By Lloyd Musser For The Mountain Times
The planners of Timberline Lodge never intended for everyone to drive their automobiles to the front door of the lodge. The plan, modeled on European mountain lodges, was for visitors to be ferried to the lodge by shuttle bus. The access road ran gently on the land: narrow, with curves and very slow travel speed. The plan did not work from the start. People would not ride the bus, even if it was free; they wanted to arrive by car.
A skier named Dodson had the idea for a tram to move skiers from Government Camp to Timberline soon after the lodge opened in 1937. It took him 10 years to find some like-minded partners and in 1947, a permit was issued from the US Forest Service. The Mount Hood Aerial Transportation Company was formed with Dodson, Dr. Otto George, and A.L. Greenwalt. Dr. George was the eternal optimist: he had some money, he loved the mountain and had a medical clinic in Government Camp, complete with an x-ray machine to treat ski injuries. Mr. Greenwalt was retired from Dun and Bradstreet so knew a thing or two about finances. The tram would cost $300,000.. They sold shares to 443 skiers at $10 per share and raised $350,000.00. Another board member was a guy named Hoover, who just happened to own Mt. Hood Stages; Hoover was president and manager of Pacific Trailways bus companies.
The tram would be 3.1 miles in length and would rise 2000 vertical feet. Pointer and Willamette, a logging equipment manufacturer, would supply the skyhooks that traditionally supported cables hauling logs – now they would support people. The skiers would ride in city buses suspended on the fixed cables. The primary reason they wanted to use buses was the fact that board member Hoover was in the bus business. He thought it was a sound idea mechanically and pointed out the potential marketing draw of a flying bus!
In July of 1948 they started clearing the right of way at the lower end of the tram’s route. After cutting trees on the first 200 feet, some alert worker blew the whistle, noting that the clearing was not headed, as planned, for the lodge. The Forest Service forced the company to hire a surveying firm to stake the right of way from the lodge to the base of the tram.
While this was going on, the Forest Service took a closer look at the plans and discovered the clearance from the bottom of the bus to the ground was only 12’ to 14’ in places. A sarcastic letter to the company said they assumed the plan was for the bus to act as a snowplow when snow depth exceeded 12 feet. The Forest Service wanted to know how the company was going to prevent skiers from skiing into the lanes created by the tram bus, since there would not be enough clearance between the bottom of the bus and the snow, creating an unacceptable hazard to the public. That got the company’s attention and they redesigned the system. They added eight more towers ranging from 40’ to 72’, bringing the total to 38 towers. They also added two more braking cables to enable them to run two buses at the same time.
Nothing in the plans allowed for the buses to pass each other, though, so the plan was to run them both in the same direction, staying 10 towers apart. Think about this idea: the goal was to move people efficiently. But in this iteration of the plan, one bus would leave, followed by the second bus departing when the first bus was only about 1/3 of the way up to the Lodge. Now both buses are going in the same direction, so the first bus needs to wait at Timberline until the second bus arrives, at which time they can both return to the base, staying 10 towers apart. A full cycle would take an hour, so you are moving only 120 people per hour!
Meanwhile, the Forest Service had been hard at work on the Timberline transportation issue. Just in time for the 1949-1950 ski season, they opened the newly constructed and paved road to Timberline Lodge, enabling a car load of skiers to reach Timberline in 15 minutes. The tram company had planned to open for that 1949-1950 ski season but didn’t meet their deadline.
The tram finally opened Jan 3, 1951. Tickets were .75 for a one-way ride. The shuttle bus was .50 and could travel the new road faster than the tram could climb to the lodge. With those statistics, how many people do you think would ride the tram?
The “Mount Hood Skiway” was a self-propelled vehicle (bus), riding on 4 fixed track ropes. Each bus had two gas-powered 185 hp engines each. Why they did not build a conventional reversible tram with two cabs, where one cab ascends the mountain and the other descends simultaneously is unknown. Likewise, why not put the power in the lower terminal and use haul back lines? Instead, they elected to have the buses climb under their own power by reeling in traction cable at the front and unreeling it out the back. Pulleys on the top guided the stationary cable to the power sheaves below the buses (where the wheels normally would be). Each bus had a driver and a front and back drive station. The driver had to literally drive the buses, though no steering was needed. The drivers had to use the throttle, transmission, and brakes as the bus lumbered up and down over the towers and pulled into the terminal.
Summer business might have been lucrative for the company, as seasonal tourists would have ridden the tram as a novelty. The problem, as John West explained, was that when the cable got warm it sagged and the gripper could not get a bite on the cable because of the oil oozing out of it – so some summer days it was simply not possible to run the tram. The restaurant and gift shop were the only profitable parts of the tram’s business. Based on the number of 1950s souvenirs with the SKIWAY logo that have been collected, way more people bought souvenirs than ever rode the tram.
The “Skiway to Timberline” operated in the 1951-1952 and 1952-1953 ski seasons and then languished, until the Forest Service demanded all traces of it be removed from public lands. Today the terminal that was on private property in Government Camp is a condo development called Thunderhead.
To learn more about the Skiway, visit the exhibit at the Mt. Hood Museum in Government Camp. There are videos online of Timberine’s “flying bus.”
Lloyd Musser is a volunteer of the Mt. Hood Cultural Center and Museum.