Polychrome Pass, Denali National Park, Alaska
AA-2026-E8F075
On the image
The National Park Service put up a sign at Polychrome Pass on the theory that a tourist who has just driven a gravel road with no guardrail deserves to know why the mountains are purple and orange instead of simply being terrified. The paragraph on the placard is long, the kind of text nobody reads standing up in the wind, but the agency printed it anyway because informing the public was part of the mission even when the public was mostly looking for a place to relieve itself after the bus ride.
Behind the sign the Alaska Range does the actual work of the view, snow lingering in the folds of rock in a summer that never fully commits to summer. The road below cuts across the tundra as a thin pale line, proof that engineers in the 1960s could put a route through a place like this and call it finished, though every driver who used it understood finished was a generous word for it.
Someone stopped, read the sign or didn't, and pointed a camera at the same view every other visitor pointed a camera at, confident the mountains would still be arranged that way when the film came back from the drugstore.
The historian's note
Polychrome Pass sits along the Denali Park Road in Denali National Park and Preserve, Alaska, at an elevation offering a wide view of the Alaska Range and the braided river valley below. The pass takes its name from the volcanic rock exposed in the surrounding cliffs, which weathers into bands of red, orange, and green.
The Denali Park Road, completed in stages through the mid-20th century, was the primary means by which the National Park Service made the park's interior accessible to automobile tourists, and interpretive signage of the kind visible here was installed along key overlooks to explain geology and wildlife habitat to a growing postwar visitor population.
By the 1960s, Mount McKinley National Park (as Denali was then named) was an established stop on organized Alaska tourism itineraries, and Polychrome Pass was already recognized as one of the road's principal scenic viewpoints.
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Visually related — by likeness
Polychrome Pass Overlook, Denali National Park, Alaska, 1960s. 1960–1969. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-E8F075. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/polychrome-pass-overlook-denali-national-park-alaska-1960s.
@misc{aaAA2026E8F075,
title = {Polychrome Pass Overlook, Denali National Park, Alaska, 1960s},
year = {1960–1969},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-E8F075},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/polychrome-pass-overlook-denali-national-park-alaska-1960s}
}TY - ART TI - Polychrome Pass Overlook, Denali National Park, Alaska, 1960s PY - 1960–1969 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-E8F075 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/polychrome-pass-overlook-denali-national-park-alaska-1960s ER -
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