Winter 2019-20
During the first summer I spent in the Gorge, back in the early 1990s, I met some fellow windsurfers who were living in Bingen. I assumed they had rented a house there. But at some point around mid-summer they invited me to stop by and it turned out they were staying at the Bingen School Inn. They shared a (messy) dorm-style room at the hostel, which still had a lot of memorabilia around from its decades as the school for Bingen and White Salmon. I found it weirdly cool. We mostly hung around outside, sitting at the picnic tables in the afternoon sun, and I ended up there several more times that summer.
Well, a lot has changed since then. The old school was bought in 2017 and the new owners, who previously turned a defunct building in Portland’s Old Town into a popular hotel, brought their hybrid hotel-hostel vision to the Gorge (page 14). The Society Hotel Bingen opened last Memorial Day Weekend and the buzz it’s generated is well-deserved. The renovation kept much of the feel of the old school — lockers in the hallway, old chalkboards, the gym and its built-in bleachers — while simultaneously turning it into a hip destination. When I go there now, instead of sitting at the picnic tables (still there, on a welcoming patio near the entry), I gravitate to the lobby library, where books line an entire wall surrounding the fireplace, complete with their Dewey decimal system catalog numbers. Everything old is new again here, and the things that are new fit tastefully in to this Bingen gem.
We found some other gems around the Gorge. The National Neon Sign Museum in The Dalles is something you may not know about, but should (page 12). Founder David Benko, who has been collecting signs since he was a teenager, has turned the former Elks Lodge building into a fascinating trip through more than a century of Americana. It’s a true visual feast.
Another gem is Dyana Fiediga’s Clay Commons pottery studio in Hood River (page 26), which fosters an ever-growing community of potters who learn, laugh, discuss, teach, befriend, and sometimes just quietly listen, while creating with clay. Yet another gem: the Sense of Place lecture series put on by Gorge Owned, which celebrates its 10th season this year (page 54).
David Hanson’s feature on clean energy in the Gorge (page 44) is a must-read. He looks at some intriguing, and sometimes controversial, projects and proposals happening here that are leveraging our region’s gifts from nature with technology to take us into the future of energy.
You’ll find plenty of good reads and visual fun in this issue. It’s our mission and we take it seriously. That’s why we were gratified to win several awards at this fall’s Pacific NW Magazine Group Contest, including top honors for Best Writing, and second place for Best Overall Design. We love bringing Gorge stories to you in these pages each season. Thanks for reading. Have a great winter!
—Janet Cook, Editor
