McMinnville, OR
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.
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.
Oregon's tallest peak at 11,249 feet — a stratovolcano 50 miles east of Portland, visible from the city on every clear day. Mount Hood is the second-most-climbed mountain in the world after Japan's Mount Fuji, with about 10,000 summit attempts per year. The last confirmed eruption was around 1865, though steam venting from Crater Rock continues. Timberline Lodge, built in 1936-1938 as a WPA project at 6,000ft on the south flank, is a National Historic Landmark and was used as the exterior of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. Timberline ski area on the south side runs year-round on the Palmer Glacier — one of the only summer ski operations in North America. From the air, Mount Hood's symmetric cone is the most distinctive feature on the Oregon side of the Cascade crest.
A 682-foot basalt butte in downtown Eugene, named for Eugene Skinner (the city's founder, who built his 1846 cabin at its base). Now a city park with a paved road to the summit, a basalt-column climbing wall, and a flagpole that's been a Eugene landmark since 1859. The view from the top covers the entire central city — campus, downtown, the Willamette River — and on clear days the Coast Range to the west. The butte's northeast side is a columnar basalt outcrop popular with local climbers; the city built a maintained climbing wall there in the 1990s.