Rare Vintage Photos Of The Timberline Lodge, Stanley Kubrick’s Film Inspiration For “The Shining”, In 1921

Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining featured a very creepy hotel that was haunted. The actual hotel used for the film was represented by Timberline Lodge at Mt. Hood in Oregon and was named the fictional ‘Overlook Hotel’.

Timberline Lodge is a mountain lodge on the south side of Mount Hood in Clackamas County, Oregon, about 60 miles east of Portland, Oregon. Constructed from 1936 to 1938 by the Works Progress Administration, it was built and furnished by local artisans during the Great Depression in the United States.

Timberline Lodge was dedicated September 28, 1937, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The National Historic Landmark sits at an elevation of 5960 ft, within the Mount Hood National Forest and is accessible through the Mount Hood Scenic Byway.

h/t: vintag.es, pdxmonthly

Publicly owned and privately operated, Timberline Lodge is a popular tourist attraction that draws two million visitors annually. It is notable in movie history for serving as the exterior of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining.

No one knows why Timberline Lodge is signed as Overlook Hotel on these photos, since Timberline Lodge didn’t open until the 1930’s…

This is the photo of Timberline Lodge that inspired The Shining’s Overlook Hotel:

Seventy years ago, Oregon’s future photographer laureate Ray Atkeson, known for his large-format pics of western landscapes, snapped this haunting, moonlit shot of Timberline Lodge, built just nine years earlier. Three decades later, as the legend goes, when Stanley Kubrick was scouting locations for the “Overlook Hotel” for his adaptation of the Stephen King novel The Shining, Atkeson’s snow-laden photo attracted him to Timberline.