Old Faithful Inn is rooted in Yellowstone

Visitors to Old Faithful Inn gather for a tour of the landmark hotel at Yellowstone National Park. (Scott Beveridge photo)

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. – While a maize of stairs leads to doors and windows where visitors once viewed the famous geyser field outside Old Faithful Inn, the entire building is actually connected to the nation's oldest national park, a tour guide here says.

The 106-year-old rustic hotel - the largest of its kind in the world - is built from the same lodgepole pine trees that still cover the mountains at Yellowstone National Park, and the rhyolite stones forming the inn's 500-ton fireplace came from a nearby quarry, guide Ruth Kansas says to make her point.

"Eighty percent of the trees here are 75 feet tall," Kansas, while guiding a group of nearly 30 tourists around the building listed on the National Register of Historic Places. "From the floor to the ceiling, it measures 76 feet to give us the feeling we are still outside in the forest."

The federal government hired a developer in 1903 to construct the building for $140,000, a project financed by the Great Northern Railway, which had hoped to extend its railroad to the hotel to fatten its wealth.

However, Congress shot down that plan as it members wanted this land in Montana and Wyoming to be forever preserved to protect its wildlife and especially the underground lava flows that create a string of geysers here, including the nearby Old Faithful, which shoots 180-foot gushes of steaming water into the sky nearly ever hour.

So the railroad promoted "stagecoach trips through wonderland" embarking from a railroad stop 50 miles to the north in Montana, $50 vacations booked mostly by the well-to-do living on the East Coast and Europe. They paid $4 a night to stay in the park's five hotels, Kansas said. That stagecoach trail forms the same roads motorists use today to tour the park inhabited by the grizzly and black bear, buffalo, moose and elk, she said.

"The wealthy wanted to experience the wilderness but didn't want to spend the night in the wilderness," Kansas added.

Ohio architect Robert Reamer

To make that happen, 50 carpenters initially built a 140-room hotel in record time over a bitter cold winter. Construction had been overseen by an unknown 29-year-old architect from Ohio, Robert Reamer, who went on to design other hotels and resorts in and around Yellowstone. He also oversaw expansions to Old Faithful Inn, enlarging its dining room and bar, as well as adding 190 additional guest rooms.

Old Faithful Inn, which had electricity and indoor plumbing from the start, welcomed its first guests in June 1904, and would later hold fancy balls where guests danced in the lobby while others promenaded about the stairs and balconies overlooking the activities.

"It was all about to see and be seen," Kansas said.

Reamer chose to leave the bark on the beams making up the building, but hotel management made the decision after 35 years to strip it off, she said.

"It was scraped off to brighten the place," she said. Housekeepers likely supported the decision, she said, because they had the monumental task of dusting the grooves in the peeling bark.

The rooms - sans televisions - are warm and welcoming with their rough-hewn, pine-plank walls and well-worn period furnishings. They are still used today, but reservations must be made well in advance.

Unfortunately, guests are no longer permitted beyond the third floor balconies overlooking the lobby.

The entrance to Old Faithful Inn at Yellowstone National Park (Scott Beveridge)

The Beehive Geyser, which goes off every 24 hours, give or take several, is sexier than Old Faithful at Yellowstone. (Scott Beveridge photo)

A tiny bug threatens the Tetons

Tall pines at the base of the Grand Tetons in Wyoming, where climate change is threatening the ecosystem (Beveridge photo)

By Scott Beveridge

GRAND TETON NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. – The story of the mountain pine bark beetle can best define how climate change is harming the ecosystem at the majestic Grand Teton National Park.

Warmer temperatures in recent years have been allowing that tiny native bug to breed faster and destroy more tall pine trees whose pine nuts support the diets of grizzly bears and even a  breed of small bird at this mountain range.

"The large pine nuts are a good source of protein and fat," explains National Park Ranger Karen Kanes while giving a climate change lecture today at the visitor center in Moose, Wyo.

The average temperature has risen in recent years by 1.6 degrees from those recorded over the past 1,300 years. That might not sound like much, but it's a number just 9 degrees warmer than it was during the Ice Age, Kanes said.

The beetle bores into the trees to feed and reproduce, killing pines and turning them red and purple before they fall over. The bug used to hatch eggs every two years while nature allowed some pines to find ways to resist it, while new trees sprouted.

So the beetle wasn't of much concern until the warmer weather allowed it to begin hatching new eggs every year. This year, it hatched twice, Kane said.

"They dryer conditions enabled it to go higher and kill whitebark pines, which produce the large pine nuts," she said. This development threatens to devastate the forest, along with the diet of the Clark's nutcracker, a member of the crow family.

The bird has a large beak, which allows it to pick open the pine cones during warm weather, collect large numbers of the seeds and bury them for its winter food supply. The reproduction of the whitebark pine depends entirely on the bird to forget the locations of some of the seeds it buried.

Meanwhile, the park staff is testing ways to slow the spread of the beetle, which emits pheromones to alert others there is nothing left to feed on in a pine tree. The park is attempting to stash the pheromones on healthy trees to ward off the beetle in what would be an expensive measure to slow the tree damage given the size of the forest, Kanes said.

The U.S. Forest Service also will spend $40 million to slow the spread of the bug in the Rocky Mountains where it has destroyed more than 2 million acres of trees, the Associated Press reported this year.

This story would not be told, though, had it not been for a dramatic climate change thousands of years ago, which melted glaciers covering the United States and left it with many of  National Park landscapes, she said.