Dreaming Timberline

The most unusual house in Oregon has 71 bedrooms, was built completely by hand from local stone and timber, and sometimes peers out from under 20 feet of snow. Pine martens live near the swimming pool and ravens bask near the hot tub. On any given day, hundreds of people and half a dozen languages swirl through and around the place. There’s a wedding party pretty much every weekend, and there are bubbling, babbling, bustling crowds in the pub and restaurant inside. Guests and visitors can energetically and exuberantly hike, fish, golf, dine and savor the delicious elixirs called microbrewed ales, all within a few miles of the lodge, all year long.

But at night, when the vast, authoritative darkness of the Mt. Hood National Forest drapes the old house like a black cloak, and humming guests pad quietly through the long hallways of fir and cedar, and a fire big enough to roast a bear snaps in the main lounge downstairs, there is nothing and nowhere and no place in Oregon as richly silent and romantic as Timberline Lodge, 6,000 feet up on the massive south shoulder of Mt. Hood. As much experience as edifice, Timberline is a savory story from its birth in 1936.

Initially dreamed as a modern lodge for skiers and climbers, it was built by workers living in a tent camp at Summit Meadows, seven miles below the building site. The project employed as many as 150 men at a time, 90 percent of them from Works Progress Administration relief rolls. Crews rotated every two weeks to provide work for as many men as possible — 90 cents an hour for skilled workers and 55 cents for unskilled. The lodge rose faster than anyone imagined, in part due to an eerie lack of snow that fall, although a blizzard roared in and nearly blew down the half-ton bronze weathervane on the day workers struggled to erect it atop the enormous stone chimney stack.

As the building itself was finished (originally with 48 rooms, all paneled in pine), woodcarvers, weavers and ironsmiths set to work making more than a thousand pieces of furniture and detail-work for the lodge: beds, chairs, desks, sofas, balustrades, lintels, chandeliers, stairway posts, bedspreads, rugs, curtains, andirons, fire-pokers, door-knockers, even such tiny but useful widgets as drapery rods and lighting fixtures. Two efficient geniuses in particular drove this extraordinary labor: Margery Hoffman Smith, in charge of all design (some of which she based on images from the Camp Fire Girls manual), and blacksmith O.B. Dawson (who used old railroad rails for some andirons). Smith also commissioned mosaics, murals, carvings and paintings, among them work from some of the great artists in Oregon history: C.S. Price, Darrel Austin, Charles Heaney.

By fall 1937, Timberline Lodge was ready to open, and it was the cheerful president of the United States who did the honors, on Sept. 28, from the terrace high over the front door. Franklin Delano Roosevelt discoursed for 15 minutes (mostly on the Oregon economy) and then he and his remarkable bride, Eleanor, enjoyed the most Oregonian meal imaginable — salmon and huckleberry pie.

So began Timberline, and initially it was a roaring success (a howling success, if you count the occasional hundred-mile-an-hour winds off Mt. Hood), in large part because of its three rope tows and Magic Mile chairlift. By the late 1940s as many as 5,000 skiers a weekend were swirling around the lodge. But the boom was hollow. The series of private companies who successively tried to make a profit from the lodge faced rigorous weather, difficult labor, the constant need for repair and renovation, and daunting logistics. All food, for example, must be trucked up and all garbage trucked down, as the lodge is inside the boundaries of the Mt. Hood National Forest. In 1954, Timberline closed, its owners unable to pay its bills or taxes, the extraordinary furnishings battered and tattered, the front door padlocked by the IRS.

But skiing over the mountain came a most unlikely cavalry: a grinning, young former social worker named Richard Kohnstamm. He borrowed gobs of money, worked like a demon, persuaded hundreds of other people to work like demons, charmed the U.S. Forest Service and senators and Congressfolk, inspired the creation of the Friends of Timberline, and eventually not only restored the original building but created the modern Timberline. It is today, he says, as much a museum as it is a working inn with more than a million visitors a year. For nearly 50 years the Kohnstamm family has operated Timberline, and it is no exaggeration to say that Dick Kohnstamm saved it, pure and simple.

I have been to Timberline many times, in many weathers, and I believe the snow junkies when they sing and shout about how coooool it is to ski and snowboard and schuss the mountain around Timberline (even in summer!). I believe the beatific botanists when they drool about alpine flowers in spring, and I believe the happy hikers who cherish crystalline vistas in autumn. But it is Timberline in summer that is the Timberline for me, Timberline in summer that I love with a child’s untrammeled and artless and open-mouthed joy.

You arrive early, wending up the mountain through Damascus and Boring and Sandy and Welches and Rhododendron and Government Camp, the names like appetizers, the air clearer and colder by the mile. Then it’s up the Timberline Road through troops of fir trees and the bright poles that mark the road when the snow falls 10 and 20 feet deep; and then one last turn and there! is sturdy smiling Timberline Lodge, with the mountain gleaming snowy behind it. You park, you wander into the lodge, you gape at the fireplace (man, you could roast two bears in there!), you inhale a chestful of that utterly medicinal pine-fir-juniper-snow-aster air, and then…

Then, well, you are on your own — snowboarding, hiking, dining in the excellent restaurant, climbing straight up a mile to Silcox Hut (sort of Timberline Lodge’s little sister), staring south at Mt. Jefferson and the Sisters and Broken Top and Three-Fingered Jack, conducting scholarly research into Oregon ales, crashing the wedding reception or rushing to register for a room (which you should do months in advance, and which gives you access to the heated outdoor pool and hot tub).

Or, if you are like lazy and ruminative me, basking on a bench in the sun while pretending to read but really quietly mouthing prayers of thanks that there is such a sweet savory place in the world as Timberline, built by proud penniless men and saved from ruin by a thousand friends. An Oregon treasure, one of those rare things in this life that is better than any song I can sing of it.

You must see for yourself, for there are as many Timberlines as there are people who find it unaccountably resident in a corner of their hearts.