Description of Historic Place

Manning Park Lodge is a complex of buildings prominently located on the south side of Highway 3 in E.C. Manning Provincial Park in southwestern British Columbia. It includes lodgings, restaurants and associated recreational facilities.

Heritage Value

The Manning Park Lodge is valued for its historical and cultural significance, particularly for representing the early development of the park as a major recreational area for British Columbians.

The Lodge, originally a single building known as 'Pinewoods' on the site of the present restaurant building, is historically important for representing the new accessibility of the park facilitated by the completion of Highway 3 across the Cascade Divide in 1949. This made high alpine country easily accessible to the highly populated southwest corner of the Province for the first time. The Lodge contains some interesting design details including hand-carved wooden door panels.

The surviving chalet accommodations associated with the Lodge, built between the very early 1950s and the early 1960s, represent the key role of winter recreational activities in the park plan. The growth of facilities comprising the lodge demonstrates the increased recreational use of Manning Park since the mid-20th century.

The organization of the Lodge as a cluster of buildings, each easily accessible by vehicles, is an important marker of the automobile-oriented travel that drove post-WWII development. In their repetitive design and curvilinear site planning, the Lodge's chalets (built in 1950) and later standard cottages (built in the 1960s) are important as typical examples of recreational motel developments of their time.

Together with other BC Parks buildings such as the Ranger Station, the Nature House, and the Staff Residence, the Manning Park Lodge formed the nucleus of a settlement of physical consequence in the heart of the Cascade wilderness.

Source: Ministry of Environment, BC Parks

Character-Defining Elements

Key character-defining elements of Manning Park Lodge include:

Site:
-clustering of buildings
-ready automobile access
-prominence when viewed from the highway

Buildings:
-original or very early parts of the lodge complex such as the chalets and standard cottages
-low gable form and siting of the restaurant building
-original hand-carved wooden door panels