Phantom Ranch

Phantom Ranch is a lodge inside Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona. It sits at the bottom of Grand Canyon, on the east side of Bright Angel Creek, a little over half a mile north of the Creek's confluence with the Colorado River. Opened in 1922, Phantom Ranch is a member of Historic Hotels of America, the official program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. History The site of Phantom Ranch and the areas around it were used by various Native American peoples for millennia. Numerous artifacts, including split-twig figurines carbon dated at 4000 years old, have been discovered in nearby caves. Puebloan peoples built pit houses and a ceremonial kiva in the area around AD 1050, and likely survived by hunting and growing corn, beans, and squash. Paiute and Havasupai people also inhabited Grand Canyon for many centuries and probably visited the area, although no direct evidence of this has yet been discovered. The earliest recorded visit by European Americans took place in 1869, when John Wesley Powell and his company camped on the beach at the confluence of Bright Angel Creek and the Colorado River. It was Powell who gave Bright Angel Creek its name, contrasting its clear, sparkling waters with the turbulent, salty, muddy waters of a creek he and his men had passed earlier and named Dirty Devil. Powell explored the area briefly and discovered the Puebloan ruins. In 1903, after François E. Matthes completed his pioneering survey work of Grand Canyon for the US Geological Survey, Edwin Woolley and other investors formed the Grand Canyon Transportation Company, hoping to develop the tourist potential of the Canyon's north rim in the same way that the Santa Fe Railroad was doing at the south rim. Woolley hired his son-in-law David Rust to improve an ancient Native American route that Matthes had used to travel down Bright Angel Creek to the Colorado River. By 1907 Rust and his crew had completed the trail work and added a small tent camp alongside the Creek at the bottom. Rust planted native willows and cottonwoods to give the camp shade, grew alfalfa (for livestock), peaches, and plums, and raised chickens and rabbits as food for guests. Theodore Roosevelt, who as president had declared Grand Canyon a National Monument in 1908, traveled down to the camp during a hunting expedition in 1913; in honor of this visit the site became known as Roosevelt Camp.