Explore Oregon

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Ride the Rails

Oregon is now the proud owner of the Mt. Bachelor and the Mt. Jefferson, two passenger trains that will join the Amtrak Cascades corridor, running from Eugene to Vancouver, B.C., beginning January 6. The new additions will increase passenger rail service in the Willamette Valley. With bike storage and 238 seats in standard or business class, eco-friendly train travel is a growing transporation method on the West Coast. Dine, surf the web and enjoy the scenery en route to your business meeting or vacation destination. For more information check out: amtrakcascades.com

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Pioneer Woman

written by Kevin Max IN A WAY, IT MAKES PERFECT SENSE THAT ROSE FORSTER HOWE WOULD END UP BECOMING a medical technician, English riding instructor, butcher, fromager and soaper on a remote ranch in Eastern Oregon. True, the path there was a bit unexpected. But life doesn’t always travel in straight lines. Video by Kevin Max The night before I left to visit Rose and her husband, Darrell, in Monument, Oregon, I had memorized the route, not wanting to trot out my mobile phone in the quiet hills that rolled up to the north and middle forks of the John Day River. I’d be damned if I was going to resort to a GPS-enabled map to tell me how to get there. This scheme worked, too. Almost. I knew Rose primarily from her Facebook posts, which is to say not at all. There were entries such as, “Dropped off a…

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Gary Randall’s Oregon

GARY RANDALL GOT HIS FIRST CAMERA when he was a boy in 1964. He began shooting and developing black and white film while in his 20s before making the leap into digital photography in his 40s. He has dabbled in many media forms, including painting, drawing, carving stone.

gary randall, crown point

Built for Pleasure

This is a tale of two highways—a wet one and a dry one. They’re both Oregon’s Highway 30 between Portland and The Dalles, more commonly known today as the Historic Columbia River Highway.

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Winter Whale Migration

About 18,000 Gray whales will pass by the Oregon Coast over the span of four weeks, from mid-December to mid-January. Much like Oregonian snowbirds, the Gray whales are heading south to Baja

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Oregon City

written by Megan Oliver | featured photo by Talia Galvin My wife and I moved our family here in 1989. I spent years cyclo-commuting between my home on the edge of Oregon City and Lake Oswego before we moved our investment management firm to Oregon City in 2008. Cycling has endured as my passion. In my spare time, I’ve led bike tours and generally enjoyed the rudimentary, yet plentiful recreational biking opportunities available to my kids. A few years ago, I attended a cycle tourism studio in Clackamas County. Someone mentioned that there was no high-end bike shop nearby. I looked into it, and there was no shop in south Clackamas County, a geographical radius of 70,000 residents. The cogs started turning, and I ended up showing a five-page business plan for an Oregon City cycle shop to local developer Dan Fowler. When cycling’s Specialized offered me a dealership, I…

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Into the Bogs: Vincent Family Cranberries

LONG BEFORE CRANBERRY JUICE became a staple on supermarket shelves, cranberry farming was a part-time job that Oregon Coast families took up to supplement their incomes.

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Suite Dreams

Any journey—be it epic or overnight—can be profoundly influenced by the places where we choose to sleep. Here is a look at some of the best places for this around Oregon.
From converted silos and a one-room schoolhouse to working ranches and vineyards—we explore twenty-four cool B&Bs that offer atypical style and comfort. With these lodgings, it’s all about the beds, the breakfasts and swapping stories at the table.

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Cache Me if You Can: Exploring Oregon’s secret and rapidly growing world of geocaching

My geocaching trial is off to an inauspicious start. After circling the block of my Bend neighborhood watching the virtual compass on my Android phone bounce from north to west and back to north, and finding myself no closer to the invisible X that marks the spot, I’m now blindly following the directions from my smartphone.