7 Oregon adventures I’ll do to make 2026 unforgettable

Ski the country’s best spring snow (and boogie)

If you’ve never skied Mt. Bachelor in the spring, which is sorta like right now, you’re missing out on some of the finest days the mountains offer. When the Pacific sun turns warm and the nights stay cool, the blessed “corn cycle” begins, and I enter my No. 1 happy place wrapped up in my No. 2 happy place. This is when we get silky, fast, sunny slopes and the next best thing to bottomless powder. Perfect sun. Perfect snow. Standing on top of that 9,000-foot volcano, head swirling in a sky so blue other blues get jealous, I’m telling you, those days are ones you want to remember forever. My most favorite family portrait was shot up there on a phone. I swear you need sunglasses to look at it.

Those days are practically guaranteed, too. Here’s a little secret I learned a long, long time ago, that’s really no secret at all: Even during a “bad” winter Bachelor is still freakin’ awesome, and it only gets better come spring. Time your trip to coincide with Mt. Bachelor’s RendezVan April 16-19 and you’ll find me boogying to live music in my ski boots.

Go sky diving from as high as the Oregon Cascades

I admit that leaping out of a perfectly good plane has never been high on my to-do list, but then new-old me has friends that did it and loved it. Call it FOMO. Call it livin’. Either way Skydive Bend opened last year about 40 miles north of Bend, at the Madras airport, with a team of highly experienced, USPA-certified instructors with thousands upon thousands of jumps under their suits. You’ll climb up to about 12,000 feet, wink at those mighty volcanoes from eye level, and leap out with an instructor strapped to your back. One full minute of free fall (“it feels like an hour!”) at speeds of more than 120 mph and then — snap! — the chute deploys and so begins five minutes of bird-like bliss drifting back to Earth. The whole thing takes less than four hours. You can be back in Bend in time to…

Float a new (to me) section of the Deschutes

Floating the Deschutes River through Bend is what makes summer summer, frankly, and every year we find new ways to make it even better. Last summer, Bend launched a revamped bike-share program, Veo, that made running shuttles easy. Park at the Park & Float, float to Drake Park, check out a bike, head back to the car. Of course, the shuttle bus makes for an even easier option. But then some friends suggested one afternoon that we float a different section north of town from Tumalo State Park to the hamlet of Tumalo, where we grabbed lunch at a food cart pod, The Bite Tumalo. The Deschutes flows a little faster here, has a few more riffles, and takes just about as long as the in-town float but with way more red-wing blackbirds flitting among the grasses. Getting back to your car takes a bit more effort. The trick? Come with a runner who doesn’t mind jogging the 1.8 miles back to the park, bring a bike, or dry off over lunch and call an Uber if you can? (They really don’t like wet passengers, FYI). Good things come to those who work for them.

Three hikers stand on a rocky ridge in Central Oregon while dozens of orange-and-black California tortoiseshell butterflies swirl through the air. The jagged peak of Mount Washington and the snowcapped summit of Mount Jefferson rise in the background beneath a blue sky with scattered clouds.

Hike a new hike and hope for the butterflies

Last summer the craziest thing happened, and I can only hope it happens again. The backstory: Getting a permit to hike some of the trails in the Central Cascades requires planning in the summer months. But one day my wife and I “found” a hike that required no permit at all: Black Crater. I’d skied this 7,250-foot volcano in winter, but hiking it in summer brought a whole new level of joy. The peak sits just off the stunning McKenzie Highway and isn’t for the meek with about 2,300-vertical-feet of climbing over about 3.5 miles one-way. But wowza. You punch through a burn scar, climb steeply up through a forest and somehow end up on Mars—a red-cinder world with the peaks of the Three Sisters, Belknap Crater, and Mount Washington screaming out of the airy landscape around you. The wild thing? That day the trail was almost fuzzy with butterflies. I’m talking about thousands and thousands of butterflies. My colleague Justin happened upon them in another spot and wrote about it. You can’t plan that, of course, but come to Bend often enough really cool things are bound to happen.

Two people working on a glass-blowing piece from a workshop with AD Glass in Bend, Oregon.

Disconnect, do a race, learn something new

Here’s what else I’m hoping to do, the quick and dirty version:

Go stargazing at Fort Rock with Wanderlust. I’ve never been down to this freakish, 100,000-year-old “tuff ring” formed when molten magma met groundwater and created an explosion that went downward instead of up. Today you’ll find sheer walls around a broad, grassy interior out in the middle of nowhere. Think stark, quiet, isolation, with a static-blast of stars wheeling above. Sign me up.

Do I start running again? I did a 50k once, got burned out, and hung up the shoes. But Bend Races seems like a fun way for me to get back into the endorphin-high of moving through the landscape as part of a trail race that, at least in Bend, can be way better than road races IMHO. Maybe by September I’ll even be ready for some solid Type 2 fun with one of the Bachelor Ascent contests, like the “vertical 5k”—a 3.6-mile, 2,700-vertical-foot “run” from the West Village base to the 9,000-foot-high summit.

Learn to blow glass: AD Glass & Design is a place where art meets 2,000-degree adrenaline, so to speak. Here a professional glassblower will work with you side-by-side to gather molten glass from a raging furnace, shape it with simple tools, and coax it into a finished piece. What will I make? A witches ball? A vase? A replica of that giant bong I had during my third sophomore year? No experience required.

That’s my list for now. I’m sure it’ll change, just like any good resolution should.