Alpine Botanizing, High Mountain Meadow, 1960s

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Alpine Botanizing, High Mountain Meadow, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

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Alpine Botanizing, High Mountain Meadow, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1960–1969

AA-2026-A9FD18

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Somewhere above the treeline, on a steep-grassed alpine slope with a glacier-scarred rock face filling the horizon, two people have dropped to their knees to examine something in the thin turf. This was the 1960s gesture of the serious outdoorsperson: you didn't just walk through a mountain meadow, you stopped and crouched over it, because the decade had decided that the difference between a hiker and a naturalist was whether you ever got your knees dirty.

The complete absorption of both figures — heads down, faces six inches from the ground, every thought apparently devoted to whatever grows this far up a mountain — has the quality of a shared conviction. They were either identifying an alpine wildflower or looking for something they dropped, and in 1960s outdoor culture both activities received identical treatment: total, earnest commitment.

The scale of the mountain wall behind them makes the whole enterprise look appropriately small against the geology that produced it, which is probably the point any mountain was trying to make, and which hikers in every decade have continued to miss.

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