Campaign 2014 has one outstanding race yet to be decided. Louisiana senate. Democratic incumbent Mary Landrieu is up against republican bill cassidy. Thats live at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on our companion network, cspan2. 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 cspan and the senate on cspan2. This thanksgiving week, cspan 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, theres 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, weve 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 didnt want me to spend the night. I said i want to spend a night. The guy said if you spend the night, ill 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 couldnt come back. It was a lifechanging 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, well take an American History tour of various native american tribes. Thats 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. Thats this thanksgiving week on cspan. For our complete schedule, go to cspan. 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 dont you go up to the Manuscripts Department and see if they need any help. Thats 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 evenings 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, ill get started with that. Vacationland, the book that sean mentioned that ill be drawing the material for tonights talk from, its 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. Its 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 theyve 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. Ive 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. Im going to begin by focussing on the very first section of interstate 70 to be built west of denver. And that was the fourlane 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 fourlane 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 postwar automobile vacation industry, it would no longer be enough, now they had to take a touristeye 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 i70 to be built up in high country, we can already see a hint of how large scale post Tourist Development would change peoples view of the land the way people related to place and the ways they saw fit to take care of it. So, ill 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 postwar 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 werent spending very long there. They werent 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 wouldnt 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 eyegrabbing 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 snowcovered 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 newfound access to scenic or remote or wild areas nature at a minimum of difficulty or risk. If you think about it, thats 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 Commissions 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 i70 now runs didnt exist. It just simply didnt exist. This is a strip map from the book. And what im 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. Ill 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 wasnt a direct route to them from denver, but it wasnt 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 didnt 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 i70. 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 interstat