| dc.description.abstract | “Becoming America’s Ski City” explores how skiers remolded the political, economic,
cultural, and environmental landscape of Utah’s Wasatch Front, transforming the region’s valley
cities and mountain forests into a more unified yet contested space over the course of the
twentieth century. This process of incorporation centered on Salt Lake City. In particular, the
exigencies and experiences of skiing pushed Salt Lake Citians not only to recognize the
ecological ties between slope and city but also to build new connections. These links included
watershed regulations, land purchases, avalanche management, investment, federal boosterism,
marketing campaigns, urban planning, wilderness legislation, and the Olympic movement.
Skiing also represented a larger attempt to Americanize Utah and its predominantly Mormon
population. By shifting attention away from popular images of the state as an insular desert,
boosters attempted to build a stronger economy rooted in tourism that placed Utah more firmly
within mainstream American culture. Their partial success points to the ways in which skiing
eroded boundaries between city and periphery as well as state and nation. This process sheds
light on the blurred dichotomies that defined modern American life within and beyond Utah—
work and leisure, city and wilderness, region and nation—and the material and social changes
that they molded. | en_US |
