Coyote Valley by Thomas G. Andrews

Author:Thomas G. Andrews [Andrews, Thomas G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Science & Nature, Nature, Environment, Environmental Conservation & Protection, History, Americas, United States
ISBN: 9780674495357
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2015-10-05T04:00:00+00:00

The Never Summer Boundary Extension

Conservationists greeted the rise of tourism at Rocky Mountain during the 1920s with a mix of approval and anxiety. Park Service officials cited the swelling ranks of national park visitors as an index of success. Other preservationists, however, worried that the onslaught of cars, tourists, and crass commercialism would mar the scenery and spoil the experience of communing with wild nature. Defenders and critics of automobile tourism could both agree, however, that a bigger park would be a better park.

The Never Summer extension of 1930, an Act of Congress that pushed the national park’s border westward to incorporate most of the Coyote Valley, reflected the Park Service’s commitment to protecting the all-important vistas from the Fall River Road and its successor, the route over Trail Ridge. As with the campaign that culminated in the 1915 law that established Rocky Mountain, however, efforts to extend the park’s boundaries to the Never Summer ridgeline led advocates to make calculated compromises. As they licked their wounds after a failed 1925 expansion bid, park officials realized that extending Rocky Mountain’s western border would remain a political nonstarter unless they made significant concessions to local landowners. By 1930, this strategy succeeded at reversing the opposition of the Water Supply and Storage Company, owners of the Grand Ditch, to a second boundary extension proposal. Almost a century later, the aesthetic and ecological consequences of the resulting bargain continue to haunt the Kawuneeche Valley.

From the inception of Enos Mills’s park crusade in 1909, supporters had treated the preserve’s borders as expedient and subject to future modification. National Park Service administrators ranging from the top brass in Washington to the superintendents of other parks and monuments across the United States expressed similar optimism; to them, as to James Gamble Rogers, the original boundaries of these federal preserves represented but a starting point for future expansion. Because most Park Service units adjoined national forests, enlarging parks and monuments typically hinged on transferring the management of these public lands from the Forest Service to the Park Service—a dynamic that exacerbated the already heated rivalry between the two agencies. By the 1920s, border controversies had erupted from Yellowstone to Yosemite, and from Glacier to Grand Canyon. Park Service and Forest Service leaders responded by convening the Coordinating Commission on National Parks and Forests, a joint committee intended to negotiate mutually acceptable solutions to these interagency conflicts.30

In 1925, the Coordinating Commission proposed a set of exchanges that would have placed nearly the entire Coyote Valley within Rocky Mountain, excepting only the Grand Ditch right-of-way and lands already claimed by or patented to settlers. Federal foresters were outraged by the commission’s expansion proposal. Forest Supervisor J. V. Leighou objected to “some agitation by outside parties … for the inclusion of additional areas on the west side of the Continental Divide,” a move for which he could see “no justification.” The forester recalled that Mills’s founding dream of a “game sanctuary” had constituted the “main reason for including” the eastern Kawuneeche within Rocky Mountain’s original boundaries.

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