Seeing America's Alps: visual media and the creation of North Cascades National Park

James Delbert Anderson

Recent scholarship has explored the concepts of nature and wilderness as changing historical constructions, as well as the ways in which photographers and filmmakers have enacted these in their craft. In this study, I apply this latter topic to a single place, asking how visual media in campaigns to create a North Cascades National Park has embodied particular conceptions of nature and human activity in it, reflected national debates and discussions over wilderness and society's relationship with nature, and impacted land disposition and management in the region. To answer these questions, I examine the visual media that park proponents used in support of a national park in the North Cascades area of Washington State, in the form of public art exhibitions, books, brochures, magazine articles, films, and other materials. I also inquire into these creations' distribution and presence in the public debate, and whether subsequent development and management decisions reflected the visual concerns of park proponents and the aesthetic implications of their campaign material. I argue that visual media had tangible consequences, both furthering the establishment of North Cascades National Park and influencing the development and management decisions of the Park Service, the Forest Service, and private actors. Park proponents in the early twentieth century, rooted in traditions of mountaineering, the national tourism movement, and development-intensive national parks, furthered tourist development in the Lake Chelan and Mount Baker areas. In the 1950s and 1960s, conservationists adhering to ideologies of wilderness preservation spearheaded a successful campaign to create a North Cascades National Park. After establishment, conflict arose when the activities of the Park Service and park stakeholders transgressed the aesthetic implications of the definitions of nature and human experience in nature that park advocates had advanced during the campaign. My study sheds light on the ways in which park advocates have used visual media to advance park campaigns, and how visual understandings of nature and experience of nature has influenced management decisions. My study also reveals visual media as an influential terrain on which park advocates and others enact and contest ideas about nature and society's place in it.

Seeing America's Alps: visual media and the creation of North Cascades National Park

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