Welcome to Gulliford's Travels   Tour Guide/Study Leader Andrew Gulliford, Ph.D.

Spring 2007

Whether it is to photograph remote Ancestral Puebloan sites on the Colorado Plateau, to hike the Lewis and Clark trail in the Bitterroot Mountains of Idaho , or to find 19 th century mining camps high in the Colorado Rockies, historian Andrew Gulliford has led individuals, families, and group tours into some of the most exciting landscapes in the American West. Based out of Durango , Colorado where he is a Professor of Southwest Studies and History at Fort Lewis College , Dr. Gulliford travels the West as a researcher, writer and photographer.

He has led tours by cruise ship on the Columbia and Snake Rivers in Washington and Oregon and by private train to national parks of the West. His Lewis and Clark tours in Montana and Idaho were by horseback and canoe, and he has also led tours to national parks by private jet for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Dr. Gulliford has worked as a study leader and expert for the Smithsonian Institution, the National Geographic Society and the Colorado Historical Society. One of his favorite tours is a four-day, three night rafting trip on Class III rapids on the Green River through the Gates of Lodore in Dinosaur National Monument . During the trip he lectures on cattle rustlers, Native Americans, wilderness preservation, and river runners including John Wesley Powell.

Andrew Gulliford 's books include Boomtown Blues: Colorado Oil Shale (winner of the Colorado Book Award), America's County Schools (with an introduction by Barbara Bush) , and Sacred Objects and Sacred Places: Preserving Tribal Traditions . He has also edited Preserving Western History , which is the first college reader on public history and historic preservation in the American West.

For the local newspaper he writes a monthly column titled “Gulliford's Travels.”

Dr. Gulliford has served on the National Register Review Board for the State of Colorado and he chairs a local historical commission. He also has a federal appointment to the Southwest Colorado Resources Advisory Council of the Bureau of Land Management.

Andrew Gulliford has received a Take Pride in America National Award from the secretary of agriculture for “outstanding contributions to America's natural and cultural resources”; the National Volunteer Award from the chief of the United States Forest Service; the Second Annual James Marston Fitch Mid-Career Award for Historic Preservation; and the Award of Merit from the American Association for State and Local History.

Dr. Gulliford's tours focus on human history in remote areas of the American West with superb opportunities for hiking, photography, silence and solitude. He carefully prepares for each tour to provide essential prehistoric and historic background information for the sites clients visit, and he prefers visits to remote locations requiring four-wheel drive access and moderately strenuous day hikes. He also donates his tours to be auctioned off as fundraisers for environmental groups and the American Red Cross. For a sample of his tours see a 2007 poster on a Green River raft trip and a 2009 poster on two lower Gunnison River canoe trips.

Dr. Gulliford is available for long excursions throughout the summer and for multi-day hikes in the Durango , Colorado and Four Corners area during the academic year. Booking availability and all lodging, meals, and transportation can be arranged through Off the Beaten Path in Missoula , Montana at 800-445-2995.

Andrew Gulliford can be reached at Gulliford_a@fortlewis.edu or see his photo website at andrewgulliford.com.

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© Winter 2007

      As a photographer and historian, I am constantly intrigued by the changing American West and the transition between the Old West, the New West and the Next West. The Old West extractive industries of mining, lumbering and grazing have given way to leisure, recreation and consumption in the same landscape. In their search for authentic experiences, tourists and new residents have helped create the Tourist West based on Western scenery and amenities such as proximity to public lands. Bernard de Voto defined the American West as a colony of the East, and indeed Exxon Corporation in the early 1980s had the gall to label its massive oil shale development the Colony Oil Shale Project (whose Vice President was William T. Slick). That Colorado project went bust.

    Just as I published a book on oil shale titled Boomtown Blues , I try to photograph and document social and environmental change in the West. I am interested in the traditions and lifeways which constitute the Old West—hunting, ranching, cowboying, mining, etc. and I am also intrigued by the New West of second homes, mountain bikers, climbers, and New Age religions in places like Crestone, Colorado with its Zen temples.

    I am fascinated by the New West where gated communities are for condos not cows, and instead of saddling up Old Paint, modern modem cowboys telecommute from their mountain retreats. For that reason, another domain name I use is newwestphotography.com.

    It's okay to take a long lens and look at transformation and leisure for incoming equity émigrés, selling out and moving West, but what about local families? In the days of extractive industries there was economic disparity and housing segregation, but at least there was housing and union wages. Now service workers get tips but no retirement. Some of my photos reflect these seismic social shifts. I travel extensively across the West, always with cameras and hiking sticks.

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    Thus the Old West of resource extraction, whether for gold, silver, grass or timber, has given way to the New West of burgeoning metropolitan cities, a huge influx of newcomers along the spine of the Rocky Mountains, and forest trails overcrowded with mountain bikers, hikers, horse and riders, and many “pilgrims” with cell phones and GPS units.

    If the Old West meant settling disputes at the end of a rope, the New West means plenty of time in court with diverse plaintiffs, including savvy sovereign Indian tribes, ready to defend themselves. The old issues are still there—-access to land, access to water, and making the most of limited resources. But new issues include how to protect sacred landscapes, where to place microwave towers, and how to keep expensive vacation homes off ridgelines.

    Increasingly in the New West, a mining and agriculture economy has been superceded by a service economy with few good paying jobs and only minimal benefits. In the Old West fortunes were made off the landscape and dollars flowed East. Now, fortunes are made elsewhere and then spent in the alpine playgrounds of Aspen , Vail, Sun Valley, Telluride, Tahoe, and Park City . From Sierra Vista , Arizona to Kalispell , Montana small western towns have become magnets for retirees and “modem cowboys” seeking to relocate close to public lands and dramatic landscapes.

    What will the 21 st century West become, and how will it connect the present with the past? How can we both learn from our history and sustain those landscapes that give our lives meaning—-those mountain vistas, those expanses of meadow and forest, canyon and prairie, those plateaus that provide in Edward Geary's words, “the proper edge of the sky?” For a more detailed analysis see the book I edited titled Preserving Western History.

    Hopefully my photographs will help explain the West to those who are moving here. For over a quarter century I have documented the West and the locals who live here and have deep roots in the landscape.

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    At the college level I teach wilderness and environmental history classes, and I try to photograph Western landscapes not only for their beauty and their scenery but also for their habitat. How are we changing the West and how has the West changed us? Having grown up on the Great Plains of eastern Colorado , I am saddened that so many counties on the high plains are emptying out of residents. The future is bleak two hundred miles east of the Continental Divide. In many ways it is the failed frontier, and I have poignant photos of the prairies.

    I am also fascinated by small towns and the resilience of small town residents. What are the ties that bind that keep people, sometimes for generations, in the same place? How does that contrast with the mobility of newcomers in and out of a boomtown like Las Vegas ? Though I have photographed throughout the United States , the West is my home and I have thirty years of black and white and color images of everything from street scenes in Lindsborg , Kansas to expensive second homes near Jackson Hole , Wyoming .

    I also have extensive photographs of archaeological sites from the Four Corners states of Colorado , Arizona , Utah , and New Mexico . Who the Ancestral Puebloan peoples were, how they survived here for a thousand years, and why they moved to the Rio Grande Valley and other places further south, intrigues me. Visiting ancient sites has resulted in thousands of photographs as I have tried to understand the Old Ones and their adaptation to this arid environment. My book Sacred Objects and Sacred Places: Preserving Tribal Traditions defines and discusses some of these issues.

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    As a historian, I guide trips all over the West for major national organizations and I have led tours by horseback and canoe on the Lewis & Clark Trail, by cruise ship up the Columbia and Snake Rivers , and by private train to Western National Parks. For two consecutive years I led trips by private jet to nine national parks in two weeks. I enjoy guiding on the Green and Yampa Rivers through Dinosaur National Monument .

    Enjoy the photos on these web pages. There are thousands of additional images to choose from. I look forward to your comments and suggestions. Feel free to contact me through Pro Photo in Durango , Colorado , and keep on searching! For each of us the West is terra incognita until we explore it on our own.

Andrew Gulliford , Durango