These Stunning National Park Hotels In America Inspired Disney's Wilderness Lodge

What do Disney World and "The Shining" have in common, inspiration-wise? If you answered, "A rustic lodge in one of the most popular U.S. national parks," you're on the right track. That lodge is The Ahwahnee in Yosemite National Park, and it's not the only one that influenced the design of Disney's Wilderness Lodge (or the Overlook Hotel in "The Shining.") The Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone National Park was another key inspiration, serving as a close visual model for both the interior and exterior of Disney's Wilderness Lodge.

You wouldn't know this from looking at Disney's website, where it says only that the Wilderness Lodge was "inspired by turn-of-the-century National Park lodges" in "America's Great Northwest." That description gives the hotel a milieu that's specific, but not too specific, since the Northwest is an unofficial region that's defined differently depending on the source. It could include the Pacific Northwest, which extends to Northern California by some definitions, thereby inching down toward Yosemite territory. It could also include Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, thereby crossing over the Rocky Mountains into Yellowstone territory.

Like many Disney landmarks, the Wilderness Lodge is meant to stir the imagination with fantasy based on a melange of real-world influences. From the hotel, you can ride a water taxi across the Seven Seas Lagoon to the Magic Kingdom, where a mix of real European destinations inspired Cinderella Castle. Or you can take a break from theme park going, relax by the Copper Creek Springs Pool, and read about how these two national park lodges informed the look of your favorite Disney hotel.

In rankings of Disney World's resort hotels, you'll often see the Wilderness Lodge listed near the top. It's easy to see why when you step into the hotel's grand, six-story lobby and behold its 55-foot totem poles and 82-foot stone fireplace. Since 1994, the Wilderness Lodge has offered deluxe accommodations with a higher level of comfort than the campsites and cabins of nearby Fort Wilderness. Disney fans who have stayed there might feel a sense of déjà vu, however, as they approach Yellowstone's Old Faithful Inn, which opened a full 90 years earlier in 1904.

The resemblance between the two main buildings is striking. They've got a similar, snow-friendly, gable-type roof, sloping down dramatically to almost the ground floor. When you walk into the Old Faithful Inn's lobby, you'll also see a towering stone fireplace in the corner, just like the one at the Wilderness Lodge. Additionally, the individual support columns on the balconies in both lobbies each have two log brackets reaching up like arms to the next floor.

According to the National Park Service, the Old Faithful Inn's log brackets "serve no structural purpose" and are merely a decorative flourish. Yet they're one that the Wilderness Lodge copied as it reached higher with more wraparound balconies, as if to give Florida the Old Faithful Inn on steroids. The Wilderness Lodge also has a working geyser that erupts every hour, and it has a concierge lounge called the Old Faithful Club. Details like these offer an overt tip of the hat to the Old Faithful Inn and the famous Yellowstone geyser that is its namesake.

The restaurants of the Wilderness Lodge are meant to evoke the "turn-of-the-century Pacific Northwest," per Disney. Storybook Dining at Artist Point is set in an enchanted forest where you can sip wine from Oregon and Washington while "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" characters visit your table. The Whispering Canyon Cafe bills itself as an "Old Western eatery" where you can chow down on "frontier fare" in the form of all-you-can-eat skillets. At the nexus of these two bygone eras in the American West are California, Yosemite, and The Ahwahnee.

Walt Disney visited Yosemite in 1935, and the architects who designed the Wilderness Lodge — led by Peter Dominick — reportedly followed in his footsteps by scouting The Ahwahnee there decades later. The Wilderness Lodge looks more like The Ahwahnee from its back side, where it has a waterfall reminiscent of the many in Yosemite. The hotel also has a Yosemite Suite, and like The Ahwahnee, it features Native American designs, such as the teepee-shaped chandelier lights that hang in the lobby.

That said, The Ahwahnee's influence is more subtle, and when you're in the hotel, you might feel like you've stepped into a classic horror movie more than a Disney fairytale. This is because Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of "The Shining" modeled the interior of its haunted Overlook Hotel on The Ahwahnee. The Overlook's exterior was filmed at Oregon's Timberline Lodge, where you can spend the night in another spooky movie hotel. It just goes to show that Disney's Wilderness Lodge isn't the only place in pop culture that drew inspiration from multiple historic hotels in the Northwestern United States.