Timberline Lodge

Timberline Lodge stands at about 6,000 feet on the south shoulder of Mount Hood, and it was built to put people to work. The Works Progress Administration put up the money in December 1935, the design called for local boulders below and heavy timber above, and crews of relief workers raised it between 1936 and 1938. Franklin Roosevelt dedicated it on September 28, 1937, as a test of whether the government could build a recreation building and run it under its own control.

Inside, the point was craft, and the WPA trained its workers as it went. The blacksmith shop forged the hinges, gates, light fixtures and andirons, the andirons from old railroad rails. Woodworkers built the furniture and carved newel posts from recycled utility poles. Women hired through the WPA's sewing project wove the upholstery, appliqued the curtains and bedspreads and hooked the rugs, and Oregon's WPA artists painted and carved the murals.

Within twenty years the lodge had nearly been lost. It closed during the war, reopened and ran down, and in 1955 the electricity was shut off for an unpaid bill and the Forest Service revoked the operator's permit. A young social worker from New York named Richard Kohnstamm took it over that year, encouraged by a lodge employee who had worked on it for the WPA, and spent the next half century restoring it; his family still runs it. It became a National Historic Landmark in 1977, the first ski lodge so designated, and three years later its exterior played the Overlook Hotel in The Shining.

You do not need a room to see it. The public rooms, the great stone fireplace and the WPA ironwork and carving are open to anyone who walks in.