Moraine Park Museum and Amphitheater: Cultural Landscape Inventory, Rocky Mountain National Park, National Park Service

Yost, Cheri; Mardorf, Carrie

Within the boundary of Rocky Mountain National Park, this property sits in the northeast corner of Moraine Park, at the base of Eagle Cliff Mountain. The property can be accessed from Bear Lake Road, a little over one mile from the Rocky Mountain National Park Administration Building on US Highway 36. It sits at an elevation of roughly 8100 feet. It affords views to the west of Moraine Park and the Big Thompson River. Views of Longs Peak dominate the setting amidst native upland shrub vegetation. Important built features include the Moraine Park Museum; the amphitheater including plank and stone seating, drainage structures, the foundation of the screen, and fire pit; pedestrian circulation system including stone steps and trails; and the entry road and parking lot, including stone culverts. Important natural features include the curtain wall of pines surrounding the stage area; the ponderosa pine tree marking the intersection of the entry trails; the ponderosa pine tree within the seating area of the amphitheater; and the views of the valley and Longs Peak. Since the 1870s, Moraine Park cast a spell over visiting tourists, many of whom remained and homesteaded its quiet meadows. One of these tourist‑turned‑landowners was Imogene Greene MacPherson. Between 1905 and 1923, she built the Moraine Lodge, a collection of rustic buildings that treated guests to the Rocky Mountain experience. After her death in 1928 and with the Great Depression of the 1930s, the number of guests declined rapidly. In 1931 the National Park Service bought the property from the MacPherson estate, quickly altering the property from a rustic resort to a modern visitor facility. The site reflects an important period of National Park Service conservation philosophy‑‑ including naturalizing developed areas, building visitor facilities in a "naturalistic" design, and communicating a strong natural ethic to visitors‑‑all focused on preserving the "wildness" of National Parks. To accomplish these goals in the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps obliterated most of the Moraine Lodge, restoring the land to its "natural" state. By 1936, they converted the Moraine Lodge's Assembly Hall to a National Park Service museum, and they began to construct an amphitheater nearby. This amphitheater design followed naturalistic principles of utilizing native plants and materials and the natural features of the bowl‑shaped topography to construct a structure connected to its landscape. The strong association between the amphitheater and the newly converted museum reflected the National Park Service's evolving education and interpretation programs, which focused on formal presentations with cutting‑edge technology of lantern slides. The amphitheater is currently used for weddings and K‑12 education programs. The amphitheater's naturalistic design reflected the conservation efforts of the National Park Service during the 1930s when hand labor was readily available from the CCC. The basic tenets of this NPS rustic design was that architecture would play a subordinate role to nature, the massing of the structure would respond to the terrain, and the design would hide and blend with the naturalness of the setting. The use of native material available in the vicinity of the site was encouraged, making stone and timber the materials of choice for most parks, including Rocky Mountain National Park. The National Park Service applied this naturalistic or rustic design to buildings, by having materials blend with their natural surroundings and reflect hand-tool construction. The Moraine Park site represents one of the earliest, fully realized examples of this type of amphitheater design in the National Park Service. The Moraine Park Amphitheater's naturalistic design utilized the natural bowl site, retained and enhanced native plantings, used rustic materials such as wood and stone, included the fire circle, and focused the view across Moraine Park.

Moraine Park Museum and Amphitheater: Cultural Landscape Inventory, Rocky Mountain National Park, National Park Service

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