Old Faithful Lodge & Coffee Shop Parking Area, Yellowstone, c. 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Old Faithful Lodge & Coffee Shop Parking Area, Yellowstone, c. 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Old Faithful Lodge & Coffee Shop Parking Area, Yellowstone, c. 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-B39CAE

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Sometime in the 1960s, an American family drove a turquoise sedan the size of a small barge across Yellowstone National Park and parked it in the gravel lot at Old Faithful Lodge, which the National Park Service had thoughtfully marked with a rustic brown sign so that no one would confuse the coffee shop with the geyser. The parking area is almost entirely empty, which either means they arrived at an off-hour or that postwar American tourism, for all its enthusiasm, had not yet achieved the industrial throughput it would manage by the 1970s. A lone figure in a cowboy hat stands near the car doing what people at national parks have always done in the moment between arriving and deciding what to do next: nothing in particular, but with great conviction. The Park Service's mission at mid-century was to make wilderness accessible enough that families would support its funding, which produced this specific landscape — a sublime geothermal wonder ringed by a gravel lot and a coffee shop — and nobody at the time found this arrangement contradictory.

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