Santiam Pass Ski Lodge restoration plans outlined
The Santiam Pass Ski Lodge located near the Hoodoo Ski Resort will undergo renovations.
The Friends of the Santiam Pass Ski Lodge gave a presentation Monday evening to a crowd of about 50 in Sisters.
The lodge was built in the 1940s and has sat empty for 30 years. It served as a ski lodge for 19 years, became a camp in the late 1950s, and eventually shut down.
Dwight and Susan Sheets said they used to visit the lodge when it was in working order and were appalled to find it boarded up. They’ve had a special use permit to renovate the old building since 2016.
The couple wants the lodge open to the public with a full range of recreational opportunities. The main floor has a great room, kitchen, dining hall and office. They plan to remove some of the walls and portions of the ceiling, to highlight the structure of the building, build a parking lot,and hopefully build a new road to provide better access to the lodge.
Susan Sheets said all the windows have been broken by vandals and they hope to start renovations as early as next month.
“It was built by the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps,” Susan Sheets said. “They started inJuly 1939 and completed it in February 1940, seven months.”
The restoration process will take some time.
“It’s a beautiful structure, and it was built at a very significant time in American history with the Depression, coming out of the Depression,” Dwight Sheets said. “IA far as historically, it’s loved by many people in the area.”
The presentation was hosted by the Three Sisters Historical Society. The group’s president, Sue Stafford, said many people in Sisters have fond memories of the lodge and want to help preserve it.
“In Sisters directly, we have lost so much of our historic buildings because of fires, we had fires in ’23 and ’24, and that wiped out a lot,” Stafford said. “We have new people coming in that don’t know about the history of Sisters, and so they just come in and knock down buildings and don’t think about it, and that building is a treasure.”
The Sheets said they do not have plans to make this an overnight stay location. They do want to eventually rent out rooms for business or family events.
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