Best Towns 2007, Bend, Oregon!!

Well we made it in the August 2007 issue of Outside magazine's best towns of 2007! Bend, Oregon with a population close to 80,000 actual, Outside gave us 67,152. An average commute time of just 16 minutes, my commute is more like 5 minutes. A median income of $29,853 and median home price of $351,978. Our largest employeers are St. Charles Medical Center with 2,063 employees, next is Les Schwab Tire Center with 1,500 and finally Sunriver Resort with 870 employees in the summer! Not bad for our little dog town. It looks as though 49% of Bend residents have a dog, I included! Lets see what else Outside magazine has to tell the nation about our town. Every place has its season-when living there makes you feel blessed. In Bend, one of the country's fastest-growing cities, the showcase season happens to be, well, all of them. Take a midsummer night. It's light until nearly 9:30 pm, plenty of time to lob woolly buggers into crisp holes on the Deschutes River after work or hop on a bike to catch Beck at the amphitheater. You can ski through May (July with Skins) and mountain-bike all year. Some 2.5 million acres of wilderness surround the city; 10,000 foot volcanoes dominate the skyline. Bend's heritage as a flanel-and-jeans lumber town is less in evidence these days. The Old Mill District now hosts an REI, and the locals include surf icon Gerry Lopez (who came for the snowboarding) and mountaineer Steve House. Bend even has its own brand of diversity: The town's signature race-the Pole Peddle Paddle, held in May-requires skiing, biking, running, paddling, and more running for 30-some miles from the top of Mt Bachelor into town, where everyone then drinks beer. And there's a lot of good beer: Five breweries for 67,000 people, plus swanky restaurants, art walks, and film festivals. But the town still has its bowling leagues, muddy pickup trucks, and chatty barbers on Bond Street (who also serve you beer during your trim). Best of all, being on the dry side of the Cascades, where the evergreen forest bumps into high-desert sage, Benders have all the fun of the Pacific Northwest without the rain. They bike-commute year-round on 51 miles of urban trails, take weekend trips to surf storm swells banging into the coast, and pick up fresh salmon at the farmer's market. No wonder someone moves here every two hours. The article goes on to talk about other local towns that contribute to our area's profile. Included is Ashland, Oregon for it's great weather and Shakespeare festival. And of course Portland, Oregon for it's excellent mass transit, anti-sprawl development, its 14 year long greenhouse gas curbing policies, and its 239 city parks, including 5,000 acre Forest Park, the largest urban park in the U.S. To read the complete article go out and buy Outside Magazine's August 2007 issue.