Guest ranch · Chester (vicinity), Lassen Volcanic National Park, California · Built 1900s–1950s; lodge 1938
Drakesbad Guest Ranch
A hot-springs guest ranch in Warner Valley inside Lassen Volcanic National Park, run by the Sifford family from 1900 to the 1950s; its plain frame lodge was rebuilt in ten days in 1938 after snow crushed the old one.
History
Edward R. Drake, a trapper and former miner, settled in the Hot Springs Creek valley in the late 1870s, pieced together some 400 acres around its thermal springs, built a bathhouse and began a small hotel, and spent summers grazing cattle there. In 1900 Alexander Sifford, a Susanville schoolteacher who had come to drink the waters for his nerves, stayed three days and bought the place for $5,000. He and his wife Ida turned it into a summer resort, first letting campers stay free and charging for baths, then building around Drake's 'big house'. They settled on the name Drakesbad in 1908, added a dining room, kitchen and tent platforms from 1912, and drained the willow swamp into a hay meadow. Lassen Peak's eruptions of 1914–15 and the new national park of 1916 brought tourists and survey crews.
Through the 1920s and 1930s the Siffords, with their son Roy, dammed a pond called Dream Lake and built cabins and trails to Devil's Kitchen and Boiling Springs Lake. In the winter of 1937–38 snow crushed Drake's old lodge; a local contractor built a new one in ten days, finishing on June 30, 1938, and guests slept in it that night. Ida Sifford died in 1951, and after hard bargaining the Park Service bought the ranch in 1953 for $325,000, leasing it to a concessioner; Roy cut his last ties in 1958. Mission 66 brought a new pool and bathhouse in the 1960s, and the ranch was listed on the National Register in 2003.
“Drakesbad Guest Ranch has been used as a summer resort for over a century.”
Architecture
Drakesbad is a cluster of plain, functional frame buildings rather than a showpiece. The 1938 lodge, at the forest edge on the north side of the meadow, is the focus, with a long front porch looking across the meadow toward the campfire circle. Behind it, along access roads cut into the hillslope, stand the kitchen and dining hall, a food locker and cabins and bungalows of the 1930s through 1960s, with the pool and bathhouse fed by hot springs at the foot of Sifford Mountain a short walk away. Repairs and replacements over the decades have generally followed the simple character of the Sifford years. The lodge went without electric light until the 1990s, and kerosene lamps lit the rooms.
What to look for
- The 1938 lodge and its meadow-facing porch
- Hot-spring-fed swimming pool
- The fen meadow the Siffords drained for hay
- Trails to Devil's Kitchen and Boiling Springs Lake
- Kerosene lamps in the guest rooms
Setting
The ranch lies at about 5,700 feet at the head of Warner Valley on Hot Springs Creek, on the southern side of Lassen Volcanic National Park, reached by a partly unpaved road from Chester. A wet meadow fills the valley floor below Flatiron Ridge and Sifford Mountain, and trails lead to the steaming ground of Devil's Kitchen and Boiling Springs Lake.
Timeline
- late 1870sEdward Drake settles on Hot Springs Creek
- 1900Alexander and Ida Sifford buy the property
- 1908Name Drakesbad adopted
- 1938New lodge built in ten days after snow destroys the old
- 1953National Park Service buys the ranch
- 1960sPool and bathhouse rebuilt under Mission 66
- 2003Listed on the National Register on October 22
Where sources differ
- Construction dates for many of the smaller cabins are approximate in the sources.
- The sources do not name a designer for the 1938 lodge.
