ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the affective intensities that emerge at and below Chute Hill campground overlook, a viewpoint across Malakoff Diggins in Nevada County California that has, since 1965, been designated as a State Historic Park. It also examines vertigo as a kind of embodied unsettling of the picturesque that helps to actively politicize the industrial past and use it to foster engagement with contemporary social and environmental issues. Vertigo can be understood within an emerging suite of geo-philosophical approaches as a means of mapping an alternative earthly affectivity at Malakoff Diggins. Holding to a geo-centric perspective along the Diggin's Loop Trail, it is easy to see these gravel walls as bodies that sense things and cultivate affects. In 1967 the parks department interviewed a long-time resident of North Bloomfield, the settlement adjacent to Malakoff Diggins. An important part of the development of Malakoff Diggins' visual economy is the platform from which the view occurs.
