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Moose in Willow Flats, Yellowstone Valley, 1950s — Archive & Atlas
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Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, USA

Moose in Willow Flats, Yellowstone Valley, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-1D0947

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Sometime in the 1950s, a family loaded the station wagon and drove into one of America's national parks, because the postwar boom had given Americans both leisure time and the sincere belief that nature was best experienced from a moving vehicle. Someone stopped long enough to point a camera across a broad river meadow — dense willow scrub in the foreground, a shallow braided stream cutting through green flats, a lodgepole pine forest rising on the far slope, and rounded volcanic hills beyond. Buried in the willows at mid-frame is a bull moose, browsing with the total indifference of an animal that has never read a brochure about itself. The moose was almost certainly the reason the car stopped. In the 1950s, Yellowstone's wildlife management philosophy held that animals encountered roadside were a scenic amenity rather than a wild population requiring distance, and rangers spent considerable effort shooing tourists who had exited their vehicles to get closer. This frame was taken from a respectful distance, which either means the photographer was unusually cautious or the moose was too deep in the brush to approach. Either way, the moose got on with its afternoon.

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Archive & Atlas — The Archive AA-2026-1D0947 · jpg · Open