West mines tourism for new economy

By John Krist,
Senior reporter

Formerly a coal-mining town, Red Lodge, Mont., now relies economically on tourists, retirees and others drawn to the beauty and recreational opportunities providing by the mountains and forests nearby.

RED LODGE, Mont. — The biggest private employer in this picturesque town used to be the coal industry. Now it's the local ski resort.

That transition is emblematic of a broad and often wrenching evolution under way in communities throughout the West, as the industries that dominated the region's economic landscape for more than a century — ranching, farming, mining and logging — falter in the face of global competition, changing markets, exhaustion of the resources themselves and stiffening environmental regulation. Increasingly, and with far-reaching effects on the social fabric of the rural West, these traditional industries are being supplanted as a source of jobs and tax revenue by Americans' growing devotion to outdoor recreation and their urge to live and work in areas of scenic beauty.

The West was the fastest-growing region of the United States in the 1990s, according to the Census Bureau, its population growing by 19.7 percent (10.4 million people). The five fastest-growing states in the nation were all in the West: Nevada (66.3 percent), Arizona (40 percent), Colorado (30.6 percent), Utah (29.6 percent) and Idaho (28.5 percent). The rate of population increase for the nation as a whole was 13.2 percent.

Within the region, a county-by-county examination of population trends suggests the influx of people into the Western states is not indiscriminate. Many areas actually lost population during the decade, particularly farming and ranching counties on the Great Plains. In the mountainous counties, however, particularly those bordering national parks, national forests and wilderness areas, the population increased much more than in counties elsewhere.

Teton County, Idaho, for example, grew 74.4 percent between the 1990 and 2000 census counts. Its neighbor, Teton County, Wyo., which likewise borders Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, grew 63.4 percent. Gallatin County, Mont., also bordering Yellowstone and including the university town of Bozeman, grew 34.4 percent.

In contrast, 23 of Montana's 56 counties lost population or remained stable during the 1990s, and all but one of these were in the semiarid and largely treeless Plains of the eastern half of the state.

Created by the same geothermal action responsible for the park's geysers, Grand Prismatic Spring is typical of the remarkable natural attractions that have drawn people to Yellowstone National Park since it was established in 1872.

Mirroring the population boom has been a shift in the foundation of local economies. In a report published earlier this year in the journal BioScience, a group of researchers at the University of Montana analyzed 25 years' worth of economic, demographic and ecological data for the 20 counties lying within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, which includes two national parks and seven national forests. Between 1970 and 1995, they found, the share of total personal income provided by the traditional mining, oil, gas, timber, farming and ranching sectors dropped from 19 percent to 6 percent.

More than 99 percent of the net growth in personal income during that time came from other sources, such as service and high-tech industries, the researchers found. So-called transfer payments — notably, retirement and pension payouts — also played a significant role, as an increasing number of retirees moved to the region.

The trend holds beyond the Yellowstone region. By 1999, according to University of Montana economist Thomas Michael Power, farming, ranching, mining and timber extraction provided less than 4 percent of total employment throughout the Rocky Mountain states; adding agriculture and agricultural services would bring the total to only 5 percent. The figures held even when the focus shifted to only the rural areas of those states.

In many of these growing communities of the West, particularly those near parks and pristine forests, recreation and tourism have become major economic factors. There's nothing new about this; the rise of gateway communities on the borders of national parks began in the late 19th century as soon as the first major transportation arteries — railroads — made travel to them convenient and quick enough to appeal to a large segment of the population. The process accelerated with the rise in automobile ownership and the construction of reliable highway networks, leading to explosive growth in formerly small towns on the outskirts of Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Zion and other well-known western parks.

Tourism-related economic and demographic change spread well beyond the parks in the post-war period with the development of destination resorts dedicated to such activities as skiing. In later decades, such newfangled pursuits as whitewater rafting, boating, mountain biking, and rock climbing brought the financial benefits of recreational travel to still more communities, which embraced this new source of revenue as a reliable alternative to the boom-and-bust cycles driven by fickle resource-based industries.

Tourism, however, is a mixed blessing for many communities. Historian Hal Rothman, a professor at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, has termed it the "devil's bargain," which promises prosperity but ends up remaking the community in unpredictable and often unpleasant ways.

"Local communities that embraced tourism expected to be visited by many people but generally thought their lives would remain the same," Rothman writes in "Devil's Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West," which documents the effect of this powerful new economic force on towns throughout the region. "They did not anticipate, nor were they prepared for, the ways in which tourism would change them, the rising cost of property in their town, the traffic, the self-perception that the work they did was unimportant, the diminishing sense of pride in work and ultimately in community, and the tears in the social fabric that followed."

Travelers around the West have no difficulty finding examples of such communities: Jackson, Wyo.; Vail, Colo.; St. George, Utah. But the devil's bargain is not inevitable, according to a trio of conservationists who've looked for success stories in the transformation of communities on the periphery of parks and other major tourist attractions.

The key, they argue, is for local communities to retain control of the decision-making process, rather than cede it to out-of-town corporate interests, and to realize that the nearby public lands are more than a draw for visitors. Forests and mountains are natural amenities that provide a heightened quality of life for residents nearby. If they are protected from exploitation, these scenic and recreational resources can draw a more diverse array of employers and workers willing to accept slightly lower wages in exchange for life in a beautiful setting.

"Increasingly, Americans are saying that the place they live is as important as what they do for a living — so much so that they're willing to relocate to a 'better' community even at the risk of diminished job opportunity or a lower income" Jim Howe, Ed McMahon and Luther Propst write in "Balancing Nature and Commerce in Gateway Communities," a project of the Conservation Fund and the Sonoran Institute.

"Technological advances like the fax machine, computer modem, overnight delivery services and electronic mail have accelerated this trend."

Among the success stories Howe, McMahon and Propst cite is Red Lodge, Mont., which has survived the demise of the local coal industry by capitalizing on its natural surroundings, while also avoiding the destructive changes so often brought about in the West by the shift to a tourist-based economy.

The town did this in a variety of ways, the authors suggest: adopting growth-control plans to prevent development from sprawling over surrounding ranchland, adopting water-quality and architectural-design programs, launching business recruitment campaigns aimed at non-tourism employers.

The community today is a curious but enjoyable blend of the old and new. Scores of well-preserved historic buildings stand along the narrow streets of downtown, many of them occupied by sophisticated restaurants and art galleries; others are occupied by hardware shops and other merchants clearly geared toward local residents rather than visitors.

The annual community calendar includes Western stalwarts such as rodeos, a mountain-man rendezvous and barbecues, but also a Taste of Red Lodge wining-and-dining extravaganza, the Fat Tire Frenzy mountain biking competition, and an oh-so-politically-correct Festival of Nations celebrating a multicultural heritage that more commonly generated strife in 19th century frontier towns.

The town's setting is spectacular, at the foot of the Beartooth Highway (which, as locals never tire of pointing out, was dubbed "America's most beautiful road" by Charles Kuralt). Completed in 1936 to provide access to nearby Yellowstone National Park, the highway climbs swiftly into the Beartooth Mountains, crossing a 10,974-foot pass through an alpine landscape of glacially carved peaks, jewel-like lakes and wind-scoured tundra, before descending to the northeast corner of Yellowstone, 68 miles away.

It is impossible to predict how Red Lodge will fare as the interior West continues to fill up with retirees, tourists and baby boomers seeking vacation homes or modern homesteads with high-speed Internet access. With proximity to the growing Billings area, as well as to some of the most scenic and unspoiled countryside in the Lower 48, the community seems vulnerable to the pressures that have had such a wrenching effect on scores of small towns throughout the West.

So far, Red Lodge has resisted the devil's bargain. The devil is, however, persistent.