The Ahwahnee

The approach road to The Ahwahnee, in Yosemite Village, California, turns off the valley loop beneath the Royal Arches and ends in a meadow. The hotel stands at the far side of it, six storeys of granite piers and dark horizontal bands, with Glacier Point and Half Dome in view from the lawn. It was built to make the case that a national park could be visited in comfort, and it has been making that case since 1927.

History

Stephen Mather, the first director of the National Park Service, wanted a hotel in Yosemite good enough to bring influential visitors and their support for the parks. The concessioner, the Yosemite Park and Curry Company, commissioned Gilbert Stanley Underwood, who had just designed the lodges at Zion and Bryce Canyon. The hotel opened on 14 July 1927 at a cost of about 1.5 million dollars. That first winter the company staged the Bracebridge Dinner, a Christmas pageant drawn from Washington Irving, and it has been performed in the Dining Room every December since, with Ansel Adams directing it for many years.

From 1943 to 1945 the United States Navy requisitioned the hotel as a convalescent hospital. Guests after the war included Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy in 1962 and Queen Elizabeth II in 1983, who was given the suite on the sixth floor. Barack Obama stayed in 2016. The hotel was named a National Historic Landmark in 1987. From 2016 to 2019, during a trademark dispute between the Park Service and the outgoing concessioner, it operated as The Majestic Yosemite Hotel; the original name returned in July 2019. Aramark runs it under the Yosemite Hospitality contract.

Architecture and design

Underwood's building is the clearest statement of what the Park Service called rustic architecture: materials and massing that answer the landscape. The piers are rough granite from the valley; the horizontal bands that read as redwood are poured concrete, stained and textured to resemble wood, because the Curry Company had lost an earlier hotel to fire. The Great Lounge runs 77 feet with floor-to-ceiling windows at each end and stained-glass panels in the upper lights. Phyllis Ackerman and Arthur Upham Pope, scholars of Persian art, chose the interior scheme: Native American basket motifs in the painted beams, Middle Eastern rugs and kilims hung on the walls, Jeannette Dyer Spencer's stencilling and glass. The Dining Room, 130 feet long under a 34-foot trussed ceiling, ends in a window framing Yosemite Falls. Stanley Kubrick's set for the Overlook Hotel in The Shining borrowed the Great Lounge's proportions and fireplace.

Rooms and suites

The hotel has 123 rooms: 97 in the main building, including suites with sitting rooms and valley views, and 24 in the cottages scattered through the grounds under the oaks and cedars. Rooms in the tower have the long views; the cottages have privacy and the sound of the meadow.

Dining

The Ahwahnee Dining Room serves breakfast, lunch and dinner, with a jacket-or-collared-shirt rule in the evening that the hotel has kept since the 1920s. The Ahwahnee Bar, off the Great Lounge, serves lighter food through the day. Sunday brunch and the December Bracebridge Dinners are the two meals people plan trips around.

Wellness

A heated outdoor pool is open in the warmer months. The valley floor paths start at the hotel's door; the Mirror Lake trail is reached on foot from the back of the grounds.

Weddings and events

The hotel hosts weddings on the lawn facing Half Dome and in the Dining Room, and the Great Lounge and its side rooms, the Solarium and the Mural Room, take receptions and meetings. Capacity depends on the room and the season, and the Park Service sets limits on outdoor gatherings in the valley.

Location

The Ahwahnee is at the eastern end of Yosemite Village, a mile from the visitor centre, on the free valley shuttle route. Fresno Yosemite International is the nearest airport, about two and a half hours by car through the south entrance. Amtrak's San Joaquin trains reach Merced, where YARTS buses continue into the valley. For a luxury hotel in Yosemite Village the walk to Yosemite Falls, about 20 minutes, is the point.