9/29/2009 9:23:00 AM Hull cabin gets a facelift Famous cabin to open for rentals by next year
Margaret Hangen/Kaibab National Forest
Kaibab National Forest crews congregate near Hull Cabin earlier this month. Restoration work on the cabin is currently in progress.
Margaret Hangen/Kaibab National Forest
George Reed's carving at Hull Cabin.
GRAND CANYON, Ariz. - One of the Grand Canyon's historic landmarks, Hull Cabin, is getting a much needed facelift, as crews with the Kaibab National Forest work to make the cabin available for public rental by spring 2010. The historic cabin was built in 1889 and has become an important part of the area's history. According to Mike Lyndon, an archaeologist with the Kaibab National Forest, the cabin is one of the few surviving cabins in the Grand Canyon area and was originally owned by the Hull brothers, then Forest Ranger George Reed, credited as one of the founders of the Tusayan village area.
Lyndon said restoration work continues on the historic landmark.
"For the last several years we've been working on restoring it and opening it to the public as a rental - as part of what's called the Arizona Cabin Rental program," Lyndon said. "Basically what the program is is that we provide these cabins to the general public to rent. It provides a really unique recreation experience. The money for those cabins, that's generated by those rentals, then goes right back into maintaining those cabins and also into developing other cabins for rentals. It's a pretty neat program."
Lyndon said the program began with a handful of cabins.
"Now I think we're up to 12 or 14 statewide and we've got several more that we're working on bringing online," Lyndon said. "Hull Cabin is one of those."
The cabin, he added, is located roughly a half mile south of the rim.
"It's just inside the Forest Service boundary. It's right down the road from Grand View Lookout tower," Lyndon said. "It's about a mile and a half from there down the road."
Anyone interested in finding out more about Hull Cabin, or booking a rental there, can log onto www.recreation.gov. Campgrounds and other cabin rentals can also be found on the Web site.
"They can just make a reservation and the Web site walks them through it," Lyndon said.
The current restoration project at Hull Cabin is not the first time Forest Service crews have worked on the cabin. Restoration work was also performed in the 1980's, according to Lyndon.
"The barn out there was pretty unstable, so they actually jacked it up and removed some timbers and replaced them, did some major work like that," Lyndon said. "In the last several years, we've been working with volunteers, a lot of Forest Service folks, in fixing this thing up. Recently we got some money from the ARRA, the big economic stimulus package, so that is going to pay for finishing up the work. That's going to do a lot of the kind of major work that's remaining. It's been kind of a cooperative effort from Forest Service folks, volunteers (and) we've paid contractors to do certain things."
The Hull brothers originally built the historic cabin as a sheep ranch, Lyndon said.
"It's a real interesting story. The Hull brothers were, like a lot of the people that came up to the Grand Canyon area in the late 1800's, they were pretty entrepreneurial; they were into a lot of different things. They started Hull Cabin as a sheep ranch and they ran sheep. It was also one of the main stops for people traveling up to the Grand Canyon from Flagstaff. So it was one of the main watering holes. One of the brothers passed away and a couple of the other cabins, I believe it was the Hance Cabin, which was on the South Rim of the Canyon, kind of drew the forest trade away and so the remaining brother decided to sell the land and the cabin to the Forest Service. In 1907, the Forest acquired that land. They built an additional room onto the cabin and a ranger moved in. The ranger's name was George Reed. He was there starting in 1907. He carved his name and the date,'07, into the barn."
