Hillsboro, OR
Owned by the Port of Portland and one of the busiest general aviation airports in the Pacific Northwest. Hillsboro Aero Academy operates the largest international flight school in the western United States from the field — Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and Vietnamese carriers send cadet classes here for ab initio training. The airport sits at the western edge of Portland's Silicon Forest, surrounded by Intel's Ronler Acres campus and Nike's world headquarters. Two parallel runways (13/31 at 6,600ft, 2/20 at 4,049ft), Class D, towered. Pattern traffic at HIO is often Cessna 172s in left-downwind while a Bombardier Global is on final — both belong, both work.
A 150-mile-long agricultural valley between the Coast Range and the Cascade Range — Oregon's heart, the destination of the Oregon Trail, and one of the world's most acclaimed cool-climate wine regions. The valley sits at the same latitude as Burgundy in France and produces Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Pinot Gris that regularly outscore French equivalents in blind tastings. The first commercial Pinot vines were planted at Eyrie Vineyards in 1965 by David Lett, who took home a top-tier place in the 1979 Gault-Millau Olympiad of Wine in Paris and put Oregon Pinot on the world map. Today the Willamette Valley AVA has 700+ wineries and 27,000 acres of vineyards, most clustered in the Dundee Hills and Eola-Amity Hills west of Salem.
Land at McMinnville and walk across the road to stand under the largest wingspan of any aircraft ever flown. The Hughes H-4 Hercules — the "Spruce Goose," though it's actually Duramold birch plywood, not spruce — was Howard Hughes's wartime answer to the U-boat: a flying boat big enough to carry troops across the Atlantic above the torpedoes. It was finished too late for the war, and it flew exactly once: November 2, 1947, Hughes himself at the controls, half a mile at 25 feet over Long Beach Harbor, about 30 seconds. Then he kept it in a climate-controlled hangar with a full maintenance crew until he died. Its 320-foot wingspan held the record for the widest aircraft ever flown until the Stratolaunch in 2019. After years beside the Queen Mary in Long Beach, it was barged up the coast and the Columbia and Willamette rivers in pieces and rebuilt here, opening to the public in 2001. The museum around it holds 150-plus aircraft and spacecraft, an SR-71 Blackbird, and a Titan II missile.
On May 18, 1980, St. Helens blew its north face off in the most destructive eruption in U.S. history, dropping the summit about 1,300 feet and leaving a horseshoe crater open to the north. Inside it a lava dome built through the 1980s and again from 2004 to 2008, wrapped by Crater Glacier, which formed after the eruption and is one of the youngest glaciers in North America. The Cowlitz people call it Lawetlat'la. It has been quiet since 2008.
The volcano that blew. May 18, 1980 at 8:32 AM Pacific time, after months of seismic warning, the north flank of Mount St. Helens collapsed in the largest landslide in recorded history, releasing a lateral blast that flattened 230 square miles of forest and killed 57 people. The eruption removed 1,300 feet of summit elevation. From the air today the crater is dramatic — a horseshoe gap open to the north, with a growing lava dome inside and Spirit Lake (now elevated 200 ft above its former level by debris) just north. Routinely visible from departures out of KPDX. The Johnston Ridge Observatory (named for volcanologist David Johnston, killed in the blast) is the eye-level ground perspective.