AA-2026-7C51F2
On the image
An afternoon visitor to Yellowstone National Park stands in a meadow dotted with late-spring wildflowers and watches a geyser erupt across the valley, white steam and boiling water rising in a column that will collapse within minutes. In the 1950s, this was a pilgrimage Americans made by automobile, often in family groups, to witness a natural phenomenon that performed on schedule and cost nothing but gas and a motel room. The coniferous forest rises behind in an unbroken wall, the scale of the park overwhelming by design—the geothermal features made trivial by distance and surrounded by ancient trees, a landscape arrangement that suggested America contained vastnesses still beyond the reach of improvement. The eruption, brief and repeatable, offered the peculiar satisfaction of a natural wonder that had been studied, timed, and rendered predictable.
The historian's note
Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone National Park erupts on a schedule of approximately 60 to 110 minutes between eruptions, a regularity that made it the most visited and photographed feature in the park by the 1950s. The meadow and viewing areas accessible by foot from the Old Faithful complex allowed visitors to observe eruptions from varying distances and angles without guides. The color saturation and film stock are consistent with Kodachrome transparency film from the mid-1950s, the material tourists brought to capture the spectacle. Yellowstone, established in 1872, had become a mandatory destination for American family tourism by the postwar era, with visitation climbing from roughly 500,000 annually in 1950 to over 1 million by 1965.
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Geothermal Steam at Old Faithful, Yellowstone, 1950s. 1950–1960. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-7C51F2. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/geothermal-steam-at-old-faithful-yellowstone-1950s.
@misc{aaAA20267C51F2,
title = {Geothermal Steam at Old Faithful, Yellowstone, 1950s},
year = {1950–1960},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-7C51F2},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/geothermal-steam-at-old-faithful-yellowstone-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Geothermal Steam at Old Faithful, Yellowstone, 1950s PY - 1950–1960 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-7C51F2 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/geothermal-steam-at-old-faithful-yellowstone-1950s ER -
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