The Old Faithful Inn and the Chimney That Holds It

The steam rises before the hotel does. It comes up in white columns between the pines, and a traveler crossing the Upper Geyser Basin often sees Old Faithful's plume before any roof. Then the road bends, and the inn appears in the timber of northwest Wyoming: a dark stack of logs, with a roofline that climbs and dips and turns back on itself, as if someone had stacked a barn on a sawmill and called it a castle. It has stood there since 1904, and the oldest part of the building is the stone.

Old Faithful Inn was raised in 1904 out of what the country had at hand. Whole logs, peeled and notched, were stacked into walls. The roof was steep enough to shed snow, and the gable ends were cut with a kind of playful irregularity, so that the building never settled into a simple line. The first guests arrived the long way — by rail to the edge of the park, then by stagecoach over roads of gravel and dust. They came into the lobby tired, coats covered in road dirt, and found themselves standing in a tall wooden room built around a stone chimney. The chimney was the first thing they saw, and it is the first thing a visitor sees now.

The Chimney Rises

The lobby is a tall one, a shaft of air held open by timber. At its center stands a chimney of rough stone, thick and square, built of rock pulled from the surrounding ground. It rises from a hearth wide enough that a grown person could lie in it, and it keeps going. It passes balconies of peeled logs and branchwork railings, passes the dark crossed braces of the roof, and disappears into the dim space under the peaks. From an upper landing, a guest can lean on the rail and look down into the fire. There is no other hotel lobby in America quite like that.

The balconies circle the shaft one above another, and the stairs climb between them in switchbacks. Rooms run along the outer walls, but the public life of the hotel happens at the center. People sit on sofas and chairs arranged in loose rings around the hearth. They look up. They look down. The stone chimney gives the room its gravity. The walls of logs matter, and the roof matters, but the chimney is the reason the arrangement works. It is the axle; the lobby turns on it.

A Cathedral in Logs

In the early years of American national parks, visitors were used to a certain kind of hotel. The great railroads had built grand wooden and brick buildings near the western parks, with marble floors, chandeliers, and dining rooms that could seat a hundred. The Old Faithful Inn went the other way. It made raw logs and rough stone the luxury. It was not a simple building, though. The timber framing was careful and complex, with braces and posts that carried the roof in a hundred directions. The stone chimney was the structural core, and the building was arranged around it, the way a shed leans against a boulder. The inn brought the American log cabin into the age of large buildings and turned the fire on the hearth into a civic monument.

That was a distinctly American idea. In Europe, an old building was a castle or a cathedral; in America, an old building might be a cabin. The Old Faithful Inn fused the two. It gave the log cabin a cathedral's height and a community's warmth. Logs cut from the mountain forests were stacked into walls; stone from the ground was lifted into a chimney; and at the bottom of the chimney, a fire was laid. There was nothing imported about it. The inn was built by hand, in a place that was hard to reach, and it was built to last. The fact that it still stands, still open, still holding its original lobby, is part of its argument.

Still Around the Fire

The seasons pass over the inn. In summer, the boardwalks around the geyser are thick with people; in the off-season, the cold air bites, the steam stands taller, and the building shows its age. The old lobby has been wired for electricity, fitted with modern safety, repaired where the years have worn it. None of that has changed the arrangement. The chairs may have changed fabric; the lamps may be electric. But the stone chimney is still there, and the fire is still at its base.

On a cold evening, the fire performs the old trick. It throws a ring of warmth across the floor, and the people nearest the hearth lean in. Voices lower. The upper floors fade into darkness, and the chimney becomes a tall black presence, glowing faintly at the bottom. A visitor could be standing there in 1904 and not feel entirely displaced, because the central fact of the room — a great stone mass, with fire in it — has not moved. The hotel was built around it, and it is still around it.

And then there is the moment when the geyser outside does its job. The boardwalks fill; camera shutters click; the plume goes up. Afterward, the crowd drifts back to the warm buildings. They come through the heavy doors into the lobby, and the first thing they do is look up. The stone chimney meets their eyes as it met the travelers of 1904. It holds the room together the way it always has, a column of the ground itself, still burning at the base, still carrying the whole weight of an American idea.

Yellowstone National Park

Photos: incidencematrix (CC BY 2.0)