Fleet of Orange National Park Tour Buses, Pacific Northwest Mountains, c.1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Fleet of Orange National Park Tour Buses, Pacific Northwest Mountains, c.1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Fleet of Orange National Park Tour Buses, Pacific Northwest Mountains, c.1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1948–1962

AA-2026-C02715

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Somewhere in the mountain West — the steep granite peaks and dense conifers place this squarely in the Pacific Northwest or Canadian Rockies corridor — a convoy of vivid orange open-topped tour buses has pulled over on a summer afternoon to let its passengers mill about on a manicured lawn, which is exactly what passengers in the postwar touring era were expected to do at regular intervals. The buses, with their canopied superstructure and bright fleet livery, belong to the era when national parks ran scheduled motor coach circuits and the entire point was to be conveyed through scenery you were not expected to navigate yourself, because the scenery was too important to leave to amateurs. Women in day dresses and men in sport shirts drift between the vehicles with the collective purposefulness of people who have been told they have twelve minutes, which means some of them are taking photographs and some are looking at the mountains and some are doing neither. The whole arrangement — the matching vehicles, the organised stop, the mowed grass in the wilderness — reflects the mid-century conviction that nature was best experienced as a managed amenity, staffed and scheduled, ideally with a return to the lodge by six.

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