It’s often overlooked on the often frenetic pace to reach Jackson Hole, but nestled on the south side of the highway 20 miles west of Dubois is an alpine resort with a mountain of history.
The Lava Mountain Lodge came into existence officially with the construction of the Lava Mountain Motel in 1966, and the adjoining restaurant 40 years later. That is the official history of the lodge, the unofficial story is much more interesting.
“The first structure on the place, a 360 square foot cabin, that still exists on the property was built in 1916,” Sam Haack, an associate broker for Berkshire Hathaway of Jackson said. “It’s currently being used for employee housing.”
Haack is selling the property for owner Frank Chapman.
Two additional cabins were built in 1928, and a couple more in the 1940s. In 1940 a family home was constructed with additional outbuildings in 1942.
Lava Mountain rests high above the lodge. It was a haven for hunting parties in the late 19th century and has suffered the dips of Wyoming’s unstable economy along with riding the crest of the latest economic development.
That first development came in hunting and trapping. Trappers worked the water between Dubois and Moran Junction beginning in the mid-1800s and hunting, especially elk and moose hunting have always been popular around Lava Mountain.
Beginning in 1914, another economic boom came to the valley from 100 miles east along the tracks of the Chicago North Western Railroad.
Railroads were big business after the initial crossing of the west by the Union Pacific in 1869. In Wyoming, the Chicago North Western headed west from Chadron, Nebraska at the end of the 19th century and wound its way to the base of South Pass at Lander in October 1906.
It’s rival, the Chicago Burlington and Quincy arrived eight years later, joining New Orleans with Seattle and creating a busy passenger depot at Bonneville, Wyoming.
These two railroads, and many others needed ties for the rails to hold steady as increasing passenger and freight traffic rolled across the west.
The Dunoir Valley, near Lava Mountain and Warm Springs on Union Pass a few miles east were hot spots of tie cutting and processing. After the ties were “hacked” into shape they were floated 90 miles east to a treatment mill at Riverton on the Wind River.
The tie drives were a momentous time in Fremont County.
The Tie Hack Memorial, established to honor the men who cut and rode the ties down the river to Riverton was built just two miles east of the Lava Mountain Lodge.
Trapping, timber and big game all brought economic booms to the isolated mountain valley, but tourism was the early economic force below Lava Mountain and remains so today.
Yellowstone National Park, the world’s first national park, opened in 1872 to less than standing room only crowds.
The nearest railroad depot was in Rawlins, almost 400 miles distant on the tracks of the Union Pacific. There was no road from Rawlins north, enterprising tourists, like Thomas Edison in 1879, hired guides and “roughed it” on the trek to Yellowstone.
By 1883, a stage and freight service began to operate between Rawlins and Ft. Brown, (later Ft. Washakie) on the Shoshone Reservation. Tourists took note and began making the three-to-seven-day trip (depending on weather, road conditions and flash floods) from Rawlins to Lander.
In Lander, pack trips, and later stagecoaches began making the run to Yellowstone.
The original route followed the Wind River. Guides took travelers north of Lander about 30 miles, then followed the Wind River to its upper drainage near Lava Mountain, then made the final trek over Togwotee Pass and into the southern entrance to the park.
Tourists stopped to camp on the route roughly every 30 to 50 miles, once again depending on conditions. From Lander to Never Sweat, the original name of Dubois, usually took three days. From there to the park, it was often five days as they climbed the Wind River Range, then descended into the Moran Valley.
The wide expanse of the valley below Lava Mountain was a way station in challenging weather, but usually guides kept the wagons rolling until they reached Brooks Lake, to camp overnight.
When the Chicago North Western reached Lander in the fall of 1906, tourism to Yellowstone jumped. More wagon companies began working the route and just 15 or so years later, buses began driving the route to Yellowstone.
Lava Mountain was never a destination, but tourists could stop for lunch, a little fishing or a photo op before cramming back into the poor suspension of these early off-road vehicles.
By 1931, when the new highway was completed and either asphalt or high-grade gravel to Yellowstone, traffic to the park grew exponentially.
In the early 1960s, the idea of a lodge at Lava Mountain to profit from the tourist traffic took root, leading to the 1966 motel.
Throughout the years other cabins were built on it, and it became a popular stop on the way to Yellowstone and an overflow option when the motels in Dubois, just 20 miles east were fully booked.
The modern complex has the lodge, the motel with 10 rooms, five dry cabins with electricity and heat but no water, and four tiny homes on wheels.
The rest of the property contains the historic cabins and two residential homes.
The “Big House” has six bedrooms and can hold up to 20 snowmobilers at a time.
Snowmobiles became the bread and butter of Lava Mountain.
First invented in 1924 as a motorized toboggan, snow machines evolved over the next three decades into “snowcat” tracked vehicles but didn’t enter the consumer market until the late 1950s.
In 1955, Polaris introduced the Sno-Traveler, the first of dozens of popular designs by the well-known outdoor power toy company.
In 1959, Germain Bombardier and his father introduced the Ski-Doo, the following year, Germain invented the seamless rubber track and snowmobiling became the thing to do across the Rocky Mountain and Great Lakes Region.
The valley below Lava Mountain is made for snowmobile trails. It offers challenges for both novice and professional alike and connects with trails into Jackson Hole, to Togwotee, Brooks Lake and Hatchet on the other side of the continental divide.
Add to the magic of a warm place to call home after a day on a sled in sub-zero weather a first-class restaurant and you have a hit.
Katina Koehler moved to Lava Mountain from Louisianna a year ago, and now offers Cajun delicacies in the rarified air of the Wind River Range.
“Katina Koehler makes her own ranch dressing from scratch,” Haack said. “I came in for a chicken sandwich and some fries and tried her ranch and I was hooked.”
Katina has served crayfish boils, jumbo and jambalaya and plans to offer catfish and hush puppies each Friday this winter.
“I really want to stay on and make this thing as good as it can be,” Katina said.
She has a southern cooking crew coming in from Arkansas to help her this winter.
The dining room seats 30 to 40 guests in a restaurant of 2520 square feet.
Lava Mountain Lodge is for sale and the price was just reduced from $2.5 million to $1,999,000.
“We’ve shown it 10 or 12 times. A lot of people are not from the area, they don’t get the Dubois side of things, they’re looking for a Jackson option,” Haack said. “I was showing it in the winter and the whole parking lot was full of trailers and trucks. Most of the license plates were from Minnesota, North Dakota Wisconsin, and Illinois. Most of the visitors were generational, they’d been coming for decades. The continental divide snowmobile trails to the Hatchet, and Brooks make it an integral part of the trail.”
Lava Mountain Lodge borders the National Forest and last summer’s Lava Mountain fire destroyed thousands of acres of dead fall and standing beetle-killed timber.
“We could see the fire cresting Lava Mountain,” Haack said. “But it never approached the property. We hope that it can find the right owner, breathe some life into and become the institution that it was in the past.”