The Quiet Strides
Eugene calls itself TrackTown USA and has the medals to back it up. We spend a few days in Lane County and find the pace that actually runs the place.
Photography by Autumn Schrock. Directed by Nate Luebbe. Written by Josiah Roe. Produced by Salina Bastos and Emily Clancy.
Eugene knows exactly how it is famous. The city built its identity on runners, and the identity holds.
But speed is the surface here, not the substance. We came into Lane County looking for the other tempo, the one nobody puts on a poster. Eugene, Cascades & Coast covers the whole county, valley floor to the Cascades to the coast, and the quiet part fills everything in between.
The house that Bowerman built
Hayward Field reopened in 2020 after a two-year rebuild. It seats 12,650 and stretches to nearly 25,000 for the big meets. The address reads 1530 Agate Street, chosen because Phil Knight once ran 1:53.0 in the 800.
Inside the stadium, Hayward Hall runs 4,000 square feet along the east side, tucked under the seats. It holds Bill Bowerman's workshop, a wall of championship trophies, and a small theater whose seats came out of the old presidential box where Bowerman gave his Men of Oregon talks.
Check the hours before you drive over. The hall closes for meets, football Saturdays and finals week.
Two thousand feet of city
South of downtown, Spencer Butte rises out of the Ridgeline trail system and tops out just over 2,000 feet, the highest point in the valley around it. The summit loop leaves the South Willamette Trailhead, runs 1.7 miles and climbs 784.
The top is bare basalt, roughly ten acres of it, holding rare grasses and lichens that do not survive footsteps. Two trails reach the summit. Stay on them.
On a clear evening you can pick out the Three Sisters to the east and Fern Ridge Reservoir to the west. Three hundred people a day make this climb. At sunset almost all of them go quiet at the top.
The river is the route
We sleep at the Valley River Inn, on the Willamette at the edge of town, 259 rooms and the only riverfront hotel in Eugene. The Ruth Bascom path runs past the door.
That path carried us over the Ferry Street and Peter DeFazio bridges at the close of Chapter One. In Eugene the river is not scenery you drive out to see. It is how you get around.
A bakery that behaves like a farm
Fifteen minutes south, in Creswell, Heidi Tunnell runs Creswell Bakery. She trained at the Culinary Institute of America, and the beef comes off her family's grass-fed cattle a couple of miles down the road.
They cure and smoke their own bacon. A wine shop fills one corner, and live music starts Friday evenings at five.
Creswell holds about 5,600 people. The bakery makes the town feel considerably larger than that.
Covered Bridge Capital of the West
Cottage Grove calls itself the Covered Bridge Capital of the West, and it has the inventory to argue the point. Six covered bridges stand in or near town. Lane County holds twenty.
The Centennial Covered Bridge crosses the Coast Fork Willamette downtown, 84 feet of Howe truss built in 1987 from timbers salvaged out of two county bridges taken down in 1979. Residents funded it by selling personalized bricks. A time capsule sits sealed in the entrance.
It carries people and bicycles only. That turns out to be the theme around here.
Thirty-six miles, no hurry
The Covered Bridges Scenic Bikeway starts and finishes in Cottage Grove, 36 paved miles looping Dorena Lake on a converted rail line called the Row River Trail.
You ride straight through the Mosby Creek bridge, built in 1920 and the oldest in the county, and past Chambers, the only covered railroad bridge west of the Mississippi. The orange trestle from Stand By Me turns up along the way.
We rent bikes and give it the morning. Nobody out there is racing.
Planted in 1978, still pouring
West of Eugene, in the Crow hills, Dan Smith planted a vineyard in 1978 and named it Sweet Cheeks for the shape of the land. In 2003 he bought a building in Junction City slated for demolition and moved it to the top of the hill.
It opened as the tasting room at Thanksgiving 2005, and it still looks down every row he put in. Pinot Noir, Pinot Gris, Chardonnay, Riesling.
Doors open daily at eleven. The view handles the selling.
The quiet strides
Here is the thing about TrackTown. The records fall in about ten seconds, and that is what fills the stands.
What stays with you runs slower. A butte at dusk. A bridge you can only walk. A bakery raising its own beef. A hill somebody planted in 1978 and then waited on for years.
Lane County is full of those. None of them are in any rush, and neither should you be.
Around Eden is a multi-chapter journey through the Willamette Valley, produced in partnership with the Willamette Valley Visitors Association, Travel Salem, Eugene Cascades & Coast, Explore North Marion County, and Mt. Hood Territory.
