“On the other hand, there is a degree of method to the madness.
Tourists get socked ten bucks per person to make the drive, and the
money has obviously gone to building a good road, and to putting up
a surprising number of informative nature-related signs that educate
you as you drive.”
This
is a city built on the theory and practice of tourism. Long before
rapacious, pickaxe-bearing miners swarmed to the goldfields of Cripple
Creek, long before Zebulon Pike made the boneheaded attempt to scale
his 14,110-foot namesake in cotton duds at the tail end of November,
long before 19th Century millionaires made Colorado Springs
a fashionable summer retreat, long before all this the Ute Indians
seasonally crossed over from the Rampart range onto the Colorado plains
in order to hunt buffalo. Often called Gateway to the Rockies, in
its true historic perspective this city of half a million people was
actually Gateway to the Plains. The movements of these Americans proved
long ago what latter-day nature watchers have so belatedly learned–the
veldt is richer than the rocky crags.
As
with any place where large numbers of humans live–tourist attraction
or not–Colorado Springs has its share of festering eyesores and
urban blight. The drive from the airport into the city passes first
through several neighborhoods of ramshackle, burglar-barred housing,
as well as a tremendous open-air sand and gravel pit. Once aboard
the continuous stream of I-25 truck and yuck, you cruise by the foot
of a spectacular mountain. Not Pike’s Peak, but the humongous
manmade lump of coal heaped up in a vigorously ugly mound to fuel
the city’s considerable energy needs.
But
make no mistake about it: Colorado Springs is a city built on tourism,
to the tune of $800 million per year and growing. Tourism is the city’s
third largest industry, and the scenic impact was enough to inspire
Katherine Lee Bates to compose "America the Beautiful" while
being lugged up Pike’s Peak in an oxcart. The Convention and
Visitors Bureau tosses around a $3 million annual tourism budget,
and in addition to fifteen museums the city sports a downtown historic
district, an imitation English cathedral, a fake Renaissance hotel
(the Broadmoor), and countless cheapo motels that cater to the countless
Winnebagos, Itascas, SUV’s and rusty pickups that are just passin’
through.
Colorado Springs is more than bad architecture and rough
looking neighborhoods. The city has made Garden of the Gods into a
1,300-acre park where you can bike, hike, or fall to your death from
the towering red rock formations. A search of the city’s travel-related
website reveals the predictable hash of outdoor activities–driving
along scenic roads, terrifying yourself in freezing water on river
rafting adventures, and slogging along endless alpine paths with too
much weight on your back and not enough oxygen in your lungs. The
plains east of Colorado Springs might as well not exist; the city,
hotels, and tourist organizations have no information about them whatsoever.
An equally gaping blind spot in tourist information
is birding, despite the astounding fact that the American Birding
Association makes its home in ‘Springs. At Garden of the Gods
we got to watch the evening return of the White-throated Swifts. These
are the ultimate flying machines, practically footless as the Latin
name Apodidae suggests, the entirety of their physical geometry
set up to fly, and do nothing but. They even do it on the wing.
We watched them slice and curvet towards the rocky cliffs, looking
like boomerangs with a cigar taped onto the middle. Violet-green Swallows,
less radical in their maneuverings and content to snap up bugs and
gnats at a lower elevation, periodically zoomed into tiny holes in
the cliffs to feed their young.
As we stood there gazing at the in-your-face view afforded
by 10x50 Austrian optics, we had the chance to turn other tourists
onto the spectacle. Predictably, people were gape-mouthed at the sight,
proving a contention that Fermata long ago accepted as a given: when
people are shown nature doing its thing in a format they can understand,
they will appreciate it and want more.
Our
presence in Colorado Springs was underlain by an ulterior motive:
we had come to make a nature tourism presentation at the regional
Economic Development Association convention. The member associations
comprised a ten-state area that covers a full twenty-five percent
of the U.S. landmass, and is populated–if you can use the word–by
a mere eight percent of the citizenry. This is Doughnut Country, where
the great center of the United States has been hollowed out by the
inexorable pull of coastal and larger urban areas. This is Crisis
Country, where traditional communities, cultures, and landscapes are
vanishing as the populations shrink, gray, and crumble away. This
is Bankruptcy Country, where no young people means no industry means
no jobs means no tax base means no infrastructure means end-of-the-line.
This is Pavement Country, where tiny burgs get steamrolled by neighboring
urban centers, where industrial concerns buy up prairie land for a
song, denude the earth, make their money and leave the waste for the
EPA Superfund to dab away at.
The
keynote speech detailed how St. Louis had revitalized one of its ghettoes.
The separate seminar on tourism explained how the Colorado Springs
Convention and Visitors Bureau went about lobbying for its share of
the $3 million tourism promotion budget.
Raymond Montoya, economic planner from the Blackfeet
Indian Reservation in northern Montana, explained some of the barriers
that his tribe faced as they tried to adjust to the new federal policy
of independence for tribal lands. He also pointed out the harsh economic
realities of the reservation: per capita income at about $7,000, unemployment
anywhere from 60-80%, and the lack of a cohesive economic strategy
for generating new revenue.
On
the other hand, the Blackfeet possess unparalleled natural resources,
and what is more fortuitous, a constant stream of potential tourists
crossing the reservation on their way to neighboring Glacier National
Park. Some two million people per year make their way through Browning,
the administrative center of the reservation, as they go to Glacier.
The Blackfeet are Plains Americans, and the 1.5 million acres that
comprise their reservation would be an ideal destination for nature
tourists, especially since two buffalo herds already exist on the
reservation. Heritage tourists could be easily attracted to the area
by the unique and world-famous culture of the Plains Americans. Although
critical issues for the Blackfeet remain, especially the question
of how to balance tourist revenue with the exploitation and commercialization
of their spiritual beliefs, unlike many other rural communities the
Blackfeet have great potential to boost their regional economy.
Initial steps into a comprehensive tourism plan were
begun with grants to build artistic renditions of traditional Blackfeet
warriors, as well as a partnership with the city of Browning to install
street signs hung on wooden poles to promote Blackfeet culture. Infrastructure
issues such as food and lodging remain to be solved. The trend seems
to be positive, however, and it seems to point clearly in the direction
of nature and heritage tourism, the two areas that Fermata actively
promotes as ways to revive rural economies and to simultaneously protect
and restore natural resources.
On
the final day of the convention we got up at the crack of dawn and
headed for Pike’s Peak. Tallying common birds such as Western
Tanagers, Virginia’s Warbler, McGillivray’s Warbler, Black-headed
Grosbeak, Steller’s Jay, Brown-headed Cowbirds and Robins by
the scope-load, we missed seeing the high-altitude Ptarmigan and Rosy
Finches that summer in the tundra.
From a nature tourism perspective, Pike’s Peak
and the surrounding area is a hard call. On the one hand, it’s
grotesque, especially at the top. Long lines of lard-butted tourists
drive in low gear up the dirt road to the gauche rest house atop the
peak, take a gander, then ride their brakes all the way back down
until the smoking brake pads cause them to pull over. In many ways
Pike’s Peak is a negative peak of sorts, and its claim to be
"America’s Mountain" may in fact be true, even if for
all the wrong reasons.
On
the other hand, there is a degree of method to the madness. Tourists
get socked ten bucks per person to make the drive, and the money has
obviously gone to building a good road, and to putting up a surprising
number of informative nature-related signs that educate you as you
drive. As with Yosemite, a place often held up as proof that nature
is incompatible with people, Pike’s Peak is a place that, in
the places where people congregate, is gross.
Like Yosemite, though, the vast majority of Pike’s
Peak is virtually devoid of people. Hiking trails to the peak are
hardly bumper-to-bumper, and it’s a simple matter to find solitude
and silence just by getting off the main highway and hoofing it. Moreover,
what are the alternatives? Opening the mountain to private enterprise
and logging? Dotting the mountainside with chain hotels? Completely
shutting off all human access to a place that is majestic, beautiful,
and awe-inspiring? The balance between use and protection is admittedly
a hard one to draw, but Pike’s Peak seems to have done it pretty
well.
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