Fading Away.

Carole and I took advantage of the briefly opened Little River Road to drive to Elkmont to see what was left of the old Wonderland Hotel. I covered this place before in my blog. It was once the only active hotel within the borders of the Park. But it had been grandfathered in and the deal had an end date. It had been known for some time that the Park Service wanted to get rid of the Wonderland, and basically I agree with their decision to end the concession and demolish the building. After all, the Park was created to protect mainly the ecosystems there and not to preserve a rickety, poorly engineered hotel.

Still, having stayed in the hotel (we booked a room when we heard they'd lost an extension on their concession and would soon be closing up forever), and having known people who stayed there many times over the years, it was still a sad day when it closed down.

In the intervening years, with no one to repair the place, the elements have had their way with it. There was even a fire that burned down the main building which is no longer there in even a ruined state. Just some stairs and the remnants of the brick chimney.

The part of the hotel that is still standing is the section where Carole and I stayed. That is, it had the bedroom we rented during our trip there. Even though I saw it as it was winding down, I liked the old place. It was old and rickety and the bed in our room was ridiculously soft. But it was really quiet and nice. Quaint is the word that always occurs to me when I need to describe it. It was a part of America that is mainly gone, now. The kind of Park experience that visitors expected during the wild and exploitative days of the National Parks. Sad as it is to see it go, that kind of thing really has no place in our National Parks. You can still witness a form of it in many of our western National Parks (Yellowstone, Yosemite, Crater Lake, etc.).

But the old Wonderland is almost gone, these days. Just a few shaky structures still holding up, ready for the first big windstorm to finish knocking them over.

The stairs that once led up from the road/railroad to the Wonderland.

All that's left of the fireplace in the main lodge.

This was the section that had the bedroom Carole and I used. Ours was on the other side. I remember walking down the hallways, rooms on either side. We were on the ground floor, communal restrooms at the end of the hall.

This building is almost gone. Last time we were there it was in okay shape. Now the roof has completely given way and most of the floor is also gone.

At the rear of the Wonderland. Our room looked out on these woods. Of course there weren't trees growing up to crowd out the building in those days.

This staircase actually led from the main building to a breezeway that went to lodging rooms. I remember exploring that building that is now completely gone, save for those steps and that crumb of a chimney.

The Long Goodbye to The Wonderland

I've posted about the Wonderland Hotel before. And as I get ready to head off for another vacation, I felt like putting up a few more photographs of the old Wonderland--a photographic record of the place as it falls into the Earth.

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park was cobbled together from various undeveloped and developed tracts of land. In several cases, entire communities had to be bought out and moved (Cades Cove and Cataloochee). In Elkmont, close to what is now the border between the Park and the city of Gatlinburg was a group of vacation homes and a hotel called The Wonderland. The Park Service worked out a deal whereby the owners of the cottages could keep using them until such time as the original owners died off. This meant that some of the vacation homes were in use up until the 1990s. You can still see these homes in the Elkmont area of the park. Some of them have collapsed, some are decrepit, but others are in amazingly good shape.

The Wonderland was an old-style wilderness experience hotel. Much like some of the hotels in our western National Parks. It wasn't grand on any level, but it was in a beautiful location and had decent, if rustic, amenities. Built around 1911, it was composed of mainly local materials and was a huge, rambling structure.

Upon learning that the hotel's concession would be terminated, my wife and I decided to rush up to the park to stay a couple of nights before the contract was ended and The Wonderland closed, possibly forever. When we stayed there, the concessionaires were taking a fatalistic attitude toward the lodgings. They provided only the most base of service, so parts of the hotel that had been historically open and operating were shuttered and dark. But the main sitting rooms were in order and the sleeping rooms and shared bathrooms were as I'd imagined them to be.

The beds were huge and soft. We pretty much vanished into the mattress in the room we had rented. Outside our window were hemlocks and poplars and it was strange and wonderful to be staying in a hotel completely surrounded by protected National Parkland. We had a good time at the place, even knowing that it was soon to be closed up, possibly for good.


And now, of course, the Wonderland it almost no more. Much of it collapsed in the past few years, and only about half the old structure is still standing. You can walk up the old staircase from what was, at one time, a spur railroad and is now a park road. Carole and I walked up those steps with our luggage once upon a time.

These days, the old parking lot and yards are filled with young hemlock trees that have been chemically treated to resist the infestation that's sending their species to extinction. You can stand around and look at hearths that once stood in large sitting rooms. One can walk up to the decrepit hotel rooms and look in to see the place slowly going to rot. On one level it's kind of sad. But on the other hand it's very good to see the land reverting to its natural state. All around the park you are aware of what happens to land that is unprotected and open to the exploitation that humans call "progress". It isn't progress at all, really, to see the trees sawn down and the earth heaved up, hills cut down to fill streambeds, buildings slapped up, and native flora and fauna trampled underfoot.

So I don't really mourn the slow destruction by neglect of The Wonderland.


Let the moisture and insects and bacteria do their work.


Let gravity pull down the weakening timbers.


Let birds raise their generations in its rubble and angles.

Let the wasps and hornets anchor their homes along the old hotel as we say our last, long goodbyes.


Our own goodbye for about a week--off we go with our Casita to the mountains of southwestern Virginia.