Cloud Cap Inn is a log lodge on a rocky point about 6,000 feet up Mt. Hood’s northeast side, close to the Eliot Glacier. It opened in August 1889 as the mountain’s first resort, built with Portland money and reached by a long stage ride from the train at Hood River. It never paid its way, but it became the home base for north side climbing, and it still stands, cared for since the 1950s by a Hood River mountain rescue club.
Building on the north side
In the mid-1880s, Hood River settlers Henry Coe, Oscar Stranahan and David Cooper pushed a rough wagon road up toward timberline, in part by burning out tangles of fallen timber, and ran it as a toll road. Mrs. Cooper kept a summer tent camp near the top, with a cook tent, a dining tent and a few tents for sleeping.
Portland’s William M. Ladd, son of the business leader William S. Ladd, and the lawyer and poet C.E.S. Wood then bought out the road company, in 1888 or early 1889 depending on the record. Their Mt. Hood Stage Company rebuilt the road using Chinese laborers, who did the grading by hand. A deep gulch they filled still goes by the name China Fill. For the inn, the partners hired William H. Whidden, an architect who had come to Portland for the firm McKim, Mead and White and later helped design Portland’s City Hall. He drew a low log building in three angled wings under a broad shingled roof. James L. Langille of Hood River helped oversee construction. The logs were bolted together and the whole inn was cabled to the rock beneath it against winter gales. It slept about 30 guests.
Guests, guides and the Langilles
The first guests arrived in August 1889, before the inn was quite finished. A coach met the Portland train at Hood River, changed horses along the way and finished with a six-horse team on the steep last pitch, a trip of five to six hours by one account and seven and a half by another. The 1974 National Register nomination counts only 88 guests in the summer of 1890.
After that slow start, Ladd and Wood turned the inn over to the Langille family. Sarah Langille ran it for about 16 years with help from her sons, more simply than before and, by the Crag Rats’ account, at a profit. Her sons Will and Doug worked as mountain guides. A University of Oregon study of the building credits Will as the first to lead guided climbs from the north side and says Doug led the Mazamas’ north side climb in 1894. Parties set out across the Eliot Glacier while guests at the inn followed them through a telescope.
The Mazamas’ records put the first skiing on Mt. Hood in February 1897, when three men poled their way to the snowbound inn on long, heavy wooden skis. The Crag Rats say the Langille brothers skied up on homemade skis in 1890.
From resort to rescue base
Automobiles reached the inn by 1907. In 1926 the Forest Service built a new road up from the freshly finished Mt. Hood Loop Highway for nearly $200,000, and plans for a bigger hotel and a cable line to the summit came and went. Once Timberline Lodge opened on the south side in the late 1930s, the crowds went there. The inn closed and passed to the Forest Service, in 1940 according to both National Register nominations, or in 1942 for $2,000 according to the Crag Rats.
With no one running it, the building declined, and around 1950 the Forest Service weighed tearing it down. Civic groups pushed back. In 1954 the Crag Rats, a mountain rescue and climbing club from Hood River formed in 1926, offered to repair and maintain the inn in return for a permit to run their rescue and snow survey work from it. They have kept it up ever since, renewing their permit in 2023 for 30 years and reroofing the inn in cedar shakes that summer.
The National Register of Historic Places added Cloud Cap Inn on October 18, 1974. In 1981 it became part of the larger Cloud Cap and Tilly Jane Recreation Area Historic District, which also takes in the Snow Shoe Club’s 1910 log cabin, a Civilian Conservation Corps guard residence and ski warming hut, traces of the early wagon roads, and the American Legion camp that hosted big climbs up the Cooper Spur route from 1921 to 1953.
See it today
- The inn: From the Cloud Cap Trailhead at Cloud Cap Saddle Campground, a short walk leads up to the inn. It houses the Crag Rats, not overnight guests.
- The old stage road: The 1981 nomination notes that the steep 1889 road still shows where it cuts across today’s Cloud Cap Road. The Wagon Road Trail, a ski route, starts near the Snow Shoe Club cabin and crosses Cloud Cap Road ten times on the way down.
- Tilly Jane: The Tilly Jane Trail leads from the inn area to Tilly Jane Campground, across the creek from the old American Legion camp, and the CCC-built Tilly Jane Guard Station.
- Around the mountain: Cloud Cap Trailhead is also a main starting point for the Timberline Trail.
