Timberline Lodge

Where it sits. Timberline Lodge sits at 5,960 feet on the south slope of Mount Hood, at the point where the last stunted subalpine firs give out and the mountain becomes rock, cinder and permanent snow. The summit is 5,300 feet directly above. The lodge is reached by six miles of steep switchbacks up Timberline Road from Government Camp on US 26, about sixty miles east of Portland, and the road is plowed and kept open all year. From the terrace the view runs south across the Salmon River canyon to Mount Jefferson, and on clear days to the Three Sisters a hundred miles away.

The story behind it. Timberline is the most ambitious surviving building of the Works Progress Administration, built between 1936 and 1938 as a Depression relief project on Forest Service land. Around five hundred workers, many of them unemployed craftsmen and artists, built it by hand. President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated it on 28 September 1937 and it opened to the public on 4 February 1938. The design, credited principally to Forest Service architects working with Gilbert Stanley Underwood, established what is now called Cascadian style: massive rubble stonework, exposed heavy timber, and a steeply pitched roof profile that deliberately echoes the mountain behind it. The central head house is hexagonal, organised around a six-sided fireplace and a stone chimney rising 92 feet through three levels of gallery.

What the craftsmen made. Almost every fitting in the building was made on site or nearby, and this is what separates Timberline from any hotel built since. Newel posts on the main staircases were carved from decommissioned cedar utility poles into the heads of owls, bears, beavers and eagles. Wrought ironwork — andirons, gates, light fixtures, door straps — was forged from scrapped railroad track and old chain. Federal Art Project weavers hand-loomed the upholstery and drapery from surplus wool blankets and worn-out Civilian Conservation Corps uniforms; the hooked rugs and appliqued curtains were made by WPA sewing rooms. Painters and mosaicists produced murals and inlays on Oregon and Native American themes. Much of this work was worn out or lost by the 1970s, and the volunteer group Friends of Timberline has since rewoven, recarved and reforged replacements to the original patterns. The lodge was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1977.

On screen: the Overlook exterior. Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) used Timberline Lodge for the establishing exterior shots of the Overlook Hotel — the approach up the mountain road, the building seen across the snow, the wide static compositions that open the winter sections. Nothing else about the film is here. The opening aerial titles following the Volkswagen were shot in Glacier National Park, Montana, along Going-to-the-Sun Road, and every interior, including the Colorado Lounge, the Gold Room, the bathroom of room 237 and the hedge maze, was built on sound stages at EMI Elstree Studios in England. Timberline has no hedge maze, no ballroom and no corridor resembling the film's, and the exterior geometry cannot be reconciled with the interiors — which was Kubrick's intention.

The room number. The novel's haunted room is 217. Timberline had a real room 217 and asked Kubrick to change the number, on the reasonable assumption that guests would refuse to sleep in it once the film came out. Kubrick substituted 237, a number the lodge does not have. The prediction was wrong in the most Timberline way possible: room 217 became one of the most requested rooms in the building, and remains so.

What you actually see today. Timberline is a working hotel of about seventy rooms operated under a Forest Service permit, with a fine-dining room, a bar in the Ram's Head loft and a chapel. Day visitors are welcome to walk in, sit by the fireplace, look at the ironwork and the carvings, and use the ground-floor exhibition on the lodge's construction; there is no admission charge for the historic building. The ski area's Palmer Snowfield keeps lifts running into late summer, one of the few places in North America with year-round lift-served skiing, and it is where national teams and camps train through July. Silcox Hut, a stone and timber warming shelter built in 1939, sits a thousand feet higher and can be rented. The Pacific Crest Trail passes just above the lodge, and the 41-mile Timberline Trail circumnavigating Mount Hood starts and finishes here.

Getting there and timing. Winter requires traction devices or chains on the access road, and a separate day lodge handles ski crowds so the historic building stays relatively calm. July through September brings wildflowers on the lower slopes and clear summit views. Interiors have stairs and narrow historic passages, with lift access to some floors.