AA-2026-9E4396
On the image
Someone propped a plaster relief map of Maui under the visitor center lights and aimed a camera at it, confident that a slide of a map would look like the map. It did not. The tungsten bulbs turned the whole island the color of old varnish, so that Haleakala's crater, on the right, reads less like a dormant volcano and more like a burn mark.
The map itself is doing exactly what 1960s park-service relief models were built to do: flatten a very large, very inconvenient landscape into something a tourist could grasp in ten seconds before getting back in the car. Wailuku, Kahului Bay, the switchback roads into the National Park, all of it rendered in raised plaster so visitors could run a finger along a ridge they had no intention of hiking. It is a map made for people who wanted the idea of Maui more than the seven-hour trail up it.
Whoever took this picture was not documenting a volcano. They were documenting a sign that explained the volcano, and did it with the same unexamined faith in indoor film and fluorescent light that produced a decade's worth of amber-tinted vacation slides.
Visually related — by likeness
Relief Map of Maui and Haleakala National Park, 1960s. 1960–1969. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-9E4396. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/relief-map-of-maui-and-haleakala-national-park-1960s.
@misc{aaAA20269E4396,
title = {Relief Map of Maui and Haleakala National Park, 1960s},
year = {1960–1969},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-9E4396},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/relief-map-of-maui-and-haleakala-national-park-1960s}
}TY - ART TI - Relief Map of Maui and Haleakala National Park, 1960s PY - 1960–1969 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-9E4396 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/relief-map-of-maui-and-haleakala-national-park-1960s ER -
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