America’s Switzerland: Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park, the Growth Years

America’s Switzerland, a companion volume to This Blue Hollow, is the first comprehensive history of Rocky Mountain National Park and its neighboring town, Estes Park, during the decades when travel became a middle-class rite of summer. Drawing on a wide variety of primary sources and extensive archival research, James H. Pickering reveals how the evolution of tourism and America’s fascination with the “western experience” shaped the park and town from 1903 to 1945. America’s Switzerland provides extensive information, much of it new to historical literature, on how Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park – the most visited national park west of the Mississippi – developed to welcome ever-growing crowds. Pickering profiles the individuals behind the development and details the challenges park and town confronted during decades that included two world wars and the Great Depression.