Eroded Badlands and Snow-Capped Range, American West, 1930s

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Eroded Badlands and Snow-Capped Range, American West, 1930s — Archive & Atlas

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Eroded Badlands and Snow-Capped Range, American West, 1930s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-C3466B

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Sometime in the 1930s, someone looked out over a landscape so thoroughly scoured by geology that it seemed to be finishing what it started, the pale clay badlands in the foreground stripped down to bare striations by a few million years of wind and water that had no particular schedule to keep. The survey or recreational aerial vantage reveals a classic Basin and Range or high-plateau terrain — the kind of arid, dramatically eroded country that the American West produced in quantity and that the Depression era's federally funded survey missions and early recreational pilots were just beginning to document systematically. A river thread barely survives at the canyon floor, proof that water carved all of this and then mostly left. Behind the badlands, a higher forested plateau steps up toward a snow-capped mountain range that belongs to a different climate entirely, which is the American West's standard trick of stacking three ecosystems into one view. The people who lived near this landscape in the 1930s regarded it as wasteland; the people who came after them put it on a postcard.

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