YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK -- Over the years, I've seen everything imaginable used in hotel guest-room decor. Photographs, prints, paintings, pine cones, teddy bears -- even goldfish bowls and rubber duckies have shown up within my four rented walls.
But a chamber pot?
The enamel thunder bucket atop the armoire in my room at the Wawona Hotel was intended as a humorous decoration, nothing more. Yet somehow, along with the old-fashioned wallpaper, the gingham coverlet on the bed and the lace curtain fluttering at the window, it helped turn back the clock to an era when Yosemite visitors arrived by stagecoach, rather than by bus or SUV.
"Back then, the standard thing was for guests to be met on the stage platform by a doorman with a feather duster," says Tom Bopp, who has been entertaining Wawona guests on the piano in the hotel's parlor for nearly 20 years. "People wore canvas dusters to keep the dirt off, but even so, everybody complained about getting covered in the scenery."
Nowadays, of course, the roads are paved and the hotel is plumbed (though not all rooms have private baths). Yet the Wawona Hotel, with its old-fashioned ambience and isolated location near the southern entrance to the park, remains a charmingly out-of-time place.
Dating from the 1870s and gleaming with fresh paint and renovations, the Wawona is the oldest hotel in Yosemite National Park and one of the oldest continuously operating resort hotels in the West. For years, it was considered the top hotel in the Sierra.
"If you had the time and money to visit Yosemite 100 or 150 years ago, your idea of romance was not something rustic," notes Dean Shenk, an interpretive ranger who has worked at Yosemite for 30 years. "You wanted somewhere nice to stay."
Galen Clark, a contemporary of John Muir and one of the first non-American Indian sightseers to visit the Yosemite Valley, in 1855, started the Wawona story rolling when he opened his Clark's Station stage stop there in 1857. By then, Clark had begun guiding tourists through a grove of gargantuan trees that he and a friend, Milton Mann, were credited with "discovering."
As worldwide fascination with Yosemite grew, Clark helped influence opinion that both the magnificent valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias should be safeguarded. In 1864, during the thick of the Civil War, Congress approved legislation granting both to the state of California.
Clark, appointed in 1866 as the first guardian of the world's first scenic preserve, sold his fledgling hotel operation in 1874 to Henry Washburn, another of Yosemite's tourism pioneers. The hotel at Big Tree Station was renamed Wawona after the local American Indians' word for the hoot of the owl, which they considered the trees' spiritual guardian. The hotel remained in the Washburn family until 1932, when it was purchased by the park service and incorporated into park boundaries.
Though room configurations have changed over the years to accommodate modern plumbing, the hotel's eight wooden structures remain authentic on the exterior, right down to their ornamental woodwork and hand-split shingle roofs.
The main building, with the words "WAWONA HOTEL" stenciled proudly across the front, is a Victorian confection that rises from an emerald lawn like a white-frosted wedding cake surrounded by an assortment of lavishly decorated petit fours. Broad verandas with comfy Adirondack chairs set a deeply relaxing tone.
A cottage studio once belonging to Thomas Hill (1829-1908), a landscape painter of the Hudson River School, now houses a visitors center. Across the road, a nine-hole, 3,000-yard golf course, laid out in 1914, was a visionary amenity in its time. Today, it is considered a valued part of Yosemite's cultural history.
The Annex building, constructed in 1918, and the "new" dining room, dating from the same year, are the most recent additions to a place that retains both a loyal clientele and a fierce attachment to its past.
The Bee's Janet Fullwood can be reached at (916) 321-1148 or travel@sacbee.com.
