The best summers of my life were spent at the Grand Canyon Lodge. Now it’s gone.

I’m not usually one to get weepy over a hotel, let alone a patio and some rough-hewn wooden furniture. But when Arizona’s famous Grand Canyon Lodge and a number of smaller adjacent structures burned down on the night of July 12 in the Dragon Bravo Fire, a blaze that to date has consumed 11,344 acres and remains entirely uncontained, it left a hole in more than just the conifer forest of the North Rim. My heart, my friends’ hearts—there’s a hole in each of these now. And there are similar holes in the hearts of thousands of folks across the globe who also loved, and still love, and will forever love, that rustic palace, that gobsmacking view, that superlative place.

In 2024, close to five million visitors experienced the beauty and wonder of Grand Canyon National Park, but only ten percent of them ventured to the high, green, thrillingly remote North Rim. For those that did make the five-hour drive from Las Vegas, or the six-hour drive from Flagstaff, or the seven-hour drive from Salt Lake City, the Grand Canyon Lodge, which until this past weekend perched at an elevation of 8,000 feet near the tip of Bright Angel Point, was invariably the destination. Designed by architect Gilbert Stanley Underwood and built in 1928 with local ponderosa pine and Kaibab Limestone, it was destroyed in 1932 thanks to a runaway kitchen fire. Phoenixes rise from ashes, though, and in 1937 it opened again for business—the business of blowing minds. 

(Did you know the Grand Canyon is a Dark Sky Park?)

Picture a sprawling mansion, solid, heavy, grounded, yet paradoxically hovering above the glowing abyss, the dizzying emptiness of geologic time. Picture old-growth logs framing gargantuan windows, splinters and chandeliers, earthiness and elegance in equal measure. Picture stepping out, stepping through, whispering a few celebratory expletives, shouting a G-rated version of the same, and taking a seat at sunset on the patio of your dreams, the patio of—what a crazy lucky blessing!—my reality.

Mike, Ally, Zak, Zig, Jeff, Tara, Sophia, Carrie, Richard—my friends and I differed considerably from the tour-bus-and-zoom-lens crowd. US Forest Service raptor scientists, we resided in a barebones field station 40 washboard miles from the Lodge and bushwhacked, week after week and month after month, the whole vast Kaibab Plateau (both the National Forest and National Park) in pursuit of molted feathers, crying hawks, active nests, data for the boss’ demography and habitat studies. Richard, a brilliant septuagenarian ornithologist sporting a handlebar mustache and chunky silver belt buckle, had been conducting research on the Kaibab for 17 years already when I joined the project in 2008. Over the next four summers, alongside my fellow bird nerds, I became intimate with the North Rim’s secret vistas, its hidden backcountry delights.

(A park ranger’s guide to the Grand Canyon)

Honestly, we were snobs, eco-elites, wilderness cognoscenti accustomed to musty sleeping bags who scoffed at the idea of the Lodge’s clean sheets. But even hardcore nature freaks need a little civilization—a cold beer and slice of pepperoni pizza—on occasion.

If the North Rim was our backyard (it was), the Lodge was our clubhouse—a clubhouse that happened to be listed as a National Historic Landmark. Every third or fourth Friday evening, we would pile into the trucks and crash the sunset party, i.e. try to snag, then defend, a block of benches and rockers amidst the oohing and ahhing tourists. There’s Zak, chatting about Coconino Sandstone and the Hermit Formation with a stylish French lady. There’s Ally, dodging a Texas oilman’s bulging belly as she seeks a fresh angle on Zoroaster Temple and Oza Butte. There’s Richard and Zig, carrying a pie to split and a round of IPAs, their Adirondack chairs lost due to my negligence, my absence, my piano playing. 

Yes, piano playing. In a lecture hall behind our favorite patio (the Lodge boasted many), I found an underutilized, almost-in-tune upright. We had guitars and banjos at the field station, but no keys, so I always seized the opportunity to pause between drinks and improvise simple spacious ambient jams, music that matched (I hoped) the chasm’s hollow moody mysterious depths. One epic Friday of bruised purple skies, rain and thunder, meteorological tympany, I grooved in concert with the storm’s pulsing energy, and when I finally looked up from my reverie, twenty-odd strangers—toddlers and elders, Alaskans and Germans and Mongolians and Tucsonians, a uniformed ranger—had gathered to listen. Of course, their backs were turned to me, their eyes fixed on the distant horizon, the flashing lightning, the desert immensity, the real show.

“Nicely done,” an Aussie said. “Thanks for the soundtrack, mate.”

This memory and a dozen others came to the surface, vivid and warm, the moment I learned that the North Rim was closing for the rest of the season, and that the popular inner corridor hiking trails were closing too, and that the Dragon Bravo Fire was expanding, and that the Lodge, my Lodge, our Lodge, everyone’s Lodge, was officially gone. 

Gone? Seriously? I sent a message to Mike, my dear pal from the Kaibab, my best buddy from the absolute best summers imaginable, the individual who, I was certain, understood the weird mixed feeling, a braid of sorrow and joy: “Dude. It burned. Terrible. Tragic. But damn am I grateful to have shared such sweet times there with you and the gang. Unbelievable privilege. Unbelievable spot. The Lodge is dead, long live the Lodge!”

He responded: “Let’s meet on the patio in three years, once it’s rebuilt. My daughter—I’ve been meaning to call you, we’re expecting a baby girl!—will be eager to see the sunset.”  

Ashes, phoenixes, indeed.