Bulletin file photoThe Three Sisters, South Sister on the left, loom behind Pine Martenn Lodge in June 2011 at Mt. Bachelor. The lodge, at 7,775 feet, hosts summertime dinners with restaurant visitors riding the adjacent chairlift.

While not as old as courthouses, former mills and other historic buildings around Central Oregon, Pine Marten Lodge on Mount Bachelor is intriguing because of its lofty perch, as well as how quickly it was designed and built.

Designing the 37,000-square-foot lodge took three months and building it six months in 1988, said Vernon Sexton, the Bend architect who drafted the plans for it and designed most of the other buildings at the Mt. Bachelor ski area. In all, he drew 59 pages by hand with the help of a draftsman, detailing everything from the 180 concrete columns at the core of the lodge to the lightning rods atop its roof.

Originally Mt. Bachelor ski area officials wanted a 6,000- to 8,000-square-foot wooden lodge at midmountain. “We had weekly design meetings and every week they would bump it up in size,” Sexton said Tuesday.

To speed up construction, Bend-based Kirby Nagelhout Construction Co. started manufacturing the components for the lodge as Sexton drew it.

The project involved hauling equipment and materials up a rugged 2-mile road to Pine Marten Knob, the lava cone that Sexton said is the namesake for the lodge and adjacent chairlift.

Pine Marten Lodge, a place for skiers and snowboarders to warm up and grab food , is at 7,775 feet up Mount Bachelor, which has a peak elevation of 9,068 feet. The lodge is now also home to summertime sunset dinners. Sexton said he designed the building to match the contours of the knob. “The basic concept of the lodge for me was to blend it into the mountain,” he said.

The biggest challenge faced by construction workers was a short summer season to build the lodge, said Jeff Deswert, then steel erection superintendent for Kirby Nagelhout. Deswert is now company president.

“We started at the end of May and had to be complete by the end of November,” he said. He recalls bulldozers pushing snow off the site for the lodge once ski season had finished that spring and transporting workers in snowcats after snow returned that fall. The late Kirby Nagelhout, who founded the company in 1986, led the construction.

A midmountain lodge had long been in the plans for Mt. Bachelor, but the installation of two high speed lifts earlier in the 1980s made it essential, according to a July 1989 article in Ski Area Management, an industry magazine. The story about the building of the lodge, written by Jeff Lokting, then marketing manager at the ski area, was entitled “Creating a Grand Vision…in a Hurry.”

In the article Sexton explained why the $4.5 million Pine Marten Lodge was designed and built in a rush.

“The key issue management faced was that you don’t start a long and expensive challenge like this, just to get snowbound in the fall with the building not operable,” he said.

Constructing a comparable building in Bend today would take about 14 months, Deswert said. That’s because waves of workers typically take their turns installing their parts of a building, such as plumbers installing pipes and electricians putting in wiring.

They swarmed Pine Martin Lodge to build it, Sexton said. “It looked like a beehive,” he said.

At one point there were as many as 150 workers on the project, Deswert said.

Nagelhout devised a way to have workers building one floor while concrete was poured on the floor above them and he figured out a way to set the concrete faster than the typical 28 days, according to the Ski Area Management article.

“I worked out the strength of the concrete and installed beams close together with more rebar, so the concrete set in just seven days,” he told the magazine.

Built fast, Pine Marten Lodge also had to be built sturdy, capable of withstanding high winds and heavy snow common that high up a mountain.

The lodge includes about 22,000 bolts, 320,000 pounds of rebar and 3,600 cubic yards of concrete, according to the magazine story. That’s about 600 truckloads of concrete.

In its first ski season the building met the hopes of Mt. Bachelor officials, David Marsh, then ski area president, told Ski Area Management.

“We’ve very happy with the results,” he told the magazine . “(This past winter,) Pine Marten Lodge handled the weather and the crowd well.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7812,

ddarling@bendbulletin.com