Your cart is currently empty
"Grand Lady of the Lake is a vivid, well-researched, and completely entertaining history of the Lake Hotel."-Ruth Quinn, Author of Weaver of Dreams: The Life and Architecture of Robert C. Reamer.
In 1891, in a magical western park dubbed "Wonderland"-where geysers explode, waterfalls plunge, and wild animals roam-the beginnings of a grand hotel rose atop a bluff overlooking magnificent Yellowstone Lake. Earliest guests at the Lake Hotel arrived by dusty stagecoach, or on an antler-festooned steamer named Zillah: watched bears feast on kitchen scraps tossed nightly behind the hotel, or hooked cutthroat trout in the eye-dazzling lake. But the hotel really blossomed in the in the early 1900's, when architect Robert Reamer transformed it from a simple, backwoods roadhouse into a sprawling, Colonial-style lodging. It's been a bumpy ride for the oldest hotel originally built in America's national parks: several times, the long yellow hostelry has faced possible demolition. Time and again, though, fate and luck saved Yellowstone's Lake Hotel from the wrecking ball. This photo-packed book celebrates the hotel's 125th birthday and tells the remarkable story of a true survivor-the Grand Lady of the Lake.