Overall, that winter of 2006-07 was quite mild and dry, but on that morning close to the winter solstice I was lucky enough to be out and about in the cold, frosty conditions I love, and always hope to find for my photography. I like this photograph’s feel of mystery, and I really like the frosty, scalloped snow hummocks in the foreground as well as the frozen mist that hangs in the air around what might be the most famous building in any national park anywhere in the world.

Looking at this picture often makes me think of how old the Inn is, and how fortunate we are that the building has managed to survive all those seasons since it first opened for business in 1904. Not only did it survive the great North Fork Fire, which burned through the Old Faithful area on Wednesday, September 7, 1988, it also survived the Hebgen Lake earthquake of August 17, 1959. The North Fork Fire, along with its offshoot the Wolf Lake Fire, burned about 500,000 acres in and around Yellowstone National Park during that summer of 1988, while the Hebgen Lake quake wrought tremendous destruction and caused many deaths across a large swath of the ecosystem. But in both cases the Old Faithful Inn came through largely unscathed.

Those are two dramatic events that stand out for anyone with an interest in Yellowstone history, but in another sense it is even more of a wonder that the Inn has survived other dangers that often escape immediate attention because they are always present on an everyday basis. Think of general weathering of the building that is situated at an elevation of almost 7400’ in an area known for its severe climate. Think also of how so many years during the Inn’s life it survived with minimal fire protection, if it had any fire protection at all. In all that time there was never a carelessly placed cigarette or cigar, never an energized electrical wire that came in contact with a combustible object, never an ill minded arsonist, never any sort of innocent oversight that could have led to the Inn being lost in a fire. For many, many winters in the Inn’s life it was left seasonally unattended, except for a winter caretaker or two, and in some of those winters there certainly must have been a few times when someone overlooked an electrical breaker or fuse box while closing the building the preceding autumn, and thereby left power running through some wiring. And chances are, at least in the earlier days of the Inn, those wires might have simply been bare copper that was wrapped around a non conductive post on each wooden beam that the electrical line passed over. All it would have taken was for one half hitch around one of those posts to come loose, and a bare, charged wire could have come in contact with lumber that had been drying inside the building for decades.

And to continue with this discourse on fire danger because, after all, the Old Faithful Inn is constructed almost entirely of wood, I’d like to add a personal anecdote on the subject. This story comes from the fire year of 1988 when, as recently as that, I was left in sole charge of fire protection for the Inn (as well as all the other buildings in the Old Faithful and Madison areas). I was a seasonal law enforcement ranger at Madison that year, and the way things worked out everyone in Yellowstone worked unbelievable numbers of hours and made tons of overtime pay while dealing with the extraordinary fires that summer. Come late autumn and early winter, all of my fellow rangers in the Old Faithful and Madison areas were exhausted and strongly desired a break from duty. And because of all that overtime they also found themselves with a lot of extra money. The upshot was they all decided to take lavish vacations, with many going to warm weather destinations like Tahiti and Hawaii. As a tangent, it’s interesting to note that quite a number of Yellowstone babies happened to be born about nine months later, so those lavish vacations must have been happy ones.

I, on the other hand and as usual for me, preferred staying in Yellowstone over going anywhere else, so I accepted an offer to extend my season until December 18 to provide ranger coverage for the Madison and Old Faithful areas through the off season of late autumn and early winter. It was a unique opportunity, and without any doubt nothing like it will ever happen again. It was also an opportunity tailor made for me and my interests – among other tasks I was assigned to snowmobile all the roads in my area twice a day every day after we switched to oversnow travel on November 15. That involved snowmobiling from Madison to West Yellowstone, from Madison to Norris, and from Madison to the top of Craig Pass—again, twice a day—amounting to about 200 miles of snowmobiling every day for four work weeks. As an illustration of how much Yellowstone has changed since 1988, it’s worth noting that in all those 4,000 miles of snowmobiling over the course of 20 working days, I encountered only one person. She had skied the road in from West Yellowstone to photograph the aftermath of the 1988 fires for an article she was writing about the subject. Nowadays there are almost uncountable crosscountry skiers skate skiing in from West Yellowstone during that time of the year, at least when there is enough snow cover on the roads for them to do so.

In addition to all that road patrol, in another illustration of how Yellowstone has changed and to continue the thread of pondering how the Old Faithful Inn has survived as long as it has, in that late fall of 1988 I was also assigned fire protection duties for both the Madison and the Old Faithful areas. One glaring shortcoming was that I knew very little about anything having to do with structural fire fighting. But I was told there was an important piece of fire fighting equipment in a shed in the Old Faithful maintenance area, and that I should go and check it out. Well, by that time I was already snowmobiling on roads closed to wheeled vehicles, so ‘biling was how I traveled from Madison to Old Faithful. There I quickly managed to locate the shed that housed this important piece of firefighting equipment. But I found that this holy grail of Old Faithful firefighting equipment turned out to be a surplus World War Two-era pump mounted on a dilapidated flatbed trailer – which in turn was mounted on wheels. No one had told me anything about any of this, so I was left to wonder how I might use a snowmobile to haul that old trailer on rubber tires through snow that was already 18” deep to wherever a fire might pop up, to say nothing of the additional fact that I had no idea how to operate the antiquated pump or where to find water from a winterized source that would not be frozen solid. To this day I often think of what an irony it would have been if the Inn had survived the conflagrations of the summer of 1988, only to burn down from some accident the following winter.

Beyond the omnipresent risk of fire, crushing snowloads during Yellowstone’s historically ferocious winters have been another recurring threat to the Inn’s integrity, and generally in the park there is a long history of buildings suffering serious damage under winter’s weight—up to and including outright collapse. We can thank generations of winterkeepers, as those seasonal caretakers have been called since Yellowstone’s earliest days as a park, for relieving the Inn’s roofs of their snowy burdens for over 120 winters now. So great was snow accumulation during the winter of 1942-43, for example, that park managers were spooked to the point that they reinforced the roof on the Inn during the following summer – this despite the fact that both manpower and materials must have been in seriously short supply because the country was literally in the middle of our participation in World War Two. A sidebar story is, in spite of what must have been the best of intentions, the section of roof that was reinforced was the south facing side of the covering over the main lobby of the building, and because that face of the roof is oriented toward the south into the winter sun and is also on the windward side of the structure it never accumulates much snowload, not even in the heaviest winter.

And, as perhaps the most serious threat of all to the Inn’s longevity and as unbelievable as it may sound today at a time when the Old Faithful Inn is universally regarded as an iconic treasure, there were bureaucratic proposals to raze the historic building altogether, and replace it with newer and more modern facilities in the Lower Geyser Basin in a development that was to be called the Firehole Village. Those proposals were part of the Mission 66 campaign that the National Park Service initiated in the mid 1950s, and the thinking at the time was that it would be better for Yellowstone’s main attractions like Old Faithful Geyser if overnight accommodations were removed from their immediate vicinity and relocated elsewhere. Fortunately those proposals never came to reality and not only are we fortunate to still have the Old Faithful Inn with us, the Lower Geyser Basin is much better off as well.

Going back to the subject of winterkeeping at Old Faithful, another personal anecdote that I am proud to be able to add is that in an earlier chapter of my life in Yellowstone, when I worked for the concession company that is now Xanterra Parks and Resorts in Yellowstone, I was one of two winterkeepers responsible for caring for the Inn. So at one time or another I have scrambled around on the snow and ice on almost all of the various roof facets of the Old Faithful Inn, and during the course of that time when I was thus employed I removed many, many tons of snow from its roofs. It was an honor and a privilege to do so, and at this point I have to reveal that one of the traditions of Old Faithful winterkeepers during that time was to enter the frigid interior of the building on New Year’s Day, where they drank a beer apiece from their own backpacks in the Inn’s Bear Pit bar. That way the winterkeepers could always say they had the first beer of every year in the Bear Pit. It was a grand tradition, and a wonderful perk of the winterkeeping job. It’s also a tradition that my daughter and I have continued in more recent years, in our case drinking soda pop in the Bear Pit with permission from Xanterra Parks and Resorts management folks.

I coauthored a book about the Old Faithful Inn with Karen Reinhart in 2004. It was titled Old Faithful Inn: Crown Jewel of National Park Lodges. We have been out of stock with that book since June 13, 2022, when we lost approximately 736 copies from our inventory during the great Yellowstone flood of that year, the waters of which peaked on that date. We are, however, in the process of having the book redesigned and otherwise updated, and if things go according to plan will have the revised and reprinted edition of the book available in Yellowstone area retail outlets by the beginning of the summer season in 2026, as well as available for direct order from us.