The Camas Room is the lodge's dining room, serving breakfast daily and dinner from Thursday through Sunday.

There’s new life in the old Wallowa Lake Lodge.

Located in the far northeastern corner of Oregon, nestled into the trees at the southern end of Wallowa Lake, pressed up against the towering Wallowa Mountains, the historic lodge is celebrating its 100th birthday emerging from something of an identity crisis.

General manager Madeline Lau, who took over in 2019, said the lodge had been transitioning out of an era spent as a quiet mountain retreat for travelers, reemerging as a hub of activity for locals and tourists alike. In the last few decades, locals rarely visited, she said, and the lodge ceased to be a part of the community.

“In our community, if a business isn’t supported and used by locals, it won’t last very long,” Lau said.

First built in 1923, when it was accessible only by boat, the lodge was part of an ambitious development at the south end of Wallowa Lake that offered restaurants, a dance hall, a skating rink and access to unparalleled natural beauty. In 1935, The Oregon Journal called it the “center of recreational and social activity” in the Wallowas, a region the newspaper called “the Switzerland of America.”

Today, the lodge is one part of a bustling tourism hub that includes Wallowa Lake State Park, the Wallowa Lake Tramway and a number of cabins, hotels and campsites.

The lodge’s 22 rooms are available during the open season, from Memorial Day to the end of September. A group of eight cabins, open year round, are also available on the property. Guests can dine at the lodge’s restaurant, The Camas Room, from Thursday to Sunday for dinner or daily for breakfast. A lobby bar, The Redd, serves drinks and small plates from 1 to 9 p.m. every day.

It’s a place where guests might find live music, yoga classes or presentations on local history. Occasionally people throw weddings or reunions there. Even on normal weekend, it’s meant to be a gathering place, rather than just someplace for tourists to sleep.

“We know that visitors from out of town love coming here and love using the lodge,” Lau said. “But to know that the locals are using it too is huge.”

With its many social amenities, the Wallowa Lake Lodge sounds like a lot of newer boutique hotels popping up across the Pacific Northwest. But here there’s a twist: the 100-year old building itself.

Structures this old often run into a Ship of Theseus dilemma: If you replace all the floorboards, the walls, the beams, is it still the same building as before? But the Wallowa Lake Lodge has yet to reach that point. In some ways, it very much shows its age: The ceiling occasionally leaks, the roof needs replacing and the old stone chimney is slowly coming undone.

“It’s like never ending maintenance in this space,” Lau said. “Honestly I’m not going to say, ‘what’s the next 100 years look like,’ because I really, truly don’t believe this building has another 100 years in it. But at least, what does the next 10 years look like and where do we want to go from here?”

Lau, who came aboard in 2019, has already accomplished a lot. In just the last few years, she oversaw the rebuilding and expansion of the deck, overhauled the restaurant and bar menus, and evicted a colony of bats that had been living in the attic for generations. Lau also overhauled the lodge’s décor. She painted beige walls white, replaced old floral comforters, swapped out art, and removed what she called “brothel-y” curtains and lamps.

The trick, she said, was bringing the Wallowa Lake Lodge into the 21st century without losing its rustic charm. And while she wanted to make the rooms cozy, she’s also made a concerted effort to nudge people to the communal spaces. On any given summer day, you may see people reading in the lounge, drinking at the bar, hanging out on the deck or playing games on the lawn.

Slowly but surely, those spaces have been populated not just by travelers but by locals as well, the result of what Lau said was the best form of advertisement in a small town: word of mouth.

“To know that the locals are using it too is huge,” she said. “Our goal is to be as accessible as possible to the widest number of people. So, for me the lodge belongs to everyone. I want everyone to come here.”

It’s something of a return to form for the Wallowa Lake Lodge, which has gone through several changes in its century of use.

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the lodge survived brutal winter storms, flooding, economic fluctuations and war. The Wiggins family, which owned the lodge for nearly 45 years, oversaw additions to the building, construction of new cabins and the ceding of some property for what would become Wallowa Lake State Park. They sold the lodge in 1988 to a trio of owners who refocused on creating a quiet retreat for travelers, which lasted for another 28 years.

In 2015, following the sudden death of one of the owners, the lodge was put up for sale, spurring fears locally of an outside hotel chain swooping in and demolishing the old building. Instead, a group of more than 100 local investors, including the Nez Perce Tribe, raised $3.1 million to purchase the place, running the Wallowa Lake Lodge with a board of managers.

In 2020, the tribe secured a conservation easement on the property that protects the land there from further development, essentially locking in the existing footprint of the lodge. That land is known to the Nimiipuu people as Waakak’amkt, or “where the braided stream disappears into the water,” according to the tribe.

“The main reason we have wanted this easement is for protection of the inlet for sockeye salmon and protecting the waters and the habitat around that area expressly for sockeye reintroduction and for the fisheries,” Shannon Wheeler, Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee chairman, told the Wallowa County Chieftan in 2020. “The other reason — it’s a place that’s very meaningful to the tribe.”

The easement also serves to maintain the Wallowa Lake Lodge’s focus on working with what it has, instead of expanding further onto its 9-acre property. And while that means more headaches maintaining the aging building, Lau said the efforts are rewarded by seeing the lodge continue to be a community gathering space, where she hopes people of different cultures and backgrounds can commingle.

“I’m proud of our community; I love the people that live here,” Lau said.

The Wallowa Lake Lodge is located at 60060 Wallowa Lake Highway in Joseph, Oregon. The lodge is open from Memorial Day to the end of September, and cabins are open year-round. To book a room visit wallowalakelodge.com or call 541-432-9821.