Bright Angel Lodge

Completed in 1935, Bright Angel Lodge was designed and built under the direction of Mary Colter, the Fred Harvey company's celebrated Southwest architect. Colter's rustic designs and attention to detail shaped the lodge complex, including a chimney whose ordinary exterior contrasts with an interior hearth layered with stone collected from the geologic layers found in Grand Canyon. She made every feature and object throughout the complex fit visually and blend with the canyon landscape. The design was first made to scale in toy form by Miss M.E. J. Colter, with every building shown in its particular architectural style and colored to show the stone, weathered logs, or adobe of its construction, and every tree also included in the model. The 1910 Bright Angel Hotel had extended Buckey O'Neill's cabin, and Colter kept the original cabin and melded its rough-hewn appearance into the lodge complex design. A wooden thunderbird looks down on the lodge lobby as Colter's "bright angel." Beginning in the late 1800s, pioneers vied to establish a hotel here worthy of the view, and in 1935 the Fred Harvey company succeeded by opening the Bright Angel Lodge complex.

Grand Canyon Village, Arizona · United States