OLD FAITHFUL, WYO. — The lumbering Old Faithful Inn building looms above the surrounding lodge pole pine trees here in Yellowstone National Park, a miracle out of America`s pioneer past.
In 1903-04, over a single bitterly cold winter, some 40 hardy artisans raised the sprawling 150-room hotel. It has become almost as much a national treasure as the world-famous geyser that inspired its construction.
The work, from sinking the foundation to putting the brass caps on the six rooftop flag poles and fluffing the pillows, was done in less than eight months of seven-day weeks. The crew worked from sunup to sundown while blizzards howled across Yellowstone`s steaming Upper Geyser Basin, home to Old Faithful.
They started as the first snowflakes began to fall in October and finished in time for the first tourists in June of 1904.
The heart of Old Faithful Inn is a wide-open, soaring, seven-story chamber, which the National Park Service boasts is the highest log structure on Earth.
The view from a rocking chair in the lobby makes the thick yellow-brown logs that form the 80-foot high ceiling look like match sticks--a Tinker Toy high-rise.
A dizzying network of wooden catwalks cling like spiderwebs to the steep ceiling leading to dormer windows which send light cascading down to the lobby floor.
Eighty-three years ago, each log had been hewn by hand, chopped by burly Swedish ``tie hacks`` swinging double-bitted axes. The loggers felled enough trees for the hotel`s timbers to clear a mountainside forest eight miles south.
Once cut and stripped of branches, the logs were loaded aboard wooden sledges and dragged across the snow by teams of Clydesdale horses.
At the construction site, less than 300 yards from where Old Faithful erupts with famed regularity, skilled carpenters carved each tree to fit using ax and adz, hammer and saw, and the same types of draw knives that George Washington had wielded to shape the timbers of Mt. Vernon.
Half a century before electric drills and routers, these anonymous craftsmen tramped through deep snow to find twisted tree limbs that could be shaped into bannisters, balcony railings and other detail work, making this famous inn a rustic masterpiece.
As a result, no two pieces of the immense building are alike.
Each knotted pillar held up by gnarled branches is different from its neighbor. Each stair riser has a shape noticeably different from the next.
The Yellowstone Institute, a nonprofit volunteer group dedicated to preserving the country`s first national park and studying its history, pieced together the story of the amazing construction feat after discovering that only scanty records had been kept at the time, explained park historian Tim Manns.
That study, done by Susan Scofield and Jeremy Schmidt, paints a grim picture of what the workers endured.
``The first room completed was the kitchen so that nails could be heated on stoves to ward off the frostbite which plagued carpenters so much as to require a small hospital and trained nurses,`` wrote Scofield and Schmidt in
``The Inn at Old Faithful.``
Located on a high Rocky Mountain plateau surrounded by 10,000-foot peaks, the geyser basin at Old Faithful is covered by 4 to 10 feet of snow every winter when temperatures frequently plunge to 60 degrees below zero, the two authors note.
The nearest community was 30 miles away, West Yellowstone, Mont., and most of the crew recruited for the project wintered at the construction site. After building the kitchen to warm tools and nails, they then enclosed the immense lobby so the detail work could be accomplished under shelter.
``It took a tough breed of men to endure the hardships which they must have faced,`` the study said. ``Where today would one encounter such a group of independent carpenters, stone masons, journeymen and forest craftsmen so suited to their task?``
Snowbound, isolated and with nothing else to do, the pioneer artisans kept warm by working. At least the snow probably made it easier to slide the logs, Schmidt and Scofield speculated.
More than 500 tons of hand-quarried lava blocks were dragged five miles across the snow by the Clydesdales that winter to create the fireplace with its 85-foot chimney and a popcorn popper the size of a washing machine.
The blacksmith, known today only as Colpits, his last name, also did all the other iron work in the building--the fireplace tools, the wrought iron locking bar on the massive split log doors, the grilled peephole, massive door hinges and the dozens of hanging lamps.
In 1903 it cost $140,000 to build the Inn at Old Faithful. In the mid-1970s, said Manns, the government spent more than $2 million installing fire protection equipment for the building. It cost more than $1 million in 1979 just to renovate the massive shingled roof.
``Today,`` said the historian, ``we live in a very different atmosphere.``