Winner of the Western Writers of America 2014 Spur Award for Best Western Nonfiction, Contemporary Mention the Colorado high country today and vacation imagery springs immediately to mind: mountain scenery, camping, hiking, skiing, and world-renowned resorts like Aspen and Vail. But not so long ago, the high country was isolated and little visited. Vacationland tells the story of the region's dramatic transformation in the decades after World War II, when a loose coalition of tourist boosters fashioned alluring images of nature in the high country and a multitude of local, state, and federal actors built the infrastructure for high-volume tourism: ski mountains, stocked trout streams, motels, resort villages, and highway improvements that culminated in an entirely new corridor through the Rockies, Interstate 70. Vacationland is more than just the tale of one tourist region. It is a case study of how the consumerism of the postwar years rearranged landscapes and revolutionized American environmental attitudes. Postwar tourists pioneered new ways of relating to nature, forging surprisingly strong personal connections to their landscapes of leisure and in many cases reinventing their lifestyles and identities to make vacationland their permanent home. They sparked not just a population boom in popular tourist destinations like Colorado but also a new kind of environmental politics, as they demanded protection for the aesthetic and recreational qualities of place that promoters had sold them. Those demands energized the American environmental movement-but also gave it blind spots that still plague it today. Peopled with colorful characters, richly evocative of the Rocky Mountain landscape, Vacationland forces us to consider how profoundly tourism changed Colorado and America and to grapple with both the potential and the problems of our familiar ways of relating to environment, nature, and place.

A hot contemporary romance from the author of the acclaimed I-Team series... Lexi Jewell left Scarlet Springs twelve years ago, vowing never to return to the small Colorado mountain town where she grew up. Now, here she is-over thirty, out of a job and with little choice but to move back in with her eccentric father. Lexi knows it's just a matter of time before she runs into Austin Taylor, her first boyfriend and her first heartbreak. She's determined to show him she's over him-until he steps out of a pickup truck and back into her life, looking sexy as hell in his mountain ranger uniform. As far as Austin is concerned, Lexi can turn her snazzy little convertible around and drive back to Chicago. After all, she ripped his teenage heart to pieces and turned her back on the town he loves. But from the moment he sees her again, he can't get her out of his mind. Even her smile messes with his head. When an evening of conversation turns into something else, Lexi and Austin agree to be friends-with benefits. But as Lexi starts making plans to return to the big city, Austin realizes he'll lose her a second time unless he can show her that what she's searching for has been right here all along. "Pamela Clare is a dazzling talent." -Lori Foster, New York Times bestselling author

What do Louise Sneed Hill, May Bonfils Stanton, Justina L. Ford, Helen Bonfils, Mary Coyle Chase, and Caroline Bancroft have in common? They are all a vital part of Colorado's history--and no one has ever written a book-length biography about any of them. While some of the names will be more familiar than others to Colorado residents, all of the women will come to live for the readers of this exciting book. Whether you are interested in the first black female physician licensed in Colorado, the ruler of Denver's social elite, the battling Bonfils sisters, the woman who brought the first Pulitzer Prize for drama to Colorado, or the self-proclaimed grande dame of Colorado history, you will find it all here. Marilyn Riley has combined some of the most fascinating (and sometimes lesser known) of Colorado's women. This is a must read for those interested in Colorado history, women's history, and in reading stories about interesting and dynamic individuals.

Anchored in eight years of fieldwork and analysis of all existing scholarship, this unparalleled summary of the prehistory of the southern Rocky Mountains is available for the first time in paperback.

"Distributed to the book trade by Mountaineers Books"--T.p. verso.

Firsthand route descriptions to the 169 highest 13,000-foot peaks -- including the Centennial peaks under 14,000 feet -- and a complete listing of the 741 highest summits in Colorado.