Phantom Ranch, at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, is turning 100 this month. But on the night of April 28, 1999, Warren Tracy was worried it wouldn’t make it to 80.
“There’s a big railroad bell that came off one of the steam trains,” says Tracy, who managed the ranch from 1989 to 2000. “We used it to sound breakfast and dinner for the guests, but we also designated it as our fire bell. The bell was ringing incessantly around 11:30 at night. I thought for sure it was just a bunch of drunks out there having fun, but I woke up, I opened the curtains, and I saw flames 15 feet over the main lodge, and they were cookin’. I thought, Oh, my God, the ranch is gonna burn down on my watch.”
Tracy and his staff had recently installed a fire suppression system, but it hadn’t been connected to Grand Canyon National Park’s water supply. Instead, Tracy organized 60 guests into a “bucket brigade” to douse the blaze, which ended up being at the laundry building. “We got that fire out in 28 minutes,” he says with more than a little pride. And the ranch stayed open, with Tracy having a new washer and dryer flown in by helicopter the next day.
That was an atypical night at Phantom Ranch. For the past century, Canyon visitors have trekked there — usually on foot, by boat or atop a mule — in search of peace and quiet in the depths of Arizona’s best-known natural wonder. Almost without exception, that’s exactly what they’ve found. “You’re totally out of touch there,” says Marjorie “Slim” Woodruff, who’s been visiting since the 1960s. “The only thing to do is sit and watch people go by, or watch the foxes, or gossip with the rangers.”
are available. | John Burcham
The human history at the Phantom site goes back some 950 years, as evidenced by Bright Angel Pueblo, a nearby Ancestral Puebloan ruin. But Phantom itself dates to 1922, when the Fred Harvey company founded it as a tourist camp with a lodge and dining hall, plus four cabins. Stones for the structures were quarried nearby, and anything that couldn’t be sourced from the area had to be carried down from the South Rim by mules, then taken across a flimsy suspension bridge that could support only one mule at a time. (The Kaibab Trail Suspension Bridge, better known today as the Black Bridge, replaced that bridge in 1928.)
More cabins, a recreation hall, a shower house and other structures came later, all of them in a style that came to be known as National Park Service Rustic, an approach that aimed to blend buildings into their environments. Later, helicopters made it easier to get large items to Phantom, but reminders of the past endure: A close look at the buildings’ rafters and beams shows where they were spliced together from pieces short enough to be carried by a mule.
The 1930s saw more expansion courtesy of a Civilian Conservation Corps team, which added a mule corral and a ranger station. The crew also installed a large swimming pool, and although it’s since been filled in, Woodruff recalls sneaking in and swimming in it, then being chased off by a ranger, when she hiked down as a Northern Arizona University student in the ’60s. Her first “real” trip to Phantom was in the 1980s, when she had a young son and her mother-in-law rented a cabin.
“We pretty much started going on our own, getting a large cabin and filling it with friends,” says Woodruff, who’s now a Phantom “frequent flyer” and visits at least monthly, except in the summer. During her visits, she’s seen two lunar eclipses and the rare occurrence of snow at the bottom of the Canyon. “There used to be turkeys down there, and they would come into the cabin and beg for food,” she recalls. “On a number of occasions, a ringtail broke in in the middle of the night.”
dinner. | John Burcham
Today, Phantom Ranch has enough cabins and dormitories to house about 90 guests — and those who haven’t planned ahead need not inquire, as reservations are governed by an online lottery held more than a year in advance. And while the ranch is managed by Xanterra Travel Collection (a descendant of the old Fred Harvey company), rangers from the park spend plenty of time there, hosting interpretive programs and assisting tired hikers or mule riders doing what park employees call the “Canyon shuffle.”
Elyssa Shalla, who supervises inner-Canyon interpretation, says while the ranch’s setting is spectacular, the diverse people it attracts make it special. “You can be giving a program, and you have somebody sitting on the bench and it’s their 50th trip to Phantom Ranch, and next to them is someone who’s on their first trip,” she says. “We always say there’s no elitism in the Canyon. Once you’re there, a lot of the things we have in our normal lives are really nonexistent.”
Shalla lives full time on the North Rim, and she speaks with reverence about being able to see autumn-hued cottonwood leaves at the ranch in November or redbuds starting to bloom in January — both months when she might be snowed in up above. But she says another aspect of Phantom’s enduring appeal is the effort it takes to get there.
“It takes work, and it’s never easy,” she says. “Even when you’ve hiked down there 100 times, you’re still going to have a sore muscle or a blister here or there. It’s a great reward, and it’s a humble place but a very welcoming place.” The work of getting there, she adds, “makes things like a cold glass of lemonade at the ranch the best thing ever.”
Of course, not everyone finds what they’re looking for at Phantom Ranch, but maybe that’s a good thing, too. “Whenever my son had a new girlfriend, we’d take her down to Phantom and they’d immediately break up,” Woodruff says. “The gal he’s with now has been down twice, so I guess she’s a keeper.”
Marjorie “Slim” Woodruff’s Top 10 Reasons to Go to Phantom Ranch
10. Air conditioning (in summer)
9. Heaters (in winter)
8. Chocolate cake for dessert
7. Ice in your drink
6. Hot showers
5. Ranger programs
4. Colter Cabins
3. Ranch T-shirts
2. Moonrise from Silver Bridge
1. The Grand Canyon (duh)
GRAND CANYON Phantom Ranch, grandcanyonlodges.com/lodging/phantom-ranch