Station history

Colorado’s first major Anglo settlements were established as part of the Pikes Peak Gold Rush of 1858. The metal mining boom that followed extended to silver, lead and other minerals. So when the University of Colorado was established during Colorado’s mining boom, it was no accident that silver and gold became the school’s official colors (never mind all of those different colors used on the uniforms of various University sports teams and bands: black, blue, and so on). It’s still silver and gold. Between 1860 and 1900, Boulder developed as the market town and railroad shipping point for their productive mining hinterland, supplying milling, processing, machinery, groceries, labor, entertainment and other services to the miners, mines, and mills, around Ward, Gold Hill, Jamestown, Nederland, Caribou, Wall Street, Magnolia, Sunshine, Rollinsville, and other forgotten mining camps. All this in return for the ore that was milled and shipped through Boulder to other markets.

By the late 19th century, however, the only gold that was being milled in Boulder was that which was gleaned from the tailings left by older, cruder methods by Boulder’s then state-of-the-art chlorinization mill and later cyanidation mill along Boulder Creek. Mines had been closing until World War I, when the demand for metals spiked again and brought mining back to Boulder’s back country, most notably, Tungsten. Still, university faculty and administrators, Boulder businessmen, and the civic leaders in small mountain towns could see the writing on the wall. Even before World War I they had begun to consider a replacement for mining as their economic mainstay, an entirely different pursuit – tourism. For example, in Ward, Emma Fairhurst demonstrated the transition from mining to tourism most aptly. She was the daughter of a 19th century miner, mining promoter and developer. A.H. Fairhurst had invested in a honeycomb of mines, some just beneath the town. She, however, became the proprietor of the Columbia Hotel in Ward, hosting tourists, who warmed their hands by a fireplace faced with gold ore. For the rest of her life she invested in local mountain tourist attractions to draw business to her hotel.

Downstream, Boulder had already worked with the National Forest Service to create Boulder’s Mountain Parks in the late 1890s, preserving the town’s stunning backdrop. The Texas-Colorado Chautauqua was quick to take advantage of the new parks in their back yard. Their curriculum included hikes in suits and Gibson girl dresses. Soon after the turn of the century, prominent citizens began forming and joining local clubs to sponsor fishing and hiking. CU faculty were invited to lecture the members. You know that times had changed when maps of Boulder County’s mountains no longer featured those rectangular outlines of mines and mining lodes and began to include Chamber of Commerce tourist destinations, showing the roads to Boulder’s mountain playground.

This shift occurred concurrently with a revolution in personal travel. Just as railroads and rails had made the mineral exploitation of the West possible, the invention of, and development of, automobiles and auto roads made Western tourism possible in a way that wagon roads could never have accomplished. Those with any doubts might want to recall Mark Twain’s description of stage coach travel, “forty memorable miles of bottomless sand, into which the coach wheels sunk from six inches to a foot…. We worked our passage most of the way across.  That is to say, we got out and walked.” Meals consisted of “last week’s bread…condemned army bacon…a beverage which pretended to be tea, but there was too much dish-rag, and sand, and old bacon-rind in it to deceive the intelligent traveler.”  So horse drawn tourism was not what it was cracked up to be, and rail tourism was that which could only be reached by rail. Hence, car travel and paved roads were vital to opening up Western vistas to the greater public. It is not accidental that automobile roads were being extended into the mountains at the same time that Rocky Mountain National Park was established in 1914. Cars, roads and selling tourism were connected.  

The University of Colorado was not blind to these developments. They, too, were hatching plans to take advantage of their mountain backdrop. Botanist Theodore Drew Alison Cockerell, Museum Director Junius Henderson, and other faculty had turned their attention to the mountains as a field of scientific discovery and taxonomy. They launched a number of field expeditions into Colorado’s plains and mountains, with wagons and Model Ts. Biology Professor Francis Ramaley’s ecological interest led him to establish one of the first inland biological stations, the Colorado Mountain Lab at Tolland, which he directed from 1909-1914. Photos of the lab show shotguns and butterfly nets leaning against the cabinets, dead birds and small animals on the benches. Not exactly an anticeptic, Bunsen Burner/beaker/microscope sort of place at first. The Colorado Mountain Lab began during the summers of 1907 and 1908 when Professor Ramaley was collecting mountain flora. He thought that the University should provide instruction in mountain zoology and botany through a laboratory site. The town of Tolland in Gilpin County seemed suitable because of its natural features and ease of access from Boulder and Denver, approachable from Rollinsville, along the road to what is now East Portal. The Regents of the University established the laboratory and summer classes were held there from 1909 to 1914.

As the Great War began, it was clear that a better site for mountain research had to be found. Education Professor, Frank Thompson, was an avid mountaineer. He had become one of the founding members of the Colorado Mountain Club, formed in 1912 (again, not exactly a coincidental date). His alpine experience made him the university’s choice to assist in the university effort to expand the campus.  The university and the Biology Department were searching to combine two major interests.  The University wanted to use its Rocky Mountain backdrop to develop a mountain recreation program with which to attract students to its summer session.

Francis Ramaley and the Biology Department were looking for a new, more appropriate location for their mountain biology lab. Thompson joined Professor Harry Curtis to locate land to develop its new mountain recreation program.  With the help from Thompson, Curtis, and the US Forest Service, the university received thirty acres in the Arapaho National Forest in 1915.  Thompson then used the land to create the University Camp.  

There were reasons to expect that such a recreation program would attract students. Faculty and students were already involved in trail-making and hiking. Often faculty, like Thompson and Gayle Waldrop, another member of the Colorado Mountain Club, were influential in establishing trails and promoting mountaineering. The University of Colorado Hiking Club was established on April 1, 1919. The club began as a way to encourage student interest in all outdoor activities, and to take advantage of the mountainous region of the school and state. There were more than 90 students on their club roster in 1924. Faculty members of the Hiking Club included Professors Bigelow, Hutchinson, Van Valkenburgh, and Wakeham.

The efforts to create a new mountain lab and to promote the summer session succeeded.  CU invited faculty from around the nation and world to teach during the summer, as one draw for students. But CU did not depend only on academics. They heavily marketed the summer session with a highly publicized Mountain Recreation Program. Summer Session brochures featured glossy photographs of alpine scenery, horseback riding, mountains, lakes, hiking and other high country amenities. One could have looked through the initial brochures in vain for any classrooms. It worked. The university’s summer session, which had attracted less than 100 before World War I, was to enroll more than 6,000 by 1921. Considering that CU’s academic year enrollment in 1920-21 was 1,950, such a summer session enrollment was nothing less than astounding.

No sooner had the Mountain Recreation Program shown itself to be successful, than CU and the Biology Department slowly began to insert science into the University Camp. In 1921, the Science Lodge was built. Within ten years the mountain recreation program transformed from “recreation” into education, as cabins and alpine activities shifted to classes and laboratories.  The University Camp became the Science Lodge, and then, the Mountain Research Station. By the mid-1930s, the glossy alpine recreation photos in the brochure had been replaced by degree requirements, lab sections and course descriptions.  

After World War II, Dr. John Marr (1914-1989) used the Science Lodge property to create the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR). Dr. John W. Marr saw the potential for teaching ecology courses at the Mountain Research Station in 1947. He was especially interested in winter ecology and was instrumental in establishing the station as a year-round facility for research and education. The Institute of Artic and Alpine Research was established in 1951 with Dr. John Marr as a founding director, a post he held until 1967. As one of the first professors at the University of Colorado to obtain outside grants, he received several large grants from the Army Research Office, National Science Foundation, and the Atomic Energy Commission to expand and upgrade the facilities and equipment at the station. Some of his early grants were for the study of cold-weather equipment and clothing, establishing a climate monitoring network, training high school students and teachers, and conducting watershed records.  

Dr. Marr’s knowledge, dedication, and personal involvement established the Mountain Research Station as a major research facility. His last major project was the building of the Alpine Laboratory in 1963 which was renamed the John W. Marr Alpine Laboratory in July 1982.

The alpine research area of Niwot Ridge was designated in 1975 as an Experimental Ecological Reserve by the Institute of Ecology, and in 1979 as a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO, the U.S. State Department, and the U.S. Forest Service. In 1980 Niwot Ridge was selected by the National Science Foundation as the alpine tundra component of the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program.  

Aside from just tracking ecological change in the alpine ecosystems, INSTAAR began to look at glaciers and the arctic as a way to measure climate alterations. Through the 1970s, interest increased in glaciers and their importance in hydrology, and the World Data Center for Glaciology was transferred to INSTAAR. Data was compiled on glaciers worldwide. By 1986, the focus of INSTAAR shifted to the problems of global change. In 1993, INSTAAR built the National Ice Core Laboratory (NICL) at the US Geological Survey facility in Denver. The environmental data collected in polar ice cores provided a new understanding of environmental history and climate change. In 2008 they worked with mountain towns and the ski industry to forecast snow packs and predict ski season conditions. Today, INSTAAR scientists continue to measure and predict rapid changes in earth systems, particularly in Polar Regions.

Tourism, in the form of forest and mountain sports, was not elbowed aside by science, however. Far from it. As mountain roads became paved state highways and US highways, the recreational exploitation of Boulder’s hinterland grew apace. Mountain lodges proliferated, as did road houses, and gift shops, as other amenities, such as gambling, returned. Even small ski areas developed.  After World War II, when Johnnie came marching home, his march was soon transformed from maneuvers, shelter-halves, and bivouacs into civilian mountain trails, fishing and camping. The canvas, rope, packs and jeeps were all put to new civilian uses. Remember, the ski-troops of the 10th Mountain Division returned from war to start the revolution in the ski industry.

But the transformation of Boulder’s population between 1965 and 1975 had an even bigger effect on mountain usage. Environmentalism merged with athleticism and recreation as Boulder’s natural backdrop became the new baby Boomer citizens’ playground. During the late 1960s and 1970s, the idealistic environmentalism brought in by the Boomers merged with older Boulder’s tourism and preservationism. In 1978, the Indian Peaks Wilderness Area was established and became Boulder’s mountain backyard for hikers and skiers in the 1980s. Desires for an expansion of this wilderness area swelled over time enough to allow the creation of James Peak Wilderness Area immediately south of Indian Peaks in 2001, limiting motorized use in parts of what used to be just National Forest, and providing additional areas for such favorite Boulder pursuits as mountain biking, hiking, climbing, snow shoeing, and cross country skiing. Wilderness designation only increased the numbers who used the areas’ trails. Today INSTAAR exists as one of several research islands within a hugely popular recreational use of the Rocky Mountain Great Divide country. Of course, few of today’s back county enthusiasts realize that today’s “wilderness” was the industrial park of a 60-year mining bonanza in the 19th century. While you hike, snowshoe, or ski, you can still see the ruts of wagon roads, the skeletal remains of cabins, the rusting mill machinery, many dilapidated mine entrances, and, of course, the tailings of all of those mines gone by.

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In case you are wondering how I came by all this information, well, I have been working in the Archives for decades. I came across the mining to tourism change when I processed the Emma Fairhurst Papers in the early 1980s. My first acquaintance with the Colorado Mountain Lab in Tolland was when I was looking in the Francis Ramaley Papers for exhibit material nearly 30 years ago. I soon found the connections to the Mountain Research Station and INSTAAR, since we received the photographs and papers of the Mountain Research Station and John Marr. I helped acquire and processed the CU Hiking Club records in the 1990s. Later, interns and students processed the Frank Thompson and Gayle Waldrop Collections, and I helped them compose biographical entries for those collections. Lastly, it was during several research requests that I found out about the CU Mountain Recreation Program. Assisting a research class in environmental history, I suggested the mining to tourism transition and the CU Mountain Recreation Program to INSTAAR as topics. While helping some of the students, I came across the enrollment statistics and changes in course requirements over the years during the change from Mountain Recreation to Science Lodge. Some information was gathered on many hikes and ski treks through the Colorado high country, as I meshed sport with my historical understanding. So this presentation is the product of decades of archival processing, research, editing of finding aids, and instruction, aside from my graduate history education which provided context.