Mountain Lake with Moored Boats, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Mountain Lake with Moored Boats, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Mountain Lake with Moored Boats, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-397EC8

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A handful of sailboats sit at anchor in a mountain lake, their hulls reflecting the afternoon, their crews presumably elsewhere doing whatever it is that boat owners do when they are not on their boats. The lake is flanked by dense coniferous forest and a sharp ridge line that cuts the sky in half, the kind of landscape that makes people buy vacation property they will visit twice. A small structure stands on the left shore, likely a boathouse or dock facility, the sort of modest infrastructure that appeared around leisure lakes in the American West after the war, when weekending became a class aspiration. In the 1950s, owning or renting access to a mountain lake meant you had arrived at a particular grade of American comfort: not wealthy enough for a house on water, but solvent enough to keep a boat sitting idle as evidence of leisure. The boats bob in a stillness that suggests mid-week; nobody here is in a hurry to go anywhere.

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