On September 4 1915 hundreds of people gathered in Estes Park Colorado to celebrate the creation of Rocky Mountain National Park. This new nature preserve held the promise of peace solitude and rapture that many city dwellers craved. As Jerry Frank demonstrates however the park is much more than a lovely place.Rocky Mountain National Park was a keystone in broader efforts to create the National Park Service and its history tells us a great deal about Colorado tourism and ecology in the American West. To Frank the tensions between tourism and ecology have played out across a natural stage that is anything but passive. At nearly every turn the National Park Service found itself facetoface with an environment that was difficult to anticipateand impossible to control.Frank first takes readers back to the late nineteenth century when Colorado boostersalready touting the Rocky Mountains restorative power for lung patientsset out to attract more tourists and generate revenue for the state. He then describes how an ecological perspective came to Rocky in fits and starts offering a new way of imagining the park that did not sit comfortably with an entrenched management paradigm devoted to visitor recreation and comfort.Frank examines a wide range of popular activities including driving hiking skiing fishing and wildlife viewing to consider how they have impacted the parks flora and fauna often leaving widespread transformation in their wake. He subjects the decisions of park officials to close but evenhanded scrutiny showing how in their zeal to return the park to what they understood as its natural state they have tinkered with its featuressometimes with less than desirable results.Todays Rocky Mountain National Park serves both competing visions maintaining accessible roads and vistas for the convenience of tourists while guarding its backcountry to preserve ecological values. As the park prepares to celebrate its centennial Franks book advances our understanding of its pa