Grand Canyon Lodge lost in fire was remote sanctuary for travelers

By Ethan Beck

For The Washington Post

When Michael O’Shea first visited the Grand Canyon in 1990, he didn’t know where he was going to sleep. On a whim, O’Shea headed to the North Rim and drove until he couldn’t anymore. Once he reached the end of the highway, a stone building stood with a sign that read Grand Canyon Lodge. It had one available room, where O’Shea and his friend stayed for two nights.

After peering out over the canyon, O’Shea realized he was seeing something vast and intimate that most people never experience.

“By virtue of its design, it effectively blocks the most prevalent view of the canyon,” said O’Shea, 58, an adviser for Elevance Health who lives outside of Boston. “You walk in and you can see a glimpse of it. Then you walk into this main area and there are these large windows. It just opens up to you.”

After evacuating visitors and campers July 11 because of two wildfires, the National Park Service confirmed last Sunday that the Grand Canyon Lodge was destroyed by the Dragon Bravo Fire. Dozens of nearby structures were also ravaged, including a visitor center, a wastewater treatment plant and several cabins, which along with the lodge, consisted of the only places to stay overnight inside the park’s North Rim.

The building was the only lodge in the lesser-visited North Rim, which is now closed for the remainder of the season, and a stunning site for visitors like O’Shea, who have grieved the loss of the serene, homey corner of one of the country’s most-visited parks.

“About 5 million people come to the canyon each year but since the North Rim is more remote, only about 10 percent make their way to the North Rim,” said Davy Crockett, vice president of Grand Canyon Historical Society. “It’s more of a quiet, peaceful, less commercial place.”

It wasn’t the first time the Grand Canyon Lodge had fire problems. Architect Gilbert Stanley Underwood wanted the original building to fit in with the rustic hillside, complete with pine wood and limestone from nearby quarries. But four years after its completion in 1928, a kitchen fire took over the lodge in only 30 minutes. The replacement structure stood in the same spot and even utilized many of the first building’s remains, but stone was more prevalent than wood when the new building opened in 1937.

“They were concerned about future fires,” Crockett said. “Fires, back then, were fairly common in both cities and the north end [of the Grand Canyon] doesn’t have a lot of water. They had to make changes to bring high pressure pumping water to the lodge. … They even took their plans to Washington, D.C., to have it reviewed by fire experts.”

For decades after the rebuild, nightly dinners at the lodge restaurant would be accompanied by talent shows, dances and music by college orchestras. Performances slowed after ownership changed, but the restaurant remained focused on regional foods, including elk chili and brisket smoked with ponderosa pine wood.

“The restaurant at the lodge, it has the best food, bar none, in the whole Grand Canyon National Park,” said Ray Liang, who works at a utilities company in Los Angeles and first visited the park in 1991. “I can guarantee you. Bang for buck and taste.”

On Reddit, visitors reminisced about the view from the lodge’s sunroom, the simple but adequate rooms and the easy access to nearby hikes and trails.

The extraordinary view, which was more than 5,000 feet above the bottom of the chasm, attracted visitors from other parts of the world. Jona Aben traveled all the way from the Netherlands and stopped by the Grand Canyon Lodge as part of a larger West Coast trip in June and July.

“If you go to the rest of America, especially for Europeans, you have an image of the West, it’s remote, it’s rustic, it’s adventurous,” Aben said. “It’s like stepping back in a different time when you go to the North Rim. We only went for an afternoon on the way to Zion National Park, but we really wanted to visit the lodge because of the different vibe the North Rim has.”

With the Grand Canyon Lodge lost to the wildfire, lodging options on the North Rim are less clear. Farther up Grand Canyon Highway is Kaibab Lodge, which has become a temporary base for firefighters and hasn’t yet been hit by the fires, owner Larry Innes said in an interview with a local CBS affiliate.

Rebuilding the beloved lodge is possible, but funding could be an issue, and Crockett added that it could take years.