Alpine Ridge and Cirque Lake, Mount Katahdin, Maine, 1960s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Alpine Ridge and Cirque Lake, Mount Katahdin, Maine, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

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Alpine Ridge and Cirque Lake, Mount Katahdin, Maine, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1960–1969

AA-2026-78F48F

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Someone stood on a ridge of loose talus above treeline and took a photograph of a mountain doing exactly what mountains do, which is nothing, slowly, for a very long time. The bare summit ahead shows the characteristic scars of a glacier that left twelve thousand years ago and never sent so much as a postcard explaining itself, while the forested cirque below holds a small lake that exists purely because the ice, on its way out, forgot to fill in the hole.

In the 1960s this was the kind of view a hiker earned by ignoring several posted warnings about weather above treeline, on the theory that a person in good boots was exempt from the laws of alpine physics. The krummholz and scrub below the ridge mark the exact elevation where trees gave up arguing with the wind and started growing sideways instead, a fact the hiker likely noted, photographed, and then forgot by dinner.

Nobody in 1965 needed a caption to know this was Katahdin; they just needed a lungful of air and a working camera. The mountain, for its part, has never once needed either.

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