Geology Field Party on an Eroded Bluff, 1960s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Geology Field Party on an Eroded Bluff, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

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Geology Field Party on an Eroded Bluff, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1960–1969

AA-2026-366058

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Six men in white shirts and dark jeans work their way up a bare, slumping hillside, which is the standard uniform of amateur science in the 1960s: dress like you mean business, then climb something no reasonable person would climb in street shoes. One man holds a graduated staff upright against the slope, the tool of choice for measuring rock strata, a job that requires total confidence that the numbers on a stick matter more than the footing underneath you.

Two of the group wear hard hats, which suggests someone in charge had read a safety memo, and four do not, which suggests the memo did not reach everyone equally. The exposed clay and gravel bank has the raw, freshly cut look of a quarry or borrow pit, the kind of scar the earth wears when it has been mined for road fill or building material and then left for people with clipboards to study.

Everyone in the photograph is climbing in the same direction, toward whatever layer or feature justified the trip, with the unhurried seriousness of men who believe the hillside owes them an answer. Bare winter trees along the ridge date the season, not the ambition, which appears to be exactly what it looks like: mapping a cutbank one careful foothold at a time.

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