Zigzag Ranger Station and the CCC on Mount Hood

The cluster of rustic log-and-stone buildings you see off the highway here is the Zigzag Ranger Station, the heart of the Zigzag District of the Mount Hood National Forest , and one of the most complete surviving examples of New Deal craftsmanship in the Pacific Northwest.

The name Zigzag comes from explorer Joel Palmer's eighteen forty-five account of picking his way through the terrain below Mount Hood. He wrote of zigzagging across the steep, crevassed slopes , and the name stuck to the river, the community, and eventually the ranger district.

The Forest Service established a presence here in nineteen oh seven, but the station's character was set entirely by the Civilian Conservation Corps, which operated Camp Zigzag from nineteen thirty-three to nineteen forty-two. The CCC was President Franklin Roosevelt's answer to the Depression , a program that put unemployed young men to work on public lands for thirty dollars a month, twenty-five of which they sent home to their families. Camp Zigzag was the chief CCC camp on the Mount Hood National Forest, and its crews were extraordinarily productive.

Over nine years, CCC workers built nine buildings at the ranger station itself, including the headquarters structure that stands today. But they also built far beyond the station: the Tollgate Campground, Camp Creek Campground, the Clackamas Lake Ranger Station, the Bull of the Woods Lookout Tower, and the Warm Springs Guard Station, among others. They terraced the grounds at Timberline Lodge , that WPA showpiece a few miles up the mountain , and built the Timberline Trail that circles the peak.

The buildings they left here are in the rustic style the Forest Service championed in the nineteen thirties: hand-hewn logs, stone chimneys, cedar shake roofs, forms that echo the natural landscape rather than impose on it. The station was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-six.

Today it still functions as it was built to function , a working ranger district headquarters, staffed seasonally, handing out trail maps and fire information to hikers heading toward one of the most-climbed glaciated peaks in North America.