Grand Canyon

One of the most impressive features at Disney’s Wilderness Lodge has got to be the towering 82-foot tall stone lobby fireplace. This unique piece of Americana is a tribute to the brilliance of design by a woman names Mary Colter, who pioneered the “National Park Rustic” style that you can find throughout the Wilderness Lodge. Mary is well known for her work on behalf of the Fred Harvey Company deigning the beautiful Bright Angel Lodge at the Grand Canyon.

The Bright Angel Lodge has a small geologic fireplace that was quarried directly from the layers of the Grand Canyon, while the massive Disney version is a work of art by Imagineering. The Geologic fireplace is built to mimic the rock structure and strata of the Grand Canyon from rim to river, representing 2,000 billion years of geologic history. Imagineering not only embraced the basic ideal of Mary’s concept, but also built their structure to scale, and painstakingly added appropriate fossilized plants and animals to the layers. More than 95 colors of paint were used to achieve the magnificent effect on this 3-sided mammoth.