Yellowstone National Park
AA-2026-05CFEE
On the image
Someone knelt at the edge of this pool and decided the responsible thing to do was take a picture straight down into it, on the theory that a hole full of scalding mineral water becomes less dangerous once documented. The rim shows the usual chalky buildup of silica and sulfur that Yellowstone's thermal features leave behind, a mineral crust that looks solid enough to stand on and occasionally is not, a distinction 1960s park visitors were trusted to work out for themselves.
By this decade the Park Service had already spent years posting signs about unstable ground and boiling water, signs that competed poorly with the human urge to get closer to something blue and bottomless. The water's clarity is the whole trick of these pools: you can see straight down into darkness precisely because there is nothing alive in it to cloud the view. Whoever took this believed the picture would capture the color, and it did, along with the quiet fact that nothing survives in it long enough to disturb the surface.
The historian's note
Yellowstone National Park, established in 1872 as the first national park in the United States, contains the largest concentration of geothermal features on Earth, including hot springs, geysers, and fumaroles fed by an underlying volcanic system. Pools of this kind form when groundwater heated by magma dissolves silica from surrounding rock, depositing it as the mineral sinter visible around the rim as the water cools and evaporates at the surface.
By the 1960s, Yellowstone had become one of the most heavily visited parks in the National Park System, part of a postwar boom in automobile tourism that brought millions of Americans to its boardwalks and pullouts each summer. Informal, close-range photography of thermal pools was common practice during this period, before later decades brought stricter boardwalk enforcement following a series of visitor injuries and fatalities at unstable thermal ground.
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Hot Spring Pool Close-Up, Yellowstone National Park, 1960s. 1960–1969. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-05CFEE. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/hot-spring-pool-close-up-yellowstone-national-park-1960s.
@misc{aaAA202605CFEE,
title = {Hot Spring Pool Close-Up, Yellowstone National Park, 1960s},
year = {1960–1969},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-05CFEE},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/hot-spring-pool-close-up-yellowstone-national-park-1960s}
}TY - ART TI - Hot Spring Pool Close-Up, Yellowstone National Park, 1960s PY - 1960–1969 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-05CFEE UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/hot-spring-pool-close-up-yellowstone-national-park-1960s ER -
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