The persistent Dragon Bravo Fire on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona destroyed dozens of buildings this weekend. Perhaps none were more iconic than the Grand Canyon Lodge.
The memories of those who hold the Grand Canyon in their hearts pierced across time this week as news of the damage on the North Rim emerged.
Flagstaff's Helen Ranney has hiked throughout the world and said this place, and particularly the North Rim, touched her soul. She joked that her son says he left for college when his mom left home. She had accepted a job on the South Rim and moved there from Phoenix, with the canyon less than a mile from her front door.
"The lodge is just so unique," she said. "At the South Rim; it's nice, you walk along the rim but you can't finish up a rim-to-rim hike and get some sort of beverage and go out on the porch like you can at the North Rim. And you'd sit down with people from all over the world and you're right on the edge."
She hiked and backpacked the Grand Canyon so many times that she lost count 20 years ago.
"And you'd put your feet up on the rock wall and you're looking, you know, right in the canyon," Ranney said.
Tom Myers works as a physician at the South Rim and has authored a book about his experiences hiking the length of the Grand Canyon, "The Grandest Trek." He holds a very special memory of the Grand Canyon Lodge and has hiked through what he deems his favorite landscape on earth for more than half a century.
"When I got married in 1988, I told my wife, 'hey, this is the most amazing place on earth.' The most spectacular architectural place on the planet. So I honeymooned there with my wife," he said.
He had only recently returned to the Lodge this past May and shares a visceral memory of architect Gilbert Underwood's choice of massive windows looking out over the Grand Canyon.
"My god, you felt like you were in heaven on earth," Myers said.
Robert Stieve is editor of Arizona Highways magazine and lamented the loss of the Lodge.
"I heard the news and you don't think something like that is going to, you start lamenting the loss of the trees when you see these fires break out. It's so rare to lose a national treasure like a Lodge in a national park," Stieve said.
Arizona Highways published a story about the lodge's original opening in the late 1920s shortly after the famous magazine launched.
"And certainly when you put it into the perspective of the flooding in Texas and the other things that are happening around the world, losing bricks and mortar and pine trees, it was nothing like that," Stieve said.
"But when you think about it in the perspective of how many lives have been changed, there were people that have lived up there and worked up there for a very long time. The North Rim was part of their life," Stieve said.
The lodge emerged in 1937 from the area's native Kaibab limestone after the original lodge burned down a few years earlier.
Ranney hopes the same stone can be used to renew the Lodge again.
"I don't know that it will be the same. Maybe it will be better, but I think it's going to be a long time before that happens," she said.
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