Painted Desert Inn

The Painted Desert Inn stands on the edge of a mesa above the red badlands of the Painted Desert, two miles past Petrified Forest National Park's north entrance. It began as the Stone Tree House, a roadside inn of petrified wood and other native stone built by Herbert David Lore, who registered it with the land office in 1924 and ran it as a tourist stop for almost twelve years. Visitors could eat in the lunchroom, buy American Indian arts and crafts, drink in the downstairs taproom, rent one of six small rooms for two to four dollars a night and take a two-hour motor tour of the Black Forest below. There was no power line, so a lighting plant made electricity, and water was hauled from Adamana, ten miles south.

The problem was the ground. Lore had built on a seam of bentonite clay, which swells and shrinks with moisture, and the walls cracked. In 1936 the park bought the inn and four square miles of land for $59,400. National Park Service architect Lyle Bennett redesigned it in the Pueblo Revival style, and the Civilian Conservation Corps rebuilt it, using ponderosa pine and aspen for the roof beams, making punched-tin light fixtures, hand-painting the skylight panels with designs from prehistoric pottery and etching the concrete floors with Navajo blanket patterns. It reopened on July 4, 1940, serving Route 66 travelers, and closed in October 1942 during the war.

The Fred Harvey Company reopened it in the late 1940s. Its architect and designer, Mary Colter, arrived in December 1947, changed the color scheme and added windows facing the view. The company hired the Hopi artist Fred Kabotie to paint murals in the dining room and lunchroom: the Buffalo Dance, a trek to a sacred salt lake, planting time, and Tawa, the Hopi sun spirit. Structural damage forced the business into the new visitor center complex in 1963. Demolition was scheduled for 1975, but a public campaign saved the building, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976 and became a National Historic Landmark in 1987.

Today the inn is a museum. While the Painted Desert Visitor Center is closed for construction, the inn serves as the park's north visitor center, including free wilderness camping permits. There is an ice cream counter on the ground floor. Behind the building, an easy accessible trail leads to Kachina Point, which overlooks the red part of the Painted Desert and is the trailhead for the northern wilderness area. Petrified wood from Lore's original building can still be seen on either side of the inn's north entrance.