Ruth M. Alexander is professor of history emerita at Colorado State University. She specializes in the history of women, race, society, and politics in the United States, American environmental history, and the history of national parks. Alexander has conducted research for Rocky Mountain National Park, Shenandoah National Park, Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, and Scotts Bluff National Monument. She has written or edited two other books, and her articles, essays, and book chapters have appeared in several publications.
SunLit: Tell us this book’s backstory. What inspired you to write it? Where did the story/theme originate?
Alexander: “Democracy’s Mountain” originated from my interest in probing the contradictions embedded in our national parks’ history. Our national parks are wonderful yet highly problematic. By law national parks exist to promote both visitor enjoyment and resource preservation, yet it’s only in recent decades that the National Park Service (NPS) has shifted from prioritizing visitation (and compromising ecological integrity) to trying to align the promises of enjoyment and preservation.
Many park visitors assume that national parks are pockets of “untouched wilderness,” yet the parks are located on what were once Indigenous homelands and they have long been places of intensive management and environmental disruption. National parks are public lands belonging to all people of the United States, yet they have persistently erased and denied Indigenous connections while functioning as “playgrounds” for moneyed white Americans.
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How and why did our national parks become sites of such contradiction, and what is their standing today?
I wanted to grapple with these questions but at the local level. Rocky Mountain National Park, one of the “crown jewels” of the NPS, is practically in my backyard and Longs Peak is the park’s most iconic mountain. A rich body of textual and visual sources on Longs and Rocky invited (and challenged) me to craft a narrative about promise and contradiction in our national parks told through the lives of Longs climbers’ and the rangers tasked with managing alpine adventurers and Rocky’s mountain environment. I quickly learned that the people whose stories I wanted to tell were complex figures, engaging with promise and contradiction in ways that were sometimes predictable, at other times unexpected.
SunLit: Place this excerpt in context. How does it fit into the book as a whole? Why did you select it?
Alexander: This excerpt is from Chapter Six, in which I focus on the history of climbing on Longs and the history of Rocky and the NPS during the 1960s. This was a decade of dramatic change in the nation, as Americans rose to challenge a myriad of flaws and hypocrisies: poverty amidst plenty; constraints on liberty in a democracy; rich natural resources despoiled by “industrial progress”; interventions abroad that hastened autocracy not liberation.
The nation’s citizens demanded a reckoning. It’s easy to think that the unrest unfolding in cities, the rural South, and university campuses had no impact on national parks. On Longs, the climbers who opened the peak’s forbidding Diamond Wall in 1960 seemed untouched by the politics of the day. And yet, their ambitions and climbing achievements were shaped by the politics and culture of the day. So too, over the decade, climbers and park managers would face discomfiting questions about their roles in contributing to environmental harm and racial privilege.
SunLit: Tell us about creating this book. What influences and/or experiences informed the project before you sat down to write?
Alexander: Well, I grew up in Manhattan’s East Harlem. I was exposed to the realities of racial, ethnic, class, and gender inequality at an early age, as well as to the persistent and hopeful demands for change. I saw that the privileged and disadvantaged had distinctly different experiences of the physical environment, especially in terms of housing quality and access to safe, unpolluted, unpaved, greenspace.
“Democracy’s Mountain: Longs Peak and the Unfulfilled Promises of America’s National Parks”
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I moved out of NYC as a young adult, established a home and career in Fort Collins, Colorado, in my 30s, and gradually became an avid outdoorsperson. I knew I was enriched by immersion in natural settings protected from environmental degradation and industrial development, yet I also knew I had gained opportunities for hiking, backcountry skiing, and cycling that were unavailable to lots and lots of people.
And as I acquired expertise in environmental history and the history of national parks, I realized that our parks were not “places apart” from the nation but, rather, mirrored our nation’s most important social and environmental challenges.
SunLit: What did the process of writing this book add to your knowledge and understanding of your craft and/or the subject matter?
Alexander: As a writer, I learned a lot about patience. I write slowly and deliberately and continually rewrite as I go along. I wanted to hurry things along, but speed never happened. In writing “Democracy’s Mountain” I also taught myself to ignore self-doubt and cultivate faith in my ability to write a book that effectively balanced historical accuracy with a compelling narrative arc and conceptual integrity.
I’m not a rock climber. I had to learn about the history of climbing on Longs Peak, in Rocky, and in other parts of Colorado and the United States. I had to learn about rock climbing technique and national parks’ management of climbing. I had to learn to describe historic climbs, accidents, and rescues in terms comprehensible and meaningful to a range of readers, some with loads of climbing experience, others with none.
I learned to think across multiple scales of inquiry simultaneously, always asking myself how the stories and dynamics of climbers and rangers on a single peak in one national park conveyed the history of a nation.
SunLit: What were the biggest challenges you faced in writing this book?
Alexander: I wrote most of this book during the COVID-19 pandemic. For many months I could not visit archives to look at hardcopy sources. I was able to access large amounts of valuable archival material online, but there are some non-digitized folders in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. related to race and race relations in the national parks that I would have loved to see. A historian’s work is never done, the sources are never exhausted, the story is never fully told, so I or another historian may someday track down this promising material.
I had to find a way to deal with silences and gaps in evidence. Histories of neglect and inequality (environmental and societal) are often not fully recorded. I had to find ways through practices of omission and inattention, looking for evidence that allowed me to read between the lines, speculate responsibly, and draw connections between the local and the national.
SunLit: What’s the most important thing – a theme, lesson, emotion or realization — that readers should take from this book?
Alexander: Core theme: The history of Long’s has its own distinct story and cast of characters, but it nonetheless mirrors the national park system and the nation. Emotions: humility, hope, exhilaration. Humility in acknowledging our national parks’ flawed fulfillment of their great promises; Americans’ great store of hope and investment in a better future, however daunting the path; exhilaration as an expression of humans’ fundamental impulse to seek out challenge and wonder.
SunLit: Walk us through your writing process: Where and how do you write?
Alexander: I write mostly at home, in a lovely room that I’ve set up as my study. It gets warm natural light, especially in the mornings. I write with diligence, knowing that I never fully know what I want to say until I’ve written, rewritten, and reworked my ideas on the page many times. I outline each chapter, but in a rough fashion. In contrast, I write chapter introductions with great care, as they serve as maps to the writing that follows.
In the summer, I walk, hike, or get in a bike ride before sitting down to write. In the winter months, I write before taking a break to exercise. Especially while riding I spend a lot of time thinking creatively and productively about writing.
I was fortunate in writing this book to have a writing buddy, my colleague and friend Jared Orsi. He was writing a book about the history of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, while I was writing “Democracy’s Mountain.” We met every two weeks for two years, though COVID-19 forced us to move our meetings online for quite a while.
We discussed sources, concepts, interpretation, and narrative style, while also humoring one another and exchanging stories about our families. We critiqued one another’s chapters and gave one another advice about finding photos, meeting deadlines, and working with our editors. Meeting every two weeks with Jared made writing more fun, though it remained hard work.
SunLit: Tell us about your next project.
Alexander: I’m thinking of writing something comparative and transnational about national parks, looking at the history of an individual park in two or three countries (Costa Rica, Mexico, and the United States, perhaps) and then exploring similarities and differences in how the parks have been valued, used, and managed in both cultural and environmental terms.
A few more quick questions
SunLit: Which do you enjoy more as you work on a book – writing or editing?
Alexander: I can’t separate the two. I write and edit simultaneously and continuously, moving from one section of a chapter to the next.
SunLit: What’s the first piece of writing – at any age – that you remember being proud of?
Alexander: I recall my father praising a paper (film criticism) I wrote in college and telling me I should consider becoming an arts critic. I didn’t follow that precise path, but my father’s praise meant a lot to me.
SunLit: What three writers, from any era, would you invite over for a great discussion about literature and writing?
Alexander: George Elliott, Wallace Stevens, Louise Ehrdich.
SunLit: What does the current collection of books on your home shelves tell visitors about you?
Alexander: I’ve got wide-ranging interests in American history, modern world history and politics, fiction, poetry, outdoor recreation, the environment, religion.
SunLit: Soundtrack or silence? What’s the audio background that helps you write?
Alexander: I don’t usually listen to music while writing though occasionally I put on some classical music or jazz. Part-way through writing this book I listened to recordings of sound birds. They were lovely, uplifting, not too distracting.
SunLit: What music do you listen to for sheer enjoyment?
Alexander: Classical, Latin, rock, folk, jazz. An eclectic array.
SunLit: What event, and at what age, convinced you that you wanted to be a writer?
Alexander: My father was a playwright and songwriter. I grew up thinking writing was very important, a way to know the world and give expression to one’s soul. I read lots of modern fiction in high school about protagonists searching for identity and meaning.
I started thinking of myself as a writer in high school, though I can’t recall a particular moment or event out of which my identity as a nonfiction writer emerged.
SunLit: Greatest writing fear?
Alexander: Losing my ability to navigate, to chart a path amidst the shards of evidence and half-told stories.
SunLit: Greatest writing satisfaction?
Alexander: Getting stimulating questions and interesting or challenging feedback from readers or those who’ve heard me speak about my writing.