Made in yellowstone: Old Faithful Inn still inspires after 100 years

By SCOTT McMILLION Chronicle Staff Writer

There's a little dip in the floor of the Old Faithful Inn, but most visitors don't notice it because they're busy digging it deeper.

Just a few feet inside the door, notes author Karen Wildung Reinhart, you can see the smooth wooden boards where people stand, crane upward and shuffle their feet as they try to take it in all that soars above them.

"There is a worn spot in the floor of the lobby where people have paused and reacted -- often slack-jawed with wonder -- to the lobby of immense proportions offered up to their gaze," Reinhart wrote, in a book she and partner Jeff Henry recently produced to celebrate the centennial of the inn.

This is no common lodging. Rather, it's a hostelry that often impresses visitors almost as much as the namesake geyser right outside the front door.

Their book "Old Faithful Inn, Crown Jewel of National Park Lodges," celebrates the history of the inn, the colorful characters who've worked there, the incredibly talented men who built it under brutal conditions, the famous guests and even the bears that have occasionally wandered the hallways.

The combination of Reinhart's prose and Henry's photographs, plus historical photos gathered from public and private archives, illustrate what a marvel it is that the inn still stands.

The building has survived all that Yellowstone National Park can throw at a building, and that's a lot: world-class earthquakes, a live volcano under the basement, bone-cracking cold, a forest fire to boggle the imagination, the gnawing demands of millions and millions of visitors and the sometimes misguided labors of renovators.

The inn's lobby is its crowning glory, soaring seven stories and seemingly constructed entirely of logs (most are half logs, nailed to beams). The details include lodgepole pines twisted by nature into curlicues, question marks and parentheses. It's no wonder people stop and stare.

And the whole structure stands as an icon, as park historian Lee Whittlesey noted, one that represents both Yellowstone and the entire national park system. It's the first truly large example of "parkitecture," the simple, elegant and powerful buildings scattered from Yosemite to Jasper.

Similar styles of buildings aren't that hard to find now. But when the inn opened its big red doors in 1904, the world teetered on the cusp of a motorized revolution and the inn represented a concept unseen before: "a consciously developed rusticity," is the way Whittlesey described it in the introduction to Reinhart and Henry's book.

The building went on to become "a model for the National Park Service in succeeding decades," Whittlesey added, because it provided comfort and shelter without detracting from the surrounding wilderness. Hitting those two targets has been a constant and often elusive goal of the National Park Service.