Mountain Park Highway Pull-Off, American West, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Mountain Park Highway Pull-Off, American West, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Mountain Park Highway Pull-Off, American West, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-26EE17

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Somebody has stopped the car up ahead, right where the guardrail curves out of sight, because in the 1950s that is what a scenic overlook was for: a place to get out, admire the view, and hold up traffic for exactly as long as it took to snap one picture. The concrete balustrade curling along the shoulder was poured by crews who built these mountain roads to be admired as much as driven, on the theory that a family in a station wagon deserved architecture, not just asphalt.

The trees do the rest of the work the road was designed to showcase, towering over the pavement in the kind of unbroken conifer wall that made postwar tourists believe they had found wilderness, even though they were standing on a paved, engineered, guardrailed highway built specifically so they could find it safely. Someone in an orange jacket has wandered to the edge for a better look, confident that the view would still be there next summer, which, remarkably, it was.

The yellow centerline running dead straight toward that curve is the only thing in the frame indifferent to the scenery, doing the same job it would do on a road with no view at all.

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