Timberline Lodge - The Hotel From "The Shining" Movie

Stanley Kubrick borrowed its face for a horror classic. Jack Nicholson swung an axe at its door. And yet Timberline Lodge, perched at 6,000 feet on the shoulder of Oregon's Mount Hood, somehow remains one of the most welcoming places in the Pacific Northwest.

Here is the strange alchemy of Timberline Lodge: a building that was used as the exterior of a fictional hotel where a man goes insane and tries to murder his family has, over the decades, become famous primarily as a charming alpine retreat. Families ski there. Hikers on the Pacific Crest Trail detour for coffee and a hot meal. Couples book the fireplace rooms for anniversary weekends. The ghost of Jack Torrance, it seems, has done nothing to dampen the mood.

That tension between dread and delight is part of what makes Timberline so interesting. It is a legitimate piece of American history en dash a New Deal masterwork built by more than 500 WPA workers during the Great Depression en dash that also happens to look, at certain angles in certain light, like it could eat you alive.

Built by Hand, Built to Last

Timberline was built in 18 months during the Great Depression by more than 500 WPA workers en dash most of them unemployed men who had never done anything like it. A master blacksmith taught unskilled laborers to forge the iron fixtures from recycled railroad rails.

Discarded cedar utility poles became newel posts, their tops carved into bears, owls, and seals by men who, as the WPA's Federal Writers' Project noted, had not previously known they were capable of any such thing. Hooked rugs were made from old CCC camp blankets. Fireplace screens were fashioned from tire chains. Almost nothing was wasted, and almost nothing was bought new.

Roosevelt dedicated the lodge on September 28, 1937, calling it a monument to the skill and faithful performance of its workers. Eleanor Roosevelt, in her newspaper column, singled out the ironwork and the massive timbers: nowhere, she wrote, had she seen such big timbers used. The lodge opened to the public on February 4, 1938.

By 1955, mismanagement had driven the place into closure. Within months, a man named Richard Kohnstamm took over the operating permit, lost money for five years, and then got very lucky: skiing exploded in popularity in the late 1950s, and Timberline was suddenly exactly what people wanted. Kohnstamm ran it until his death in 2006; his son Jeff operates it today. In 2009, Congress named a 126-acre wilderness area above the Palmer ski lift after him.

Then, in 1980, Stanley Kubrick used the lodge's exterior as the face of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining en dash and accidentally gave Timberline a second life it never asked for. The building that Roosevelt called a monument to American workers became, to a new generation, the place where Jack Nicholson lost his mind. Both reputations have proven remarkably durable.

Where It Is

Timberline Lodge sits at 6,000 feet on the south slope of Mount Hood, about 60 miles east of Portland in Clackamas County, Oregon. The drive up is its own kind of statement: the road switchbacks past the 4,000-foot mark and then the mile-high mark, threading through old-growth fir before the lodge appears en dash hulking, stone-faced, and improbably grand for something this far up a volcano.

The lodge sits within the Mount Hood National Forest and is accessible via the Mount Hood Scenic Byway. At this elevation, snow is a near-constant companion for much of the year en dash the mountain averages around 540 inches of snowfall annually, which is part of why the ski area here operates year-round, something almost unheard of in the contiguous United States.

The Lobby

The main headhouse is a six-sided structure 60 feet in diameter, with a stone chimney stack 90 feet high and 14 feet wide. Each of the six fireplace openings en dash three on the ground floor, three on the first floor en dash is five feet wide and seven feet tall. When you walk in, the scale of the thing stops you.

The ground-level exterior walls are heavy rubble masonry using boulders from the immediate area. From the first floor up, the building shifts to heavy timber en dash cedar, Douglas fir, hemlock, western juniper, and ponderosa pine, all sourced from Oregon forests.

The furniture in the seating areas includes white oak couches with hand-woven upholstery and hexagonal white oak coffee tables. The hexagon motif, in fact, runs throughout the building: you'll see it in the coffee tables, the angled couches, the shape of the headhouse itself.

A recurring curved post-and-lintel arch en dash which locals call the Timberline Arch for how often it appears, in doorways, mirrors, and chairs en dash gives the interiors a visual consistency that feels almost medieval.

The newel posts are the real showstoppers: carved from recycled utility poles, each is topped with an animal figure. An owl guards one hallway entrance. A bear stands watch somewhere else. The men who carved them had largely never carved anything before.

Where to Eat: The Cascade Dining Room

Timberline has several places to eat en dash the Blue Ox for casual bites, the Ram's Head Bar for drinks and family-friendly dining with mountain views, and the Y'Bar for something quick en dash but the Cascade Dining Room is the main event.

The kitchen runs a farm-to-table program that takes seriously its position at the center of Oregon's agricultural landscape: cold mountain streams and the Pacific supply the fish; the Willamette Valley and surrounding farms supply much of the produce. The menu rotates with the seasons. The wine program has received consistent recognition, and there's a glacier-fed microbrewery, Mt. Hood Brewing Co., whose beers are on tap at the lodge's bars.

The Rooms

No two rooms at Timberline are the same en dash this isn't marketing copy, it's a genuine consequence of how the building was made. Hand-built in the 1930s with unique layouts and hand-forged details throughout, each room has its own particular character. There are 70 guest rooms in the main lodge and 10 chalet-style rooms with shared bathrooms.

The hallways to the rooms are narrow and dimly lit en dash famously so, for anyone who has seen The Shining. Walking them at night, particularly after a couple of drinks at the Ram's Head, you will almost certainly think about those twin girls. This is not a design flaw so much as a byproduct of the original 1930s construction, but the atmosphere is undeniable.

Then there is Room 217. In Stephen King's novel, Room 217 is the most haunted room in the Overlook Hotel en dash where Jack Torrance's predecessor went mad, and where young Danny is nearly strangled by a dead woman in the bathtub. When Kubrick was making his film adaptation, Timberline's management asked him not to use that number, worried guests would refuse to book it. Kubrick changed it to the fictional Room 237. The plan backfired spectacularly: Room 217 is now the most frequently requested room in the lodge. If you want it, book well in advance.

The premier options are the fireplace rooms en dash spacious, with a sitting area, coffee maker, bathrobes, and a real wood-burning fireplace. These tend to get booked for weddings and anniversaries, by people presumably unbothered by the lodge's cinematic history. Standard rooms range from queens to kings to multiple twin configurations, with several pet-friendly options.

The chalet rooms go from small en dash one bunk bed, two people en dash all the way up to an extra-large configuration sleeping 15, with six bunk beds. Chalet rooms have bathrooms across the hall, which feels fine during daylight and marginally more interesting at 3am.

The Outdoor Pool

There is a year-round heated outdoor pool and hot tub at Timberline, which is one of those things that sounds unremarkable until you're actually sitting in it at 6,000 feet with snowfields visible above you. The pool was originally built by Richard Kohnstamm in 1958 as part of his effort to attract year-round visitors. It remains one of the lodge's most quietly excellent features. There is also a sauna and a fitness room for those who want to offset the mountain food.

Skiing

Timberline operates the longest ski season in the United States en dash all 12 months of the year. The Palmer chairlift, which opened in 1978, accesses a glaciated snowfield that holds skiable snow even through the summer. The sight of skiers on an August morning, moving like specks across a vast white field above the treeline, is one of the more surreal things you can watch over breakfast.

In 2018, Timberline acquired Summit Ski Area en dash now called Timberline Summit Pass en dash which was established in 1927 and is the oldest ski area in the Pacific Northwest. A shuttle currently connects the two areas, and a 2021 permit allowed Timberline to plan for connecting them via trail, which would create the longest continuous vertical ski terrain in the country at 4,540 feet.

A bike park opened in 2019, and snowshoeing and hiking are available across multiple trails. The lodge also began embracing snowboarding in the mid-1980s en dash young riders built the first hand-dug half-pipes on the mountain and helped pioneer what would become the modern terrain park.

The Shining

In 1980, Stanley Kubrick released his adaptation of Stephen King's novel The Shining, in which Jack Nicholson plays a man who takes a job as off-season caretaker of a remote mountain hotel called the Overlook, descends into murderous madness, and eventually freezes to death in a hedge maze. For the exterior of the Overlook, Kubrick used Timberline Lodge.

The connection is somewhat misleading in its simplicity. Kubrick used aerial shots of the lodge and some exterior footage for the opening sequences and other brief moments, but most of the film en dash including the interiors, the hedge maze finale, and the famous door-axing scene en dash was shot at Elstree Studios in London. A full-scale mockup of the south face of the lodge was built there for the outdoor finale scenes. The interior design of the fictional Overlook Hotel was reportedly more influenced by the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park than by Timberline itself.

The lodge did have one condition for Kubrick en dash the Room 217 situation, covered above en dash which he honored, and which backfired on everyone involved in the most predictable way imaginable. The gift shop now sells copies of The Shining alongside its other merchandise.

The association has proved durable. In 2017, the inaugural Overlook Film Festival was held at Timberline, drawing horror fans to the lodge for screenings and events. The festival subsequently moved to New Orleans, but the connection between the lodge and Kubrick's film endures in the cultural imagination, four and a half decades on.

Timberline Lodge has appeared in other films over the years en dash Bend of the River (1952), All the Young Men (1960), Lost Horizon (1973), Wild (2014) en dash and exterior shots were used in multiple episodes of Hogan's Heroes as a stand-in for a Bavarian ski resort. But nothing has stuck the way The Shining has. You can argue, with some justification, that Kubrick did the lodge a favor: a beautiful but relatively obscure New Deal-era ski lodge became, overnight, one of the most recognizable buildings in American cinema.

What you find, if you actually stay there, is that the horror framing dissolves almost immediately on arrival. The stone and timber weight of the place, which reads as oppressive in a 1980 horror film, feels like shelter when you are actually inside it at altitude, wind howling, snow falling. The fireplaces are real. The St. Bernards en dash Bruno and Heidi, the latest in an unbroken tradition of resident St. Bernards stretching back to 1937 en dash are available for petting in the lobby. The PCT hikers with their enormous packs give the common areas an accidental communal warmth.

Timberline Lodge draws nearly two million visitors every year. Most of them, presumably, survive.