Two Children at Mendenhall Glacier, Juneau, Alaska, c. 1950s

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Two Children at Mendenhall Glacier, Juneau, Alaska, c. 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Two Children at Mendenhall Glacier, Juneau, Alaska, c. 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-55597A

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Two small children in puffy winter jackets and knit hats have been seated on a glacial moraine boulder and told to smile, which is the standard protocol when a parent has driven the family to Mendenhall Glacier outside Juneau and wants proof that everyone was there. Behind them the glacier's serrated blue icefall fills the entire horizon, a wall of compressed millennia that was, at the time this was taken, considerably closer to where they are sitting than it is today. The 1950s were a period when Americans brought their children to national landmarks with the sincere belief that exposure to large natural phenomena was improving, in roughly the same way that taking vitamins was improving, and that the child would carry the lesson forward into adulthood. The smaller one in orange is holding something up for the camera with the confidence of a child who has decided the snack is more important than the glacier. What the glacier was doing while no one paid attention to it was retreating, which is the thing it has been quietly, steadily doing ever since.

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