![]() Another young forester sat in on that meeting. In the fall of 1919 when Carhart shared his thoughts with the regional forester in Denver. Trappers Lake is now known as the cradle of the American wilderness- land without roads or development. Forest Service official had conceived of leaving land in its natural state.1 This was a bold suggestion for such a young employee, but in 1920 Trappers Lake was designated as an area to be kept roadless and undeveloped – it remains so to this day. Carhart visited Trappers Lake, but one evening after Pennsylvania fishermen admonished him to leave the lake alone, he walked back to his campsite and had an epiphany. One of Carhart’s first assignments was to survey a road around Trappers Lake in the White River National Forest in Colorado, and to plot several home sites on the lake shore. Forest Service hired Arthur Carhart as its first full-time landscape architect. The National Park Service was created in 1916, and the Forest Service, concerned about losing acreage to national parks, sought to develop recreation areas. (More information on this topic can be found in the book “Troubled Trails” by Bob Silbernagel). These tensions escalated, ultimately resulting in the “Meeker Massacre” of 1879, after which the Utes were forcibly removed from western Colorado by federal troops. However the Homestead act of 1861 allowed white people to move into Ute Territory, creating tensions between the two groups. When Euro-Americans arrived in in this area in the 1860s most of it was occupied by Ute Indian tribes, whose rights were limited by the Matreaty, under whose terms the Ute retained only that portion of the Colorado Territory west of longitude 107° west (roughly a North South line that would pass through present day Aspen and Steamboat Springs). People are known to have visited the Flat Tops for over 8,500 years, perhaps because of its life-giving beauty. ![]()
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