Shadow on the Cinder Cone: Volcano Hike, Mexico, 1960s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Shadow on the Cinder Cone: Volcano Hike, Mexico, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

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Shadow on the Cinder Cone: Volcano Hike, Mexico, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1960–1969

AA-2026-D7D835

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Somewhere on the flank of a young volcano, a hiker has stopped to take a picture and gotten, mostly, a picture of himself. His shadow falls long and dark across the loose grey scoria, which was the whole point of coming here: this cone did not exist a generation earlier, and by the 1960s it had become the kind of natural marvel a certain type of traveller felt obliged to climb.

The yellow patches spreading across the ash are lichen, the first stubborn colonisers of rock that has barely cooled by geological standards, though cooled plenty by human ones. Below, an older forest runs unbothered to the horizon, having had the good sense to grow somewhere the mountain hadn't gotten to yet.

Nobody in 1960s hiking gear expected to be graceful on a slope like this, and the photograph confirms it: no summit, no triumphant pose, just a silhouette and a slope of loose rock that took the effort and gave back very little except the fact of having been there.

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