United States Forest Service Northern Region Aerial Photographs Collection, 1932-1978

This collection of US Forest Service aerial photography consists of reels of film, 9 inches wide and hundreds of feet long, with anywhere from 200 to 600 images per reel. 157 reels have black and white negative images from the 1930s and 1940s. Each reel has a number of projects (flightlines); there is no logical order to the flightlines on the reels of film. The majority of the images are of Central and Western Montana and Northern Idaho, but some images are of parts of Eastern Montana and Eastern Washington. An access map documenting the center points for images dating from 1932-1944 is available from the Archives and Special Collections Aerial Photograpy webpage. The collection also includes some color infrared film from 1968, and color infrared panoramic images from 1972, 1974 and 1978 taken from a U2 plane at 65,000 feet. This portion of the collection is not indexed.

Series II of this collection consists of pdf files of a set of note cards and two binders which provide information relevant to the 1930s and 1940s film. The records provide information about when a flightline was flown, on what date, by whom, and at what altitude. Some pages are annotated with information about when the original film reel was sent to the National Archives and when the duplicate reels of film were received from NARA. Some projects have associated flightline maps, including scans provided by the National Archives and black and white scans provided by the Northern Region, which may be reproductions of original maps held at the National Archives. These scans are considered Series III of this collection. The flightline maps and the pdfs of the binders and notecards were acquired by the Archives to assist with indexing the images.