Explore Oregon’s Three Capes Scenic Drive

How Oregonian are you? Willing to brave gale-force winds and hard-driving rain to visit the Coast? Willing to spend a night with hearty people who are accustomed to coastal flooding? Ok with drives through murky woods?

Oregon Travel: McMinnville

IN 1950, CREATURES FROM ANOTHER WORLD SELECTED McMinnville, Oregon, planet Earth as a place of curiosity and research. Their vehicle was nearly thirty feet in diameter and shaped like a flying saucer or a garbage can lid. If it weren’t for Mr. and Mrs. Paul Trent out feeding the rabbits on their farm that day, this foray would have gone unobserved by humans, and the saucer pilots would have quietly collected data before reporting back their observations.

Road Reconsidered: The Cascade Lakes Highway

This highway is the stuff of ballads. The Cascade Lakes Highway winds south from Mt. Bachelor to Highway 58 and just to the east of the ridge dividing wet Oregon from dry Oregon. It takes you just as close as you can get to the great outdoors and true wilderness.

Oregon Travel: Columbia River Gorge

Eons of spewing volcanoes and cataclysmic floods created the Columbia River Gorge, where Oregon’s grandest river rolls through towering cliffs of basalt. Even Congress agreed this place was special. Twenty-five years ago, it named the Columbia River Gorge the country’s first National Scenic Area, protecting the Columbia’s most dramatic stretch, the eighty-five miles between the Sandy and Deschutes rivers.

Highway 20: Bend to Burns

Wake up your recondite historian and geologist and the events of Highway 20 are perhaps Oregon’s most interesting combination of geology, and Native American and pioneer culture in one stretch.