The Ski House at Badger Pass, c. 1935
- Image
- c. 1935
- Printed
- c. 1937
- Size
- 8⅝ × 6¾in
- Material
- Gelatin silver print
- Mount
- Unmounted
- Rarity
-
- Not editioned.
- No other original prints of this image located by the gallery.
- Vintage — printed c. 1937.
- The negative may have burned in the 1937 darkroom fire; later prints are less likely.
- Verso
- Calif.—Parks—Yosemite stamp, red-crayon underline; Yosemite in pencil; blue San Francisco Examiner reference-library stamp, Feb 17 1937.
-
Kodak Azo, 193693%
The paper was photographed at microscopic resolution under raking light and compared against a reference library of dated papers. The match supports the printing date, and the texture is kept on record as this print's fingerprint. A paper match is dating evidence, never authentication.
These images may contain artifacts from the scanning process.
This unmounted gelatin silverThe standard black-and-white print process: silver suspended in a gelatin emulsion on paper. print, 8⅝ × 6¾ in, is in overall excellent condition. Every defect noted below is visible only in raking lightLight cast from a low, glancing angle across the surface, used to reveal texture and shallow defects invisible head-on. — none is apparent in normal viewing.
A uniform warm tone, consistent for its age, with a very slight greenish cast — characteristic of papers of its era.
- MatteA non-reflective, low-gloss surface finish. areas in the lower-left, upper-left, upper-right and center-right.
- Soft linear impressionA shallow indentation pressed into the surface, often from handling or contact, without removing material. along the top edge, and a crescent handling creaseA line where the paper has been folded or bent, which may or may not break the image layer. in the lower-right quadrant.
- Hard creaseA line where the paper has been folded or bent, which may or may not break the image layer. at the top edge near the upper-right corner that breaks the emulsionThe light-sensitive image layer of the print — the gelatin coating that holds the silver and carries the photograph..
- Soft impressions in the center that do not break the emulsionThe light-sensitive image layer of the print — the gelatin coating that holds the silver and carries the photograph..
- Embedded fibers in the upper-left quadrant, likely original to the paper.
- Pin-sized impressions throughout, on close inspection.
- Edge bumps throughout, consistent with an unmounted print.
- Faint silveringA faint metallic sheen, usually in the dark areas, where silver in the emulsion has migrated to the surface over time. in the shadows, on close inspection.
Does not appear to fluoresceTo glow under ultraviolet light — a response that can reveal coatings, retouching, or repairs. under ultraviolet light.
Condition is reported as an opinion, not a statement of fact, and may not note every defect. It describes the artwork as observed at the time of imaging.
Provenance is compiled from documents and owner accounts and may be incomplete.
A ski resort built inside a national park — and the photograph made to sell it.
In the winter of 1935 the Yosemite Park & Curry Company opened a ski lodge at Badger Pass and put Ansel Adams to work photographing it. This view — published as The Ski House at Badger Pass — is early, working Adams: made for the park, not the gallery wall, at the moment California's first alpine ski resort was invented.
“The Ski House at Badger Pass.”
Yosemite Park & Curry Company, ed. Stanley Plumb · 1936
The slope only became a resort once roads, a tunnel, and a lift had tamed the climb — about 3,200 feet above the valley floor.
This view is one picture in a campaign. Adams had already photographed skiing as Sierra Club high-country touring — Lembert Dome, Tuolumne — so he knew the sport from inside. From about 1929 Donald Tresidder put that knowledge to work for the Curry Company, hiring Adams to sell Yosemite's empty winter season. The commission grew into a whole sales system — photographs, a film, window displays, Ahwahnee menus, postcards and advertising prints, much of it staged from a shooting script — and the Ski House sits at the center of it.
In The Four Seasons in Yosemite National Park (1936) Adams's winter pictures run as a sequence, and this one is its hinge.
In that arc the Ski House is the practical anchor — the picture that says the place is real, you can reach it, and skiing starts here. Its claim is specific: not a lodge portrait, but the hinge image of Yosemite's winter turning from scattered high-country sport into an organized ski destination. It may also be scarce — Andrea Stillman notes that most of Adams's Curry Company winter work was lost to a 1937 darkroom fire, and survives mainly in a few early prints.
This story was researched and written with Vault’s AI from the sources above. It can make mistakes — check the sources yourself.