Let’s celebrate a 50-year-old solar failure
Why a history of Wyoming’s Bighorn Canyon visitor center matters today
The first time I approached the Bighorn Canyon Visitor Center in Lovell, Wyoming, I was puzzled by how far away it was from the natural wonders it celebrated. But as I reflect this year, I’m impressed at how central it is to today’s politics—and the compelling resilience of the National Park Service as an institution.
In sunny Wyoming, the solar-power picture today is about as stormy as it is in other states. Federal funding is both a stop and a go. On one prominent project, “We’re not moving backward, but we’re also not moving forward.” Planners are pleased, lawmakers cautious, utilities skeptical. Meanwhile, an oft-forgotten but weirdly compelling solar structure is celebrating its 50th birthday.
Bighorn Canyon itself is an awesome limestone chasm in a forbidding desert. Straddling the Montana-Wyoming border, it’s a long way from anywhere. In 1966, construction of Yellowtail Dam created a 70-mile-long lake through the canyon bottom, a potential powerboat paradise compared to Lake Powell and Flaming Gorge.
As I’ve written before, over the past 110 years the National Park Service has continually adjusted to societal priorities of the time. Thus in the 1960s it created National Recreation Areas focused on powerboating and other forms of recreation, often in newly-dammed reservoirs. One such “park” was Bighorn Canyon.
The steep canyon walls make the park hard to get around in, and often hard to photograph from the accessible sites on its rim. But when you approach the area properly, it yields profound scenery and fascinating cultural and natural history—including a herd of wild horses and the homestead of the legendary Caroline Lockhart.
However, this visitor center isn’t very close to any of that. Instead it’s on the outskirts of Lovell, Wyoming, a town of 2200 people with a 19% poverty rate. At the opposite end of downtown from the sugar beet processing facility, the visitor center occupies a prominent intersection that might otherwise boast a gas station. It symbolizes Lovell as an (aspiring) tourist community.
The visitor center occupies a lovely campus, with green grasses and tall (for Wyoming) trees shading a well-landscaped parking lot. An paved path invites you to the north side of a low, functional building. It symbolizes Lovell as an (aspiring) oasis.
It also symbolizes Lovell as modernist. The 1975 building shows the influence of Mission 66, the Park Service’s midcentury infrastructure-building program that embraced modernist architecture for park hotels and visitor centers. Indeed, Mission 66 invented the very idea of the visitor center—and encouraged its architectural design to be smart, creative, and functional.
The Bighorn Canyon building and campus were designed by Ted Wirth (1927-2009). He lived in Billings, Montana, the nearest city of any size. He was also the son of Conrad Wirth (1899-1993), the longest-serving director of the National Park Service, and the only one formally trained in landscape architecture. During his tenure, Conrad created Mission 66. It’s quite a family: Conrad’s father, Theodore Wirth (1863-1949), had designed and built the world-class park system in the city of Minneapolis.
With its modernist philosophy, Mission 66 sought to segregate uses: park (nature) here; visitor center (education, administration, parking) there. Most visitors to the southern end of Bighorn Canyon are coming through Lovell, and most employees live in Lovell, so the park can contribute to Lovell’s economic development by locating its visitor center in town instead of on the canyon rim.
In 1976, one big proponent of such views was Cal Taggart, a Lovell insurance executive (in partnership with his twin brother Hal), booster, former mayor, and state senator. In 2006, the visitor center was re-dedicated in his memory. Taggart had endlessly lobbied the Park Service to build the building—and locate it in Lovell—in the first place.
Who was Cal Taggart? He was a conservative Mormon Republican businessman whose one public “vice” was driving his yellow Mercedes extremely fast. On his regular 820-mile round trips to the state capitol building in Cheyenne, he collected quite a few speeding tickets. When President Jimmy Carter lowered the national speed limit to 55 mph, Taggart protested by authoring a bill to dramatically lower Wyoming’s speeding fines.
Modeled on a successful Montana law, Taggart’s bill would have fined speeders traveling below 75 mph for being “wasteful of a resource currently in short supply,” rather than for speeding. Thus insurance companies wouldn’t be able to raise anyone’s premiums due to speeding tickets.
Taggart’s bill succeeded in the state Senate, but floundered in the House, in part because a state representative who was also an oil and gas producer noted that the 1979 Iranian revolution would likely force drastic energy conservation measures. Reduced speed limits were a pill, Taggart’s rival claimed, that Wyoming would simply have to swallow.
As the situation developed, Taggart soon had to admit that his bill was dead—“unless they open up their eyes, their damned heads.” He also complained that his rival was out of touch. “Oil and gas people… don’t go anywhere in the damn car. They fly.”
Taggart’s chief political legacy as an anti–speed limit crusader provides some delicious irony: Lovell’s Cal S. Taggart Visitor Center is a solar building, designed in the same energy conservation spirit as the 55-mph speed limit. In a 1976 cutting-edge innovation, the $1.3 million building’s south side featured 2,500 square feet of glass-covered solar panels tilted at a 50 degree angle. Air circulating through the panels transferred heat to seventy-five tons of stones in the basement. It was expected to provide half to two-thirds of the energy needed to heat the building and nearly all of the energy needed to cool it.
It was the first solar-powered visitor center in the entire Park Service, a potential model for other parts and a tourist attraction on its own. The system was designed by the Solaron Corporation, known at the time as “the Cadillac of the solar heating business.”
However, the solar heating system never worked properly, and was eventually disconnected. So maybe Taggart won in the end.
I was attracted to this story because of the parallels today: high energy prices, resistance to green energy, war in Iran, and conflict over the values represented by national parks. We live in tough times, and it can feel infuriating that we are still arguing over solar power, energy conservation, and war in Iran. But 1976 was tough times too—with the exact same arguments—and the nation survived, indeed eventually prospered.
I dug into this story because I was fascinated by the people behind the building, especially Taggart and the Wirths. (Although George Löf of Solaron sounds pretty interesting as well!) The people and their passions—not the technologies—were what led to progress.
I came away from this story with an unexpected appreciation for the resilience of the National Park Service. This institution has continually adapted to multiple constituencies—local boosters, landscape architects, powerboating powerbrokers, and alternative-energy fads. Some of the adaptations have aged better than others. But each involves a terrific story of people, place, and American values.
In 1976, Wirth designed a pond adjacent to the visitor center, intended to reflect the sun’s rays into a solar collector. Today the park is reconfiguring the pond as trout habitat.
End notes:
I quote Cal Taggart from “As Carter threatens funding loss: Speed limit challenge appears doomed,” Associated Press, Feb. 13, 1979. I learned about the Wirths from Joan Berthiaume, “Theodore J. Wirth: a fine park planner with wise advice for Nov. 3 election,” MinnPost, Nov. 2, 2009. I learned about the architecture from Anthony Denzer, “Bighorn Canyon Visitor Center“, from SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012. A few other source links are sprinkled in the text.
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Thanks, John. Good story. There's a couple of public rest stops in Wyoming that were instigated if I remember correctly by female state legislators like Peg Shreve to provide the potty breaks that parents needed when crossing the state with children in the car. They used cutting edge septic tank technology perhaps to promote the lowest maintenance costs, and maximized sunlight and windproofing to be sustainable?
Thanks for this story,John. It did remind me to remember the long view.