Yellowstone is a place that no one on the planet should miss.
The Mill Faithful Inn became a benchmark for park lodge architecture all over the American West.
Yellowstone resides every bit as strongly as it did out there inside as well.
The scale of Yosemite is just beyond comprehension. It's incredible.
Duwani is simply the most stunning hotel in the national parks.
It's a pinnacle of elegance, and it blends with the environment.
Every window seems to have a view. No matter where you go in this hotel, you're going to find Yosemite.
Built in the untamed landscape of the American West, they were the vision of early park enthusiasts, architects, and entrepreneurs.
The great lodges of the national parks reflect the wilderness that surrounds them while providing shelter from it.
Production of Great Lodges of the National Parks was brought to you in part by
MJ Murdoch Charitable Trust
The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations
and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.
Thank you.
The American West was once wilderness.
A place of raw beauty where mighty beasts roamed free and the soul of man was humbled.
There is still such a place. More than 2 million acres of deeply gorged, fire scarred, and geyser studded rocky mountain landscape.
Yellowstone National Park.
It is also the site of one of the great classic lodges of the West, Old Faithful Inn.
Old Faithful Inn is a big deal for a lot of reasons.
Much as Yellowstone, the world's first national park, was a role model for all subsequent national parks worldwide,
Old Faithful Inn became a benchmark for park lodge architecture all over the American West.
It was the architect's philosophy, Robert Reamer, which was,
I built it in keeping with the place that it stands. No one could improve upon that.
Prior to his time, all the hotels that were built here in Yellowstone and in other national parks as well,
stood out markedly from their surroundings and they were meant to.
The thought was that the wilderness was still a scary place and that when people had spent the day looking around in the wilderness,
they would feel most comfortable by seeing a building that reminded them exactly of any hotel they would see in Newport, New York, or Chicago.
Mr. Reamer thought he could give everyone that sense of tranquility and safety
by making a first class hotel with all the amenities they had come to expect,
but at the same time he could create a structure that looked as if it grew out of the landscape.
I think the Old Faithful Inn is a great place to take a pause during your visit to Yellowstone National Park
and let what has happened to you in the hours previously sink in.
You've also got the opportunity, of course, to visit with lots of other people and share the experience
and by sharing what has happened to you out there with the thermal features of the wildlife, it becomes more real.
With its western frontier sense of size, space, and grandeur,
Old Faithful Inn has become a symbol of the park itself, reflecting the wildness that is Yellowstone.
Yellowstone is one of the most special places on the planet.
It's just a magical place.
Leslie Quinn came to Yellowstone for a temporary summer job 20 years ago.
Today he trains and oversees 25 interpreters and tour guides.
Over half of the world's geysers, a rare enough phenomenon to be found anywhere,
are contained here in Yellowstone Park, along with a vast array of large mammals.
The park encompasses some 2.2 million acres of fantastic Rocky Mountain scenery.
It has the largest lake on the North American continent for lakes above 7,000 feet.
A glorious canyon that provides some of the most spectacular views on the continent.
And it's the world's first and oldest national park.
This is where the birth of the national park idea happened.
Three million people a year visit the park.
Most head to the Upper Geyser Basin, the geothermal epicenter of Yellowstone.
A stroll along the boardwalks here at the Upper Geyser Basin can be within a few feet
of beautiful deep blue hot springs whose temperatures rise sometimes right to the boiling point,
of steaming and hissing fumaroles, of acidic springs with a strong sulfur smell,
and of erupting geysers.
Old Faithful Inn is footsteps away from its namesake, Old Faithful Geyser.
Not the largest geyser in Yellowstone, it is one of the most dependable.
Some 20 times a day, every day, year after year,
thousands of gallons of boiling water blast upwards nearly 200 feet.
Mr. Eamer was careful in the way that he oriented the inn.
He didn't orient it to face Old Faithful Geyser.
He oriented it so that when your stagecoach rolled up in front,
Old Faithful Geyser was what you were seeing directly ahead of you.
The inn stands here next to the geysers without upstaging them,
which probably couldn't be done anyway.
The moment the geyser has erupted, the geyser rush takes over,
and all the buildings around Old Faithful, including the inn,
are just flooded with people within three minutes of the end of the geyser eruption.
As they enter the front door, there's a ceiling over them for the first few feet inside,
and then it opens up into the lobby, which stands 76 feet, 6 inches,
from the bottom of the soles of your shoes to as high as you can see,
and people are literally awestruck.
They stand there with their jaws hanging open for a minute or two on end,
sometimes not even speaking, and when they finally find words to speak,
it's the types of comments of, can you believe this?
The inn is the social hub of Yellowstone.
Those who come here to the Upper Geyser Basin
come to see the geysers and hot springs, which rightfully overshadow the inn.
They're the real scenic value here,
but those who step into the lobby of Old Faithful Inn
find one of Yellowstone's greatest surprises in this structure.
Today this building is very much a place for the public to come and enjoy.
It is not just restricted to the guests as it would have been when it opened in 1904.
Visitors of all ages, shapes, sizes, nationalities come inside the inn.
Any of us are free to sit in a chair, sit back, enjoy an ice cream,
just listen to the sights and the sounds of the building.
One of my favorite things here in the lobby is just watching the light change throughout the day.
Robert Reamer constructed the building,
so the windows on the east side of the building are not the same as those on the west side,
so the light changes throughout the day.
It's very much like standing in the forest
and getting the feeling of how the light changes when you're standing in the forest.
The Yellowstone of 150 years ago offered no such comforts as Old Faithful Inn.
The mountain men and fur trappers who roamed this rugged and isolated land
filled Montana's bar rooms with stories of a place where the earth spewed steam and mud.
Few believed them.
By 1872, three geological expeditions had confirmed the fantastic tales,
and on March 1st of that year, Yellowstone National Park was created.
The Northern Pacific Railroad jumped on that bandwagon
and they were thinking from the very get-go that this was a great place where we can put people on a train
in Minneapolis or Chicago and cart them out to Yellowstone and make money off it.
The railroad didn't get here until 1883,
and of course that arrival of the railroad is really what kicked Yellowstone into gear.
All of a sudden, we had 5,000 visitors that summer instead of the 500 to 1,000 we'd had before that.
By the turn of the century, there were a number of hotels in Yellowstone,
but the Spartan accommodations at the Upper Geyser Basin kept many away.
In a scenario repeated in other national parks,
powerful railroad interests helped to open the parks to tourism by creating first-class accommodations.
The railroads were bankrolling the national parks for the whole first half of the 20th century.
Now, please don't get me wrong.
They weren't doing anything with resource protection, building the roads, things like that,
but for tourist travel to the Great Western National Park, to Glacier National Park, to Yosemite, to Yellowstone,
they were the ones who were providing the funds to build the grand hotels.
At the turn of the century, Harry Child, the president of the Yellowstone Park Hotel Company of the time,
managed to convince the Northern Pacific to fund for him building a very good hotel here at the Upper Geyser Basin,
and he hired a young architect of 29 years of age, Robert Chambers Reamer, to come and do it for him.
Robert Reamer was a versatile architect who appreciated the relationship between a building and its setting.
This sensitivity would create a lasting identity for lodges in Yellowstone and all the national parks.
The original Queen Anne plans were scrapped.
After visiting the Upper Geyser Basin, Reamer was inspired.
He turned to nature and designed an asymmetrical, rustic lodge to reflect its setting.
He understood the nature that surrounds the building, the trees, the mountains, the rocks.
I mean, take just about any tree. A tree is not symmetrical.
It's asymmetrical, but it has balance of form, and Reamer wanted to do the same thing in the building.
Construction of the inn began in June of 1903 and continued through a very long and cold Yellowstone winter.
It was so cold, nails shattered, but the work continued.
Little is known about the 50 men who built the Old Faithful Inn.
Even most of their names are lost to history.
They dragged hundreds of native lodgepole pines and tons of rhyolite rock to the shadow of Old Faithful Geyser.
Robert Reamer's giant structure steadily rose from the steamy earth, but things didn't always go as planned.
I'm sure that at some point the master carpenter came over holding the drawings just angry as can be.
Mr. Reamer, you see this here thing on the drawing and you see that up there on the building? I can't build it.
And Reamer looked at his drawings. He looked up at his buildings and he said, oops.
And so Reamer would make changes as time went on. He massaged it. He improved it.
He made parts of the buildings that didn't exist in his original concept.
The Old Faithful Inn opened in June 1904, the first great lodge in the world's first national park.
The original section, known as the Old House, had 140 rooms.
Initially, the middle class couldn't afford to come to a place like Yellowstone.
The train ride was expensive and when you got here it was $50 for a five-day tour around the park,
which included your meals and your accommodations, but that was a lot of money in those days.
And it was basically well-to-do folks who could afford that, so the hotels had to be built to their expectations.
It had a rustic look to it, no doubt about that, and everyone commented on that in very, very positive terms.
But the Old Faithful Inn was built as a luxury hotel.
This building had electricity from day one. It had flush toilets from day one. It had lights and telephones from day one.
Hot and cold running water, steam heat. It was a luxury joint.
Over the years, two wings were added, also designed by Robert Reamer.
Today, Old Faithful Inn offers 326 rooms in the heart of Yellowstone Park.
The inn is owned by the American people and overseen by the National Park Service.
It is operated by a private concession company.
This is very much what our rooms look like today in the Old Faithful Inn.
This is exactly how we rent them today. We're renting 89 rooms.
Curiosity about the inn's past is so great that interpreters, such as Ruth Quinn, conduct tours four times a day.
This piece of furniture is an original piece of furniture in this room.
It's the wash stand with the copper top here.
They would have had a pitcher and a basin on top of it so they could bring water from down the hall to wash in their rooms.
A chamber pot underneath so they could not have to walk down the hall in the middle of the night themselves.
The rooms in the original part of the building are still very much the same way they were constructed.
We've left a lot of the character the same.
We do now have sinks in the rooms, but visitors in the original part of the building still walk down the hall for the toilets and the showers,
just like they did when the building opened.
We do have more modern rooms in addition to the building, but here in the original part, in the old house,
we try to keep that character the same as it would have been when visitors stayed originally.
There are certain people who only stay in the old part of the building.
It gives them a feeling of being connected to those visitors who came here many, many years ago.
They are essentially our history, our past, and you can get a feeling of that past by staying in this building.
Over the years, I don't know, I've replaced several hundred of these, I suppose, around the end.
I think little kids get fooling with them and get one out and stick it in their pocket and halfway back to Iowa they say,
Hey, Dad, look what I got, you know. I never forgot the idea that it was theft as much as just, you know, interest in the material.
Blacksmith George Ainsley is one of the many craftsmen who preserves the inn's legacy.
The goal at the inn here is to make the work look like it looked originally.
So my job is to try to match the texture and the color and the scale that the original architect had in mind.
You know, the inn is not a dead building, it's a live building. We're still working on it, we're still using it.
It's a constant job to keep a building like this up and running because it is in use all the time.
It's not a museum, it's still being used.
This is the front entrance to the inn.
And if you sit here for very long when it's cold out, you'll see this door open.
It's like it's never still almost. It's open closed, open closed.
When I came on the project, this door had worn down to where it was dragging on the floor.
It was taking several guys to drag it open in the morning and drag it shut at night.
We came in and ground out those hinges flat and put in an inch and a half of bushing.
And now with that bushing in there, it works like it used to.
You can see the mass and size and the weight of this hardware.
The idea was to try to match the scale of the west and the park around you without mimicking it.
You know, they wanted to build stuff that was big and heavy.
So this was the first thing when people came, the first experience after seeing the whole building
was seeing this door and getting to feel this hardware and handle it.
Atop the lobby's massive fireplace clings the inn's most famous piece of iron, the giant clock.
It was built below me here about 60 feet, I guess, by George Kolpitz,
who was a blacksmith on the project, designed by Robert Reimer.
It's centuries old technology, brought into a modern setting.
It's still operating, it's still beautiful, it's still one of the key points of the inn.
It's an honor to get out here and just take a look at how the old guy made the letters
and the numbers and how it was all put together.
Anytime I can work on this building, it's an honor.
The inn is particularly special because you are part of a continuing process of life in this building.
People are still staying here. They're still coming from far away at great expense,
from different cultures and different places where this is all new.
And that's been going on for 97 years, and it'll hopefully go on for another 97.
The serenity of the lobby is deceptive.
Yellowstone and Old Faithful Inn are in a constant battle.
The inn's timber frame has endured a relentless assault of heat, cold, rain and snow.
By the late 1970s, the strain on the giant wooden structure had taken its toll.
There were some people that thought the Old Faithful Inn was in such bad shape we should tear it down.
There were joints coming apart. The roof was collapsing in sections.
Logs were falling off the building. It needed a lot of work.
In 1979, a 10-year restoration and rehabilitation of the Old Faithful Inn began.
Restoration of a log structure this size had never been attempted.
It would need the right man to oversee it. That man was Andy Beck.
Much like Reamer's effort in building the inn, Beck and his crew worked night and day and through harsh winters restoring it.
The two architects were from different eras, but they shared a common bond, Old Faithful Inn.
The Old Faithful Inn was the first big project for Robert Chambers Reamer and it was the first big project for Andy Beck also.
I would walk through the building and I'd look at something Reamer did and I'd think to myself,
what did he do this for? Was he nuts? And then I'd think that if Robert Reamer was alive at that time,
he would have put his arm around me and said, look, Andy, I only designed it to be here 50 years.
Tear it down. Build another one that's nicer.
When I came here in 1979, a lot of this building was shot, like this log over here, completely rotted away.
We had to tear off the entire roof, a lot of the logs, a lot of the sheathing and replace it.
Like this log that we did 20 years ago is now holding up pretty well.
When Robert Reamer designed the main lobby, he had a long span of open space that he wanted to open up for 76 and a half feet into the air.
And his concept of rustic architecture meant that he had to do something.
He couldn't get a single log to span the space. He had to do something to get enough structure up there to hold it.
When I first started working on the building, I was looking at the truss, the structure that holds up the roof,
the triangular portion there, and I resolved the truss in my head and realized it couldn't work.
Wood just can't fit together like that. And then I noticed there was a straight crack running down the center of the piece of wood.
The crack that's in this column is not unlike the crack that's in the truss.
It's absolutely dead straight. It had to have been cut with a saw.
What Reamer did was he cut the log in half, hollowed it out, and then filled it with steel.
And that's what's up there holding it together.
Robert Reamer taught me a lot. Perhaps he was my mentor in some ways.
I definitely do things differently now as a result of what I learned from Robert Reamer.
Just when the Old Faithful Inn had been restored to its original glory, it was nearly destroyed.
Fire is a constant threat to a wooden lodge like the Inn,
but the inferno that engulfed Yellowstone Country in 1988 was like nothing in recent memory.
As the flames surrounded the Inn, a new water system soaked the roof.
Volunteers stamped out sparks. Then suddenly, the wind shifted.
A million acres had burned, but Old Faithful Inn stood uncharted.
The fires of 1988 reminded everyone that nature is in charge in Yellowstone.
Well, people come to Yellowstone for a variety of reasons,
but they spend their hours during the day focused on one of two things.
One is the geothermal features, and this has been true since Yellowstone opened its doors in 1872.
The second thing is the wildlife.
Both of those things, I think, serve as a whack on the side of the head, if you will,
against the kind of insulated lives that many of us lead.
You get to Yellowstone and you're seeing something you didn't quite expect and couldn't quite imagine.
When you have spent your day out in the park and you've seen the thermal features,
you've seen the wild animals, you come back to the Old Faithful Inn
and you're surrounded by these massive timbers, these massive stones.
It has enough of that wilderness as part of it that I think it keeps alive what you felt during that day.
Yellowstone still resides every bit as strongly as it did out there inside as well.
This still is my favorite. It is. Mine till we hide this night.
You'll hear people recounting the stories and the adventures they had
prior to getting back to their rooms in the inn that evening.
You'll see them go up to their rooms, get cleaned up, come down again,
looking phenomenally relaxed and at peace, order a glass of wine.
The piano player starts up and they'll sit back and they'll start visiting
and they'll really start to have an experience that they didn't necessarily count on.
People who would never write a postcard or a letter normally seem to be drawn to those writing tables.
A lot of things about who we are just as human beings seem to be supported not just by the park but by that inn.
And so the Old Faithful Inn, whether you're staying there or not, I think is worth visiting,
sitting down and letting the experience of the greater Yellowstone area sink into you.
The warmth and shelter of Old Faithful Inn is but a seasonal offering.
It was built as a summer hotel.
Each October the crowd's now gone, the inn is closed tight for the winter.
Winter in Yellowstone is an austere landscape, but no less majestic.
The bison continue to forage.
Old Faithful Geyser is as faithful as ever.
Other lodging is available at the Upper Geyser Basin,
allowing winter visitors an intimate Yellowstone experience.
The inn is quiet, but not ignored.
We'll go ahead and start up there and see what we've got out there.
The wind's been blowing pretty hard the last few days.
Winter keepers, such as Larry Perkins and Doc Watson, routinely check up on the sleeping giant during the cold winter months.
Alright, well I'll get out there and get the shutter out of the way.
Well, we have to go through periodically and check for the windows being open because if the windows are open the snow blows in.
And then we have to turn around and throw the snow back out.
That's got a drift out there, we're going to have to get on that drift too before it's too long.
We have to take it out not for this time of the year because this building stays cold all winter long.
It's in the spring when as the building starts to warm up then the snow melts and creates more problems for us.
Alright, Larry, I think that's it. Here's my shovel.
You come in the summer, you're standing elbow to elbow with people.
You come in in the winter time and you are it, you and your shadow if there is any sun leaking in through the windows.
Catch that side and I'll get over here.
Alright, that sounds good.
I wonder how much snow we got in here.
Got a window open, Larry. Not enough snow to worry about though.
The inn's timber roof must also be protected from Yellowstone's heavy snow.
The snow builds up on the roof and it forms a lot of stress on the building.
So we get up there and get every bit off that we can.
Well, we have Brandy Brandstetter, he's our climber.
And he sets the cable for us and he just is our roof man, he's our hiker.
There he is. Are you going to clean off that top edge first?
He's not afraid of heights. That's it. He likes to climb, he's our climber.
It's all sugar underneath, man.
This has got wicked potential to slide, Larry.
This may even come down without any help.
Look out! Holy!
Just like I told you, it wasn't going to take the cable.
In May, a crew will be readying the building for the rush of summer's visitors.
Old Faithful Inn will open, as it has for generations.
Offering shelter to the thousands who come to experience Yellowstone's wilderness.
In the heart of California's famed Yosemite Valley stands another grand lodge thought by many to be the finest in all the national parks.
The Iwany.
The Yosemite Valley is a beautiful place to live and to be a part of the world.
It's the finest in all the national parks. The Iwany.
When you walk in the front door of the Iwany, you know that it's something that has harmony with the valley.
The outdoors just pours through the windows.
They spared no effort in making it the finest hotel of its time.
It's the pinnacle of elegance and it blends with the environment.
When you get down to it, the Iwany is simply the most stunning hotel in the national parks.
The luxurious Iwany opened its doors in 1927 and would serve for years as an exclusive country estate for the powerful and wealthy.
It's grand halls a place where presidents, film stars, and royalty felt at home.
The entire hotel, even when you stand back, seems anchored with royal arches raining above it and the forest sheltering it. It's really perfectly situated.
Christine Barnes is an author of several books on the great lodges of the national parks.
It's the most elegant hotel in the national parks. It's so different from any of the other lodges.
From the huge clusters of granite on the outside to the intricate detail that you see on the edges of the beams. It is absolutely majestic.
Hello, welcome to the Iwany.
Thank you.
This is in a national park. Anyone can come here.
They can have a cocktail in the lounge, they can have lunch, they can splurge and go to the dining room, they can really splurge and stay here and have quite an event.
This is probably one of the only four star properties in America where you can see people walk in in tuxedos going to a wedding or in shorts coming back from a hike. So we see everything in between.
The Iwany is only one of Yosemite Valley's lodging options. Like Old Faithful Inn, it is a publicly owned building overseen by the National Park Service and operated by a private concession company.
Kathy Langley is the Iwany's concierge.
People stay at the Iwany for different reasons. For some it's a family tradition. They've been coming for years and years and we have many, many of our guests who fit into that category.
Let's go ahead and get you checked in and make you comfortable.
Okay, good.
We also have people who have heard of the Iwany for years and just want to come and spend one night here.
From its inception, the Iwany's lavish design had a far more important purpose than mere comfort.
Stephen Mather, the first director of the National Park Service, saw it as a way to ensure Yosemite's survival.
Stephen Mather felt very strongly that they needed an elegant hotel so people of power had a place to stay.
Because these people of power were the ones who were going to support the parks and Mather knew it.
That meant that you needed a space where they could gather, a space that was elegant, that enhanced their experience and exuded nature to get fit into nature.
To create his vision, Mather turned to a 35-year-old architect from Los Angeles, Gilbert Stanley Underwood.
Underwood was instructed to build a first-class hotel that was in keeping with its dramatic setting.
That was Underwood's genius, really, that he was able to pull this off.
It fits so perfectly with the environment, something that was sort of over-scaled and could have been too grandiose.
It really fits and blends, settles right in.
When it was finished, it was given the local American Indian name for Yosemite Valley, Awani.
The Awani mimics Yosemite in the background absolutely perfectly.
For example, the huge columns, those all reflect the cliffs in the surrounding area.
And in such detail that Underwood asked the masons to make sure that the walls were covered with a layer of wood,
and that the weathered part of the stone was always on the outside so that it matched.
Underwood was also directed to create a fireproof building.
He built the Awani primarily of granite, concrete, and steel without sacrificing the look of a rustic lodge.
Most people look at the siding here and they think that it's wood. In fact, it isn't.
Underwood used concrete instead of wood.
He made it look like wood by pouring it into wooden mold so that it mirrored the texture of the wood.
And then they stained it with an acid to look like redwood.
Underwood was a bit ahead of his time in the use of the huge spans of glass.
These are very indicative of 1930s art deco. This is the 1920s.
And really it reflects a sense of future, brightness, optimism.
Every room, every window seems to have a view. In the guest rooms you can open up one window and there's like a framed portrait of Half Dome.
You go across the hall and you see the same thing, but it's Yosemite Falls.
No matter where you go in this hotel, you're going to find Yosemite.
The scale of Yosemite is just beyond comprehension.
To stand at the base of one of these cliffs and look up 3,000 vertical feet of ground is just incomprehensible.
Each feature, El Capitan, Half Dome, Yosemite Falls, they would all qualify as a national park in their own right.
And yet here in Yosemite, Yosemite Valley in particular, they're concentrated in one place. It's incredible.
Artists from around the world are drawn to these cliffs.
Perhaps none more strongly than photographers.
Keith Walklett has traversed hundreds of miles in his effort to capture Yosemite on film.
It was photography that brought me here. It was photography that kept me here.
It was photography that really my whole relationship with the park revolved around.
I got to know Yosemite because I was a photographer.
From an artistic standpoint, here everything is a subject.
The massive vertical relief, sunset through the trees, clouds and interplay of shadow and light.
The light in the winter in particular is phenomenal.
You have light that's shooting straight down Yosemite Valley at sunset. It's neon. It doesn't look real.
People see a photograph and they say, oh, it can't be real. It is.
Photographs such as those of Ansel Adams helped introduce the world to Yosemite's views.
But it was the work of little-known photographer Carlton Watkins that helped create Yosemite Park.
Early lobbying efforts to preserve Yosemite were met with disbelief.
People could not comprehend the magnitude and scale of its beauty.
Watkins' photographs settled the argument.
In 1864, President Abraham Lincoln took the unprecedented step of setting aside Yosemite Valley for posterity.
Yellowstone may have been the first national park,
but the spirit of the national park system started right here in Yosemite.
Nearly four million people a year visit Yosemite Park.
Most limit their stay to Yosemite Valley.
Some come to climb America's most famous and challenging cliffs.
The less adventuresome see the valley from an open-air tram or by bike.
There are 12 miles of bicycle paths on the valley floor.
Every clearing offers a view.
But the most breathtaking is from Glacier Point.
What do most people think caused Yosemite Valley?
Glaciers, okay.
Dick Ewert has been a park ranger for nearly 30 years, most of that time at Yosemite.
He lives here at Glacier Point during the summer.
It's great to work here because you get to see people coming out here for the very first time.
I mean, it's like their first experience ever, and you get to see it day after day.
And people are just in awe.
I mean, they just stand there and look out and just can't believe what they're looking at.
The main segment of the view is Half Dome.
You know, the dome, it looks like it's been sliced in half.
Most geologists agree probably only 20% of it is missing,
but it still looks like it's a dome that's cut in half.
We're at 7,200 feet right here, and the valley is at 4,000 feet.
So we're talking 3,200 feet straight down.
If you walk to the railing, look just right over the edge,
and you'll be able to see the Iwani sitting right down there, clear as can be.
I just remember the first time I walked in, I was just overwhelmed with just the grandness of it,
the scale, the beauty.
I mean, just how large and open it is, sort of resembling outside, which is large and open.
It's just one more aspect of Yosemite that people can see that is beautiful.
I like to bring my friends that come to visit to the Iwani Hotel,
because it's one thing in the park that's not the natural aspect of the park
that I really don't think anyone should miss, because I just consider it a work of art.
That artistry is played out in the Iwani's interior.
The hotel's first decorators incorporated the basket designs
of California's indigenous people throughout the hotel.
They also integrated Near and Middle Eastern rugs,
originally purchased in bulk.
The remaining rugs are rare and displayed on the hotel's walls.
In each of the Iwani's public rooms, careful use of light, color, and space create distinct atmospheres.
The bright and open solarium is a favorite setting for wedding receptions.
I love the solarium. It's one of my favorite rooms because of the simplicity.
And this is where Underwood knew you simply can't compete with Mother Nature.
So instead, he created these huge windows, and you can look out, and you see the cliffs, and you see the trees.
It also gives you an opportunity to look at the beautiful, tiny details.
You see the grass, and the flowers, the acorns.
And all the while, in the background, if you listen carefully, you'll hear this trickling from the Jasper Rock Fountain.
The Great Lounge is perhaps the signature room at the Iwani.
It's cathedral-sized. It's absolutely massive.
It's toned down by the use of warm colors, sort of a pale yellow.
And you have the massive windows, and the huge expanses.
And then you have delicate detail, like the painting on the beams.
The furnishing is that of an English country home, an exclusive luxury home.
Ninety-nine percent of the furniture that's in the public areas of the hotel is original furnishings.
And they took great care in selecting that furniture.
The chairs in the Great Lounge, for instance, they're called beacon chairs.
And those chairs are an incredibly relaxing place to sit.
They recline, and you have no choice but to look at the ceiling,
and see the beautiful stained glass windows in the Great Lounge,
and all the details of wrought ironwork is just absolutely gorgeous.
Years ago, a local artist would stop by the Great Lounge each afternoon to practice on its grand piano.
His playing drew small crowds, which prompted the staff to serve tea.
The pianist was Ansel Adams.
To this day, afternoon tea is a time-honored Awani tradition.
The room that really makes people gasp is the dining room. It's huge.
What can I bring for you today?
It's the only room in the hotel that's made of wood.
It's these big timbers, and that's Underwood's nod to really rustic lodge architecture.
But along the sides, again, you have the alternating glass and the piers of wood.
It's his favorite sort of roof design with the trusses and the beams, and it is absolutely majestic.
The dining tradition here is really special.
It's a place where weddings and anniversaries and all kinds of special events have occurred for any number of families.
Bob Anderson is the Awani's executive chef.
I'd say most of the folks that dine here aren't guests to the hotel.
Okay, gentlemen, here comes your lunch. French dip with potatoes and dried tomatoes.
Maybe a third are hotel guests, and the rest either come here for the day or they're staying in some of the other properties,
or they're camping out and they brought a coat and tie and they're having their big meal out here.
Did you care for any coffee at all?
On our staff are world-famous rock climbers and athletes of pretty impressive proportion,
but they do this so that they can live in this beautiful place.
You walk into the kitchen, it looks like organized chaos, and it's more organized than chaos.
The kitchen's huge. It's about 7,000 square feet. It's got a 45-foot ceiling.
It's like everything else here. It's just gigantic.
Bob is also the Awani's ice sculptor.
It's funny how no one ever gives me a hard time when I have a chainsaw in my hand.
You can't hear the phone, and it's very, you kind of get that zen thing going on.
So that's a big part of what I like to do.
I've spent days or as little as a couple hours on pieces.
I do a lot of half domes. That's pretty requested at the wedding, so I do an awful lot of these.
I can knock these out pretty quick.
The Awani is a place of many traditions.
Its grandest, a Christmas celebration, known as the Bracebridge Dinner.
The Bracebridge Dinner is a Christmas that everyone has dreamed about.
It's the wonderful smells of Christmas coming from the kitchen.
It's the joy of music wafting through the air.
It's people being able to be together with everyone they love.
It's warmth, it's tradition, and there's just something so tremendously magical about doing it here at the Awani.
For three quarters of a century, professional singers, actors, and talented Yosemite locals
have filled the Awani dining room with the pageantry of this hugely popular medieval-style feast.
Famed Yosemite photographer Ansel Adams directed Bracebridge for nearly 40 years.
For the past two decades, it has been directed by Andrea Fulton.
The dining room is just, under normal circumstances, the most magnificent room.
It's magical. But then, at Christmas time, it becomes a warm and wonderful, baronial manner.
It becomes Bracebridge Hall.
I bid you hey to Bracebridge Hall!
Truly, the Bracebridge guest is transported into a mythical Christmas.
Coveted tickets to one of the five Bracebridge performances are awarded by a lottery.
It's a special night for first-timers and longtime Awani staff like Kathy Langley.
The Bracebridge dinner for us is where we spend Christmas.
If you have to work on Christmas Day, there's no place like being here. It's as festive as you can get.
Every time Oh Holy Night is sang by the soloists, I can't stop crying.
And I've seen Bracebridge five times a year for 18 years.
The essence of Bracebridge is the music.
The room just exists to be filled with sound.
And the room is simply alive with all the years of tradition that it's seen with the Bracebridge dinner.
There's a majesty to it that the hotel has, a majesty to it that the valley has.
And they all go hand in hand.
Awani evokes a certain ambiance that some other places don't here in the park.
You don't see buildings built like this anymore. You don't see this kind of detail and attention to a theme.
It speaks to someone who had a great passion to make this place exemplify Yosemite.
And if a visitor pays attention to that, I think this place can speak loads about creativity, passion, and history.
My name's Julie Miller. I work for Yosemite Concession Services. I work in the interpretive department.
I'm kind of curious, when we asked, Kaylee and Lee said you'd been here how many months?
Five.
Five months. You guys have been coming here?
For years.
For years, as well as?
50 plus.
50 plus years.
The Twilight Strolls at the Awani are an hour-long walk, close of the day. They start at dusk, they end at dusk.
We make a circle that takes in some of the meadows and head along the river.
And it's a chance to just experience sort of that quiet hush of the day before nightfall.
Alright, well let's head out to the meadow then.
I see people that return again and again to places like Yosemite and places within the park themselves, like the Awani.
And I realize that those places have a certain draw to them.
I often see wildlife cruising by on this trail.
They're all leading to the meadow because meadows are magical places for both humans and creatures.
Certain places heal us, they encourage us, they inspire us.
For some people it is Yosemite, for some people it is the Awani Hotel, for some people it's Glacier Point.
But I think there's a certain feeling that you get no other place than when you're right here, going home.
Some people, their goal is to climb Half Dome and have kind of a strenuous adventure here.
Some of them want to take a book and read by the river.
People find their own niche.
I think the Awani definitely serves as a niche for some people who find that the comfort of this place,
in the setting that it is placed in, is just perfect for their experience here.
And if they fall in love with the Awani and then fall in love with the park, great.
If they fall in love with the park and then discover the Awani, even better.
The Awani and the Old Faithful Inn reflect the rugged landscape that surrounds them,
and how the people of their day related to it.
They share man's endeavor to fit in to the wilderness he set aside to preserve.
I'm always amazed that these lodges were ever built.
And when someone achieves something like the Awani Hotel,
when someone builds something that's going to last and be here for all of us to enjoy, it's really quite remarkable.
You know, it was about 130 years ago that people had the foresight to set aside our nation's natural resources
in the name of generations yet unborn.
Well, now we have the opportunity to set aside our nation's cultural resources
in the name of the generations that will be coming after us.
And I think that the Old Faithful Inn is one of the finest things that we can set aside for these future generations.
We get all excited about the architecture of the National Parks.
And why? Because it's rustic.
You know, it blends in with the scenery.
It mimics it. It celebrates the beauty of randomness.
That's what makes the Great Lodges of the National Parks so special.
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