Review: Democracy’s Mountain: Longs Peak and the Unfulfilled Promises of America’s National Parks, by Ruth M. Alexander

Ruth Alexander’s Democracy’s Mountain is the latest addition to a field of scholarship that stresses the tension between the democratic ideals declared in the National Park Service’s 1916 enabling legislation and the system’s on-the-ground reality. In collaboration with Colorado State University’s Public Lands History Center, Alexander examines the history of Longs Peak, Rocky Mountain National Park’s (RMNP) most rugged, spectacular, and dangerous feature. She sets the study within the larger history of NPS’s management challenges, which reveals the underbelly of “America’s greatest idea”: segregation, white privilege, Indigenous displacement, an exclusive focus on middle-class experience, and the ecological damage caused by teems of visitors. Alexander draws a contrast between Rocky—established to exemplify democracy—and the peak’s history of “recreation and cultural interpretation”; the latter, she argues, “reveal[s] a repudiation and evasion” of the obligations inherent in the park’s founding (2). A close-up look at a specific set of visitors (climbers) and their...