The historic CCC-built stone cabins on the canyon floor and rim — including the famous Rim cabins and the 'Cow Camp' cabins — where visitors can still stay overnight in the canyon.
Keep an eye out along here for some small, sturdy stone cottages tucked against the canyon walls and perched up on the rim — because those aren't ordinary park buildings. Those are the historic cabins the Civilian Conservation Corps built back in the nineteen thirties, and the remarkable thing is, you can still rent one and sleep in it tonight.
There are a handful of them. Up on the rim stand the Rim cabins, little stone rooms hanging right at the lip of the canyon, where you can watch the sun come up over eight hundred feet of red rock from your own doorstep. And down here on the floor are the Cow Camp cabins and the one they call the Lighthouse cabin — thick-walled little fortresses of native stone and timber, hand-laid by those young men ninety years ago and still snug and solid today. They've got no frills, and that's the point; you're here for the canyon, not the television.
Imagine it — waking up at the bottom of the Grand Canyon of Texas, the walls going gold at dawn, the wild turkeys calling, and the whole place nearly to yourself before the day-trippers drive down. People book these cabins a year ahead, and once you've stayed in one, you understand why. It's about the finest way there is to feel this canyon: to still be here when the crowds have gone home and the stars come out over the rim. Roll on toward the river; the heart of the canyon's life is just ahead.
Photo: Larry D. Moore · CC BY 4.0
