Colorado Plateau badlands, American Southwest
AA-2026-E3C7AD
On the image
Someone has driven a long way to touch a rock wall, which is the entire point of field geology and the reason geologists are rarely invited to parties twice. The man in the plaid shirt leans in with the studied concentration of a person about to say the word 'stratigraphy' out loud, one hand pressed to the banded clay as if checking whether history is still warm.
His companion has taken the opposite approach to fieldwork, which is to remove his shirt, plant his hands on his hips, and let the rock formation do all the remaining work. Sunglasses on both men suggest the sun was doing something the pink bentonite hills were built to survive and human skin was not. Nobody in 1960s field geology wore sunscreen, on the theory that a suntan and a rock sample were both acceptable souvenirs.
The cliff behind them is the real subject, a wall of eroded clay banded in oxide reds and grays that took several million years to arrange itself into something two men in blue jeans could casually lean against for a snapshot. Only one of them seems aware that the outcrop will outlast the photograph, the jeans, and possibly the department that sent them there.
The historian's note
The outcrop shown is a badlands formation of banded clay and mudstone, its color variation produced by iron oxidation and shifting depositional conditions in ancient floodplain or lakebed sediments. Such formations, common across the American Southwest and interior West, were frequently the subject of university and government geological surveys throughout the twentieth century, valued for exposing long stratigraphic sequences without the need for drilling.
Field parties in the 1960s regularly combined instructional and research purposes, sending students and junior geologists to log sections, collect samples, and photograph type localities for later reference. The informality of dress seen here, along with the absence of protective equipment, reflects standard practice for the period rather than any particular institution or expedition, since safety protocols for sun exposure and site access were minimal by later standards.
Without a legible site marker or survey label, the specific formation and expedition cannot be named with certainty, though the sedimentary banding and clay composition are consistent with badlands terrain typical of Cretaceous or Tertiary-age deposits found across the Colorado Plateau region.
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Geology Field Trip at a Painted Badlands Outcrop, 1960s. 1960–1969. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-E3C7AD. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/geology-field-trip-at-a-painted-badlands-outcrop-1960s.
@misc{aaAA2026E3C7AD,
title = {Geology Field Trip at a Painted Badlands Outcrop, 1960s},
year = {1960–1969},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-E3C7AD},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/geology-field-trip-at-a-painted-badlands-outcrop-1960s}
}TY - ART TI - Geology Field Trip at a Painted Badlands Outcrop, 1960s PY - 1960–1969 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-E3C7AD UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/geology-field-trip-at-a-painted-badlands-outcrop-1960s ER -
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