Autumn Boreal Hillside, Canadian Shield or Northern Rockies, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Autumn Boreal Hillside, Canadian Shield or Northern Rockies, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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1950s

Autumn Boreal Hillside, Canadian Shield or Northern Rockies, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-B9CFB7

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Somebody stopped the car — or the train, or the bush plane — looked out at a hillside going gold in early fall, and decided this was worth a frame of color film. In the 1950s that was not a casual decision; color slide film cost real money and the results came back weeks later from a lab in a distant city, by which point you had mostly forgotten what you were trying to capture. The exposed granite shelves pushing through the spruce and birch mark this as Canadian Shield or the northern fringe of the Rockies, country where the bedrock is never far from the surface and the trees know it.

The aspens and birch are turning that particular flat yellow that reads on mid-century Kodachrome as almost electric, while the spruce stays its obligatory dark green, indifferent to the season. The slope is large enough and steep enough that no one has logged it or farmed it, which in the 1950s simply meant it was the kind of country you drove through on the way to somewhere else.

Whoever took this shot was recording the trip more than the landscape — the slightly tilted frame and the motion blur at the edges suggest a window that was only briefly open. They wanted proof they had been somewhere big and wild. The hillside has not noticed.

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