Tom Bean (Member 41,135) is one of the millions who mourn the loss of the North Rim Lodge, on the edge of the Grand Canyon, Arizona, US. The Lodge was burned down a couple of weeks ago by the Dragon Bravo wildfire, which continues to rage.
Tom first visited the Lodge in October of 1983 while on assignment for the national park to photograph the Grand Canyon’s North Rim. One of his favourite memories of the place over the years was out on the veranda, ‘watching a summer thunderstorm as it moved across the Canyon and ducking inside to the Sun Room as the downpour swept over the Lodge’.
Susan Lamb, a park ranger who was based at the South Rim, on the other side of the Canyon, also visited the North Rim Lodge in October 1983. She’d been assigned there to prepare closing down the Lodge for winter, when deep snow makes it inaccessible. As it happened, Susan and Tom were allocated accommodations in the same cabin. Earlier this month, on July 15, they celebrated their 35th wedding anniversary. The North Rim Lodge had burned down just three days before.
‘Over the decades, we’ve visited the North Rim many times,’ says Tom. ‘The Lodge was a spectacular place to view magnificent skies over the Canyon. We revered it as a remote, quiet place to contemplate one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World.’
Cumulonimbus capillatus incus clouds viewed from the veranda of the North Rim Lodge in October 2023, when Susan (lower centre) and Tom last visited. They camped on the North Rim with two other couples they knew from Tom’s five years as a ranger in Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve. This idea was suggested by Tom and Susan’s friend Suzanne Winckler (Member 41,844).
