some of the other mining counties. they were never as prosperous as ledville. when railroads built or aspen, when railroads built up into the high county, they built into the biggest, most prosperous mining towns. when the first road builders come along to the early 20th century, oftentimes they would start out by following more or less the railroad routes. they didn't emphasize eagle or summit county so neither did the early road builders. it was not just daunting topography but historical precedent that kept a street route west of denver. if you look at this map, this is from about 1925, if you look at this map, look directly west of denver and you will see hardly any hint at all of the future path of i-70. hardly any hint of a major highway corridor. a map like this is a reminder that there is nothing natural and nothing historically inevitable about an interstate highway trance seconding the high country. the earliest precursor to interstate 70 was a pie in the sky proposal hatched in the 1920s for a highway that would basically go more or less directly west of denver to this area here, to red cliff called the holy cross trail. this scheme was hatched by a newspaper editor in red cliff which by then was a very depressed stagnated old silver mining town and he hoped that having a trail, a road that went directly from denver to red cliff would help red cliff book again as a tourist destination capitalizing on scenic desire to see mount of the holy cross. the highway department never obliged, never provided any funding whatsoever for the holy cross trail, but they did from the early 1930s on begin bypassing those roads that i showed you before, the roads -- let me go back to this one here. those roads looping to the south around the southern tips of mountain ranges, one after another they started to cut those loops out by building roads that bypassed them, that went directly over the mountain ranges. the first three examples of this were kben the map i just showed you is on the top. this strip is what it looked by 1937. loveland pass where there was a dirt road built in 1931, shrine pass dirt road built in 1931 and then vail pass a paved road built in 1940 with deal public works funding. so, by the time you get to that bottom map, you can really very clearly start to see the precedent emerging for interstate 70. you can see the path it's going to take but there was still, still nothing historically inevitable about it. in 1937, this route, right, go to this map here, from denver sort of directly west became part of u.s. highway 6. but u.s. 40, the one running up higher on the map there farther north was still the main route through the high country. highway 6 was less improved than highway 40. many stretches were still gravel and dirt and less promoted and thus very much less traveled. u.s. 6 boosters became desperate that they started trying some really desperate measures and maybe the most desperate one of all and ridiculous was the effort in 1956 to create an attractive brand for their route by giving it a cartoon mascot. and this is what they came up with. the sublimely ridiculous sidney 6. this brochure, which i find by dumb luck on ebay, this brochure had sidney 6 frolicking along the highway 6. of course the brochure urged tourists to follow in his path to stick to 6 with sidney 6. kind of sad, right? really amateurish, clownish. it showed just how desperate highway 6 boosters were to generate some sort of interest, some sort of brand anymore recognition or tourist cachet for their little known little traveled route. this is proof, by the way, that no matter what evil manipulative emotional geniuses seem like they are, advertising doesn't always work. sidney 6 flopped on this one brochure and never again. so, so much for that idea. but at the same time, they were engaged in this failed and rather ridiculous branding campaign, highway 6 booster were engaged in another desperate measure, to get it named an interstate highway. an interstate really would have the power to attract and channel tourists in enormous numbers. it would have the power to make this part of the high country into vacationland. in 1956, this effort to get interstate highway designations seemed every bit as doomed as sidney 6 and that was because as plans for the interstate highway system nationwide stood as of then, there was not even going to be an interstate through the colorado rockies. if you look at this map, this is one of the earliest sort of tentative ideas of what the interstate highway system might look like back then called the interregional highways, 1939 and if you look there you see an interstate snaking across the plains from kansas into denver and stopping. the final interstate highway map 1947, same exact thing, it dead ends in denver. the obvious reason once again was the high ranges of the high country, which had always seemed to stand like walls in the way of east/west travel. they were the same reason, by the way, that the trance continental had shunned the highway. and now the planners of the federal interstate system planning the biggest public works project in human history were planning to shun the colorado high country, too. so once again, we see that there was nothing natural, nothing historically inevitable about interstate highway through the high country, in fact, we see that all historical precedent weighed against it. now, once again i should mention here, it was more than just simple topography that caused federal interstate planners to reject the idea of an interstate going all the way through colorado. post-war highway engineers weren't really daunted by any topography at all. they were full of sort of a hue brisic belief that they could conquer any landscape, any. there were even proposals at one point to use nuclear detonations to clear mountains away that were in the way of an interstate in california. so these were not people who were daunted by topography. but in this case, they calculated, they were engineers and they calculated that there simply wasn't a utilitarian rational, a cost/benefit analysis that justified blasting an interstate through this particular topography. there just weren't enough people up in the high country and there just wasn't enough economic activity. highway planners, highway engineers, professional training taught them to build major highways, most importantly the interstates, where there was existing demand. they were not in the business of building interstates to create demand, to try to spur economic development where it wasn't already going on. and that, of course, was a major problem for boosters of colorado in the high country because they wanted the interstate exactly to stimulate economic development above all as i mentioned before to stimulate the development of tourism. putting an interstate through the high country they figured out would put the high country right on the main line for growing hordes of automobile dependent in the post-war. they had to get these stubborn federal highway planners to change their minds. now, taking the lead in the struggle to do this was governor edwin johnson as everyone knew as big ed. he was kind of a buffoonish man. he was really the most important political figure although largely forgotten, not sort of big name as many other colorado political figures. but he was really the most important political figure. he spent two terms as governor in 1930s and went to washington for three terms in the u.s. senate and returned to colorado for a one final term as governor in 1955. to big ed fell this awkward challenge of selling federal highway officials on an massive tourist boosting scheme by somehow not making it seem like a tourist boosting scheme. he somehow had to persuade federal officials that building an interstate highway through this rugged terrain of the high country made utilitarian and cost benefit sense. i won't go into detail here because it would go too long. for the utilitarian argument, he made the case that the high country contained many minerals, other natural resources that were crucial to national economy and security and there could be an interstate to help get those things out of there. to make the engineering case for the interstate, big ed hatched a wildly audacious idea to have the state build a tunnel under the continental divide to dispatch for once and for all this ideaed that the high rockies were an inpenetrable barrier to travel. big ed was convinced that federal planners would see the engineering problem eliminated and they would see fit to approve the interstate. now this tunnel proposal that big ed championed set off a fire storm of controversy. some coloradoens were excited. others were really not. for many it depended on br the tunnel was going to go. so boosters and business owners along 6 loved the idea of building a tunnel that would channel traffic along 6 but hated that it would channel people along 40. 40 people saw it the other way around. the most serious criticism of the tunnel proposal, though, came from those who felt the tunnel would simply be too expensive for too little benefit. in other words, they made that cost/benefit utilitarian calculation that highway engineers did. the chief engineer of the state hoid department at the time, a guy named mark wattress proved skeptical. that's him on the left and that's big ed looming over him to intimidate him on the right. wattress sited engineering studies that the kind of tunnel would only slightly reduce the altitude. big ed responded with absolute fury. he unleashed his supporters to mercilessly attack wattress as a scrawny pencil neck, a wimpy little geek and hid behind engineering statistics to avoid doing a real-man's job of just taking on the mountains the way the pioneers had done. the language unleashed did portray him in this unmanly weak willed way not like the hardy pioneers that we descend from. so, big ed won the popular debate. it wasn't that hard to do that over uncharismatic highway engineer and he finally managed to bluster and bludgeoned enough to approve the tunnel in 1956. the state highway department signing off on the idea. when will it be built? where will it be built and where is the money coming from and are the feds going to actually give us an interstate even though we now decided to build a tunnel, are they going to give us an interstate? the proposal would still have to go through both congress and the federal highway. congress as part of the 1956 act, did approve a 1,000 mile expansion of the interstate system, but the question was still where are those extra 1,000 miles going to go? it was still up to the federal highway planners to decide that. to make a long story short, after sweating it out for another whole year, colorado boosters and so forth political leaders finally got what they wanted in october 1957 when the federal highway planners did indeed a lot 547 of those 1,000 miles to allow the interstate to be extended west of denver as you can see on the map there through the colorado high country and on into utah. now, some of you might have heard it said that president eisenhower personally ordered this extension of interstate 70 because of his love of fly fishing in the high country. there's no question that eisenhower was a frequent vacationer in colorado. he was known for his very long summer visits in colorado, golfing in denver, fly fishing and oil painting up in the mountains especially at the ranch of axle nielson up near frazier. the story is told that ike through his weight behind the interstate extension or perhaps ordered the interstate extension because it would make his annual trip up to the mountains much more convenient. i looked at a lot of correspondents between eisenhower and his staff and axle kneelson and big ed johnson and another governor dan thornton and others and i did find that big ed appealed pretty shamelessly to ike's recreational interests. he would write letters to eisenhower saying that you of all people, mr. president, know just how much traffic is up on that drive to frazier and wouldn't it be great if there were a multi-lane interstate there. but i did not find any evidence to be honest that ike was receptive to these appeals. i found a lot of appeals that eisenhower and his staff were repeatedly brushing johnson off and basically trying to get him to shut up. i also found that axle nielson, i found him refusing basically to use his personal friendship with eisenhower for political purposes including and especially on the interstate issue. i should also point out one other thing while i'm dispatching this story and that is by the time that the extension of interstate through western colorado was finally approved in october 1957, eisenhower was no longer vacationing in the high country. as many of you probably know, he suffered a heart attack in denver and went through a very long convalescence after that in september of 1955. his doctors banned him from ever vacationing at altitude again. he approved this interstate is sadly you might say one of those colorful colorado myths that turns out to be not quite true. it's hard to know for sure, but it appears that the single most decisive factor in these federal highway planners decision to capitulate and to extend the interstate through the high country turn out not to be any of the arguments that big ed made or any of the other coloradoens were making but instead the army's purposes. that helps explain why when the interstate planners granted this interstate extension, they baffled, they shocked, they surprised everybody by not having it go from denver to salt lake but instead from denver down to a point in southern utah called cove fort which nobody had even heard of before. and even utah officials were like, we didn't ask for this, right? but the federal planners were angling interstate 70 down to hit interstate 15 which then as you can see goes to the southwest on its way to los angeles. so that desire for a quick route, a direct route more or less from denver to los angeles for national defense purposes appears as far as i can tell, there probably are more sources to look at if they can ever be opened up to researchers, but it appears from the sources that i was able to find that that was the most decisive factor. in any case, though, the announcement that colorado would be getting its high country interstate was cause for jubilation in the state as coloradoens felt sure it would do wonders to foster a high country tourism. now, that said, it was still to be decided exactly where the new interstate would go. the federal planners had only fixed the end points, denver on the east, cove fort on the west. how would the interstate get from point a to point b? this became the next cause for furious debate in colorado in the late 1950s as boosters and partisans insisted the highway should go their way and highway 6 boosters argumented. big ed successor, a much less blustery named steve mcnickels called in an new york engineering firm and decide from an expert engineering perspective which would be the best route. this new york engineering firm studied no fewer than eight possible routes including seven different proposed tunnel sites. on this map here, the ones highlighted in red are the sort of last two routes that this engineering firm narrowed the possibilities down to. you can see that one sort of arcs up and follows along u.s. 40 for part of the way and the other follows roughly along u.s. 6. but besides those two that sort of were the finalists, there were six other routes, including ones that ran along the colorado river and ones that went across the williams' fork mountains across the blue river drainage. again a map like this shows you that there was nothing historically inevitable about the path that i-70 ended up taking. but in 1960, the new york firm recommended and the state highway commission ruled in favor of the interstate mostly following u.s. 6. so that bottom red line there. more or less from idaho springs directly west from summit and eagle county were two of the most remotest, most obscure lightly populated in the high country and into grand junction and on into fort couch. this is how it followed the route that it did. there can be no question that interstate 70 more dramatically than anything else packaged. and because of this it spurred much more investment in tourist businesses and tourist infrastructure along the route. and it began to have this effect, i think this is important, even before its actual construction when it was still in the planning stages. perfect example of this is a development beginning in the early 1960s of vail whose founders used the promise of future interstate access, the access wasn't actually there yet but the promise to be in the future. they used that promise to sell investors on the vail enterprise. so they went around the country with a map like this that basically highlighted the location of vail and emphasized that it was located on future interstate route 70. so there's no question that it did -- that interstate 70 even before it was built would have that spurring effect on tourist development. but besides it's doing that, i also want to return to an idea i mentioned earlier, how interstate 70 changed people's views of the high country, particularly by making visitors feel closer to high country nature. now, to be sure, there's real irony here, of course, because interstate 70 buzz not itself remotely natural. it was a massive artificial intrusion into the high country. it would take heavy handed modification of the natural landscape to shoe horn this giant superhighway into the rugged terrain of colorado. interstate highways had all sorts of design specifications of how wide the shoulder had to be, how curves couldn't be too sharp because it would slow cars down too much and inclines couldn't be too steep because that would deter from the smooth flow of traffic along the interstates. so there were all sorts of design specifications and design standards that were utterly against it. amputating the toes of mountains and this example is then bandaged up in steel mesh to keep the rocks from crashing down on to the highway below. it required draining wetlands, required relocating river channels. the most dramatic intrusion of all the eisenhower tunnel, undercutting the continental divide. so the two now westbound lanes they opened in 1973, the two eastbound lanes called the johnson tunnel after big ed, you can see they haven't been built yet but they would open in 1979. but the interstate for all of this art fish yalty, all of this really heavy handed modification of the high country landscape ended up enhancing the experience of nature for many visitors. i-70 made it much easier to access the forrests and slopes, rivers meadows, peaks of colorado. it made visitors feel closer to nature. it really did make the high country in many people's minds a natural place for a vacation. among other things it created new vantage points. it opened access to new landscapes. it freed people from the former difficulty of traversing this very rugged terrain. i like this picture because it shows how i-70 ended up providing sort of this scenic viewpoint of the snowy peaks there and also i-70 became part of the scenery itself. i'm not saying you have to like that or that i necessarily do, but it certainly -- it's sort of insinuated itself into the landscape the way it curved with the on the tours of the land. or this picture where the eisenhower tunnel, this most forceful intrusion on the high country topography, nestles into the natural setting like it belongs there. the tunnel and i-70 have become integral to the high country. we have a hard time now managing our movement through this region without it. now, the more inviting the high country in particular this u.s. 6 interstate 70 corridor became to leisure seekers, the more flocked there. people planning longer stays, seasonal or second homeowners and growing numbers of permanent new residents. ever larger number of people began permanently relocating. the denver metro allure was the easy access to the highlights of the high country. the ideas of proximity and easy access were utterly premt premsed on the improvement of highways. more and more people came to colorado again to live close to recreational bow-mar, 1947 portrays the mountains as being right in your backyard. more and more people -- bow-mar. not quite. more and more people came to colorado to live a tourist way of life. to consume the recreational amenities of the high country on an on going basis, not just on vacation but every weekend or even everyday if they wanted to, to live near those recreational amenities or even amidst them so they can have convenient access to them. so these vacationers or i should say the vacationers way of consuming nature could not become the basis for a permanent lifestyle. if you look at a promotional brochure like this urging you to move to jefferson county, it's got as many images of sort of tourist-style recreational actives as it does of sort of everyday life like the shopping mall or the church. so it's really holding up jefferson county to live this tourist way of life. people who picked up on this promise, on this hope essentially rearranged their entire lives and lifestyles and careers and livelihoods and personal identities around the high country. they were people who had become very deeply personally invested in the high country's recreational settings and that leads me to another critically important way that tourist infrastructure including i-70 changed peoples way of relating to nature. because when people became deeply personally invested in recreational settings in the high country, it kindled in them a fierce desire to guard those settings against perceived threats. so, in short, as tourist development fostered these powerful personal attachments to landscape, that in turn ended up fostering the rise of popular environmentalism. we saw a very early form of this in the story i told earlier toward the beginning of the talk how in 1958 the people of idaho springs suddenly realized how ugly their town looked from this new bypass and in this case there was a business or profit making incentive to clean up and spruce up the place for the sake of attracting tourism. as the interstate continued to take shape and as more and more visitors and also seasonal and permanent new residents became to flock to this vacation land that the interstate was opening up, popular environmental concerns began to deepen and take on more dimensions and very interestingly the interstate itself increasingly became the target of these environmental concerns. somewhat ironic, as identify been saying, the interstate's existence was crucial to the vacationland's very existence, its very emergence but now that interstate was becoming the target of more and more environmental concerns. there's many examples i can give you from the 1960s and '70s, the single most revealing one was the enormous popular outrage when the state highway department made plans to cut a south ward loops to make the interstate more direct. it was the biggest such loop left and biggest such loop on i-70 along its entire length through the entire country. it's this loop here where interstate 70 curves around the southern tip of the gore range over vail pass. state highway planners proposed to bypass this loop just like they bypassed all the earlier ones by boring a tunnel directly west beneath the gore range. it wo go here from silver thorn through the gore range through a tunnel and out on basically east vail on the other side. this proposed tunnel became known as the red buffalo tunnel because it cut between buffalo mountain and red peek on the summit county side. now the sticking point was -- here is a schematic map that the sierra club put out this map. what you can see is the sticking point. that green-shaded area, that was a wilderness area. that's the eagles -- it was then called the eagles's nest primitive area. this place was supposed to be off limits to road construction. but in this particular case, there was actually a clause in the wilderness act of 1964 that landmark -- which landmark act that created the wilderness designation, it has a clause in it exempting this one wilderness area, the clause empowered federal officials to withdraw wilderness protection from this one area so the interstate tunnel could be built underneath the gore range. there was no other wilderness that had a clause like this in the wilderness act. red buffalo -- this proposal became a major state and brief moment a national controversy in 1966, 1967 around in there and became a rallying point for the environmental organizations, really their first great success when -- and again i'm making a long story very short, they managed to defeat this proposed tunnel in 1968. what i think is especially interesting, though, is the coalition that lined up to do this to defeat red buffalo. on the one hand, the environmental organizations that fought against the tunnel were overwhelmingly organizations of outdoor recreational enthusiast, the wildlife federation made up of hunters and the new colorado open space coordinating council, a coalition of smaller groups almost all of which were organized around one outdoor recreational pass time or another, fly fishing, these outdoor recreational enthusiasts, people who had been so deeply personally invested in outdoor recreation that they made it the basis for organizing themselves and taking political action, these thank yenthusiast the charge. goes back to the profit making perspective. these were tourist boosters. tourist business owners for whom the scenic and wild and recreational amenities had become a matter of economic value, of profits, of prosperity. business interests on either end of this proposed tunnel spoke out against red buffalo. so they were going away from the old booster approach of the more direct and higher volume the interstate access is the besttt for us. the less direct, the better for us. the argument is that to put the interest or state throuintersta would remove a tourist attraction from the region. it would cut into their business. people in vail took the lead on this. vail town council made a powerful statement against the rough buffalo proposal. the marketing director was one of the leading voices against the red buffalo proposal. his rational and also the vail town council's was that putting this interstate through would jeopardize lifestyle interests and vail businessowners' business interests. this combination of interests, really for a brief time potent alliance of recreational lifestyle and business interests, this was what launched colorado's environmental movement to political prominence by the early 1970s. again, i won't go into detail. but the movement would have smashing successes in the early 1970s. most famously, the state wide vote in 1972 to reject the 1976 winter olympics which had been granted to denver and when the committee then started spraying out venues around the state. this map i think -- this is a bit of the olympic organizing committee literature in which they show where the venues are going to be. as you can see, they were counting heavily on interstate highway access. i-70 access to make the olympics work. environmentalists in the state and many others as well rejected this in 1972. they voted to deny state funding for the winter olympics and caused it not to happen. other success came just two years later, 1974, when the leader of the anti-olympics movement and the most vocal environmentalist man was elected governor. this alliance of recreational business interests and recreational lifestyle interests became the basis for environmental movement that was very short lived, because that combination of interests saddled the movement with some -- how would i put it? lethal internal contradictions. and what i would argue, serious logical limitations and blind spots. for one, what do i mean by this? the promoters of tourism and the consumers, they might be able to agree on marginal things. but they parted way on bigger issues like the winter olympics. the defeat of the winter olympics convinced many tourist boosting interests that popular environmentalism had gone completely mad, had gone totally out of control. when many coloradans voted support for land use reform which was the talk in the 1970s, the citizens hoped that the land use reforms would protect against small and environmental degradation. but the business interests, including the tourist interest, used their lobbies muscle to defeat the reforms or water down land use reforms to the point where they were almost meaningle meaningless. it was not just the opposition of business interest that brought the heyday of environmentalism to a crashing halt. it was hesitation. i would argue an uncertainty and conservatism among colorado ra s s themselves. people who felt invested and the tourist way of life were usually not inclined to seriously challenge the system that had promoted and packaged all of those same recreational landscapes and amenities and activities that they had reshaped their lives and identities around. consumerism is not really a very good recipe for radicalism. so i will briefly mention one final controversy over interstate 70 to illustrate the point. that was the debate in the later 1970s and early 1980s over building the interstate through glenwood canyon. environmental groups, many others got involved in trying to save glenwood canyon from interstate ugly-fication. some proposed to design the passage through the canyon in a more environmentally responsible way. notice that both of those proposed alternatives exceeded to the viewpoint that somewhere or another a super highway should or would go through. very few environmental organizations dared to propose that maybe there didn't need to be a super highway uninterrupted all the way through. maybe a two-lane road was okay. the small minority who raised this possibility that maybe it could stay two lanes for part of the high country most notely a small group led by john denver, they were mocked and marginalized as unrealistic dreamers at best and at worst as enemies of the public interest, because they were standing in the way to oppose a four-lane road was to oppose safe, convenient automobile friendly access to outdoor recreation. given that was a form of recreation that most colorado outdoor love hrs had invested i most laughed at john den fver a their fight and settled for more limited goals like building the inn interstate in a more sensitive way or according to a more environmentally sensitive design. instead of joining the fight to try to stop interstate construction, that seemed unrealistic, out of -- beyond the limits for them. they settled for the limited goal of making the interstate look nicer. what in the end can we learn from stories like this and the other stories i told about interstate 70? as i argued before, they show how packaging and promotional of recreational places, landscapes for tourists to consume could reshape people's ways of connecting to nature and place. for even as we often tend to dismiss consumerism as something shallow, it would seem from the kinds of stories i have been telling that consumers were able to forth quite strong personal connections to the recreational places that they were con assuming. at the same time, that kind of environmentalism that grew from the consumer attachments had limits that are equally important to notice. consumers learned to care about their favorite places but not necessarily about any others. that was a recipe for an environmental movement that was fragmented, local and provincial more than holistic. it was a recipe for a movement that was fairly conservative. the consumption of places, the consumption of recreational landscapes was too rooted in the culture of endless growth and entrepreneurialism to pose a really serious challenge to them, even if or when such a challenge was needed. then again, even as consumerism constrained environmental protest, it was a reason why many protested at all. connecting to certain settings as consumers into ecologists. but it did spur many of them to care. on some level, in some way about environmental issues that they wouldn't have given a thought to before. that leaves us with an important and troubling question or set of questions as we grapple with the difficult issues of growth and sustainability, including the debate over what to do about congesti congestion. i will throw out a couple of the questions. on the one hand, can environmental sensibilities rooted in recreational consumerism ever really point us toward more sustainable ways of living and doing business? but on the other hand, if not for consumerism, would popular concern for environmental quality be as widespread or would it exist at all? those i think might be unanswerable questions. i think they are worth pondering. i will leave you with them. will take any questions you might have for me. thanks very much. [ applause ] >> make sure you hold the microphone close to your mouth. >> my question about the tipping and the balance in '56 or '57 on the decision of creating the interstate through the mountains, besides ed johnson, it sounded like the military was the decisive factor. was there ever a military transport on i-70, eisenhower was famously part of the military transport of 1919. obviously, using lincoln highway mostly. was there ever an event like that? >> not that i'm aware of. there were -- there was the movement of missile parts along that interstate from time to time. but i'm not aware of an actual transport like what eisenhower had, which was one of the things that apparently convinced him of the need for a system of defense highways. i'm not aware that there was any use of interstate 70 for those purposes. it seems to have been, as far as the evidence i have been able to find. there was a lot of talk at those times about the highways being defense highways. the official name for them, for the interstate system when it was created in 1956, the national system of interstate and defense highways. >> thank you. >> two questions. i believe i read or heard that the interstate through glenwood canyon cost more than the entire rest of the interstate 70 cost total. >> i don't know if that's true. but i frankly would not be surprised at all. the cost as you probably know it kept ballooning as the design changed, as they ran into -- as highway builders always do, into unexpected geological obstacles. i would not be surprised, but i don't know the dollar values. >> another question about president eisenhower's involvement or lack of involvement. in a book called the old gray mares of denver, he tells a story how ed johnson and ed nickleson met with eisenhower. they asked eisenhower to help get approval for the interstate 70 to go west to denver and ihe asked what he could do then and that was passed and passed in the house. so i take it you don't agree with that? >> i don't agree it was that cut and dried. there was -- as you said, eisenhower supported the idea of thousand extra miles. there were claimants to the thousand extra miles. it was not a conclusion they would go to colorado and utah. even when congress approved that extension, that 1,000 mile expansion, it was up to the highway people to decide where they would go, who would get those extra 1,000 miles or how they would be divvied up. it was difficult to push around politically. there was deference to -- we tend to think of anybody who claims expertise above political partisanship we're like, yeah, right. we have a more cynical political culture than that. but there was a lot more deference to the judgements and to the power of the highway people at that time. even if eisenhower -- there's no question he made happy noises about having an interstate through colorado. he made happy noises about that. but i was not able to find any evidence in the eisenhower library -- i found evidence of that meeting that you are talking about between nickleson and johnson and ic-- he is instructing his aids to get him to -- to extricate him from any sort of commitment to the colorad coloradans. i think george kelly was probably making -- he was making -- tieing up too neat a story, i would say. i have an old map. i have been puzzling over why 24 and 50, why neither of those routes was considered for the interstate. >> the biggest reason was denver. neither of them go through denver and the sort of -- again, the greatest political power in colorado but also the greatest sort of engineering argument for an interstate through colorado would be one that went through denver. so that's really the single biggest reason. 24 goes through colorado springs and 50 goes through pueblo. >> what about dylan reservoir? did that have anything to do with the project? >> it did.

Related Keywords

Camp Run , Ohio , United States , New York , Louisiana , Loveland Pass , Colorado , Argentina , Country Meadows , Utah , Glenwood Canyon , Vail Pass , California , Washington , District Of Columbia , Ethiopia , Hoosier Pass , Jefferson County , Buffalo Mountain , Hungary , River Valley , Idaho Springs , Colorado Springs , Eagle County , Tennessee Pass , Kansas , Switzerland , Romania , Americans , America , American , George Kelly , Tony Hall , Clarence Thomas Sonia Sotomayor , John Denver , Mary Landrieu , William Philpott , Los Angeles , Denver Metro , Dan Thornton ,