National parks lodges: Can you find the inspiration for “The Shining” here?

As if, in this economy, you didn’t have enough reasons to feel grumpy about staying home to save money, now comes “Great Lodges of the National Parks, Volume Two” (Graphic Arts Press, $35) to a coffee table near you.

In these pages, behold Death Valley’s Furnace Creek Inn, Hawaii’s Volcano House, Alaska’s Camp Denali and seven other memorable outdoorsy lodgings, all west of Denver, in historic black-and-white and contemporary color.

The author is Christine Barnes, who has produced three other volumes on memorable lodges of North America, with considerable help from photographers Fred Pflughoft and David Morris. The book is companion to an ongoing PBS series on park lodges. (Four of the photos from the book are in this post. As the fine print reveals, two of the 10 lodgings in the book are actually sites in Oregon national forests, not national parks.)

While other park appreciators pause to sniff the flowers or watch the waterfalls, Barnes is busy nosing around stone fireplaces, tracing the rail delivery of iron roofing, parsing construction memos from the 1920s. In fact, architects and engineers may savor certain passages more than casual readers will. But there are always the pictures to rely upon — 190 of them in 176 pages —  and the author’s enthusiasm is never in doubt.

“Museums with beds,” she calls the lodges. Barnes also throws light on the exasperating job of a park lodge architect: You’re supposed to produce something beautiful, but in no way compromise the natural beauty surrounding your site. You’re working for the government on land owned by the taxpayers, but many of these enterprises wind up charging more than $300 nightly and competing for guests with some of the grandest hotels on Earth.

Barnes puts buildings places into three categories: Grand Resorts, Classic Lake Lodges and New Visions (which takes in everything built since 1940). Here, gleaned from her pages, are four things I didn’t know before about these places:

1. When the Great Depression hit in 1929, visits to Yellowstone National Park began to slump, and the Lake Hotel there was shuttered from 1933 to 1936.

2. Death Valley’s Furnace Creek Inn opened in 1927. But Death Valley wasn’t declared a national monument until six years later. And it wasn’t declared a national park until 1994.

3. In 1926, after a fire destroyed an earlier building in Olympic National Forest in Washington, a crew of about 44 men built the Lake Quinault Lodge from the ground up in just 53 summer days.

4. The white-walled, red-roofed Stanley Hotel, in Estes Park, Colo., neighboring Rocky Mountain National Park, is the lonely mountain retreat that inspired Stephen King (then a Colorado resident) to write “The Shining.” Though the Stanley wasn’t used in director Stanley Kubrick’s movie version, a later TV miniseries did shoot at the site of King’s inspiration.

— Christopher Reynolds/Los Angeles Times

[Photos: "Great Lodges of the National Parks, Volume Two"]

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 3, 2008 at 4:20 pm by Christopher Reynolds and is filed under Book Reviews, California, National Parks, News, Tips & Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.