| Construction of the Trail Ridge Road across Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park began in 1929. The road was opened to traffic in 1932, and the supplementary work of guardwalls, parking areas, surfacing, and landscaping was fininshed by 1941. The road both revealed and helped establish a specific understanding of the role of the national park as a culturally defined space. A review of literature covering the interpretation of landscape, the West, and the National Park Service supports an examination of Trail Ridge Road and the historic elements of its design and construction as symbolic landscape. The Park Service employed a deliberate program of development heavily influenced by the profession of landscape architecture, a specific narrative of national identity, and the ascendance of motor tourism, resulting in the case of Trail Ridge Road as a carefully produced experience inherently complicit with the essentialization of nature as scenery, and dependent upon the recognition of the park as a symbolic national space. |
