We’ve previously seen a 44-page 1929 Rock Island booklet advertising “personally conducted and independent all-expense tours to Colorado.” This one from two years before has fewer pages because it only describes the personally conducted tours, not the independent ones.
Click image to download an 11.7-MB PDF of this 36-page booklet.
In 1927, Rock Island offered ten-day tours that left Midwest cities every Saturday from June 25 through September 3. The tours spent one night in Colorado Springs, one in Denver, three at Estes Park (on the east side of Rocky Mountain National Park), two at Grand Lake Lodge (on the west side of Rocky Mountain Park), one in Idaho Springs, then one more in Denver before heading back east. This works out to a day-and-a-half in Colorado Springs and six days in Rocky Mountain Park, which seems imbalanced to me.
Just two of the six hotels and lodges used on the tour still exist. The night in Colorado Springs was at the Broadmoor Hotel, still the grandest hotel in Colorado. The first night in Denver was at the Albany Hotel, which opened in 1885 but went out of business in 1976 and was already quite dated in 1927.
On the east side of Rocky Mountain Park, the Estes Park Chalet was built in 1920 and though it was classified a state historic site I can’t find any evidence that it still exists. On the west side, the Grand Lake Lodge, which opened in 1920 with financial support from the Burlington Route, is still in business. I can’t find any evidence of the Idaho Springs Hotel today and presume it is long gone.
The last night was at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Denver. This hotel was built in 1926, making it practically new when these tours took place. Admittedly, it annexed an 1891 hotel called the Metropole, and it is quite possible that tour members would have been lodged in the older building. Yet the Cosmo was the only hotel on the tour where people enjoyed rooms with private baths at no extra cost. This makes me wonder why the tour didn’t spend both Denver nights at the Cosmo rather than one night at the relatively seedy Albany.
The tours cost about $148 from Omaha (about $2,600 today), $175 from Chicago (about $3,100 today), or $182 from Memphis (about $3,200 today). These prices included rail transportation with single occupancy in a lower berth, local auto transportation, hotels (double occupancy), and all meals. Two people willing to share a lower berth could save about $10 each; someone willing to accept an upper berth would save only about $4.
The booklet concludes with seven pages of letters and endorsements from people who had found one of Rock Island’s Colorado tours to be the “best vacation we have ever had.” These endorsements were needed as Rock Island was competing against a wider range of tours offered by the Union Pacific and Burlington. Both UP and Burlington continued to offer such tours until World War II, but Rock Island appears to have been pushed out of the guided tour business by the Great Depression.