There is nothing like an overnight visit to a historic lodge to get a taste of what the national parks to have to offer. Here’s a look at the top lodges in seven popular western parks.
Yellowstone
Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, 307-344-7381, www.nps.gov/yell
Classic Old Faithful Inn. Watch her blow – Old Faithful geyser, that is – from one of the world’s largest log structures, which boasts 325 rooms and a 77-foot lobby ceiling. Plus, it turned 100 this year. From $78 to $371.
Booking: 307-344-7311, travelyellowstone.com.
Glacier
Montana, 406-888-7800, www.nps.gov/glac
Classic Glacier Park Lodge. Built in 1912-14, the 160-room “Big Tree Lodge” is the perfect blend of past (Great Northern Railway, Blackfeet Indians) and present (heated pool, steak house), natural (hiking, fishing) and manmade (pitch-n-putt golf course). From $96 to $145.
Booking: 406-892-2525, www.glacierparkinc.com, www.glacierguides.com.
Grand Canyon
Arizona, 928-638-7888, www.nps.gov/grca
Classic El Tovar. Modeled after a European hunting lodge, the 99-year-old property looks as good inside, with its native stone and Oregon pine decor, as it does outside, with views of the South Rim and Hopi House. The 78 rooms start at $123.
Booking: 888-297-2757, www.grandcanyonlodges.com (South Rim); www.grandcanyonlodge.com (North Rim).
Yosemite
California, 209-372-0200, www.nps.gov/yose
Classic Ahwahnee. Built in 1927, the 123-room lodge is a slide show of styles, including art deco, Middle Eastern, Native American and Arts and Crafts, all wrapped up in nature (and those views! – of Half Dome, Yosemite Falls and Glacier Point). From $371.
Booking: 559-253-5635, www.yosemitepark.com.
Crater Lake
Oregon, 541-594-3100, www.nps.gov/crla
Classic Crater Lake Lodge. The 171-room lodge opened in 1915 and underwent a $15 million renovation in 1995 that restored its Northwest flavor – all the better to frame those fabulous lake views. From $126-$241.
Booking: 541-830-8700, www.craterlakelodges.com.
Grand Teton
Wyoming, 307-739-3300, www.nps.gov/grte
Classic Jenny Lake Lodge. The lodge’s 37 historic cabins sit at the base of the Tetons and capture the region’s colorful wrangler past. Bright handmade quilts, airy wooden interiors and easy access to hiking trails and lakes add to the cozy nature feel. From $459.
Booking: 800-628-9988, www.gtlc.com.
Mount Rainier
Washington, 360-569-2211, www.nps.gov/mora
Classic Paradise Inn. The 1917 property, sitting at 5,400 feet, was built by a German carpenter whose handiwork, including a 14-foot grandfather clock, jockeys for attention with the wildflowers, mountain peaks and Nisqually Glacier. The 117 rooms go for $89 to $205.
Booking: 360-569-2275, www.guestservices.com/rainier
Andrea Sachs, The Washington Post
By Steve Hendrix
The Washington Post
This isn’t a lobby, it’s a nave. This isn’t tourism, it’s high church. And the country’s great national park lodges are not just hotels, they are America’s summer cathedrals.
This one happens to be the Glacier Park Lodge, on the eastern edge of Montana’s Glacier National Park. But the arrival ceremony is just a variation of the one at Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone, the Ahwahnee in Yosemite or any of their grand sisters in the mountains, deserts and canyons of the American West.
In Glacier, it goes like this: Newcomers enter the lobby, still distracted by the demands of their journey. Inevitably, they check their strides, raise their faces in wonder at the great hall created by 24 Douglas fir trunks, tall as steeples, and seem very near to crossing themselves in the shadow of this soaring indoor forest.
This is what churches attempt to instill, a simultaneous sense of awe and comfort.
In Glacier Park Lodge, the comfort draws folks to gather around the lobby. In that nether-hour between the day hikes and the evening meal, groups and families sprawl over the armchairs.
In a lodge, the lobby is the living room. The guest rooms are almost an afterthought. With some showy exceptions (some of the oldest rooms in the Old Faithful Inn, for example), guest chambers tend to be austere, plainly furnished bunk rooms. Some of them are frankly homely. In Glacier, as at many others, the rooms don’t have televisions.
Because they sit amid the continent’s most spectacular scenery, lodges don’t have to be luxury hotels. After a 10-mile trail ride, it’s the hot shower that matters, not the milled soap or the thick towel.
The result is a uniquely communal tradition of lodge guests spending their free time together. Public spaces are designed for constant use. Scrabble players and puzzle makers share the long coffee tables.
Around the cavernous stone fireplace, people fill a haphazard amphitheater of seats, sitting and staring at the flames. Writing tables and card tables are tucked into every crevice.
“We have people who come year after year,” said Michael Buck, a volunteer tour guide from St. Paul, Minn., who has been spending summers at Glacier since 1960. “They treat it like it’s their home.”
Buck is a trim retiree whose main job is driving lodge guests around in a “jammer,” one of the park’s vintage red sightseeing buses with roll-back canvas tops.
Much of the old fleet, long beloved for open-top drives on the spectacular and nail-biting Going-to-the-Sun Road, was recently restored and returned to service. Similarly, several of the 1920s-era touring boats are still at work on Glacier’s mountain-rimmed lakes. This is a park with a keen fondness for its old days.
Summer visits to national park lodges are pilgrimages to a younger, wilder America, and we want them not just in the wilderness, but of it.
The Grand Canyon’s long and low El Tovar lines the southern lip of the canyon like another strata of geology. In Yosemite, the blocky granite face of the Ahwahnee tucks into the base of the high gray cliffs like an outcropping, not an add-on. Oregon’s Crater Lake Lodge, opened in 1915 and recently completely restored, fits snugly into the rim of rock that forms the walls of the deep, dramatic lake.
It’s not that these great lodges are camouflaged. In fact, they brim with personality and, once seeing them, none of them wears a face you’re ever likely to forget. But still, each manages in its own way to be of a piece – and at peace – with its feral landscape.
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