What’s in a Name at Yosemite?
For our writer, whose family has 130 years of history at the national park, changing iconic names stirs up vivid memories.
The Ahwahnee, which opened in 1927, was designed to highlight its natural surroundings, including stunning views of Half Dome, Glacier Point, and Yosemite Falls. Foreign royalty and U.S. presidents have stayed there. The hotel’s name, taken from the Sierra Miwok name for Yosemite Valley, is being changed because of a legal dispute with the park’s long-time concessionaire.
PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER DASILVA, THE NEW YORK TIMES, REDUX
The great fireplace in the 88-year-old hotel, the heavy dark beams above, the Art Deco ambience, the Southwestern motifs on the walls, the Navajo rugs, the Pomo baskets, the fortress-like exterior of mortared stones. For millions of visitors to Yosemite National Park, the name “Ahwahnee” evokes these images. Some of us, from families with a long history in Yosemite, see ghosts.
My uncle Joe ran the Ahwahnee elevator in summers as a teen-ager. My aunt Gayle, his future wife, worked for Virginia Adams, the wife of Ansel, our greatest landscape photographer, in their studio an easy walk down the road. In his twenties, my father, David Brower, when he was not making his dozens of ascents of Yosemite’s walls, worked as the public relations man for Yosemite Park and Curry Company, the park’s first concessionaire. He wrote copy, took pictures, and photographed the Ahwahnee inside and out. If the Ahwahnee had an animating spirit, it was Ansel Adams. He is now chief ghost. At nighttime, with no light left for his camera, he hung out at the hotel playing piano. (It was Adams, trained as a concert pianist, who procured this very Steinway in the hotel’s first year, 1927.) On the keys he was a great comedian and entertainer. Now and again he would rise abruptly, spin about, and play a thunderous Wagnerian chord with his behind. I remember my delight, as a boy, at seeing an adult behave this way. For my father, Adams was mentor. He critiqued his pictures, and sometimes even developed his images for him. “The negative is the score,” he advised my father, his apprentice, in the darkroom. “The print is the performance.”
The Name Game
Ahwahnee. The Ahwahnee Hotel. What’s in a name? Decades of personal, historical, and cultural significance—and now a lot of controversy, too.
Earlier this month, the National Park Service announced plans to change the hotel’s name, and the names of other iconic Yosemite landmarks. Delaware North Companies (DNC), the concessionaire that runs the hotels, restaurants, and retail stores of the park, lost its contract-renewal bid last summer. It then sued the Park Service for $51 million, the value, the company claimed, of its intellectual property in Yosemite, which includes park names it has trademarked. The Park Service, “to assure seamless transition” in management as this litigation is resolved, will change the names on March 1, when the new concessionaire takes over. The Ahwahnee will become “The Majestic Yosemite Hotel.” The Yosemite Lodge, at the foot of Yosemite Falls, will be “Yosemite Valley Lodge.” Curry Village will be “Half Dome Village.” The Wawona Hotel will be “Big Trees Lodge.” The Badger Pass Ski Area will become “Yosemite Ski and Snowboard Area.”
Picture of a family of tourists pose after driving through the Wawona Tunnel Tree in the 1920s
Tourists pose after driving through the Wawona Tunnel Tree in the 1920s. The 227-foot tall, 2,300-year-old giant sequoia stood in Yosemite’s Mariposa Grove until it fell under the weight of snowfall in 1969.
PHOTOGRAPH BY KIRN VINTAGE STOCK, CORBIS
The public response has been outrage. “Boycott DNC,” is a suggestion made again and again, as is the vow to never, ever, resort to the blasphemy of these new names. The Park Service, too, has drawn fire in this affair. Some believe that the renaming is not timidity, but tactics. “I think it was the smartest thing the Park Service has done for decades,” Jordan Fisher Smith told me. (Smith, a former ranger, is the author of Nature Noir, a look at the grittier side of park stewardship.) “Maybe they’re finally learning how to finesse these things.” The environmental filmmaker John de Graaf suspects, along with Smith, that the name changes are intended to provoke public reaction against DNC. Both men point to one name change in particular. They argue that conversion of the lyrical “Ahwahnee Hotel” to the comically portentous “Majestic Yosemite Hotel” can only be calculated to offend.
Bob Hansen, who for twenty years was president of the Yosemite Fund, worries less about the motivation behind the name changes than about their effects on the park’s legacy. “In the history books, we read about Teddy Roosevelt going to the Wawona Hotel,” he says. “We read about the founder of the Park Service, Stephen Mather, being responsible for the construction of the Ahwahnee Hotel. Those are the references. These na