Bulletin E-Edition:
more photosLight from Lake Crescent Lodge reflects on Lake Crescent in Olympic National Park in Washington.
Courtesy David Morris
‘Great’ escapes
Bend author Barnes opens door to national park lodges
By David Jasper / The Bulletin
Published: October 11. 2008 4:00AM PSTAfter a career as a journalist at newspapers including the San Francisco Examiner, Christine Barnes, has established a second career for herself writing books about national park lodges around the West.
The Bend author’s series of lodge books — “Great Lodges of the West” (1997), “Great Lodges of the Canadian Rockies” (1998), “Great Lodges of the National Parks” (2002) and the recently published “Great Lodges of the National Parks, Volume Two” (2008) — have sparked three Public Broadcasting System series exploring the same subject matter, which she’ll discuss one week from today at Des Chutes Historical Museum in Bend (see “If you go”).
Detours
Barnes, 60, enjoys holing up in libraries doing research, not to mention visiting the parks of which she writes in full-color, coffee-table books. Her latest book explores— in exquisite detail — the origins, history and upkeep of 10 lodges, including Glacier Bay Lodge, Wallowa Lake Lodge, Yellowstone National Park’s Lake Hotel and Denali National Park’s Camp Denali.
Barnes, originally from Colorado, attended journalism school at the University of Missouri. There, she met her future husband, Jerry, “and got detoured,” she said.
In 1974, they moved to the Chicago area, and Barnes ended up finishing her degree at Northwestern.
“I worked there for a group of newspapers, and then one winter, we couldn’t hack it anymore,” recalls Barnes.
A February trip to California with their two kids, Melissa and Michael, provided the catalyst.
After they returned, “Jerry calls me at work and says, ‘Chris, let’s move to California.’ So he quit his job, I sold our house, he flew to California,” Barnes said.
“It was a different time, too. We didn’t have big discussions about it.”
In California, she began working at the Contra Costa Times, then moved to the Oakland Tribune, where she worked for five years wearing several editing hats. Next, Barnes says, she was recruited by the San Francisco Examiner, where she worked for six years.
Moving to Bend
Then, with their children grown, “We were just tired of the drama of living in the city, really,” Barnes said. Their daughter, who’d attended Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., suggested they consider moving to Bend. They did, and moved to town in 1994.
Once in Oregon, Barnes began writing travel pieces, including several about a five-week trip to Asia with the whole family. The highest-profile piece landed in The New York Times and Toronto Globe and Mail.
But Barnes didn’t have the constitution for freelance travel writing, per se.
“I don’t like to sell,” she says, adding with a chuckle: “The selling part is bad news.”
She began researching books about her new home, which “was so beautiful, and you could tell it was going to grow.” Not finding much along those lines, Barnes wrote “Central Oregon: View From the Middle” in 1996.
“I never wrote a book, never thought I’d write a book, but as a journalist, nonfiction is just a natural,” she said.
Knowing the environment
Working on “Central Oregon: View From the Middle,” she says, “was a blast.”
“What a way to get to know your new environment,” said Barnes, who visited Paulina Peak by snowmobile in winter, hiked all over the area and visited Warm Springs.
The publisher used stock photos in the book, which Dan Hays, of the Statesman Journal, said were “masterful,” writing that “The book has 91 of them, and every one is effective.” Many of those photos were by Fred Pflughoft.
With an eye toward her travel writing, Barnes decided to take a photography class, although she didn’t really want to become a photographer.
“During the course, Fred and I figured out who we were: He figured out I’d written the book on Central Oregon, and I figured out a whole bunch of the photos were his,” Barnes said.
After the course, Pflughoft suggested that they stick to what they know best, an idea Barnes was amenable to. She told him that she was thinking of writing about the lodges of the Pacific Northwest, and began researching accordingly.
The result was “Great Lodges of the West,” published in 1997 by W.W. West, a small, Bend-based publisher. It and the subsequent books are loaded with historical photos, illustrations and landscape and interior photos by Pflughoft, who now lives in Pinedale, Wyo., and David Morris, who lives in Bend.
“Those two, they stay in tents,” Barnes said. “I say, ‘You know, they’ll let you stay at the hotels now. They know who we are.’”
“Great Lodges of the West” won the Benjamin Franklin Best History Award in 1998 and sold in the neighborhood of 35,000 copies.
Enter PBS
While Barnes researched and wrote her second lodge book, “Great Lodges of the Canadian Rockies” in 1998, her publisher approached Oregon Public Broadcasting with the idea of making a series based on the first lodge book. For its part, OPB took the idea to PBS, resulting in a national-scale production.
“But they wanted to call it ‘Great Lodges of the National Parks,’” Barnes recalls. “I added three more lodges (and) rewrote the whole darned book. I couldn’t help myself.”
The resultant book was “Great Lodges of the National Parks,” the companion to the PBS series. Both debuted in 2002.
The book “sells and sells and sells, because,” says Barnes, “not only was the PBS series like a gigantic advertisement, but it continues to sell in all of the lodge gift shops. So it has legs.”
Barnes also served as senior consultant and historian for the dovetailing TV series.
“I gave them all of my research, and I edited all of the scripts for historic accuracy,” Barnes said. “It was really hard. I can have a page to tell a story” that has to be explained in just seconds on television. “It was ultra-editing.”
Next came the “Great Lodges of the Canadian Rockies” series, a joint effort between PBS and Canadian Public Broadcasting based on her second book. She sold the rights to the book and “next thing I know, it was a two-part series,” she said.
Next, Barnes wrote “Only in Oregon” and a few other books, including one on Old Faithful Inn. After a period of not doing much writing, she talked to the folks at OPB about doing another book and series on places not included in the first national park lodge book.
“Great Lodges of the National Parks, Volume Two” was officially released in late June, with the TV series premiering that same month.
She remarks on the impact that John D. Rockefeller Jr. had on the national parks, donating the land for the likes of Grand Teton National Park.
“I just don’t think people have any idea,” she said. Rockefeller also paid for the lodge, which was designed by Gilbert Stanley Underwood, Barnes’ favorite lodge architect.
The lodges themselves would be massive and gorgeous in any setting, but, Barnes marvels, “all of these are in these remote places.”
National treasures
As she writes in the author’s note at the start of her latest book, “Every citizen needs to be reminded that they are treasures: millions of acres of spectacular real estate that have not been carved up and fenced off for personal consumption.”
Barnes says that she got chills when, doing research, she got to hold letters written by Stephen T. Mather, the founder and first director of the National Park Service.
“I’ve gotten pretty into it,” she said. “Some of the archivists are just thrilled that somebody cares. They’re the unsung heroes of the national parks. They keep our history intact.”
She “can’t really say” what her next project is, but hints that there may be a deadline involved.
Asked what her favorite lodge is, Barnes says she always answers, “The last one I was at.
“That’s really the truth, because they all have something extraordinarily special about them.”
David Jasper can be reached at 541-383-0349 or djasper@bendbulletin.com.
ARTICLE ACCESS: This article is among those available to all readers. Many more articles are available only to E-Edition members. Sign up today!
blog comments powered by Disqus
