Rocky Mountain Vacation Lodge, Colorado Rockies, 1950s

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Rocky Mountain Vacation Lodge, Colorado Rockies, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Rocky Mountain Vacation Lodge, Colorado Rockies, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-FC0669

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Sometime in the 1950s, an American family arrived at a mountain lodge in the Colorado Rockies and did what American families did at mountain lodges in the 1950s: parked their cars in front of the building and walked around in the dirt. The lodges themselves — dark board-and-batten construction, low-pitched roofs, a row of rooms that could have been a motel if anyone had called it that — were the decade's solution to wilderness tourism, which held that nature was best appreciated from within fifty feet of a parking lot.

The cars nosed up against the buildings are early-1950s sedans, the kind of heavy, unhurried machines that made a two-day drive from Denver feel like an achievement worth commemorating. A woman and a child cross the gravel in the middle distance, moving with the purposeful aimlessness of people between activities, which is most of what a family vacation actually consisted of.

Behind all of it, the Rockies rise with the complete indifference of mountains to whatever humans have built at their feet. The jagged granite pinnacles above the tree line are the reason everyone drove here, and yet the camera is pointed at the parking lot. That is the vacation photograph in its purest form.

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