Crater Lake Lodge

William Gladstone Steel, who campaigned for years to make Crater Lake a national park, wanted a hotel on its rim almost as soon as he got the park in 1902. In 1909 he talked a Portland developer, Alfred Parkhurst, into building one, on a field of pumice a thousand feet above the water. It opened on July 3, 1915, and it was not finished. The outer walls were lined with tar paper, the inner walls were thin beaverboard, many rooms were left incomplete, and a small generator supplied electricity a few hours each morning and evening. Guests came anyway, for the view.

The building spent the next seventy years deteriorating faster than anyone could fix it. It closed during the Second World War, the Park Service bought it in 1967, and in the spring of 1989, just before the season opened, engineers warned that the Great Hall might collapse. The Park Service had at one point proposed tearing the lodge down and building a new hotel away from the rim; public outcry kept it where it was. The Great Hall wing was taken apart and rebuilt, the whole structure was carried on reinforced concrete and steel, and the lodge reopened on May 20, 1995, after more than $15 million in work. Eighty years after it first took guests, it was finally finished.

Only about a tenth of the original building survives, mostly the stone fireplaces and some decorative woodwork. The bark-covered pine posts in the lobby, the Great Hall and the dining room are steel columns with a bark veneer. The public rooms are restored to their look of the late 1920s, and the Great Hall and dining room look straight out over the caldera.