Old Faithful Inn: A National Park Lodge

Old Faithful Inn derives its name from its close proximity to the Old Faithful geyser, which erupts once every 35 to 120 minutes. Courtesy of Xanterra Travel Collection

The wood at Old Faithful Inn goes every which way: up, down, sideways, and back. Stairs slant, banisters twist, posts soar, hallways veer, and balcony railings look like roller coasters. Structural members are unmilled; planks are rough-cut, un-planed. Posts and rails often sport natural burls, dwarfish bumps, and rings on the tree trunks. The high beams of Wyoming sunlight that lance through clerestory windows 80 feet above the lobby floor make the old lodgepole pine logs gleam amber.

It’s an elvish fantasy of timber, and there’s a heck of a lot of it.

In fact, this massive 1904 structure may well be the world’s largest log building, at 188,445 square feet. Poised beside one of the most famous geothermal features on Earth, in what’s usually considered the planet’s first national park—Yellowstone—the inn bestrides several vectors of fame that make it exceptional.

Old Faithful Inn was designed by Robert Reamer and built with local logs and stone. Courtesy of Xanterra Travel Collection

“This building speaks to so many people in so many ways,” inn historian Ruth Quinn observes. “The unique design and construction, the appealing antique furniture, the aura of the romance of early 20th-century travel. For some people this is actually what they most want to see here at Yellowstone.”

Now that qualifies the inn as famous. But famous is not always the same as popular.

“Rusticity gone berserk,” one early 20th-century critic sneered about architect Robert Reamer’s now legendary creation—a visionary design that inaugurated what has become a singular American accomplishment, the national park lodge. The park service assigned Old Faithful Inn and its brethren a label—national park rustic, aka “parkitecture”—and this unique approach to built environments is now found in several dozen lodges in just as many parks here and in Canada.

What is parkitecture? The term refers to, simply put, public buildings made of native materials and formed in a way to blend in with, rather than impose upon, their surroundings.

Famous examples include:

• Yosemite’s Awahnee
• Grand Canyon South Rim’s El Tovar and North Rim’s Lodge (12 miles across the canyon)
• Glacier National Park’s Many Glacier Lodge & Lake McDonald Lodge
• Crater Lake Lodge in Oregon
• Zion National Park’s Lodge
• Death Valley’s California Inn
• Shenandoah’s Big Meadows Lodge
• Mount Rainier’s Paradise Inn, which may be the closest in spirit to Old Faithful
• Alberta’s Jasper Park Lodge
• Quebec’s Chateau Montebello

Most of the famous Canadian park hotels, such as Banff Springs and Lake Louise, are massive European-style monuments bestriding rather than joining their surroundings. All are blessed, amazing, and worthwhile destinations on their own merits.

A Head Above the Rest

But Old Faithful is the queen of them all. It’s the first, the biggest, and the most sensational, and when you park yourself in a pine chair at the lobby’s edge, you can see this in action as each visitor enters the inn. When they leave behind the low-ceilinged registration area and enter the open lobby, everyone looks up—everyone. The lobby pinnacle is 92 feet above, supported by a phantasmagorical framework of wood.

The dining room features massive log beams, chandeliers, and a large stone fireplace. Courtesy of Xanterra Travel Collection

The Inn has a massive stone fireplace and a hand-crafted clock made of copper, wood, and wrought iron in its lobby. Courtesy of Xanterra Travel Collection

The dining room features massive log beams, chandeliers, and a large stone fireplace. Courtesy of Xanterra Travel Collection

The suites feature a well-appointed sitting room with refrigerator and a bedroom with two queen beds. Courtesy of Xanterra Travel Collection

The Old House rooms are located in the original part of the inn and are quite rustic. Xanterra Travel Collection

Also up above are Old Faithful’s two (not one, two) mezzanine balconies overlooking the lobby, an inspired design vision on Reamer’s part that I don’t recall seeing anywhere else. Yes, there are many European buildings where balconies overlook courtyards. But here, they overlook the lobby, and dozens of visitors are parked in easy chairs or at reading carousels, passing time or writing postcards.

“That’s what I used to do years ago when I started working here as a housekeeper,” Ms. Quinn recalls. “I'd come up here and have lunch and just watch. I still do, in fact.”

The Power of Parkitecture

Despite those few early, snarky misgivings, parkitecture now has a deep hold on the public imagination. Design magazines periodically publish features on how you can incorporate its basic principles into your own home. An online search uncovers innumerable features on which lodges are best and where to find them. Lavish picture books cover the topic, and there’s a group devoted to it, the National Park Lodge Architecture Society.

The Grand Canyon’s South Rim El Tovar sports a rustic wood style similar to Old Faithful—but it’s conspicuously out of place atop the scrub-clad desert plateau; in fact, the wood for El Tovar was shipped all the way from Oregon. Quebec’s Chateau Montebello claims greater size, at 4 million cubic feet of interior space—a size apparently beyond the reach of eastern Canada’s forests, as its 1930 construction required the shipment of 10,000 western red-cedar logs across the entire continent from British Columbia.

Old Faithful stands tall, but not obnoxiously so, in the lodgepole pine woodlands surrounding its namesake geyser. It’s conspicuously appropriate, therefore—in contrast to the Lake Yellowstone Hotel 10 miles away, a massive neocolonial structure, painted vivid yellow, hoisted on a bluff overlooking the United States’ largest lake above 7,000 feet. Yellowstone locals grouse that it sticks out like a sore thumb.

Built in 1903, the Lake Yellowstone Hotel is known for its grand architecture, featuring a Colonial Revival style with large porches, symmetrical design, and a central dome. Courtesy of Xanterra Travel Collection

After visiting Yellowstone half a dozen times and helping write a book about it, I want to see nothing in the park more than Old Faithful Inn. There are geysers, mountains, wild animals, sparkling lakes, and awesome waterfalls in many places around the world, though Yellowstone is clearly superlative in all those regards. But there is truly only one Old Faithful Inn.

The summer before the inn opened on June 1, 1904, the architect, Reamer, and the project developer, a Montana tycoon named Harry Child, met on-site with a rather famous celebrity: President Teddy Roosevelt. At the time, Child planned to build a set of cottages at Old Faithful, which was beginning to enjoy its worldwide fame. Child had commissioned timber cutting for the cottages, and there was a lot of rough-cut lumber lying about. TR had a look. No one knows what was said among the three, but it’s fun to speculate.

I would never describe the inn as berserk rusticity. It’s artistic, down-to-earth, compelling, enthralling, memorable. I might apply the term grandiose, but I mean that fondly. If I were to advise visitors from another planet to book a room in just one hotel in the United States, it would be here.

What Teddy Roosevelt said to Child and Reamer seems clear to me.

“Why think small, gentlemen? Talk softly but carry a big stick. Many, in fact.”

So they did just that.

Heading to Yellowstone? Find tips here, from visiting geological wonders to viewing wildlife.

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So How Big Is Big? 

Circumspection guides the National Park Service’s descriptions of Old Faithful Inn. To NPS, it is “one of the world’s largest log buildings.”

Meanwhile, the Chateau Montebello in Quebec calls itself the “largest log cabin,” an odd turn of phrase that may or may not signify something. At any rate, Montebello reveals no square feet statistics. It claims to hold 113,000 cubic meters (4 million cubic feet) and has 211 rooms and a lobby rising three stories (about 60 feet).

Old Faithful is 188,445 square feet (not cubic), has 327 rooms, and is 700 feet long, and its lobby tops out at 92 feet. One long-ago estimate determined that its construction required 10,000 trees, almost all locally harvested and milled.

So, to borrow an old human axiom, size is in the eyes of the beholder. Or, to quote Orwell, “All animals are equal; but some animals are more equal than others.”