Animas Forks Mining Camp, Colorado, September 8, 2009

Wolfe Cabin, Arches National Park, Utah, September 24, 2007

Wolfe Ranch (National Park Service)

 

Turnbow & son at Wolfe Cabin

This humble, one-room cabin sits near the present-day trailhead for the hike to Delicate Arch. Visitors regularly peer through the doorway and wonder aloud, “Who lived here… and how?… And why?”

In 1898, a nagging leg injury from the Civil War prompted 69-year-old John Wesley Wolfe to leave his home in Ohio and seek a drier climate. He brought his oldest son, Fred, with him out west, and the two settled a 100+-acre property along Salt Wash, just north of the sleepy little village of Moab. The property had fresh water, enough grassland to feed a few head of cattle, and plenty of peace and quiet. For nearly a decade, they lived and worked alone on the remote “Bar DX” ranch.

The scene changed in 1906 when John’s daughter, Flora, made the westward trek with her husband, Ed Stanley, and two young children, Esther and Ferol. Appalled by the condition in which her father and brother lived, Flora demanded they build a new cabin with a wooden floor and real windows. John obliged, creating the small (17 x 15 ft / 5.2 x 4.6m) but sturdy cabin made of cottonwood logs that remains in the park to this day. He also constructed a root celler, irrigation dams, and a corral. All six family members lived and slept under the distinctive thatch-and-clay roof for just two years, when the Stanleys resettled in nearby Moab. (That house also remains, a few blocks off Main Street in the center of town.) John, Fred, and all the rest finally returned to Ohio in 1910, where John remained until his death in 1913 at the age of eighty-four.

The cabin passed through several more hands, including J. Marvin Turnbow (pictured above), the first custodian of Arches National Monument. The final private owner, Emmett Elizondo, sold the property to the U.S. government for inclusion in the monument. Wolfe Ranch and surrounding acreage were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.

Along the Salmon River in Idaho, July 29, 2010

Adobe Structure Roof Beams, Painted Desert Inn, Navajo, Arizona, Petrified Forest National Park, October 9, 2011

Painted Desert Inn (National Park Service)

Only one national park in the country includes and protects a section of historic Route 66: the Petrified Forest National Park with one of the world’s largest and most colorful concentrations of petrified wood, multi-hued badlands of the Painted Desert, historic structures, archeological sites, and displays of over 200-million-year-old fossils.  The national park and this section of Route 66 are not to be missed, and one of the most special places to visit in the park is the Painted Desert Inn.

The inn is situated on a mesa overlooking the vast and colorful Painted Desert.  It is rooted in a lodge that entrepreneur Herbert David Lore completed around 1920.  In 1935, the National Park Service purchased the inn and its surroundings.  The National Park Service immediately began planning to overhaul the building using the rustic aesthetic so popular in park architecture of the time.  The National Park Service commissioned Lyle Bennett, one of its most sought-after architects, for the remodeling.  Young men employed in the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration’s back-to-work programs, supplied the labor.

The inn is of wood and native stone in the Pueblo Revival style.  Outside, flagstone terraces surrounded by low walls overlook the desert.  The building’s stone walls are more than two feet thick and finished with textured earth-toned stucco.  Multiple flat roofs with parapets give the inn its varied massing, and Ponderosa Pine logs pierce the walls, adding play between light and shadow.

Fern Lake Trail, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, September 6, 2009

West-Central Arkansas, July 25, 2011

Starved Rock State Park, Illinois, September 9, 2008

March 4th, 2008 in Arkansas

Union Covered Bridge State Historic Site, Missouri, September 28, 2012