Beer, Trails, and Volcano Water RoadyGoat
Bend sits in Oregon's high desert on the banks of the Deschutes River, with the Cascade volcanoes piled up on the western horizon, and it's become a poster child for the beer-and-trails good life. The town claims the most breweries per capita in Oregon, roughly one for every forty-five hundred residents, and it created the Bend Ale Trail in 2010, billed as the first beer trail in the West. The anchor is Deschutes Brewery, founded downtown in 1988 by Gary Fish, which helped put Pacific Northwest craft beer on the map using water filtered through volcanic rock. When you're not drinking it you're moving: hiking, climbing, paddling the river through the middle of town, mountain biking, or skiing nearby Mount Bachelor. Sunshine, lava-filtered water, and a trailhead at the edge of every neighborhood, that's the Bend formula.