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Book Review
| Ski Style: Sport and Culture in the Rockies. By Annie Gilbert Coleman. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. xii + 299 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.
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| Ski Style takes the story of skiing and examines its historical and cultural development as a major tourism industry. The book fits squarely within the latest literature by Hal Rothman, David Wrobel, Patrick Long, and Marguerite Shaffer while also making clear that skiing is an athletic pursuit that is sheer fun. General readers of western history will find an informed narrative while scholars will see another detailed examination of a western region that securely links economic and cultural developments. |
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Most people visiting Aspen or Breckenridge recognize that mining once shaped these towns while Steamboat Springs or Durango had strong ranching and farming influences. Yet, as Coleman lays out in her book, the switch from these extractive industries to the ski industry was neither immediate nor expected. Ski Style documents this transformation. |
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Coleman focuses her study on three well-known ski areas, Aspen, Vail, and Steamboat Springs. Each has good documentary collections, and they have instant name recognition. Extensive oral history interviews with former ski developers sets this book apart and brings a strong human dimension. Coleman made a calculated decision not to organize her book by case studies. Such an arrangement would have been historically repetitious, but more importantly, it would have de-emphasized her central argument. Coleman believes that the present identity of the Rocky Mountains has become defined largely by skiing. Yet she understands that this industry, while economically powerful and in many ways sanitized and impersonal, is not the sole arbiter of this image. Instead, Coleman makes the important contribution of describing how ski enthusiasts, local ski clubs, World War II veterans, residents of former mining and ranching towns, corporate executives, and more all shaped and reshaped the resorts skiers visit today. |
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Ski Style looks at the different groups of people who have skied in the Colorado Rockies and shaped the experience of skiing. One group, women, first adopted skiing as a way to get around in remote mountain towns. Coleman then charts how women became associated more for their fashion sense in ski wear and less for their athletic prowess. Instead, through advertising, promoters gave skiing a masculine edge. Coleman is careful to point out that women have regained the sport as an athletic experience with the popularity of women snowboarders. Underlying this and other examples, Coleman argues that the different groups are not simple victims of how the corporate world defined skiing. Instead, skiing has embraced and been shaped by multiple identities and experiences. |
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Environmental historians will find Coleman's history focused on the changing regulatory scene between the United States Forest Service and resort developers. Not surprisingly, the Forest Service went from an agency that readily approved permits to cut down trees for ski runs to its present-day stance of effectively blocking new resort development. However, Coleman gives little information on specific environmental consequences from skiing. There are few details about soil erosion from extensive tree cutting or air and water quality around these large resorts largely serviced by smog-producing automobiles. This history is directed toward understanding the people and the sport of skiing, and at this, it makes a worthy contribution. |
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Joan Zenzen is a public historian based in Maryland who writes about national parks. She is currently writing the administrative history of Minute Man National Historical Park. |
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