a trip to Mount Hood was a full-day expedition. The road, built upon the bones of the old Barlow Trail, was steep, narrow, and often rutted beyond recognition. Depending on the season, it was either ankle-deep in dust or swallowed in mud.
Bill Lenz spent his life in the forests of Oregon, working with his hands and leaving behind buildings that still stand today. From the Zig Zag Inn to the Barlow Trail Inn, Bill helped shape the Mount Hood area at a time when everything was built the hard way — by hand, with simple tools, and a lot of determination.
Long before guardrails and parking lots, long before social media and tour buses, this basalt promontory rising 733 feet above the Columbia River stopped people in their tracks. Native people knew it. Early settlers noticed it. And when engineers began carving a modern scenic highway through the Gorge in the early 1900s, Crown Point demanded something extraordinary.
Multorpor Mountain lies just south of Government Camp, across Highway 26. Today it forms the eastern half of Mt. Hood Skibowl — known as Skibowl East.
The history of Zigzag Oregon is not the story of a town that failed to grow, although it never did. It is the story of a place that has always been defined by movement – by rivers, trails, roads, and the people who passed through them. Long before there was a town of Zigzag, settlers, businesses or the highway that travels past, this area was already an important place on the south side of Mount Hood.
