American West badlands
AA-2026-473251
On the image
Someone stopped the car here because the hillsides had gone the color of a dirty bedsheet, which in badlands country means bentonite clay, a substance that turns to grease when wet and to talcum powder when dry, and which nobody in the 1950s had yet found a profitable use for beyond confusing tourists. The dark boulders scattered across the foreground are volcanic rock, weathered out of a harder layer above and left behind while the softer clay eroded around them, a process that takes about ten thousand years and looks, to the casual visitor, exactly like a bulldozer got here first.
The person behind the camera was almost certainly not a geologist, just someone with a new color slide film and a conviction that the landscape owed them a postcard. That conviction was correct. The scene required no staging, no waiting for better light, and no cooperation from anyone, which made it, by the standards of 1950s road-trip photography, an unusually reliable subject.
The historian's note
The terrain shown is a badlands formation characteristic of the western United States, where soft sedimentary clays, often bentonite derived from weathered volcanic ash, erode into rounded, banded hills largely free of vegetation. Such formations are common across the northern Rocky Mountain states, including parts of Wyoming and Montana, where they were of practical interest during the 1950s to both petroleum geologists mapping exposed strata and to the growing number of Americans touring the West by automobile on the newly expanding highway system.
The scattered dark boulders visible across the slope are resistant volcanic or igneous rock left as a lag deposit after the surrounding softer clay eroded away, a common feature in these landscapes and one that made them both scientifically legible and photogenic to postwar travelers equipped with color slide film.
No specific location, name, or survey is documented with this scene; it is representative of the badlands terrain widely photographed by amateur travelers exploring the American West during the decade.
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Eroded Clay Badlands with Volcanic Boulder Field, American West, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-473251. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/eroded-clay-badlands-with-volcanic-boulder-field-american-west-1950s.
@misc{aaAA2026473251,
title = {Eroded Clay Badlands with Volcanic Boulder Field, American West, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-473251},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/eroded-clay-badlands-with-volcanic-boulder-field-american-west-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Eroded Clay Badlands with Volcanic Boulder Field, American West, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-473251 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/eroded-clay-badlands-with-volcanic-boulder-field-american-west-1950s ER -
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