Badlands of the American West
AA-2026-348B5F
On the image
Someone pulled the car off the road because a sign or a guidebook used the word "scenic," and here was the proof: a fold of striped, treeless hills that had been quietly falling apart for a few million years before anyone thought to bring a camera. The banding in the clay was the whole point, though nobody stopping here in the 1950s could have said which mineral made which color, only that it looked like something worth using a slide on.
A family vacation of this era ran on the assumption that a view earned by driving far enough deserved to be preserved and then endured again later, projected on a bedsheet for relatives who had not driven anywhere. The sagebrush scattered across the slope was doing the actual hard work of the scene, holding on in dirt too poor and too dry for anything else, while the tourist stood a polite distance away admiring erosion as scenery rather than as the slow verdict it actually was.
No road, no fence, no marker interrupts the hills, which was probably the appeal — a piece of the country old enough and empty enough to make a two-week vacation feel appropriately small.
The historian's note
The exposed, multicolored strata typical of badland formations in the interior American West result from differential erosion of soft shale, clay, and volcanic ash layers, a process that has been ongoing since the sediments were deposited tens of millions of years ago. Such terrain is common across the high desert basins of Wyoming, Utah, and the Dakotas, where postwar highway travel brought increasing numbers of automobile tourists to scenic overlooks previously seen mainly by ranchers, surveyors, and rail crews.
The 1950s marked a boom in domestic road-trip tourism in the United States, driven by improved highways, affordable automobiles, and the spread of color slide photography as a way to document travel. Scenic geological formations like this one, though rarely tied to a single named landmark, were frequently photographed as representative images of the western landscape's scale and age.
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Eroded Badlands Overlook, American West, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-348B5F. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/eroded-badlands-overlook-american-west-1950s.
@misc{aaAA2026348B5F,
title = {Eroded Badlands Overlook, American West, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-348B5F},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/eroded-badlands-overlook-american-west-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Eroded Badlands Overlook, American West, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-348B5F UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/eroded-badlands-overlook-american-west-1950s ER -
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