January 2019

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In 1909, hotel founder Pete Berry and his wife Martha reopened the Grand
View Hotel. Its glory days now past, the Grand View evolved into a rustic, quiet
alternative to the tourist circus at Grand Canyon Village. Berry sought a buyer
for the abandoned mine and sleepy hotel, and found one in California publishing
magnate William Randolph Hearst, who paid $45,000 for the property in 1913.
Although Hearst had grandiose plans for the site, these faded away, and the Grand
View Hotel continued serving tourists much as it always had.
Pete and Martha returned and managed the hotel for eight more seasons before
the Grand View Hotel closed forever in October 1916. Abandoned in 1919,
a decade later it was razed for tax purposes. Giant logs used to support its roof
were removed and reused in construction of the
Desert View Watchtower, where they can still be
seen today. In 1941, the U.S. Park Service acquired
Hearst’s Grand Canyon properties, preserving the
area which remains open and accessible to all.
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In the spring of 2018, I contacted a National
Park Service archeologist and filed a request for assistance.
I soon learned the NPS had an archeological
file on the Grand View Hotel, but the file was
classified “need to know only.” I requested access,
and in May I received the complete NPS Grand
View Hotel file, and discovered that NPS archeologists
had consistently misidentified the ruins of the
Summit Hotel as those of the Grand View − the
same mistake I’d made in 2016.
However, NPS surveys around the Summit
Hotel had discovered ruins from the Last Chance
Mine mill site upon the rim of the Grand Canyon,
not below it. Further, an 1892 mill site survey map
included boundary markers which would align
with current topographical maps.
Orienting the historic map with a modern satellite
image of the search area revealed a nearly
perfect alignment. If a 1903 survey benchmark recorded
on an unrelated document could be located,
the site of the Grand View Hotel would be found
100 yards away.
On a hot, dry summer day, our first stop was
a location 100 yards from the estimated location
of the 1903 survey benchmark, where the terrain
was hilly and forested, with no indication of a hotel.
We then began walking south in an arc keeping the
1903 benchmark location to our left. After 150 feet,
we entered a small clearing with two tall ponderosa
pine trees, both evenly pruned to a height of about
40 feet.
The trees were 280 feet from the 1903 benchmark. Beyond the trees perhaps
30 feet was a wide stone walking path ending in a straight line: the front entrance
path to the Grand View Hotel. We’d found it. The two trees, the stone path, even
the distant ridge from the historic photograph aligned perfectly.
Figure 10 shows how the camera was used to document our discovery. Using
the two surviving ponderosa pines to align the images, I superimposed a 90-yearold
image of the abandoned Grand View Hotel with a photo of Judy Cody standing
Figure 10. Using the two surviving trees
to guide him, the author superimposed
a 90-year-old image of the abandoned
Grand View Hotel with a photo he took
of Judy Cody standing at the empty
lot last year. The result is this eerie
simulated “double exposure” in which
Judy appears to be hiding behind a post
at the long-vanished lodge.
JANUARY 2019 / AMERICAN PHILATELIST 49