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Sunday, September 19, 1999
Outdoor Activities have Evolved into High-tech Pastimes
By Rick Nathanson
Journal Staff Writer
Fast-moving Americans have always had a love affair with their cars. Now they are also sweet on $1,000 mountain bikes, $100 running shoes and $300 parabolic snow skis.
You can still go outdoors and work out cheap: Buy a $15 basketball and dribble it to a nearby schoolyard.
But since the mass-produced auto, Americans have taken recreation to new technological heights and expanded their playgrounds.
Early leisure seekers would be overwhelmed by the choices available today for outdoor recreation. In addition to organized team sports, there are more individual pursuits -- everything from jogging to hot-air ballooning and hang gliding to white-water rafting.
And most of them involve some level of technology.
Urban flight
Through the century, the population shift from rural to urban created the phenomenon of "doorstep recreation," activities that people can engage in practically right outside their own homes, said Fred Perez, director of recreational services at the University of New Mexico.
These activities include in-line skating, walking, bicycling or heading to the neighborhood health club.
"We do have highways and cars, but recreation doesn't necessarily mean going somewhere," Perez said. "Sometimes it means just stepping outside your door." The automobile may have provided individual mobility, "but it has also created lifestyles of hurry and stress," he said.
Perez takes "recreation" literally to mean "re-create" with leisure activities that "reduce stress and renew our spirit and sense of self apart from our jobs," which is how most of us define ourselves, he said.
Clothing and image have become integral to outdoor recreation, said Art Gardenswartz, owner of Sportz Outdoor and Go Golf. Gardenswartz, whose family has been in the recreation and sporting goods business for 45 years, said different activities were given a boost as cultural and pop icons began engaging in them.
Golf and related clothing got a boost in the late 1950s partly in response to President Eisenhower, who was frequently photographed hitting the links, Gardenswartz said.
In the late 1960s, exercise guru Ken Cooper began talking about exercise and its relationship to health and longevity. He coined the term "aerobics," Gardenswartz said, which took on true meaning when marathon runner Frank Shorter won a gold medal at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, the first American to win the event since 1908.
Not surprisingly, Gardenswartz said, people began jogging and signing up for Jazzercise and other aerobic-type workout classes. Jogging shoes, shorts and sweat suits became a fashion statement.
The 1970s also saw a renewed interest in tennis as colorful characters such as Chris Evert, Billie Jean King, John Newcombe and Bjorn Borg took to the courts.
Health clubs also proliferated during that decade. Many were located in urban areas where space constraints made racquetball courts ideally suited.
As interest in a particular activity grew, new high-tech equipment soon followed -- and sometimes it morphed into a new sport.
The increased popularity of road cycling and racing spun off into an increased interest in off-road bicycling. By 1985, mountain bicycles accounted for 80 percent of all bike sales, Gardenswartz said.
Meanwhile, shoe companies began developing high-tech footwear for specific sports and athletic activities in the '70s. When Bo Jackson played professional football and baseball in the late-'80s, companies began marketing cross-training shoes, now a standard.
Hot-air ballooning, a novelty recreation in New Mexico in the early years, began to show signs of something bigger in 1972, when 13 balloons launched one morning from the parking lot of Coronado Center. The rally was a 50th anniversary promotion for KOB-AM radio. Surprisingly, 20,000 people showed up to watch.
Rally organizers decided to repeat the event the following year, attracting even more balloonists and spectators. Now, Albuquerque is considered the Balloon Capital of the World, and last year's fiesta attracted 850 balloonists and more than 1 million spectators.
Another recent phenomenon in outdoor recreation began about 1980, when two hockey-playing Minnesota brothers started experimenting with various in-line skate designs. Interest was limited geographically for many years, but by 1995 in-line skates had taken over. They now account for more than 90 percent of the market, while traditional skates with the two-by-two wheel arrangement are less than 10 percent, according to a spokesman for the Rollerblade company.
Transit expands reach
The mobility offered by the automobile also allowed people to travel to remote places -- areas previously limited to those with the stamina and time to trek across great distances.
Consequently, the automobile helped popularize and spread the national park system, made people aware of other public lands and created enormous opportunities for people to enjoy scenery and learn about natural history, said National Park Service historian Richard Sellars.
Sellars, author of "Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History" (Yale University Press, 1977), said there were six national parks and monuments, none in New Mexico, at the turn of the century. When the National Park Service was created in 1916 there were 15, including three in New Mexico -- El Morro, Chaco Canyon and Gran Quivira. The number grew to 380 national parks and monuments, 13 of them in the state.
In 1933, the New Mexico State Parks Commission was established and shortly thereafter named the Santa Fe River and Hyde Memorial Park, both in Santa Fe, and Bottomless Lakes southeast of Roswell, as the first state parks.
The New MexicoParks and Recreation Division now oversees 31 state parks with a combined 267,000 acres of land and water. The largest of them is Elephant Butte Lake, visited by an estimated 1.8 million people annually.
As new roads were built through federal and state lands, they attracted more visitors with more diverse interests. Furthermore, the roads got people ever closer to the seldom-explored backcountry terrain. The automobile also introduced people to car camping. By the 1940s and '50s, travel trailers and recreational vehicles brought camping to a new comfort level.
Also, the sale of hunting and fishing licenses began to generate income for state coffers. The first report issued by the New Mexico Game and Fish warden, covering 1909-1911, showed that licenses brought in about $7,700, said Marty Frentzel, editor of New Mexico Wildlife, a publication of the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish. License fees at the time ranged from $1 to $25.
Today, there are numerous hunting and fishing categories. Fees range from about $24 for a resident fishing license, to more than $3,000 for a nonresident license to hunt bighorn sheep. Frentzel said the sale of licenses generates about $8 million a year.
He estimated about 100,000 people purchase a New Mexico hunting license annually, and 250,000 buy a fishing license.
Let it snow
Outdoor winter recreation to many people means skiing. The industry generated nearly $294 million in economic impact for the state during the 1997-98 season, the last for which statistics are available, said Steve Lewis, spokesman for Ski New Mexico.
Credit Bob Nordhaus for a snow-filled vision of New Mexico's future. Nordhaus, 89, organized the Albuquerque ski club in 1936. The group of 15 to 20 skiers spearheaded a drive to have the U.S. Forest Service clear slopes at La Madera, the state's first downhill ski area. It later became part of the Sandia Peak Ski Area.
After World War II, an explosion on the slopes occurred as ski areas around the state were built, most notably Taos Ski Area in 1956.
Taos integrated condos and retail shops into its ski resort concept, as envisioned by Ernie Blake, the founder of Taos Ski Valley. That made it the first winter ski area destination in New Mexico, Chris Stagg, vice president of marketing at Taos. Other ski areas followed that model in the 1960s and '70s.
Ski equipment has come a long way, too, starting with the skis themselves, which used to be "slats of wood with pine pitch on the bottoms and strapped to a shoe or boot with leather wraps," Stagg said.
Snowboards debuted on the slopes in the late '70s but weren't commonly seen in New Mexico ski areas until about 1985. Shape skis, also called parabolics, were introduced about 1995 and within two years had all but replaced the traditional alpine ski design.
Technology also influenced fashion on the slopes, Stagg said.
Now, winter recreational clothing incorporates high-tech materials such as Gortex and polypropylene.
And with recreation and sporting equipment, "technology is all important," Gardenswartz said. "Form follows function. If something works, it will eventually be adopted by fashion."
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