Finding Inspiration in Mount Rainier's Historical Photographs

A fellow in the archive

Meg McCann, a National Park Service Workforce Management Fellow with the Northwest Youth Corps, was an arts-loving student who turned to science in college. Her fellowship took her to the curatorial office of Mount Rainier National Park, where one of her main projects was processing and cataloging historic photographs — a welcome task for someone who grew up shooting film.

What processing means

On her first day she found vintage film cameras spread around the office, waiting to be processed. Processing an artifact or archive means:

1. accessioning it into the collection;
2. adding it to the park's online database;
3. housing it in acid-free packaging, such as an envelope or box.

The film in those cameras recorded the park's history: visitors, scientists at work, and volunteers doing hard trail work.

The Lindsey photographs

In two months she processed hundreds of photographs, negatives, positives and slides. With the park curator she worked through a collection taken in the 1930s–40s by ecologist Alton Lindsey, who photographed across the park to document glaciers, waterfalls and how they interacted with the wildlife and plants around them.

Back to film

The work pushed her to take up film herself. She bought a vintage Olympus Trip 35 and began photographing the trails near the office on lunch breaks — mushrooms, wildflowers and paths under Douglas fir and western hemlock bright with new needles — and landscapes in Alaska, from Denali to Turnagain Arm. Without the fellowship, she writes, she might never have been inspired to pursue film photography — and she looks forward to seeing where the work at Mount Rainier leads.

Sources

Based on Meg McCann, "Finding Inspiration in Historical Photographs," "A Day in the Life of a Fellow" series, Mount Rainier National Park, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The first-person essay is retold here; its photographs, credited to the author personally, are left out.