In the midst of the Great Depression,
President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated one of Oregon's most cherished landmarks.
Timberline Lodge was designed to be an illustrious alpine getaway
on the slopes of Mt. Hood, the tallest peak in the state.
While the lodge suffered from financial trouble for years,
its popularity with skiers grew steadily after World War II.
But even by the late 1940s, getting up to Timberline wasn't always easy.
The road to the lodge was steep, narrow and often closed due to heavy snowfall.
As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention.
And this soon inspired an invention that had never been seen before,
and would never be seen again.
About 2,000 feet downslope from Timberline is the small ski village of Government Camp.
In the mid-1940s, a physician named Dr. J. Otto George
was running a small family clinic here on weekends.
He also happened to be an avid skier
and spent much of his spare time on the slopes of Mt. Hood.
He was familiar with the unreliable road up to Timberline Lodge,
and he knew there had to be a better way.
George would find his answer on the opposite side of the country.
While visiting Cannon Mountain in Franconia, New Hampshire,
he witnessed their aerial tramway which had been running since 1938.
While aerial trams were more common in Europe,
this was the only one operating in North America.
George knew a system like this could be perfect for Mt. Hood.
Not only would it carry skiers,
but it would also be an attraction for casual tourists and sightseers.
After returning to Oregon, George formed the Mt. Hood Aerial Transportation Company,
and set to work on developing a system of his own.
The plan was to build a tramway between Government Camp and Timberline,
climbing about 2,000 feet in elevation over the course of 3.1 miles.
This would make it the longest aerial tramway in the world.
To build the system, George partnered with the Pointer-Willamette Company of Portland.
They had recently developed a suspended cable system called Skyhook,
which was designed for use in the logging industry.
The Mt. Hood tram would use a modified version of this design,
with a gasoline-powered motor car hauling large passenger coaches through the air.
In this proposal, the motor car would attach itself to a coach at one end,
and then carry it to the terminal on the other end.
After dropping it off, it would pick up another coach there
and bring it back in the opposite direction.
On October 2, 1947, the US Forest Service
granted the company a special permit to build the tramway.
The project quickly became the most anticipated new development on Mt. Hood,
and construction was soon underway.
Preliminary work took place throughout 1948.
The three-mile route was staked,
and crews began clearing a 100-foot-wide path through the trees.
The cables were manufactured by the John A. Roebling's Sons Company of Trenton, New Jersey.
John Roebling himself had designed the Brooklyn Bridge back in the 1850s.
And more recently in the 1930s, the company had supplied the cables for the Golden Gate Bridge.
Each of the cables for the Mt. Hood tramway would be over three miles long,
and weigh nearly 70,000 pounds.
Meanwhile, the Pointer-Willamette Company was constructing the steel A-frame towers
and designing the passenger coaches.
But by November, they realized their jerry-rigged design would need some serious revisions.
The motors and coaches would now be combined into self-contained units,
which the company called "Cloudliners."
These closely resembled city buses, and had a driver's cab at each end,
seating for 36 passengers, and standing room for another 14.
Each Cloudliner would be equipped with two gasoline motors,
providing a combined 370 horsepower.
These motors would be connected to pulley wheels by a traction cable.
Using this setup, a Cloudliner would pull itself up and down the mountain along this fixed cable.
This was quite different from the typical design,
where gondolas are pulled along by a moving cable
rather than being powered individually.
These revisions set back progress by several months,
but all of the towers were installed by October of 1949.
Testing with the Cloudliners began in the following March,
but issues with the motors and braking systems delayed progress yet again.
It wasn't until November that the engineers had finally ironed out the kinks in the system.
What had started as a six-month construction project
had grown into a grueling three years of engineering challenges.
Despite the wait, tourists were still excited for the tram to open.
And with winter quickly approaching,
Mt. Hood was shaping up to have its biggest tourist season ever.
Through chilling winds and heavy snowfall,
the tramway made its first demonstration run for the press on January 3, 1951.
The bus was packed with newsmen and radio announcers
who were eager to be among the first to experience the new attraction.
A writer for The Oregonian recounted the experience, saying:
"Practically everyone aboard was too busy holding his breath and gaping at the spectacular scenery
to pay much attention to the workings of the aerial bus, longest and largest of its type in the world."
The preview run went without a hitch, and a month later on February 3,
the Mt. Hood Aerial Skiway finally opened to the public.
Riders were treated to a heated cabin, comfortable leather seats and large windows,
but most importantly, the breathtaking views of Mt. Hood.
The Skiway's main hub was the lower terminal building Government Camp.
The boarding platform was inside the building itself on the third floor.
The lower two floors welcomed guests with a lounge, restaurant, gift shop and ski shop.
The upper terminal had a much simpler design,
with an open-air platform about 100 yards west of Timberline Lodge.
The Skiway's success carried on over the next several months and into the summer,
proving its worth as a year-round attraction.
In July, it celebrated its 1,000th trip up the mountain.
By this point, it had carried tens of thousands of tourists from all 48 states,
and from over a dozen foreign countries.
In the following month, it was prominently featured in Popular Science Magazine,
celebrating the unusual feat of engineering.
Over the next couple of years, Mt. Hood itself saw a historic increase in visitors,
to the point where it had grown into the most popular skiing destination in the western United States.
Despite this, the popularity of the Skiway declined fairly quickly.
The Oregonian had pointed out one of its flaws early on, saying:
"The Cloudliner makes considerably more noise than a wheeled bus."
"The clanking and grinding of its cables make conversation aboard impossible."
Even the article in Popular Science alluded to the poor ride quality, saying:
"The weight of the heavy car makes the incline extremely steep
where the cable passes through the towers."
"The coach must cross each jack slowly to avoid a jarring bump."
For many people, one ride was enough, and the Skiway's novelty wore off quickly.
The company was well aware of this, and less than two years after starting operation,
they were already discussing plans to completely rebuild the system.
While the Mt. Hood Skiway could boast a unique mechanical design,
this was also its most fundamental problem.
At its core, the Skyhook system was designed
to carry logs and construction equipment, not human beings.
Adapting it for a passenger tramway made the whole system
needlessly complicated, expensive and uncomfortable.
Dr. George and the company's leaders knew the only way to truly fix this problem
was to build a more traditional system in its place.
This would make the ride much smoother and quieter.
It would also solve another one of the Skiway's biggest design flaws.
Even though there were two buses, they operated on a single track and couldn't run past each other.
This meant they had to follow each other up and down the line,
and tourists had to wait up to an hour to catch the next ride.
The company's plan was to convert the system into a gondola lift.
The smaller pods would only hold about six passengers each,
but they would continuously loop around the system on a moving cable.
This would triple the hourly capacity and reduce the wait time to just a few minutes.
This work was expected to get underway as early as 1953,
but the company's shareholders weren't convinced.
Ridership was already falling rapidly,
and this didn't seem to justify the cost of building a completely new system.
The revisions were put on hold,
and the Skiway continued running in its existing state for another couple of years.
At first it was operating year-round,
running every day during the winter season and on weekends during the summer.
But by 1954, it was only running on weekends during the winter,
or whenever there was enough demand to justify a trip.
In January of 1956, after five years of operation, the Skiway closed indefinitely.
Despite being in the middle of the ski season,
ridership was so low that it wasn't enough to cover the operating costs.
The company now discussed the rebuild project more seriously,
but one major factor still remained.
The Skiway had originally been built in response to the poor road conditions up to Timberline Lodge.
But the road had since been overhauled,
allowing drivers to get up to the lodge more safely and quickly.
This work had been completed back in September of 1950,
just a few months before the Skiway started running.
So in a way, the system was obsolete before it even opened.
After years of deliberation, it was finally decided that the Skiway would be demolished
and the company would be dissolved entirely.
In September of 1960, after sitting abandoned for almost five years,
the busses, cables and towers were sold for scrap,
and demolition took place over the next several months.
While the Skiway has been gone for over 60 years,
it left behind some remnants that are still visible today.
The lower terminal building in Government Camp
was sold and remodeled into Thunderhead Lodge in 1962.
This completely removed the loading platform on the third floor,
and replaced it with two floors of hotel rooms.
The building was remodeled again into rental condos in 1981,
and is still in use to this day.
The route of the Skiway itself can still be clearly seen in the cut of trees up the mountain.
Today skiers and hikers can retrace much of the original route using the Glade and Skiway trails.
In a way, the Mt. Hood Aerial Skiway is a cautionary tale.
It reminds us that just because an idea is unique, doesn't necessarily mean it's good.
The Skiway's demise can best be summed up by a local skier who said at the time:
"It's the end of an era — an era that never started."