Tourist Trails

More Tourist Trails

• Search Western Trails for More Tourist Trails
• Hall County Western Trails - Stuhr Museum
• Roads for the Modern Tourist - University of Northern Colorado
• Nebraska Recreational Trails - Nebraska Library Commission
• Nina Heald Webber Postcard Collection - Center of Southwest Studies
• Tourist Trails - Grand Lake Area Historical Society

Tourism—traveling the trails, tracks, and roads for pleasure—began in the West in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Most tourists came to see nature’s grandeur, the jagged mountains and deep canyons of Colorado and Wyoming that only a few decades earlier had barred the way for the pioneers.

The best of all the natural wonders were found in the newly formed national parks, particularly Yellowstone. Its history (at least for non-Indians) dates to the mountain men of the early nineteenth century, and, for publicizing, to the Hayden Survey of the 1870s. Yellowstone was a popular destination by 1900, with trainloads of tourists arriving each summer to stay in the grand hotels at Old Faithful, Mammoth Hot Springs, and Yellowstone Lake. Visitors traveled through the Park in Yellowstone Stages, first horse-drawn then, by 1920, motorized.

By the 1920s the more intrepid tourists were driving themselves around the loops of the Park roads. This tourist was obviously not constrained by a tour bus. Her sense of adventure (or foolhardiness), communing with one of the famous Yellowstone bears, is caught in this snapshot to show the folks back home.

The famous Fall River Road in Rocky Mountain National Park took tourists over 12,000 feet to the top of the Continental Divide. The road was built with convict labor in the 1920s. Keeping the route passable, especially in late spring, was a monumental battle against the elements.

With the advent of the motorcar and increasing numbers of manageable roads, tourism expanded dramatically. Roadside tourist cabins and “tourist homes” supplemented the big destination hotels. The change in transportation from train to car meant a change from group travel to individual sightseeing, and, in the early days, a sense of adventure and fortitude. The new roads were hardly highways. Much like the old trails, they lacked lights, guard rails, and road maintenance. Asking for directions from people one met on the road often resulted in looking out for geologic features, buildings or other landmarks because road maps were rare in teh first decade of the twentieth century.

For a privileged class of tourists, these problems were easily overcome. Entrepreneurs built tourist hotels for the well-to-do in picturesque places. Some of the resort hotels catered to easterners with money who came for long stays. The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs was (and still is) famous as an upscale destination resort.

Tourism became the lifeblood of many small communities in the West. Today the attractions are often linked to adventurous outdoor sports. Nevertheless, the same motivations that made travelers take to the road a hundred years ago still exist—to see new landscapes, to experience the wildness of nature, and to enjoy the freedom of the open road.