Yellowstone’s ‘Grand Lady of the Lake’ turns 125

YELLOWSTONE LAKE – Michelle Trappen was dismayed on two counts when she started her first job in Yellowstone National Park.

First, she wasn’t working at the “jaw dropping” Old Faithful Inn but instead had drawn the Lake Hotel. Second, she was washing dishes – her least favorite household chore.

And when her adult children found out Trappen, a career woman in her 50s, also was sharing a dorm room with a 21-year-old named Toast, they started taking bets on how long their mom would last.

“But what my children, my parents and my friends back home in Portland did not realize is that Yellowstone casts a spell,” she wrote.

By the next year she was happily conducting tours around the Lake Hotel, a long, yellow building on the shore of Yellowstone Lake. She’s a yellow bus driver, too, and author of “Grand Lady of the Lake: The Remarkable Legacy of Yellowstone’s Lake Hotel.”

New lodges replace old cabins at Yellowstone's Canyon area

The Lake Hotel is the oldest hotel in Yellowstone National Park, and the National Park Service – which it predates by 25 years – is celebrating the hotel’s 125th anniversary this month. It’s also the longest standing hotel originally built in a national park.

“By all accounts, the Lake Hotel should be gone, dead – a burning rubble of historical firewood,” Trappen wrote. “More than once, park leaders deemed the rambling yellow structure obsolete, past its prime, a candidate for demolition. Fate kept her alive.”

Building a hotel in the world’s first national park was slow going, partly because the park didn’t have much by way of roads or bridges.

Two decades later, the roads (OK, rutted paths) were in place and construction could begin on hotels along the Grand Loop Road, connecting Old Faithful with Yellowstone Lake. Wagons crisscrossed the park with all the stuff three hotels would need, shipped to Montana by railroad.

The Lake Hotel began with the Northern Pacific Railroad, which aimed to bring tourists to the park on its trains. The Yellowstone Park Association dragged its heels on building hotels, starting on three before “complications ensued,” Trappen’s research found. The railroad pitched in at least $60,000 ($1.6 million in today’s money) to finish the hotels, with the Fountain Hotel and Canyon Hotel long ago demolished.

They found a beautiful spot with sweeping views of the Absaroka Range for the Lake Hotel, but the original architect in Washington, D.C., designed the hotel having never been to the site, with no knowledge of the logistical challenges of the remote location or consideration of materials available.

Workers constructed a foundation of rock rubble over a bumpy surface of tree stumps and clay.

“I am told there are many places in the foundation that one can today push over with his foot,” Yellowstone Comptroller E.C. Buchanan reported to railroad officials.

Plasterers got drunk on whiskey. Delays in the arrival of materials, especially the oak staircase, 200 feet of steam pipe and wire for electrification, hampered plans. The furniture selected was terrible, and new furniture had to be ordered.

Open in 1891, the three-story hotel had offices, a writing room, an ordinary room (like a ladies receiving room or activities room), a dining room about half the size of today’s and two floors of guest rooms with communal wash rooms. Individual guest rooms had chamber pots. A porch and veranda offered a place to take in the view and jaw.

The Lake Hotel’s “golden age” had arrived, Trappen wrote, “a slower, gentler era when Yellowstone Observation Wagons rolled guests from hotel to hotel, unveiling a diorama of natural wonders along the way.”

Most Americans couldn’t afford the trip, but those who did would travel to Livingston on the railroad with porters to cater to every whim. They’d get transportation, lodging and meals for five and a quarter days in Yellowstone for $110, about $2,850 in today’s dollars at a time when the average wage for a 60-hour workweek was $9.06 for an unskilled laborer and $19.32 for a carpenter, Trappen wrote.

They took a train to Cinnabar, just north of Gardiner, and then rode dusty stagecoaches on a loop around the park. Sometimes guests had to walk or push, but hey, they did want to experience the Wild West. Sometimes bandits held up the coaches and robbed passengers.

At the Lake Hotel, ladies and gents could have their attire cleaned, send a telegram, buy a shave or, for 25 cents, buy a bath. French wine, wildflower arrangements and delicate china were features of the dining room.

“As comfortable as the Lake Hotel may have been, it was not the area’s main draw,” Trappen wrote. “Guests fished the lake, which teamed with cutthroat trout, and they trooped behind the hotel nightly to watch bears feast on kitchen scraps. Sometimes they just sat on the front porch or upstairs on the veranda, absorbing the surrounding beauty.”

Maybe they’d take a ride on the Zillah steamboat around the lake. Transported in pieces by horse-drawn wagons, the steamer may be at the bottom of the lake. It was taken out of service in 1907.

If not originally – no one is sure exactly – by at least the 1890s, the clapboard siding of the Lake Hotel was yellow and yellow it has stayed. Trappen found “Colonial yellow” was popular with railroad properties and with East Coast hotels, so perhaps that is why the hotel is yellow. Or, yellow for Yellowstone?

By the 1900s, Americans knew a new level of wealth and they’d started driving cars. A trip to Yellowstone was suddenly in reach for an emerging middle class. The hotels needed to grow.

Though the Lake Hotel’s yellow exterior and neoclassical columns are a surprising sight along the lake, they are the legacy of the architect better known for Old Faithful Inn, Robert Reamer. His designs for that hotel became so popular across western parks that they simply became known as “parkitecture.”

Over time at the Lake Hotel, he expanded the clapboard building with more rooms and most notably with Greek Revival porticoes. He opened up the lobby, too. Out with the writing room! Upscale guests would be more comfortable in a hotel that look like those of the East Coast, he decided. The $79,202 renovation ($2.1 million in today’s dollars) meant the hotel could accommodate 466 people in 210 rooms. The “Colonial” became the hotel’s nickname for awhile.

The Lake Hotel closed with the advent of World War I. While it was closed, the wooden porch was chucked and a porte cochere added. In the 1920s, Reamer designed a flat-roofed wing for 323 more guest rooms, and a dorm to replace “bat alley,” the attic where female workers had lived.

One of the most treasured spaces he created was a horseshoe-shaped sun room/lounge making the most of the lake views.

Then the Great Depression came. Bereft of guests and designed for a different era, the hotel closed for five years, finally reopening in 1937. Reamer recommended tearing it apart and focusing on cabins, but park leaders decided to “wait and see,” and “fortunately, change often comes slowly in Yellowstone,” Trappen wrote.

One wing did topple for cottages and a parking lot in 1940, and the rest of the hotel seemed on the chopping block, too. World War II saved the grand dame of hotels, stopping construction and, key, wrecking balls, too.

“After five years of sitting empty and idle, the Lake Hotel was in no shape to house the deluge of visitors, which totaled 178,296 in summer 1945,” Trappen wrote. That number ballooned to 814,907 the next summer with the war officially over.

The hotel was in tough shape at 50, but its rooms were desperately needed for the sudden influx of tourists. A remodel project began in 1950, with a three-year, $121,000 renovation (about $1.2 million in today’s dollars).

Mission 66, which invested more than $1 billion in the parks in time for the NPS’s 50th anniversary, seemed another impossible hurdle for the hotel. The master plan for Yellowstone called for the Lake Hotel to be demolished and replaced with “motel-type lodge units” or at least painted brown or gray to blend with the landscape.

The hotel “limped on” after being sold, with the rest of the lodging and transportation concerns, to General Host, Trappen wrote, and “virtually ignored over the next 13 years. Structural and safety concerns mostly went without repair. Furniture got dingy. Walls were painted an institutional green.”

The hotel was a face of “faded glory,” overshadowed by the iconic Old Faithful Inn. At the commemoration of the hotel’s centennial, Yellowstone Superintendent Dan Wenk recalled uneven floors and a foundation crumbling away from the hotel itself.

In 2012, a two-year $28 million renovation began, and three years later, the hotel was awarded national historic landmark status.

Gone are the days of faded glory. Instead, guests from around the world fill the lobby with tourist bustle. On many summer evenings, the Lake String Quartet, the hotel’s resident musicians (along with a pianist), perform.

Lake Hotel will close for the season Oct. 9. Rooms range from $690 a night for the Presidential Suite (in which President Calvin Coolidge stayed) to $157 for a frontier cabin. The hotel has a dining room, deli and gift shop, too, for casual stops.

Reach Tribune Staff Writer Kristen Inbody at kinbody@greatfallstribune.com. Follow her on Twitter at @GFTrib_KInbody.

National Park Service at 100

Across the country, the National Park Service is marking its centennial.

In Yellowstone, the celebration will include “An Evening at the Arch,” a concert with Emmylou Harris and John Prine on Thursday, Aug. 25, at the north entrance at Gardiner.

The event also will be broadcast live and include a children’s chorus, a President Theodore Roosevelt reenactor, dignitaries’ speeches and more.

The event also will recognize the completion of the Gardiner Gateway Project: Phase 1, which seeks to smooth entry into the park.

Tickets are required but free. The next ticket release is June 15, then July 15 at https://www.ticketriver.com/event/19359.

Fast Facts: Lake Hotel

125: Age of Yellowstone’s Lake Hotel

720 feet: Length of the Lake Hotel, or more than two football fields

153: Guest rooms, plus 110 cabins and 36 rooms in an annex

$690: Price for a night in the Presidential Suite

$157: Price for a frontier cabin at the hotel complex

250: Seats in the dining room

3,500 gallons: Amount of yellow paint needed for the exterior

$105,000: Cost for the yellow paint job

7,700 feet: Elevation of Yellowstone Lake

Pearl divers: slang for hotel dishwashers

Spider web windows: Also called oculus windows, a neoclassical addition during renovation

1903: When President Theodore Roosevelt visited Yellowstone and was denied a stay at the Lake Hotel because it would be too much work to open it for the season. President Jimmy Carter stayed at the hotel after his term, President Warren Harding visited but didn’t stay and President Calvin Coolidge stayed in the presidential suite.

Colonel Sanders: Among the famous guests, which also include Ted Turner, Roy Roger and Dale Evans, Beau Bridges, Tom Brokaw, First Lady Laura Bush, Steve Martin and Donnie Osmond.

– From “Grand Lady of the Lake: The Remarkable Legacy of Yellowstone’s Lake Hotel” by Michelle Trappen