Hiker in Arizona Canyon Wash, 2002

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Hiker in Arizona Canyon Wash, 2002 — Archive & Atlas

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Hiker in Arizona Canyon Wash, 2002 — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 2002

AA-2026-B94321

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Standing in the gravel bed of a desert canyon wash in 2002, a woman in a blue jacket poses for the camera with the practiced ease of someone who has been doing this at every scenic stop for the past two hours. The canyon walls rise on both sides in the layered volcanic and sedimentary rock characteristic of central Arizona's backcountry — the kind of geology that took two hundred million years to arrange itself and will be described in the trip journal as 'really big rocks.'

The cottonwoods behind her have gone to fall yellow, which narrows the visit to October or November, when Arizona canyon country briefly resembles somewhere with seasons. She carries binoculars or a camera around her neck, the universal signal of a person who came prepared to document everything and will return home with four hundred pictures of cliffs.

What the scene records without meaning to is the particular leisure culture of the early 2000s — the fleece jacket, the gravel bar, the solo woman hiker comfortable enough in remote desert terrain to stop and smile — a quiet piece of social progress that would have surprised an earlier generation and that this one treated as entirely unremarkable.

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