We awoke in the gloomy woods again… Did I mention we don’t like camping in dense dark forests?
Today we are climbing Mt. Hood. Not hiking, and not to the top. We drove up to the Timberline Lodge.
Mt. Hood is a potentially active volcano in the Cascade Volcanic Arc, sometimes known as the “ring of fire”… It is located about 50 miles east-southeast of Portland. In addition to being Oregon’s highest mountain, it is one of the loftiest mountains in the nation based on its prominence, and it offers the only year-round lift-served skiing in North America. It is approximately 11,240 feet in elevation, although the official height seems to change now and then…
We are here to see Timberline Lodge, a National Historic Landmark located on the southern flank of Mount Hood just below Palmer Glacier, with an elevation of about 6,000 feet.
Publicly owned and privately operated, Timberline Lodge is a popular tourist attraction that draws two million visitors annually. It is notable in film for serving as the exterior of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1980).
The lodge and resort hotel is a four-story structure of about 40,000 square feet. 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 in diameter, with a six-sided stone chimney stack ninety-feet high and fourteen-feet in diameter. Each of the six fireplace openings—three on the ground floor, three on the first floor—is five-feet wide and seven-feet 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.
The architect of Timberline Lodge is Gilbert Stanley Underwood, noted for the Ahwahnee Hotel and other lodges in the U.S. national park system. He produced the design. 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. A recent graduate of the University of Washington, forest service engineer Ward Gano was structural designer.
Timberline Lodge was constructed between 1936 and 1938 as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project during the Great Depression. 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.
We were here not only to see the Lodge, but for lunch…
I love seeing these old lodges. I love to see the lifestyle of the residents. Here we see a typical writing desk that these lodges always provide…
Another feature of the Lodges is the array of large windows facing out to the prime views…
We returned to the Villa in the dark gloomy forest campground.
An enjoyable time was had by all…
Adventures in the Villa 