This Field Trip is completely different than the ones I’ve done previously. While those focused on local Portland shops, for this one I drove up a mountain. On April 2 my brother Patrick married his new wife, Danielle, in the Silcox Hut at Timberline on Mt. Hood. We couldn’t be more thrilled to have her as part of the family, and their wedding was a fun celebration of the start of their life together.

This is just a quick snap Steven took with his cell phone, so can you imagine how stunning their professional photos are going to be? (I actually forgot my DSLR camera battery, so all of these photos were taken with either my phone or Steven’s. The lighting was tricky with a phone camera, but I did my best!)

Steven took a panorama shot of the exterior of the lodge, so it’s a bit distorted, but you get the idea. If it looks familiar, that’s because it was the exterior of The Overlook Hotel in The Shining. The interior is totally different, though, and there’s no hedge maze or room 237.

The lodge actually has amazing details throughout the interior. It was a Works Progress Administration project during the Great Depression, and you can tell that they were trying to hire as many skilled artisans as they could. The handmade details are everywhere–if I’d had my real camera I’d have captured even more. You’ll just have to go visit for yourself–you don’t need a lift ticket to wander around the lodge. They’ve even got a little museum section, where you can read more about some of the art and history, and see the chair specially made for President Franklin D. Roosevelt when he came to dedicate the lodge in 1937.

The view from the window in our room in the lodge was pretty stunning.

To get there we had to drive an hour and a half to Timberline Lodge, and then take a snowcat up the mountain to the wedding venue in Silcox Hut. You might think that the snow would be gone by April, but Timberline is actually open for skiing year-round. This was our transportation up to the hut.

It’s called a “hut,” because it was originally the end of one of the first ski-lifts, but it’s actually a mini lodge with bunks and a kitchen.

It was the perfect opportunity to wear the cape/coat that my grandmother gave me. She originally got it when she lived in Michigan, but she lives in Arizona now, so she didn’t have occasions to wear it any more. It’s wool, and real fur, which I would never buy new, but I’m grateful to have such a beautiful vintage family heirloom.

The dramatic vintage vibe had me repeating the line from The Shining, “I’ve always been here,” after a few drinks. We watched the movie a couple of days before we went up to the mountain, so it was fresh on my mind. The wedding was totally non-spooky, though, and it was fantastic to have an excuse to go on a fun little adventure to such a cool place.