Читать книгу One Best Hike: Grand Canyon. Everything You Need to Know to Successfully Hike from the Rim to the River—and Back онлайн
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MARY COLTER
Mary Colter’s name is inexorably linked with Grand Canyon architecture. She was first hired by the Fred Harvey Company to decorate Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque in 1901. She began her work on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon in 1905, designing Hopi House. In subsequent years she designed Lookout Studio (1914), Hermit’s Rest (1914), the Watchtower at Desert View (1932), Bright Angel Lodge (1935), and most relevant for a Grand Canyon hiker, Phantom Ranch in 1922. She designed her buildings to be in harmony with the natural surroundings, using local materials and architectural designs that caused the buildings to effectively merge with the landscape. Her buildings are beautiful exemplars of the style known as National Park Service rustic. At Phantom Ranch, for example, the cabins are built (mostly) of local rock, colored to blend with the surroundings, and spaced at irregular intervals.
TRAIL HISTORY AND CONSTRUCTION
The Bright Angel Trail is a historic Indian trail used by people for millennia to access the inner canyon and the Colorado River. By the 1870s miners were entering the Grand Canyon and descending this same route. Ralph Cameron and his brother Niles acquired mining claims along the Bright Angel Trail in 1890. They quickly realized that the money was not in mining, but instead in tourism. They therefore took advantage of a law that allowed the “builders of a trail” to collect a toll for its use. In 1890 and 1891 they improved the Havasupai trail to Indian Garden and in 1898 completed a new trail down to the Colorado River. From 1903 until the 1920s they charged each person a dollar to descend the Bright Angel Toll Road (also called the Cameron Trail). These fees were introduced to keep money flowing their way once competing South Rim accommodations were constructed and disrupted their previous near-monopoly on housing Grand Canyon Village visitors.