The historic Skyliner Lodge on Tumalo Creek west of Bend needs a new tenant, the Deschutes National Forest announced this week.

Owned by the U.S. Forest Service, the lodge has housed the Cascade Science School, a program of the Portland-based Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, for the past 16 years. Mat Sinclair, vice president of education for OMSI, said his organization concluded that it’s no longer cost-effective to run outdoor schools and science camps at the lodge, and intends to vacate the site this fall.

Sinclair said the lodge and the surrounding cabins and storage buildings allow OMSI to host groups of 50 to 60 people overnight. But to meet the needs of the schools and school districts that are its customers, OMSI needs to be able to house about 100 people overnight, he said.

“If they want to bring the whole fifth grade, and it’s 75 students, we can’t quite accommodate them at CSS (Cascade Science School),” Sinclair said. “Or, if it’s a small school, we’re not able to get two small schools simultaneously,” he said. “And so the result is the site doesn’t lend itself very well to dealing with the group sizes we typically work with without some more investment in the site.”

Sinclair said OMSI has spent the past several years looking for grants or private donations to help it expand the facility but has found few willing donors.

“While we enjoy a lovely and robust relationship with the Forest Service, raising funds to do capital improvements on a site we don’t own is a really tricky proposition from a donor perspective,” he said. “Bottom line is, after several years of effort, we haven’t been able to invest enough in the site to do the programming at the level we needed to recover our operational costs.”

Built in 1935 by crews from the Works Progress Administration, Skyliner Lodge took its name from the Skyliners Club, a ski club that moved into the lodge upon its completion and ran a small ski area. The club operated a rope tow and hosted statewide competitions for ski racers and jumpers until a fire destroyed much of the ski area’s equipment in 1957. What would eventually become the Mt. Bachelor ski area opened the following year, and the Skyliners’ ski area never reopened.

Sue Olson, public affairs officer for the Deschutes National Forest, said the Forest Service is hoping to find a tenant that could continue to use the lodge for educational purposes, noting that the Pacific Crest Outward Bound program occupied the site prior to OMSI.

The Forest Service is unlikely to allow the lodge to be used for commercial purposes, she said.

Prospective tenants are asked to contact the Bend-Fort Rock Ranger District with a proposal by May 29.

“Right now, we’re pretty wide open to ideas that would be appropriate for the greater good of the forest and forest education,” Olson said. “We really are just trying to reach out and find what the interests are and who’s interested.”

The Forest Service did not collect rent from OMSI but had an arrangement where OMSI was expected to fund building repair and restoration.

“It is a historic site, so it needs to be maintained with the integrity of what’s required of a historic site,” Olson said. “You can’t make renovating changes. You need to maintain the integrity of its history, and that requires some substantial upkeep.”

Olson estimated the annual cost of maintaining the lodge, which has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1978, at $7,000 to $7,500. She said the Forest Service would like to find a tenant willing to occupy the lodge and bear the cost of historically appropriate maintenance for 10 to 20 years.

Sinclair said OMSI will continue to offer outdoor school programs at its other facilities: Hancock Field Station near Fossil, and Camp Kiwanilong and Camp Magruder on the Oregon Coast.

Steve Tritz, the manager of the Cascade Science School for the past three years, said he and the rest of the OMSI staff will miss the lodge. Even with shutters that rattle in the wind, the occasional basement flood, a front door that’s impossible to open and one of two fireplaces inoperable, it’s a beautiful building, he said, and in a beautiful location.

“It provides an incredible natural classroom,” Tritz said. “So my hope would be that students can still come out here and enjoy it and it doesn’t get to be something that’s more exclusive, that it will still be open for education.”

To submit a proposal

Organizations with a proposal for utilizing Skyliner Lodge should contact Rick Wesseler, special uses coordinator by May 29 at the Bend-Fort Rock Ranger District, at 541-383-4792 or at rwesseler@fs.fed.us.