I recently caught most of “The Shining” on A&E and it got me to thinking. Do they really have hotel caretakers like they do in the book/movie? Is there some poor family stuck in a gigantic hotel in the rocky mountains right now waiting for May to come so they can leave again?
Can’t speak for true ‘hotels,’ but the fishing lodge my friends and I patronize in west-central Ontario is deserted from mid-October to mid-April save one of the locals who stays on and keeps watch over things. He told us (he works as a fishing guide/camp handyman in the summer) he’ll go weeks w/o seeing anyone, despite relatively close roads and a couple towns within a 40 minute drive of the place. We were led to understand that a number of lodges up there do something similar.
That always seemed to be odd to me too. It seems like winter would be one of their high seasons. What about winter sports like skiing?
Northern New England has some grand old resorts in the White Mountains that were built as summer resorts for wealthy people to escape the heat in the late 1800’s - early 1900’s. Some were shut-down or semi-shutdown for a time as people tried to figure out how to make them profitable again after their heyday. However, now they are certainly open all year round if they are of any size at all.
The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, CO is supposed to be the inspiration for the Shining’s hotel. It certainly looks like it could support winter business and it is open year-round itself.
There are certainly motels that get nearly no business in some seasons. I’ve spent up to a week stuck in a motel front desk without seeing a single soul- and this was in a busy accessible tourist town. I’d imagine in some places the cost of heating the place alone would make it worthwhile to shut down for the season.
The question of why this particular lodge is closed is one of the nuances of the movie. At the other time period referenced, winter sports were not popular.
Yeah, they exist.
I do support for hotel reservation software and occasionally we get calls from the care takers, usually right after the hotel closes for the season ( Do I need to end the day* in the software every day? Answer: YES) and before it opens for the season (I didn’t end the day for the past three months, do I really have to do it 90 times? Answer: YES. Can’t you just change it for me? Answer: NO)
One of the guys, who seems pretty cool, told me about the gig. He is an older guy and likes hunting/fishing and the job gives him the chance to do that while making some money. He said he doesn’t have to do all that much, just check on stuff to make sure nothing is broken or leaking plus doing the end of day stuff. Sounds like a good gig for him.
Slee
*End of day is rolling the software to the next business day. It is a huge pain in the butt if the property is on the wrong business day.
I can’t remember if it’s in Danse Macabre or On Writing, but in one or the other of them King tells about his inspiration for the book. He and his family were on a trip with no real destination while he was a newly rich and famous writer and stopped at The Stanley, knowing nothing of it and having no reservation. One of the managers had read Carrie (Salem’s Lot was about to be released) and that’s the only reason he was allowed to check in because the hotel was about to close for the season. He talked with the staff about the off-season and learned about the caretaker, including IIRC one who was alcoholic and had committed suicide some years before due to the loneliness and spookiness of the place (nothing supernatural, just a huge abandoned resort snowed in for the winter) and the novel was born. So in other words, he based it on an actual person.
My understanding is that a lot of places in the mountains are more accessible now than they were 30 years ago due to, among other things, more money for roads and the prevalence of 4 wheel drives.
The interior was the Stanley. The exterior was Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood.Timberline
The reason given in the movie for closing in the winter was that the lodge had a 25 mile road to it and it would be to expensive to keep it plowed.
I also believe the reason the hotel in The Shining needed a caretaker was because it had an old-fashioned heating system that required daily maitenance. I would imagine that’s not the case anymore.
A friend of mine used to be caretaker for three motels on Panama City Beach that closed every year after Labor Day. They were all able to make enough during the summer to close for the winter months when tourism is minimal and rooms that rent for $220 in July are renting for $40 when they can get it. He would receive free rent in the manager’s apartment of one property and make casual daily checks on the other properties (all with the same owner).
Jobs like that don’t exist much anymore because the resort properties have enough business to stay open (various marketing in Canada, U.S. Midwest, Europe, etc.) while the independents and mom&pops mostly sold their cinder block buildings to developers when their beachfront property quintupled in value over the last 20 years.
This is addressed in the movie:
Ullman: Let’s see, where were we? Yes. I was about to explain that eh… our season here runs from, oh, May 15th to October 30th and then we close down completely until the following May.
Jack: Do you mind if I ask why you do that? It seems to me that the skiing up here would be fantastic.
Ullman: Oh, it sure would be but the problem is the enormous cost it would be to keep the road to the Sidewinder open. It’s a… It’s a 25 mile stretch of road - gets an average of 20 feet of snow during the winter, and there’s just no way to make it economically feasible to keep it clear. When the place was built in 1907, there was very little interest in winter sports, and this site was chosen for its seclusion and scenic beauty.
Jack: Well, it’s certainly got plenty of that.
Or what Soylent Gene said. My new year’s resolution was to read the entirety of threads before posting. I lasted almost four weeks!