The current ecological condition of the Rocky Mountains can be viewed from two somewhat opposing perspectives. The first is that human occupation has had relatively little effect on the Rockies: large natural, if not pristine, areas remain, and the regionâs open spaces provide wildlife habitat, majestic scenery, and a sense of wildness. Unlike the situation in, say, the Swiss Alps, where even high-elevation meadows have been mown and grazed intensively for as long as 500 years and many large mammals have been extirpated, most elements of Rocky Mountain landscapes and biota are reasonably unaltered. Even the presumption that Native Americans changed regional landscapes with deliberately set fires has been challenged by Baker and Ehle (2001) and others who think that most fires were lightning-caused or accidental ignitions.
The second view is that humans have dramatically transformed the Rockies, at least since Euro-American settlement in the mid- to late 1800s. The slaughter of vast buffalo herds, the clearing of timber for railroad ties, and even the removal of whole hillsides in hydraulic placer mining represented substantial transformation. Ranch, resort, and residential development marks the latest incarnation of this transformation. Numerous, complex layers of land use have left landscape legacies, some of which may be unrecognized or underappreciated in modern assessments (Wohl 2001).
Here we consider both perspectives because we are impressed with both the many effects of human use of the Rockies and the regionâs remaining wild landscapes. Ironically, much of the recent population growth and development in the Rockies is driven by the regionâs wild landscapes, which make the present widespread transformation seem all the more significant. It is, of course, the rapid clip of current human transformationâhigh population growth rates, pervasive rural residential development, and landscape fragmentation (Baron, Theobald, and Fagre 2000)âthat worries ecologists and others concerned with Rocky Mountain ecosystems. So although we offer an overview of historical changes in the Rockies, especially since the 1800s, much of our attention here is on land uses, economies, and settlement patterns since the 1970s and on their future trends.
Making and Remaking the Rockies: Changing Human Geographies
The Rocky Mountain region is booming at the turn of the millennium, exhibiting some of highest population growth rates in the United States and Canada (figure 1.1). Two Rocky Mountain counties, Douglas in Colorado and Summit in Utah, grew faster than any others in the United States during the 1990s. The Rocky Mountain sections of even slower-growing states such as Montana and Wyoming grew at two to three times the national average in the 1990s. Population growth and land development go hand in hand, but the landscape effects of a given human population can vary tremendously, depending on how development is structured and which ecological settings are most affected.
The region has boomed before. Humans probably first found their way into the Rockies some 15,000 years ago; by 5,000 years ago essentially all the regionâs habitats were used at least seasonally by humans. Regional ecosystems were altered by early settlement, hunting, setting of fires, and even rudimentary irrigation, in at least subtle but poorly documented ways. Human populations within the Rockies themselves were low compared with populations supported by bison herds on the nearby Great Plains or in the extensive settlements of the American Southwest, where Anasazi and Chacoan cultures cultivated stable food supplies, irrigated land, and created urban-like settlements (Lekson 1999). Certainly the lower intermontane valleys, such as the Rocky Mountain Trench and major river corridors, were used extensively, many year-round, and teepee rings and discarded arrowheads are found at treeline and vision quest sites on the summits of many peaks, indicating frequent use of alpine areas (Reeves 2000).
The first Europeans, entering the southern Rockies during the 1500s, found some permanent native settlements and wide seasonal transhumance (populations that migrated seasonally). The settlers quickly filled the Rio Grande valley with farms, villages, and military posts (Hornbeck 1990). Waves of development began washing over the middle and northern Rockies in the 1800s during a series of natural resource booms. Trappers pioneered commercial resource extraction in the Rockies. Following Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, whose 1804â1806 expedition was undertaken partly to assert American control over the rich beaver regions of the northern Rockies (Beck and Haase 1989), they created a thriving trapping economy that, although thin on the ground, managed to deplete most Rocky Mountain beaver populations by the 1840s (chapter 6; White 1991, Wishart 1992). Still, trails established by the trappers opened the Rockies to further development. Those trails (and trapper guides) helped, for example, the Mormons to pass through the Rockies in 1847 and settle on the shore of the Great Salt Lake, at the western foot of the Wasatch Range. Salt Lake City would become one of the major cities edging against the Rockies.
FIGURE 1.1 Annual Population Growth Rates in the Western United States and Canada, 1990â2000. Rates for the United States are from U.S. Bureau of the Census county data for 1990 and 2000. Rates for Canada are from Statistics Canada regional division data for 1991 and 1996.
Rocky Mountain development shifted into high gear during the gold and silver rushes of the mid-1800s (chapter 5). The Westâs first gold rush, at Sutterâs Mill in the Sierra Nevada foothills, affected the Rockies by attracting prospectors who, unable to afford the ocean journey around South America, passed through the region on their way to California. In Canada, the first major Rocky Mountain rush occurred on the western slopes of the Cariboo Range and in the Fraser River valley in 1858, a region settled not from the east but from the Pacific Coast cities of Vancouver and Victoria. A year later, some of the prospectors who were headed across the Rockies for California found gold in what is now Colorado, and by the summer of 1860, more than 5,000 miners a week inundated the southern Rockies. Many mountain towns owe their start to gold and silver: Colorado Springs, Canon City, and Cripple Creek emerged from Coloradoâs rush; Montanaâs Virginia City and Helena started with the 1864 gold (and then copper) boom; and silver and gold got Coeur dâAlene, Idaho, off to a start in 1883. Successful mineral mining and milling required better wagon roads and railroadsâmuch of the mineral belt of the southern Rockies was roaded by the 1870s and laced with rails by the 1880s (Wyckoff 1999). These roads and rails then began to serve ranching and loggingâindustries that also fed the mines and minersâwhich were operating pretty much along the entire length of the Rockies by 1900.
Military forts were planted throughout the Rockies to safeguard settlers and project authority, and they often formed the nucleus of a future town. Fort Missoula, established in 1877, became present-day Missoula, the largest city in western Montana. The need to supply and maintain better communication with such outposts provided impetus for better roads. A network began to form in Montana in the 1860s. Booming mining camps attracted settlers, who followed rough and dangerous roads, such as the Bozeman Trail to Montana Territory or the Cariboo Road from the coast to the interior of British Columbia. Although mainly associated with resource extraction, the transportation network also moved passengers, mail, consumer goods, and, quite soon, even tourists. The first tourists made their way into Yellowstone in 1871, a year before it was designated a national park (Bartlett 1985); by 1873 they enjoyed well-worn wagon roads.
Commodities and âseeing the sightsâ werenât the only attraction: land itself lured settlers to the Rockies. Survey parties mapped the interior of the Rockies in detail during the 1860s and 1870s as a prelude to homesteading. In policies to foster western settlement, both the United States and Canada encouraged homesteading in the Rockies. The first transcontinental railroad was pushed across the Laramie Mountains in 1868 and dropped down through the Wasatch Range to the Great Salt Lake in 1869, thus bisecting the Rockies. By 1883, the Burlington Northern Railroad had crisscrossed the northern Rockies with rails. The Great Northern Railway actively enticed settlers to establish farming communities along its route from Minneapolis to Seattle to create a market for its services. From their start, the transcontinental railroads also encouraged tourism in the Rockies as a way to increase ridership. Banff, Yellowstone, and Glacier National Parks were heavily advertised as tourist destinations by the railroads.
The homesteaders brought new land uses and technologies, transforming the regionâs ecology and economy in more profound and enduring ways than did their predecessors. Homesteading permanently carved the land into parcels to be developed for the highest value the market would bear. Rocky Mountain terrain imparted a pattern of homesteading different from that on the plains: most homesteads were in valley bottoms along the streams and rivers, whereas most of the higher slopes remained in public ownership.
The land not homesteaded continued to be used for logging, grazing, and mining, often with significant degradation (Coggins, Wilkinson, and Leshy 1993; Wilkinson 1992). By the 1890s, this degradation of public lands was so obvious that the United States Congress began to restrict homesteading and reserve public lands in a series of acts (e.g., the Forest Reserve Act in 1891) that would eventually retain more than half the land area of the Rockies in federal administration. In Canada, control of most public lands and resources was transferred to the provinces in 1930. The federal government, however, had created several national parks in the Canadian Rockies, starting in 1885 with a large area around Banff. Federal reservation of land in the U.S. Rockies began with creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872 and selected forest reserves in 1891. But large additional public land designations were made in the first three decades of the 1900sâsome 65,000 square kilometers (km2), or 16 million acres, of forest reserves and huge tracts of public land were retained under the 1936 Taylor Grazing Act. Thus, by 1940 the public lands of the Rockies were almost fully in place, establishing a key pattern of land tenure that profoundly affected regional development (plate 1). Public lands would continue to shape regional development, especially as they came to be seen, after World War II, as a valuable fount of habitat and recreational lands.
A more recent regional development boom began in the 1970s, when global oil prices quadrupled and American and Canadian energy policy makers favored domestic sources. The Rockies, especially the overthrust belt in Wyoming and the Rocky Mountain Front in Montana and Alberta, filled with oil rigs, coal mines, and natural gas wells. Eventually, though, oil prices fell in the face of mounting supplies, and the energy boom busted in the early 1980s.
As detailed elsewhere in this book, Rocky Mountain ecosystems were modified by each of these human invasions. Mining in particular resulted in deforestation, water diversions and altered streamflows, and pollution. Placer mining reshaped entire valleys, obliterating wetlands and creating large expanses of gravel tailings (Wohl 2001). Wagons and railroads themselves transformed linear swaths of landscapes and provided access for other development (Kindquist 1995). Grazing intensified to supply the burgeoning mining towns. As a result, the composition of the regionâs vegetation, from tundra down through montane forests to lower-valley grasslands, was visibly transformed, as documented in several rephotographic surveys (e.g., Amundson 1991, Fielder 1999, Gruell 2001, Veblen and Lorenz 1991).
Each regional boom also set the geographic stage for subsequent development. In particular, roads meant to export resources further opened the Rockies to recreation and settlement, fueled in recent decades by the services and high-technology economy. Improved transportation and communication allow people to live and work farther from cities and still function in the global economy; people and businesses disperse across the landscape, city dwellers move to the mountains, and small-town residents look farther afield for properties to develop and market. Settlement spreads, and valley bottoms are laced with more roads and driveways as land is carved up into subdivisions, mini-estates, and ranchettes (Theobald, Gosnell, and Riebsame 1996).
As natural landscapes, and even isolation, have become desired commodities, road improvement has become controversial in many parts of the Rockies, in part because people know that better highways bring more people and development while reducing habitat and fragmenting the landscape. The small community of Polebridge, in the North Fork area of the Flathead River valley, Montana, has debated whether to pave its washboard gravel main access road, forcing residents to trade off convenience, comfort, and their automobile suspensions against the likely influx of development. At the other extreme, the main highway through Coloradoâs Roaring Fork Valley (serving Aspen) was recently widened to four lanes, complete with a high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane.
