Hotel in Mount Hood, Oregon

This article is about the building. For the ski area, see Timberline Lodge ski area.

Timberline Lodge is a mountain lodge on the south side of Mount Hood in Clackamas County, Oregon, United States, about 60 miles (97 km) east of Portland. Constructed from 1936 to 1938 by the Works Progress Administration, it was built and furnished by local artisans during the Great Depression. Timberline Lodge was dedicated September 28, 1937, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The National Historic Landmark sits at an elevation of 6,000 feet (1,829 m), within the Mount Hood National Forest and is accessible through the Mount Hood Scenic Byway.^[3] Publicly owned and privately operated, Timberline Lodge is a popular tourist attraction that draws two million visitors annually.^[4] It is notable in film for serving as the exterior of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1980).

The lodge and its grounds host a ski resort, also known as Timberline Lodge. It has the longest skiing season in the U.S., and is open for skiers and snowboarders all 12 months of the year. Activities include skiing, snowboarding, snowshoeing, hiking, biking, and climbing.

Design and construction

Purchased for $2.10 each, discarded cedar utility poles were repurposed as newel posts—19 of them crowned with carvings of area wildlife.^[5]: 142

WPA workers lived in a nearby tent city while building Timberline Lodge (1936).

Timberline Lodge, a mountain lodge and resort hotel, is a four-story structure of about 40,000 square feet (3,700 m²). The ground-level exterior walls are heavy rubble masonry, using boulders from the immediate area, and heavy timber is used from the first floor up. The central head house section is hexagonal and sixty feet (18 m) in diameter, with a six-sided stone chimney stack ninety feet (27 m) high and fourteen feet (4.3 m) in diameter. Each of the six fireplace openings—three on the ground floor, three on the first floor—is five feet (1.5 m) wide and seven feet (2.1 m) high. Two wings, running west and southeast, flank the head house. Oregon woods used throughout the building include cedar, Douglas fir, hemlock, western juniper and ponderosa pine.^[7]

The architect of Timberline Lodge is Gilbert Stanley Underwood, noted for the Ahwahnee Hotel and other lodges in the U.S. national park system.^[5]: 338 He produced the designs.^[8] Then, his central head house was modified from an octagon to a hexagon by U.S. Forest Service architect W. I. (Tim) Turner and the team of Linn A. Forrest, Howard L. Gifford and Dean R. E. Wright.^[5]: 338 A recent graduate of the University of Washington,^[9] forest service engineer Ward Gano was structural designer.^[10][11]

Timberline Lodge was constructed between 1936 and 1938 as a Works Progress Administration project during The Great Depression.^[12] Eighty percent of the WPA's $695,730 total expenditure on building costs went toward labor. Skilled building trade workers received ninety cents an hour; unskilled laborers received fifty-five cents an hour. Some of the skilled stonemasons on the project were Italian immigrants brought in after working on The Historic Columbia River Highway and other roads in Oregon. About a hundred construction workers were on site at a given time, and lived at a nearby tent city. Jobs were rotated to provide work.^[5]: 338

Materials costs were minimized by the skillful use of recycled materials. Women wove draperies, upholstery, and bedspreads. Hooked rugs were made from strips of old Civilian Conservation Corps camp blankets. Discarded cedar utility poles became newel-posts with their crowns hand-carved into birds, bears, and seals. Fireplace screens were fashioned from tire chains. Andirons and other iron work were forged from railroad tracks. WPA workers used large timbers and local stone from the site.^[5]: 338

"All classes, from the most elementary hand labor, through the various degrees of skill to the technically-trained, were employed," reported the WPA's Federal Writers' Project. "Pick and shovel wielders, stonecutters, plumbers, carpenters, steam-fitters, painters, wood-carvers, cabinet-makers, metal workers, leather-toolers, seamstresses, weavers, architects, authors, artists, actors, musicians, and landscape planners, each contributed to the project, and each, in his way, was conscious of the ideal toward which all bent their energies."^[6]