A Stop on the Big Oak Flat Road Part 2 - Remembering the Cliff House
- Yosemite Chamber
- Jun 4
- 4 min read
By Kathy Brown, Groveland Yosemite Gateway Museum/Southern Tuolumne County Historical Society
The South Fork, with its covered bridge, waterfall, and cool inviting pool, became a perfect place for tourists and fishermen to stop. Nearby residents and travelers and workers staying at other camps frequented it as well. The earliest accommodations at the falls were built around the old toll keeper’s cabin. In 1924 Nellie Bartlett and her brother William “Tug” Wilson leased the property and added to the Cox’s cabin room by room. It was the beginning of the resort, then called the Fall Inn, which they ran for 34 years. By the 1920s, The Cliff House Inn and Cabins, perched on a rock ledge above Rainbow Pool, became a very popular tourist stop. Until its realignment, the Big Oak Flat Road ran right past the Inn and over the bridge. Concrete foundations of some of the old resort cabins can still be seen found along a trail upstream from the bridge.
The late 1910s and 1920s saw San Francisco building O’Shaughnessy Dam and a gravity-fed pipeline to supply clear mountain water to their city. One of the major project sites was the South Fork Tunnel Camp. It was located down the South Fork Cascades below Rainbow Pool, making it convenient for Bartletts to board some project engineers. Remnants of San Francisco’s railroad, built to bring equipment and supplies to the dam site, have been found in the area. The Old Mine Cocktail Cavern was dug into the hillside near the hotel for an cool and popular place for guests to have a drink.
In 1931 Lumsden’s covered bridge was replaced by a timber truss bridge. Unfortunately, in 1934 the first Cliff House was destroyed by flood waters. Bartletts rebuilt a 2-story hotel which opened in 1935. Daring divers jumped from the second story balcony of the resort into the natural pool formed by the waterfall below. Once again tragedy struck as this resort also burned to the ground in 1939. A more modest one-story lodge replaced it by 1940. The new resort had a dance floor, gas pumps and picnic grounds.
The resort was loved by both fishermen and vacationers. It was well-known for its Saturday night dances which were well-attended by vacationers from nearby camps as well as area residents. At one time it was reputed to have popular slot machines which were turned to the wall when word of deputies arriving was received.
In a 2018 Union Democrat interview with Donn Harter, who grew up nearby, he mentions that he worked as a bellhop at the hotel when Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman stayed at there while filming of For Whom the Bell Tolls in the early 1940s. He says the owners had previously added new motel type units in which they stayed.
Dayle Wilson Smith who grew up at the Cliff House remembered the time in 1947 that First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had stopped to dine at the Cliff House after a visit to Yosemite and decided to spend the night much to the chagrin of her Secret Service detail.
The above sketch map drawn by Dayle Wilson Smith shows the location of primary buildings at the Rainbow Pool area in 1955 under operation by the Wilson family. The Eagle’s nest shown on the map was a bunkhouse for the college students who worked there in the summer.
When a subsequent fire in 1958 burned the second Cliff House to the ground, it spelled the resort’s end. It was never rebuilt. Rick and Evelyn Lewellen owned and operated a small restaurant and a 14 unit motel at the site for about 4 years until it, too, was destroyed by fire. In 1960s Hwy. 120 was realigned over a new high bridge that Route 120 travels today. The Old Big Oak Flat Road that once dipped down right through the resort and across the the river became an access road to the renamed Rainbow Pool Day Use area administered by the Forest Service. In 1997 flood waters collapsed the old timber truss bridge at the falls and a new bridge was built to replace the old one in 2000.
Cox’s cabin and the different renditions of the Cliff House that once perched on the big rock near the bridge can only be imagined or seen in old photos now. You can stop at this day use area and enjoy swimming in Rainbow Pool as conditions on the river allow. When you do so, use your imagination to picture what this area once looked like in its many years as one of the most popular resorts on the Big Oak Flat Road to Yosemite.
(Credit and many thanks to Sharon Giacomazzi, Carrie Carter to other prior writers for their research and the information they amassed in doing their articles on this area.)
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