"FIRE! The hotel's on fire!" The cry rang out through the Canyon Village area the night of August 8, 1960. And, indeed, the Canyon Hotel was engulfed in flames. By dawn, the largest structure that has ever stood in Yellowstone National Park wasashes.

Fortunately, no lives were lost that August evening because two years before the hotel had been condemned and closed to the public. The hotel was built in the early part of the century, measured a mile in circumference, and had room for 900 guests. Unfortunately, while the hotel had fantastic views of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, it had been built on a hillside with unstable soils and had been sliding and twisting on its foundation ever since. At the time of the condemnation, a National Park Service engineer had said that the reason the building was still upright was that it was held together by its plumbing! The hotel was in the slow process of being torn down when it burned. The cause of the fire has never been determined.

Today, the site of the Canyon Hotel is once again a gentle, rolling meadow, with the Canyon horse corrals nearby. Like other places in Yellowstone that once were the settings for facilities no longer standing, the area has been revegetated and returned to more natural conditions. While many facilities have been removed because of modernization, many others have been removed because they were inappropriately located in resource-sensitive areas, although at the time the facilities were built these concerns were not known or understood. Of course, there are occasions when Yellowstone itself removes a facility. For example, a tennis court in Mammoth disappeared in the 1930s when Opal Terrace came bubbling up through the middle of it!

 Mammoth Hot Springs is the park's oldest development, and it has changed the most over time. Gone is the Mammoth Lodge, where patrons could sit on the long front porch and take in the sweeping views of Canary Spring and Jupiter Terrace.

McCartney's Hotel, Yellowstone's first lodging facility, no longer stands in Clematis Gulch, and the Cottage Hotel is gone from its site next to today's gas station. Historic Fort Yellowstone is the second Army post that was built in Mammoth; nothing remains of Camp Sheridan, the first post, which once stood just south of Capitol Hill. The Norris Blockhouse, built by the park's second superintendent, Philetus Norris, once stood on top of Capitol Hill and served as the park's first headquarters. Mammoth also once boasted hot springs baths and later one of two swimming pools in Yellowstone (the other was at Old Faithful). Both were fed by runoff from thermal features.

 Many other lodging facilities in other areas of the park are also gone today. For example, the Sylvan Pass Lodge no longer sits at the park's East Entrance, and the Marshall House at Lower Geyser Basin (the park's second hotel) is today the site of the Nez Perce Creek Picnic Area. Just south of there, near Fountain Paint Pots, a stone foundation outline can be seen in the midst of a mature lodgepole pine forest; this is all that remains of the beautiful Fountain Hotel. Today's visitors who patronize the Pleasant Valley wagon cookout at Roosevelt are usually surprised to hear from the wranglers that the idyllic and wild-looking setting was once the site of "Uncle John" Yancey's Pleasant Valley Hotel, which included a saloon and mail station. Also gone are the tent camps run by the Wylie and the Shaw & Powell companies. While a few of these camps evolved into current park lodges (Old Faithful, Lake, and Roosevelt), many more vanished entirely, including those that were located at Swan Lake Flats, Willow Park, Beryl Spring, Riverside, Nez Perce Creek, and Wylie Hill (next to Grotto Geyser in the Upper Geyser Basin).

Lodging facilities are not all that has vanished from the Yellowstone landscape. Red Siwash's Round Prairie Saloon is gone from the large meadow that abuts the Pebble Creek Campground in Yellowstone's northeastern corner. The abutments on either side of the river are all that remains of Baronett's Bridge, the first bridge to span the Yellowstone River anywhere along its 671 mile course. Many sections of the park's Grand Loop Road have been moved through the years, some significantly. The abandoned road segments have often become trails or have been allowed to "slip back into the forest."

 Finally, two entire park developments have vanished from Yellowstone. The facilities that made up the village of West Thumb were removed from the resource-sensitive geyser basin area in the 1960s and 1970s. At one time cabin facilities, a campground, general store, photo shop, service station, and boat dock were located here. The new village of Grant, a few miles south of West Thumb, was built in the 1970s and 1980s to provide visitor services for this region of the park. Today, few who visit the Brink of the Upper Falls at the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone suspect that at one time Canyon Village was located here. A ranger station, general store, photo shop, service station, and camper's cabins all once stood at the site. These facilities were removed when the current Canyon Village was built as part of the Mission 66 project in the 1950s.

The list of long-gone facilities could get longer yet if one considered structures that have been proposed, but never built; for example, the elevator to the bottom of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone!

The visitor to Yellowstone today drives through an entrance station into a place where he or she hopes to find the wilderness in all of its wild, romantic splendor. But, visitors also expect to find facilities to ease the rigors of their journey--campgrounds, hotels, and dining facilities. Such facilities require many support services--roads, water systems, sewer systems, and employee housing. Throughout the years, park staff have tried to evaluate facility locations and adjust and balance human use with preservation of natural areas and the functioning of ecosystems. Today, less than 3 percent of Yellowstone National Park is considered developed, but it remains important to periodically re-evaluate park developments and facilities to determine how they fit into Yellowstone's constantly changing landscape