If you’ve ever hiked the Pacific Crest Trail out of Yosemite and up to Tahoe then you’ve likely been to the Kennedy Meadows Lodge and store. Unfortunately pictures and memories are all anyone has left after theywere destroyed by a fire early Monday that was believed to have started in a woodstove’s flue.
LA Times: “Authorities said the fire appeared to have broken out shortly after midnight in a chimney flue for the pot-bellied stove inside the main structure. The two-story lodge was built in 1917 at a forest-ringed meadow along California Highway 108, about 60 miles northeast of Sonora near the road’s Sierra crest at Sonora Pass.
Employees housed in the main lodge awakened to smoke and managed to flee the flames and then alert guests in the resort’s 20 cabins. All managed to escape unharmed.
Matt Bloom, owner of the resort for the last decade, worked hard with some employees to try to knock down the fire.
Meanwhile, others raced down the highway to call fire officials from the nearest working phone — in the tiny hamlet of Dardanelle, seven miles away. Kennedy Meadows has no cellphone coverage, and the land lines on the property had been swallowed up quickly by the flames.
Julie Chaffee, who works at the resort, said Bloom and the others pumped water onto the blaze until flames consumed the structure that housed three diesel generators. The generators supplied the resort’s electricity. Without power, the pumps stopped working.
Crews from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection arrived soon after they got the call and tried their best in the bone-dry terrain, parched after last winter’s drought and a long summer, Chaffee said.
But the old lodge — the resort’s centerpiece — was leveled by the flames, along with the store and restaurant, where workers would clang an old triangle to call folks to breakfast.
“It’s down to the ground,” Chaffee said sadly. “Gone, gone, gone, gone.”
The blaze claimed seven of the resort’s cabins but skirted the rustic building that houses the Last Chance Saloon. Built during the 1880s, the old watering hole features stiff drinks, a tiny wood dance floor and an ancient jukebox with no music newer than Hank Williams songs from the 1940s”.
I’m glad the owner has decided to rebuild. The lodge is a great place and was an icon to a by-gone age.