triggered the demise of the train service, and the railway ceased to run in 1968. In 1989, the historical route was resurrected and the historical depot in Williams refurbished.
PHANTOM RANCH
Phantom Ranch is a collection of backcountry cabins, bunkhouses, and a dining hall located approximately one mile north of the mouth of Bright Angel Creek—a third of a mile upstream of the Bright Angel Creek Campground. The current structures were built beginning in 1922, designed by Mary Colter under contract with the Fred Harvey Company. She initially designed five buildings, but the resort was so popular that they built more structures. By 1930 the ranch appeared much as it does today. Only the hiker dorms were added much later.
The first structures at this location predate this. In 1903, Edwin “Dee” Woolley, a rancher from Kanab, Utah, and colleagues formed the Grand Canyon Transportation Company with the intent of building a cable across the Colorado River and a trail up to the North Rim via Bright Angel Creek, to be called the Grand Canyon Toll Road. They viewed a South Rim to North Rim trail system as the easiest way to increase tourism on the North Rim; to the north, the rail line stopped in Marysvale, approximately 200 miles north of the North Rim. They decided upon Bright Angel Creek as the best corridor, for François Matthes, a surveyor and geologist, had already created a rudimentary trail in 1903. They viewed the lower reaches of Bright Angel Creek as a good place for a guesthouse.
Only slight progress was made until 1906 when David Rust, Woolley’s son-in-law and a schoolteacher, took on the job of trail foreman. His journal indicates that the construction of the trail proceeded much as expected, but the construction of the cable involved much effort and numerous false starts. The first party finally crossed the Colorado River on September 20, 1907. In 1906, Rust and his crew also built the first dwellings at the Phantom Ranch site. They planted a garden, a small orchard, and many hundreds of cottonwood cuttings, obtained upstream from Phantom Creek, for shade. In subsequent summers they upgraded the accommodations and planted more trees in anticipation of a stream of wealthy guests. Unfortunately, relatively few tourists made use of this cross-canyon corridor, and although Rust continued to spend each summer until 1915 running his cable car and the Rust Camp, it never earned money for the Grand Canyon Transportation Company. In 1919 the newly founded national park took over possession of his cable car and trail.
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.
The Santa Fe Railway and Fred Harvey Company, which ran the concessions associated with the railroad (and had built Phantom Ranch), the National Park Service, and other government agencies wished to invalidate Ralph Cameron’s mining claims and take control of the trail that departed from the rapidly expanding Grand Canyon Village. Moreover, Ralph Cameron took poor care of “his” trail and the Indian Garden Campground. In 1913 the U.S. Forest Service sued Ralph Cameron over his unused claims, which led to a 1920 U.S. Supreme Court decision that dissolved his claims and turned the trail over to Coconino County. However, Cameron succeeded in continuing to collect tolls. He was also active in local politics and in 1924 convinced the citizens of Coconino County to vote against selling the Bright Angel Trail to the National Park Service.
To avoid requiring tourists to support the Cameron brothers, as soon as the Grand Canyon became a national park in 1919, the park service began arranging for the construction of an alternative route, which would become the South Kaibab Trail. They moved forward quickly following the November 1924 election and by December 1 of that year had $50,000 for the project, had ordered construction materials, and had amassed two 20-worker teams. One team would begin at the Colorado River and the other at Yaki Point. They had hoped to complete the trail by May, but it took until mid-June for the two teams to meet up because of the difficulty in blasting into solid rock and winter storms that delayed work. The final cost for the project was $73,000. The trail was dedicated on June 15, 1925. Except for the section of the trail below the Tipoff, the South Kaibab Trail did not follow an existing route.
The new trail was named for the Kaibab Plateau, a name suggested by J. R. Eakin, the first superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park. National Park Service Director Stephen Mather selected this name over other possibilities: Yaki Trail, indicating its descent from near Yaki Point and Phantom Trail, an option promoted by the Fred Harvey Company since the trail descends directly to their Phantom Ranch.
The National Park Service finally took control of the Bright Angel Trail in 1928, when Coconino County traded it in return for the park service funding a new road from Williams to Grand Canyon Village. The park service then reconstructed the Bright Angel Trail between 1929 and 1938; they decreased the grade of the trail, including the section above the 3-Mile Resthouse (1930–1931) and through the Devils Corkscrew (1929), built a trail alongside the wash upstream of Indian Garden (1930), routed the trail through the Tapeats Narrows (1929), and built a trail alongside Pipe Creek (1938). The trail had previously dropped down the Bright Angel Fault at nearly three times the grade it is today, simply followed the Garden Creek wash, diverted east of Garden Creek on the Tonto Platform, dropped down the Salt Creek Drainage (the seep you cross toward the top of Devils Corkscrew), and continued nearly straight down to Pipe Creek. The old, much steeper switchbacks can still be seen as you descend the Devils Corkscrew to Pipe Creek.
In addition to acquiring and retrofitting these important corridor trails, the park service lost no time in building a bridge across the Colorado River that was accessible to stock. In 1921 they completed a wooden suspension bridge to replace Rust’s cable car. Unfortunately this bridge was susceptible to great contortions, even flipping over, and in 1928 a sturdier bridge, the current Kaibab Suspension Bridge (or “black” or “mule” bridge), was constructed. The eight 550-foot-long main suspension cables were each carried to the bottom of the canyon by a team of 42 Havasupai Indians.
The River Trail, the 1.7-mile trail along the Colorado River between the Bright Angel Trail and the Kaibab Suspension Bridge, was built between 1933 and 1936 by the Civilian Conservation Corps, under park service supervision. Long sections were blasted into vertical rock, providing hikers with airy views into the river. Until its construction, hikers descending the Bright Angel Trail and wishing to cross to the north side of the river, would leave the Bright Angel Trail just beyond Indian Garden and cross over on the trail that followed the Tonto
