This 1929 booklet calls the San Isabel National Forest “Colorado’s newest playground.” But it was hardly new, as it was created in 1902 by Theodore Roosevelt and became one of scores of forests that originally were managed for cattle grazing and some timber cutting.
Click image to download a 6.0-MB PDF of this 20-page booklet.
After 1916, however, the Forest Service felt threatened by the creation of the National Park Service, a feeling that was justified by the fact that many national parks ended up being carved out of national forests. In order to show that national forests could be recreation areas too, in 1919 the agency hired landscape architect Arthur Carhart to help design recreation facilities. He started in the San Isabel National Forest, where he designed the agency’s first recreational campgrounds and a road network to connect those campgrounds.
These campgrounds proved to be extraordinarily popular. Carhart is also known to be the first Forest Service employee to suggest the idea of designating certain lands as wilderness, a proposal he made to his boss, Aldo Leopold. Although a lack of funding for recreation led Carhart to leave the Forest Service in 1922, by 1929, when this booklet was published, the San Isabel was one of the most popular recreation forests in Colorado.
This booklet points out that the national forests are not run using the rigid regulations enforced on the national parks. It notes, for example, that people can get permits to cut timber and build summer cottages and hunting and fishing regulations are “very liberal.” This remains true today: hunting is forbidden in the national parks, where people can be heavily fined for simply stepping off of trails, while in national forests people are free to camp and hike anywhere that isn’t specifically designated to forbid such activities.
No one seems to know exactly who the San Isabel National Forest was named for. There was an early mining and ranching community named for San Isabel Creek that had a San Isabel Post Office established in 1872. San Isabel is Spanish for Saint Elizabeth, and the Catholic Church has canonized at least six St. Elizabeths, including the mother of St. John the Baptist, a Portuguese queen, a Hungarian princess, and even an American nun. A St. Elizabeth Catholic church in North Carolina was named after St. John’s mother while one in Missouri was named for the Hungarian princess. While St. John’s mother seems the most likely inspiration for San Isabel Creek, it could also be that the creek was named by an explorer from Missouri.
For the Missouri Pacific, the primary reason to promote the San Isabel National Forest was that it was the closest forest to Pueblo, the railroad’s terminus in Colorado. Unlike other Colorado national forests, when tend to be big blocks of land, the San Isabel consists of several little strings of land located miles apart from one another. It is one of the least-used national forests in Colorado for recreation today, yet it contains 36 percent of the fourteeners, the Colorado mountain peaks that are higher than 14,000 feet in elevation. Reading about it in this booklet and in more recent publications, I am tempted to go visit it soon.