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Historic Structures of the Upper Geyser Basin
by Park Ranger George Heinz
Presented Live Online Aug. 13, 2009

Park Ranger George Heinz: We are coming to you live here from the Upper Geyser Basin in Yellowstone National Park. We’re right across the river from Old Faithful Geyser and the Old Faithful Inn and we’re going to start a program here in just a couple of minutes on the historic structures of the Upper Geyser Basin. Before we get started we are going to let our camera man do a little 360 and just give you an idea of where we are standing. So, stay tuned and we’ll be back with you in a couple of minutes.

You’re getting a view of Castle Geyser down there; it’s in the steam phase. You’re going to see the Lower General Store that we’re going to talk about. You’re coming around to the Old Faithful Inn, one of the treasures of our National Park System. The white roofed building there, that’s a new visitor center that we will be talking about here in a little bit. You can see that the crowds are starting to develop there. Old Faithful is starting to play a little. So, we might even get an eruption; Old Faithful is predicted to go at 11:02 plus or minus 10 minutes. But, it’s been pre-playing here quite awhile. That’s the Old Faithful Lodge there; you can see the brown roof. We’re back over here to Geyser Hill. Geyser Hill has about 40 geysers, the highest concentration of geysers in the world. We’re coming around; I hope you are watching mom.

Hi everybody, my name is Park Ranger George Heinz, and I’m a ranger here in Yellowstone National Park. I’d like to welcome everybody to the Upper Geyser Basin. This is an incredible place where I’m standing. It’s a little windy today with temperatures probably in the lower 60s, some puffy clouds, but mostly a blue sky. It’s a great day here in the Upper Geyser Basin.

When Yellowstone became the world’s first National Park on March 1st, 1872 by an act of Congress, Ulysses S Grant was the president in those days and the park was set aside for its thermal features basically; for the unique geology here.

But today, if we were looking at Yellowstone, and we were trying to decide if this place was worthy of being a park, it’s probably worthy of many little parks. You have over 10,000 thermal features, 300 geysers, and that’s about half of the geysers in the world are here in Yellowstone. You have the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River. You have the largest lake above 7,000 feet in North America. There’s all kinds of reasons why Yellowstone is worthy of being a big park. But, again, originally it was because of the thermal features.

But, sometimes when a park develops, and especially when it develops early on like Yellowstone did, over the years a cultural history starts to develop. Today the cultural history of Yellowstone, of the buildings and of the people that have been here is almost as important as that natural history. If we take a look at some aspects of that cultural history, and start talking about the development here in the Upper Geyser Basin, and we look at some of the buildings that are gone today, and some of the buildings that are still standing, you can get sort of an idea of how important this place is today to our society and has been in the past.

In the 1870s, when Yellowstone, it was the only National Park in those days, Yosemite was a state park, and Hot Springs, Arkansas was a land of many uses, it was where we use the resources. Yellowstone was the first place really where we are going to protect the resources on a national level, for future generations. So, as a park ranger, my job is to help protect Yellowstone, and interpret Yellowstone, for today’s visitors, but also for the future generations, so for our kids and grandkids.

So, there were questions when they were trying to make-up all these rules. Who was going to build all these hotels? Where were those hotels going to be built? Where was the money going to come from? In the first few years of Yellowstone, there was no money being spent here by the government. I think it was about 6 years after Yellowstone became a park before the first money came along. That was in 1878 and it was about $10,000.

One way to attract people to get here, they had to have a way to get here, so it was very important, some of that early road building, and the first road got here to the Upper Geyser Basin in 1878, again 6 years after Yellowstone became a park. That road was built by the second superintendant of the park, his name was Norris, and his road came to the Upper Geyser Basin and it ended up right behind me, right on this little curve in the river. So if you look behind me, you’re seeing the Firehole River. The Upper Geyser Basin is the uppermost basin on this Firehole River.

The first little village, it was more like a little shanty town, developed on that flat area right above the river there. The first buildings, the first one was a little log cabin and it was built so that people could stay up here in the winter and could do some sketching so people could understand what this place was like in winter. And, there was a gentleman that lived there that was trying to find a route from the Upper Geyser Basin here over to Yellowstone Lake. They first built a little shack and then, if we look at this picture down here, the building that is on your left or my right, that was built prior to 1886. It was built to be an Assistant Superintendant house. The person that was in charge of this part of the park would have lived in that little house.

Eventually by 1886, there were all kinds of things happening. People were here in Yellowstone, and they were here for the nature, but they were not necessarily here to protect nature. They were cooking food in some of the hot springs; they were washing clothes in the hot springs. It was common practice to write your name in geyser cones and even to take some of the minerals and some of the rocks home with you.

In 1886, to help protect Yellowstone, the U.S. Cavalry came to the rescue. They first built Fort Sheridan up in the Mammoth Hot Springs area.

Let’s swing our camera around and take a look. We’ve got Old Faithful erupting, so we’ll talk about that for a second and we’ll get right back to the U.S. Cavalry. That’s a beautiful eruption of Old Faithful. Again, Old Faithful is a bimodal geyser; it has a short mode and a long mode. The difference is whether an eruption lasts longer than 2 ½ minutes. As soon as that eruption started, there would be some rangers in the visitor center that put a stop watch on it. They’re going to time the complete eruption. As long as it’s putting water out of the cone, even if it’s only put it out a couple of feet, they will be timing that. The highest burst of Old Faithful is usually in about the first minute and a half. An eruption averages about 135 feet tall. They’ve been recorded as high as 184 feet. Each eruption is different; it depends on which way the wind is coming from and how cold the air is. They’re all beautiful in their own way. You can see that this thing is already starting to go down. It’s anywhere from a 2 to 5 minute eruption and it can throw upwards of a bout 8,000 gallons up into the air.

Later this afternoon at 2 o’clock, we are going to be talking about the thermal features here in the Upper Geyser Basin and so we’ll give you some better ideas on how Old Faithful works, what makes it erupt and what made it the world’s most famous geyser. It’s just a beautiful thing to see. If you get a chance to come out here, get out here early in the day; it’s an incredible place.

So let’s get back to the U.S. Cavalry and their part here in Yellowstone. They took over the management of Yellowstone in 1886. They were under the command of Captain Moses Harris and he was considered the Superintendant of the park in those days. The U.S. Army took over this little shanty town that was here. The Assistant Superintendant house became a soldier outpost. If you can imagine, it’s 21 years after the Civil War and all of the sudden these soldiers found themselves out here, this was a pretty good duty station. Your job would have been to help protect Yellowstone; it would have been a great place to be a soldier in those days.

So, this little town was developing back here behind me. If we swing around and we look down here at what we call the Lower General Store today, that’s the oldest building still in use here in the Upper Geyser Basin. That was built in 1897. Originally it was just a white framed farm house looking building. Then in 1903, it was called a Klamer’s Store, excuse me, but in 1903, Robert Reamer, the young architect that later on would build the Old Faithful Inn, he was working here on the Old Faithful Inn and he redesigned the lower store. He added all the knotty-pine, all the fancy wood, and the little dormers that stick out there. You’ll notice that it looks a lot like what became known as parkitecture across our National Parks; they were rustic little buildings that were built to supply goods and services to the visitors. In 1915, the Klamer’s Store was sold to the Hamilton Company and the Hamilton Company ran concessions here in Yellowstone until 2002. Then it was taken over by a company called Delaware North and Delaware North runs that store today. You can always tell if somebody has been around here for a long time because when they talk about lunch, they say, “well let’s go down to the lower Ham’s Store,” even though today Hamilton is gone and it’s ran by Delaware North. It is an incredible building. That was 1897.

That same year, right on this side of where that store sits today, another little building was built; it was a Haynes Photo Shop. Frank Haynes was the father and he was the park’s official photographer and eventually his son Jack Haynes would take over. If you can imagine, before the people back east could travel here, how do you make Yellowstone known to the public? One way is through photographs and paintings. If we look at this photograph here, this is a lithograph that was hand painted eventually by Jack Haynes, the son, probably in the 1920s or 30s. This picture itself is of Morning Glory Pool, which sits about 1 mile behind me. It was one of the more popular and more famous hot springs here in Yellowstone because until 1972 the road went right by Morning Glory Pool. In’72 the road was moved farther away. These photographs by the Haynes family are pretty collectable today. You can find them in museums and antique stores. They show an incredible history of Yellowstone Park; it was a good way to document what was going on here.

That same time, toward the end of the 1800s, there really were no hotels here. There had been a little hotel that we will talk about in a minute, but most of the accommodations here were tent camps. There was a Shaw and Powell Camp up where the lodge sits today. Back behind me about a mile sat a camp called the Wylie Tent Camping Company and they had little tent camps, called permanent tent camps, all over the park. They had these canvas tents that had wooden floors. They were pretty fancy, with nice bedding, some nice furniture and then you would go down the way a little to eat in a dinning tent. People would be dressed to the hilt; they’d have their Sunday best clothes on. It was an incredible way to visit the park. It would be quite a few years until there was a really good hotel here in the Upper Geyser Basin; that would happen in the early part of the 1900s.

If we take a look at this picture, this is a picture of the Old Faithful Inn the year it opened and it opened in the spring of 1904. The construction started in 1903. They worked through the winter; it was easier to drag logs and rocks. They could drag them over the snow with horses a little easier in the winter than they could in the summer. A group of about 40 people, plus Robert Reamer, the architect worked on the Old Faithful Inn, an incredible building. If we swing around here, we get a look at what the Old Faithful Inn looks like today. It is just an amazing building. You can see the main house (Old House), it looks just like the picture I just showed you. The logs have aged a little. Originally when that opened there were about 150 rooms. You can see the flags up there; in the early days people could go up there and they could watch the basin from where those flags are. That has been closed since a big earthquake in 1959 out at Hebgen Lake, Montana. It’s an incredible building.

If you look off to the left of what is called the Old House today, you can see a wing sticking out toward the new visitor center; that’s called the East Wing and that was built in 1913. If you look off to the right of the building, there’s another even larger wing that sticks out this way. That’s called the West Wing and that was added in 1927; that added about another 150 rooms to the Old Faithful Inn. Today, they rent 329 rooms nightly in the Old Faithful Inn. It’s sold out every night; it’s only open about 6 months a year, but it is an incredible building. You’ll notice that the Old Faithfull Inn is facing us here on Geyser Hill; it is not facing Old Faithful Geyser like you might expect. That’s because Robert Reamer, the 27 year old architect that designed and built that building, designed it so that when you pulled up in front of the Inn in a stage coach, the first thing you saw, straight ahead, would be Old Faithful Geyser. Then, when you where leaving the Old Faithful Inn on a stage coach, the last thing you would see would be Old Faithful Geyser.

The inside is an open lobby; it’s about 85 feet tall. It has a couple of balconies. It is all full of historic furniture and you can sit on those balconies on the inside and look down on the lobby. There is a giant fireplace that has a big clock that was forged by a blacksmith right here on location in 1903. That clock has about a 20 foot tall pendulum that swings back and forth. About twenty years ago or so, I was sitting on one of those balconies with my big brother and he noticed, he is in to antique furniture and stuff, that when you step into the Old Faithful Inn, it’s almost like you have stepped back in time. But, that clock keeps ticking. Today, I don’t think that pendulum clicks like it used to, but in those days he said it was almost like you were back in 1904, but the clock reminds you that you’re not, because it keeps clicking.

So, we’ve got a little eruption of Lion Geyser. We’ll swing around and look at that real quick and then we’ll get back to a building that sat where the Old Faithful Inn sits, here in just a second. Lion Geyser, there’s actually 4 geysers in that group, Lion gets into a series it’s called. It is about 13 hours between initial eruptions, but then about every hour and 20 minutes or so, it has shorter smaller eruptions. This is the third eruption in the series. Sometimes it can have up to 7 of these smaller eruptions before it gets back and then it goes through that 13 hour interval or so. It is an unpredictable geyser. We know from statistics the average of when it goes, but were not able to predict it today. It is an incredible thing to watch.

Let’s look back to where the Old Faithful Inn sits. I started working there when I was 18 years old; I worked housekeeping. I drove the linen truck for the Old Faithful Inn. In those days, over in the West Wing, there was a laundry-shoot. It was a spiral shoot; there was a little bitty door you could open in the hallway. It was common practice for the housekeepers to jump in the laundry-shoot and take a ride down to the basement. They took that out some years ago and they replaced it with an elevator so they could help people get up to the top floors without using the steps.

The Old Faithful Inn is not the first building that sat there. In the 1880s, there was a building that sat there called the Shack. It was actually built in 1885. There was a bill called the Sundry Bill of 1883 that stated that no building in Yellowstone could be closer than ¼ of a mile to a geyser. The Shack was built in the days before the U.S. Cavalry and it was built in the wrong spot; it was actually built a little to close to Old Faithful. In 1894, the Hayes Act superseded that Sundry Bill and from that point on buildings could be as close as 1/8 of a mile to a geyser. So today, the Old Faithful Inn, which was built in 1903, 10 years after that change, sits exactly 1/8 of a mile from Old Faithful Geyser. If you ever get a chance, whether you are staying there or not, come here and check-out the Old Faithful Inn. I like to call it the Grand Old Lady of the Upper Geyser Basin. It is definitely one of the cultural treasures that we have in our country. If you want to stay there, you will need to make your reservations 6 months to a year in advance. It’s an incredible building.

Right after the Inn was popping-up, on the flat spot off to the right, in 1914, there was a guy named Henry Brothers that got permission to build a bathhouse and swimming pool out here on the flats. He built this swimming pool, and we actually have a picture of it here. He used the hot water from Solitary Pool and Solitary is up behind Geyser Hill where we are standing. They tapped into this hot spring and they ran that hot water through a pipe across the river and into this swimming pool. This is what the original pool looked like. We now know that they destroyed Solitary or at the least we changed it. Solitary was a hot spring, we dropped the water level in it when we tapped into it and it became a geyser because the water level was lower, the run-off channel was lower, the water was hotter and it became a geyser. Today, even though it has been a long time since the pool was here, Solitary is still erupting as a geyser; it erupts about every 4 minutes.

In 1934, Henry Brothers sold his bathhouse to the Hamilton Company, which ran the store down here. The Hamilton Company remodels that and they named it the Plunge. The Plunge was about a 5,000 square foot swimming pool. It sat in the flats right across the river from where we are. There was a 25 foot tall lifeguard stand in there. The lifeguard had a Tarzan rope. He could swing out, or she could swing out on that rope and help people that might be in danger across the pool. By the late 1940s, there were some questions, both about using the resources here in Yellowstone and about the health of the water and what was happening to that water that might have chlorine in it. Every fall when they drained that pool, they were afraid that water was getting into the Firehole River. In 1949 the swimming pool was closed. It took a couple of years, but by the early 1950s, this building was completely gone.

It was sort of a different era. In the early days of Yellowstone, people were here for nature, but like I talked about, they were not here to protect nature, but maybe to use nature. They would cook food in the hot springs, do some laundry in the hot springs, but by the middle part of the century people were looking at Yellowstone as a resort type of area. There were dance halls that were popping up around the park. People wanted to go horseback riding. So they were here to use it more as a resort type of vacation more than as a vacation where they come and visit the natural resources like we do today. So, there have been a couple of big philosophy changes over the years on how we looked at Yellowstone, on how we managed Yellowstone and on why people have come here.

Sorry, I’ve got to look at my pictures.

There were other changes happening. If we swing back around here we can look at the Old Faithful Lodge. That building first started popping up in about 1916. Originally there was a Shaw and Powell Camping Company tent camp there. In 1916, the Wylie Camp we have talked about and the Shaw and Powell Camp combined and they became the Yellowstone Park Camping Company. It took about 12 years to build that little community there I call it, the Lodge. One reason those lodges started to pop-up in1916, was because that was the first year that automobiles were really let into the park on a complete basis. 1915 had a few automobiles, but by 1916 automobiles were replacing stagecoaches and so a new visitor was coming. The early visitors were the wealthy, the educated, and the people that could afford to stay in these big hotels. So, you didn’t have to got he Wylie Way, you could go the hotel way. By 1916, when people were visiting in their new automobiles we needed new places for them to stay. These lodges were built around the park, but there were not rooms in the lodges. The lodges rented cabins. They were called housekeeping cabins and they had maid service and stuff like that. They were fairly rustic; they had wood burning stoves and you did have running water in those cabins and some heat.

Probably the most important thing that happened in 1916 was the formation of the National Park Service. On August 25, 1916, the National Park Service was formed. It took about 2 years to completely take over the management of the park. The U.S. Cavalry actually left in 1918; there was a little lay over year there. If you notice what we wear as a park ranger, this is called a flat-hat basically or a campaign-hat you may hear them called. But, if you look back at what the U.S. Cavalry wore in the 1910s, they wore hats a lot like this. When the Park Service was formed, our hat was designed in recognition of the job the Army did managing our National Parks until the National Park Service was formed. We still wear our hats today so we can thank the U.S. Army for managing and protecting Yellowstone during their stay here.

So, we have these lodges popping-up and people are here for a different reason, their dancing and their wanting to do stuff. One of the popular activities was feeding bears. One of the questions we still get is, “where are the bears,” here in Yellowstone. We still get asked that all day as a ranger. The north end of the park is better bear habitat if you are wondering. This is a photograph of a bear-feeding ground that was here in the Upper geyser Basin. It opened in1919. These big hotels, every night after dinner, they would take the all the dinner scraps and they would go out, and rangers would pour those scraps on a big platform and bears could jump-up and eat that garbage. There was one ranger that became fairly famous here, his name was ranger Martindale. He would sit on a horse and watch the bears eat garbage. There was a fence that would keep the bears away from the tourists. The guest would sit on these benches and Ranger Martindale would talk about the natural history of the bears; it became known as the, “sermon on a mount.” We fed bears here in Yellowstone at our dumps until 1936 when all the dumps were closed except the one at Otter Creek, which is up near Canyon Village about 52 miles from here; That one was closed within a few years. We no longer feed any of the animals in Yellowstone. Yellowstone is left as a natural place; fires are able to burn if they are in the wilderness. We let nature take its course as much as humanly possible here in Yellowstone.

If we swing back around here and we can take a look at what is being built over there. That is going to be the new Old Faithful Visitor and Education Center. That’s due to open-up on August 25, 2010, which is the anniversary of the formation of the National Park Service. It’s going to be an incredible building, but it’s not the first building that sat on that spot. It is actually the third visitor center that has sat on that spot. The first one was built in 1929 by an architect named Herbert Maier. Herbert Maier built some buildings here in Yellowstone; he built this museum here, he built one at Fishing Bridge here in the park, he built one at Norris Geyser Basin and he built one at Madison Junction. The one he built here was called the Museum of Thermal Activity. It was just a little log structure; it had a little courtyard out back that actually had a little pond they built in the courtyard so people could go out and hear the rangers talk about the wetlands here in the park. That building was replaced in 1972 by a visitor center that is being replaced today. The reason that the original Museum of Thermal Activity was replaced in the early 1970s was because of a program that the Park Service developed in 1956 that was called Mission 66. During World War II, our government was not spending very much money in our National Parks; all the buildings were deteriorating. In 1956, they started a 10 year program to upgrade our National Parks and clean-up and fix-up the buildings we had let go for way too long. The Mission 66 plan here was to remove all the hotels from the Upper Geyser Basin here. Take away all the cabins; the Old faithful Inn would loose its wings and the Old House would become a museum. The Lodge would probably stay as a cafeteria, but nobody would be able to stay here in the Upper Geyser basin anymore. That really never came to fruition.

Today, we are glad that never happened, because we like coming here and staying in the Upper Geyser Basin. If you ever get a chance, this place early in the day, late in the day, is as magical as anyplace on our planet. I hear people say all the time that, “that place is too crowded there at the Upper Geyser Basin, but it really is only crowed in the afternoon. If you get out here at sun-up, you might be one of the only out here in the geyser basin.

This place is magical; it is the reason why Yellowstone became the world’s first National Park. About ¼ of all the geysers in the world are within walking distance from where I’m standing. This is a special place, so if you get a chance. The cultural history of a place develops and we are still developing it here in Yellowstone. It is really because of the people; it’s because of the soldiers, it’s because of the people that worked in the Old Faithful Inn, it’s because all the rangers that came before us. You might be sitting back home watching, but you have a chance to become part of the cultural history here in Yellowstone. You just have to start visiting. You just have to develop a relationship with this place. As humans we are more apt to protect a place that we develop a relationship with. So, pack your car, make your reservations and come out to Yellowstone. If you can’t come here, we have nearly 400 units in our National Park System. Make a trip. Start developing a relationship with one of these places. Your life will be better for it.

Stay tuned, because at 2 o’clock we will be talking about the thermal features here in the Upper Geyser Basin. Thanks for joining me, by mom and I love ya. Thank you very much.