Relatinship Between Parks And Tourism

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Given that both the centenary of the National Park Service (NPS) of the United States and Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado are both fast approaching centenaries in 2016 and 2015 respectively, it is a key time to investigate retrospectively at the history of a specific park over the last century. Parks in the United States are one of the key driver of tourism within the US. And it is worth examining the relatinship between parks and tourism. Additionaly, 2014 is the 50th anniversary of the US Wilderness Act. Since 2009, this piece of legislation carries heavy weight governing the relationship between Rocky Mountain National Park and its key gateway community Estes Park. Even prior to the declaration of the Rocky Mountain National Park wilderness, the park has been managed for its wilderness charateristics since at least 1976 with the publication of the park’s current master plan. Environmental protection, wilderness, water, gateway community economics, and tourism have a confluence at Rocky Mountain National Park.
The park and its environs present an ideal location for this project for many reasons. Firstly, it straddles the continental divide and is an example of one of those early western parks that sought to protect “pre contact” natural values (Master Plan). It protects the headwaters of the Colorado River, arguably the most important river in the arid part of the United States beyond the 100th meridian. Secondly, since 2009, a vast majority of the land contained in the park is officially designated as a wilderness area. Of the park’s 265,777 acres nearly 250,000 are now designated a wilderness. (Official press release http://www.nps.gov/romo/naturescience/wilderness.htm retrieved 3/31/2014). These 250,000 acres are ...

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...’s relationship to the national park. Again, the Estes/Rocky relationship is ideal because it is relatively simple in comparison to America’s two other continental divide parks – Glacier and Yellowstone. The park has two main gateway communities – Granby and Estes Park. Estes is larger and handles most of the tourist traffic through the park since most visitors arrive from Colorado’s Front Range and the Denver metropolitan area. Therefore, this study will be limited to Estes Park and the eastern area of the park where most tourism activity takes place. The other two parks have more communities and more relationships as will be discussed below. It is hoped that the results of this study would be ultimately applied to other parks and communities with an eye toward developing broader understanding of the park/gateway community relationship in a North American setting.

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