Timberline Lodge: What the WPA Built on a Volcano

Five hundred workers built it in two years, and nothing about it is standard. The beams were hand-hewn from Pacific Northwest timber. The rugs were hand-woven on site, depicting local wildlife in patterns the weavers invented. The iron hardware, the hinges and door handles and fireplace fixtures, was forged in a smithy the workers built on the mountain specifically for this project. The murals in the interior were painted by artists hired under a New Deal relief program. Everything in Timberline Lodge was made by a person's hands, on purpose.

Franklin Roosevelt dedicated it on September twenty-eighth, nineteen thirty-seven, the same day he dedicated Bonneville Dam downstream. He called Timberline Lodge "a monument to the skill and faithful performance of workers on the rolls of the Works Progress Administration." The quote is carved into the building.

The lodge sits at six thousand feet on the south slope of Mount Hood, Oregon's highest peak at eleven thousand two hundred fifty feet. The mountain is a stratovolcano, the same class as Mount St. Helens. It last erupted in the early eighteen hundreds and is classified as potentially active. The ski area above the lodge runs on Palmer Glacier year-round, one of the only glacier-skiing operations in the contiguous United States.

Stanley Kubrick filmed the exterior of Timberline Lodge as the Overlook Hotel in The Shining in nineteen eighty, the same year Mount St. Helens erupted forty-five miles to the north. The interior scenes were filmed elsewhere; the Overlook's layout bears no resemblance to Timberline's. Guests who arrive looking for the hedge maze find instead a building that is genuinely, materially extraordinary, a place where depression-era workers made something meant to last centuries, and it has.

The Palmer chairlift above carries skiers to nine thousand feet in July. The mountain looks down from above the clouds. The hands that built the lodge are gone. The lodge is not.