Mountain Pass Road, Alpine Forest, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Mountain Pass Road, Alpine Forest, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Mountain Pass Road, Alpine Forest, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-D020A8

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A narrow highway threads through a dense coniferous forest, hairpinning upward through a mountain pass in a pattern that suggests serious elevation gain and the kind of engineering that was, in the 1950s, a point of civic pride. The road has been painted with neat white center lines and edge markings, as though a highway engineer had decided that visual order would compensate for the actual danger of taking these turns at speed. The bare earth on the roadside slopes and the scattered regrowth in the forest indicate this pass was recently cut or widened, the landscape still healing from the work of graders and dynamite. Someone in the 1950s believed that paving a mountain road through such terrain, straight up through old timber country, was progress worth documenting from the air.

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