Meanwhile, Ellsworth and Emery Kolb-photographers whose work is a hallmark of the canyon’s early days-captured images of these tourists on mules, developing the photos in a mineshaft nearby to sell to them on their return. The railroad arrived at the Grand Canyon in 1901, and entrepreneurs charged curious visitors a $1 toll to explore the inner canyon on privately owned trails that had been used for mining not long before. Tourism, however, was a much easier way to turn a profit. After investing time and effort into developing mining sites, the return was, in most cases, pretty dismal.
“That was the default-go homestead it, go put a mining claim on it.”Īs Cleeland has noted, explorer Joseph Christmas Ives declared the area “a profitless locality” in 1861. “These places were all open for exploitation,” says former Kaibab National Forest historian Teri Cleeland, who has richly documented the significance of Phantom Ranch and the surrounding canyon corridor, while making a case for its preservation. Beginning in the late 1800s, a wave of prospectors began descending into the canyon in search of copper, asbestos and other ore. The Ancestral Puebloan, Cohonina, Havasupai, Zuni, Navajo and other Native American tribes traversed the inner canyon for thousands of years before European explorers arrived. The Grand Canyon, a place that appears devoid of human life from the rim, has long brimmed with it. Which raises the question: Why was it built here in the first place? Bringing tourists to the Grand Canyon But in those modest buildings is an aesthetic that would help define the look of nearly all the historic buildings at the park, from the Bright Angel Lodge to the Desert View Watchtower and beyond-and others around the country dating to the National Park system’s formative years.Įven today, Phantom Ranch, nearly one vertical mile below the canyon’s rim, is a marvel-a fact that only underscores its improbable construction a century ago. Grand Canyon National Park via Flickr under CC BY 2.0ĭesigned to channel a dude ranch, the site consists of a handful of cabins and dorms situated around a canteen that’s home to the ranch’s kitchen and dining hall. Once the day hikers depart, you’re left in solitude, silence and perpetual stars, a feeling that is at once jarring and wondrous. Instead, people sit around and swap tales over stew from the canteen while mule deer graze mere feet away.
Accessible only by foot, mule or raft, it is secluded, and, like the canyon that cradles it, it’s a place frozen in time. After five hours of descent, calves wobbling and fortitude waning, you cross a foot bridge spanning the Colorado River and round a final corner, and there it is, against all odds: Phantom Ranch.Ĭurrently celebrating its centennial, Grand Canyon’s Phantom Ranch is considered one of the world’s most exclusive accommodations, requiring a win in a lottery system more than a year in advance to nab a reservation. The hike down the South Kaibab Trail is intense: seven-and-a-half miles of sunbaked switchbacks and thousands of feet of elevation change, past endless prickly pear and alien blooms of agave. A labyrinth of trails branches miles and miles out from the bustling, tourist-packed South Rim of the Grand Canyon.
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