Amid the wilds of Yosemite, the Ahwahnee hotel is a monument of civility and man-made beauty.

BY STANLEY ABERCROMBIE

Yosemite's Ahwahnee (Ahwahnee Hotel)

A four-hour drive inland from San Francisco, in the heart of Yosemite National Park, is the Ahwahnee hotel. The name Ahwahnee, Native American in origin, is said to mean “land of the gaping mouth,” which could refer either to the dramatic natural chasms of the park or the dropped jaws of visitors. The hotel is celebrating its 75th anniversary as the architectural centerpiece of the great park established by Congress during the Civil War. The legislation, signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1864, granted the land to the state of California “for public use, resort, and recreation … inalienable for all time.” The Ahwahnee itself was conceived less than a decade after the National Park Service was established in 1916, and it remains one of that agency’s choicest man-made properties.

The Ahwahnee’s architect was Los Angeles-based Gilbert Stanley Underwood, whose other works include the Grand Canyon Lodge, opened the year after the Ahwahnee, the Jackson Lake Lodge in Grand Teton National Park, opened in 1954, and a number of station designs for the Union Pacific Railroad, including the one in Omaha. At the base of Yosemite’s stupendous rock formations called the Royal Arches, the hotel Underwood planned has a Y-shaped structure of three wings that pivot around a central six-story tower. Virtually every window has a view. Finished with stone piers and chimneys and green slate roofs, the fireproof structure of scored and stained concrete quite convincingly resembles redwood. An interior innovation was lobby flooring of colored rubber, still in use. Guests choose from 99 rooms (supplemented since 1928 by two dozen cottages along the banks of the Merced River) and hang out in two large and beautiful public spaces—the Great Lounge and the dining room, which seats 350 people beneath a 34-foot-high ceiling supported by beams of, in this case, actual wood, not concrete.

By the standards of most resorts today, the recreation facilities may seem meager. A small heated pool was added in 1968, and the hotel has two tennis courts, but no gym and no spa. A golf course dating from the late 1920s was planted over in the ?70s when its greens and fairways had come to be considered an intrusion on the wilderness.

Make a reservation at the Ahwahnee, a Historic Hotel of America.

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