Some cool colorado camping images:
Mystery camping scene
Image by Ed Yourdon
I have no idea when or where this photo was taken. There are two tents, and it seems that the one on the left has a cot and a packing trunk of some kind.
I put in an arbitrary date of 1935, but I have no idea if that is correct…
*********************************
To the best of my knowledge, most of the photos in this Flickr album were taken by my grandmother, Mabel Yourdon, during the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. Most of them depict scenes of everyday life in mining camps and small towns near the Utah-Colorado border. Some of them show hunting, fishing, and camping trips in unspecified parts of the American west. It appears that a few of them were taken in southern California, when Mabel and her husband Ike traveled out there to visit relatives.
I have no idea what kind of camera Mabel used for these photos, nor what kind of film. There probably wasn’t that much variety available in the 1920s, and she was not a “professional” photographer. So it may have been a Brownie and whatever B/W film Kodak was selling at the time.
My stepfather, Ray Yourdon, was born in 1922; and his older brother, Marvin, was born two years before that. You’ll see photos of Ray and Marvin when they were young boys, when they were in high school, and when they went off to join the Navy and the Marines to fight in World War II.
Somewhere around 2005, I asked Ray if he could tell me the details of some of the photos; where possible, I have included those details in the notes for the photos. Some of the photos obviously evoked pleasant memories, and I heard stories about minor day-to-day events in his life that I had never heard before. But we rarely got through more than a few pictures before he ran out of energy; and so many of the photos have no explanation at all.
At this point, my parents and grandparents are all gone. I have cousins who grew up in the same area where these photos were taken, and one or two of them are still in that area. They may be able to fill in a few of the details; otherwise, you’ll just have to accept these photos as a glimpse of what life was like nearly a hundred years ago …
Campsite
Image by schramroyal