early 1950s
AA-2026-7E8957
On the image
Sometime in the early 1950s, a shirtless man found the most comfortable seat available in a high alpine meadow: the collapsed remains of what had been a serious industrial operation, its log cribbing and iron wagon wheel now a scatter of silver-gray timber slowly returning to the hillside. The structure — almost certainly ore-processing infrastructure from a late nineteenth-century hard-rock mining claim — had outlasted everyone who built it and everyone who profited from it, and was now a sun-warmed backrest for a man on a summer hike.
The Rocky Mountain West is full of ruins like this one, each representing a moment when someone was absolutely certain there was money in the ground. The certainty was usually correct for about four years, after which the equipment was abandoned in place because hauling it back down cost more than it was worth. The result, half a century later, is a landscape where you can walk for an hour through wilderness and then find a cast-iron wheel.
He has his hands up to his face — eating, drinking, or shading his eyes — with the comfortable posture of a man who does not know he is sitting on a minor historical document. The meadow behind him, recovering scrub and scattered snags, suggests the timber that fed the mine was long since gone too.
Visually related — by likeness
Hiker Resting on Collapsed Mining Structure, Rocky Mountain West, Early 1950s. 1950–1955. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-7E8957. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/hiker-resting-on-collapsed-mining-structure-rocky-mountain-west-early-1950s.
@misc{aaAA20267E8957,
title = {Hiker Resting on Collapsed Mining Structure, Rocky Mountain West, Early 1950s},
year = {1950–1955},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-7E8957},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/hiker-resting-on-collapsed-mining-structure-rocky-mountain-west-early-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Hiker Resting on Collapsed Mining Structure, Rocky Mountain West, Early 1950s PY - 1950–1955 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-7E8957 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/hiker-resting-on-collapsed-mining-structure-rocky-mountain-west-early-1950s ER -
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