Henrietta Hay's Column

There is something magical about great hotels -- and even those not so great. They bridge time and miles and bring wonderful memories.

The La Veta Hotel in Gunnison was probably the first one I knew. Of course there is no La Veta Hotel in Gunnison any more, but it was there in the twenties.

My dad was an avid fisherman, and when I was a kid we spent many a summer vacation in and around Gunnison. We sometimes stayed at the La Veta, built in 1884 and a great hotel in its day. Behind the big desk in the lobby there was a sign that said, as I remember it, " For every day the sun does not shine the lodging is free." Beside it was a list of the dates on which the hotel had swallowed the bills. Back then I think there were about seven or eight dates listed. Abbot Fay remembers it a little differently. In "I Never Knew That About Colorado," he says "The famous LaVeta Hotel used to offer a free meal on any day the sun did not shine." Now who are you going to believe, historian Abbot Fay who has researched western Colorado for years, or my fading memory? Better believe Abbot, because he goes on to say, "The sun did not shine only 16 days in the 60 years during which the offer stood." But I still like my version!

Some miles beyond Gunnison was Cebolla. To mention "Cebolla" and "hotel" in the same sentence is like comparing the Million Dollar Highway to I-70. It was a string of crude log cabins literally hanging over the Gunnison river but it seemed like a hotel to me when I was a kid. Like the La Veta, Cebolla is no more. It lies many feet beneath the surface of Blue Mesa Reservoir. But then the river was beautiful and the trout winked at you when they jumped out.

Another very exciting hotel of my youth was the Brown Palace in Denver. It is still a luxury hotel, but I am told that it no longer does its part to maintain Denver's image as a "cow town." It does not celebrate Stock Show week as enthusiastically as it did once. We always took in the Stock Show and then headed for the Brown to see the steer that resided in the lobby for the week. I think that is one custom they should have kept.

And then we have a couple of ghostly hotels in Colorado, the Stanley and the Colorado. The Stanley in Estes Park was famous in the early days, but really achieved fame as The Overlook, the locale for Stephen King's horror story, "The Shining," and for the movie version with Jack Nicholson. The guests were deceased but not necessarily departed. I attended a convention there once and didn't see a single ghost.

The Colorado Hotel in Glenwood Springs has been modernized, but it still has its ghosts. We sometimes stayed there because my dad liked the vapor caves almost as much as fishing, and my mother loved the glamour of the hotel. I was just along for the ride, and I don't think the ghosts had arrived yet. The hotel's current "Ghost Expert" says there are 50 or 60 of the beasties wandering around the halls, turning lights on and off, making things move and indulging in other ghostly activities. The basement has escape tunnels and catacombs that may have been used by Al Capone's gang when they stayed there. During WW2 the hotel served as a Naval Hospital.

The great hotels in Colorado were built in the 1880's, when the railroad came through and the western expansion really began. Another great hotel half a world away in a land I had never heard of when I slept at the La Veta was built at the same time. I got a postcard from my newly hatched college graduate grandson from The Raffles in Singapore. He was sipping a Singapore Sling in the hotel where it was invented, a hotel built to serve, not hardy pioneers and explorers in a new land, but travelers in "the golden age of travel, the gentle age of the steamship, horse-drawn carriages and leisurely strolls on the promenade," a hotel that hosted Rudyard Kipling and Noel Coward.

Yes, there is something magical about great hotels.