The Old Faithful Inn--a National Historic Landmark

by Andrea Downing

Yellowstone National Park is world-famous for its geology, beauty, and wildlife, but it often seems that the one place visitors wish to go see is Old Faithful.  If one has only a day,  it may make sense to go there and walk the surrounding basin as well as wait for the next eruption.  But with so much to see, viewing Old Faithful has become almost Disneyish with the benches surrounding it and the postings of its next spurt.  Luckily, there is something else of fascination to see there…and it happens to be manmade.

The Old Faithful Inn is on the National Register of Historic Places and is designated a National Landmark.  The over-300 rooms enjoy full occupancy for the months the hotel is open, from the first weekend in May through the first weekend in October—many rooms being booked a year in advance. The hotel has survived a 7.5 magnitude earthquake in 1959 (which shook it loose from its foundations), 1988 forest fires (saved by, among other things, a sprinkler system just installed the previous year), as well as the notorious winters the Rockies offer. 

There had been a previous hotel on the site, The Upper Geyser Basin Hotel, which burned down.  The Yellowstone Park Company had originally approved a turreted  Queen Anne hotel, but Harry Child, President of the company, had met a young architect, Robert Reamer, whom he admired.  He instructed Reamer to design a hotel with the feel of the ‘camps’ in the Adirondacks.  The lobby and the original guest rooms, now known as

hallway of The Old House

The Old House (rooms without baths but with plenty of atmosphere) were built over 1903-1904 and the Old Faithful Inn welcomed its first guests on June 1, 1904.  The East Wing addition was completed in 1913—these are the rooms you would want in order to have a view of the geyser—and the West Wing

Landings of the half-stories of the West Wing

was finished in 1927, forming a hotel that is now 700 ft. long.  Local materials have always been used:  lodgepole pine, rhyolite rock for the lobby chimney, and local artisans were employed for the clock and sandblasted glass windows of the dining hall and lounges.

It is really an honor to be able to sit in the lobby, glass of wine and book in hand, live music drifting down from one of the upper galleries.  Every so often there is a blast of icy air as the front door is opened, people come and go, chatting in about every language of the world, as a fire blazes beneath the chimney clock.  And outside Old Faithful shoots up night and day on its fairly dependable schedule.

  I hope you enjoy the photos.