A historic lodge on the Grand Canyon's North Rim has been destroyed by a fast-moving wildfire, the park said Sunday.
The Grand Canyon Lodge, the only lodging inside the park at the North Rim, was consumed by the flames, park Superintendent Ed Keable told park residents, staff and others in a meeting Sunday morning. He said the visitor center, the gas station, a wastewater treatment plant, an administrative building and some employee housing also were lost.
Arizona Highways editor Robert Stieve talked about a nostalgic tradition at the lodge and its history.
Conversation highlights
You've been to the lodge, so this must be heartbreaking. Can you talk about the Lodge's significance?
ROBERT STIEVE: It's a historic place in Arizona, first of all, you know, we're such a young state and we don't have things that are super old, like you do in Boston, or if you go to New York. You see with things in Paris or in London or wherever. So I mean, this was one of our old landmarks and it has an interesting history.
The first lodge was built in the late 1920s and a couple of years later, ironically, it burned down. Quickly rebuilt it, and the one we lost yesterday was was the new version back in 1932.
It was a special place because I think the North Rim is such a special place and I know so many of your listeners visit the Grand Canyon. The most people visit the South Rim because it's pretty easy to get to. To get to the North Rim requires an extra effort. It's a lot farther to get there. And typically, when you go to the North Rim, you spend more time.
So there's almost a different psychology when you go to the North Rim, it's a place to sort of drop out, get off the grid, as they say. And what I loved about the North Rim was that it was sort of timeless, right? There was very, the cell service was terrible up there, which was a good thing.
And you could go there and you felt like you were walking back into 1932. That lodge was spectacularly beautiful. Unlike El Tovar on the South Rim, which is set back off of the rim. You can't really see the Grand Canyon from the lodge.
The Grand Canyon Lodge on the North Rim was the exact opposite. You could actually sit in the lodge, eat dinner and look into the canyon. And the sun deck, which was outside, you could literally just hang out on the rim of the canyon and look in. So it was just a special place for, for so many reasons.
You've written about Cabin 310 at the Grand Canyon Lodge, and said there's nothing else like it. Can you tell us about it?
STIEVE: You hear people talk about a room with a view. And certainly, there are some great rooms with views around the world in different places. … Of all the places you can go in the world with, you know, beautiful hotels no matter how much you want to pay, nothing can rise above hanging off the edge of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon in Cabin 310. And you sit there, there's a little deck, there was a little deck on that cabin and you could just sit there and look out into what is arguably one of the greatest natural wonders on the planet.
The Grand Canyon is so special, almost every president visits the Grand Canyon for a reason because there's nothing else like it in the world. It's one of two things you can see from outer space, along with the Great Wall of China. It's a World Heritage Site. So the canyon itself is special.
For me personally, I always liked the North Rim, mostly because, like as I mentioned, you could get off the grid. The ecology is different up there. It's about a thousand feet higher than the South Rim. So you had different trees. You had different wildlife up there. And it was, it was a very special place.
When I heard the news, you just don't think something like that's going to happen. You start lamenting the loss of the trees when you see these fires break out. It's so rare to lose a national treasure like a lodge in a national park.
The lodges been featured multiple times in Arizona Highways. Can you talk about one of the first times it was written about?
STIEVE: We've been writing about it since the first lodge opened. There was a time when there was no lodging up there. And when that very first lodge opened in the late 1920s, we did a story about it. The magazine started in 1925.
And, you know, certainly when you think about what's big news happening around Arizona, certainly the opening of a lodge on the edge of the Grand Canyon was big news. So that was our first story. And we've been covering the North Rim ever since.
Again, because it's so different from the South Rim, we've done stories that compare and contrast, but there's so much to see and do up on the Kaibab Plateau, where the North Rim was is located. It's a place that we write about because not everyone knows about it in the same way they know about the South Rim. It's always been a go-to story for us.
I was looking through our archive last night and it's just heartbreaking. And certainly when you put it into the perspective of the flooding in Texas and the other things that are happening around the world, losing bricks and mortar and pine trees, it was nothing like that.
But when you think about it in the perspective of how many lives have been changed, there were people that have lived up there and worked up there for a very long time. The North Rim was part of their life and their livelihood. Lives have been upended and not in the same way as they are in Texas, fortunately. And then that's to the credit of the firefighters and the people that managed to get everyone evacuated in time, but it's still a very, very sad thing.
What's your favorite photo of the Lodge or that part of the Grand Canyon?
STIEVE: There are so many beautiful landscape shots by David Muench and Ansel Adams, but my favorite shot is actually a human shot, a human interest photograph. Back in the 1940s, because it was a summer place, people would go up there so kids got summer jobs up there, usually college kids, and because it was only open in the summer, it worked out that way that college kids could have a summer job up there.
And whenever guests would leave on the bus, because the only way really in there was on a tour bus from one of the railways. And so when that bus would load up in the morning and those people would get ready to leave the, the North Rim and head back to the train, wherever it was, these college kids would get together and do what was called a sing-away. And there's this fantastic photograph of these young college-aged kids standing around this bus seeing some sort of farewell song.
I don't know what the song was, but they called it a sing-away. Not only did you have that whole experience of seeing the Grand Canyon and staying in this lodge, you got serenaded essentially as you left the place.
What a beautiful memory. And what I love about it is it's nostalgic, but it's just a simpler time. You think about people today, especially at parks like Yosemite and Yellowstone and the South Rim where people are just jockeying for position, trying to get their selfie, check the box and get back in the car and go to the next place.
It was a simpler time in that photo I described, but even today, that place didn't change. It was unaffected by advances in technology and the polarization of society. Nothing seemed to affect that feeling of peacefulness and dropping out from, from all the chaos.
And that's what the North Rim gave us.
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
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