Summer 2015
When I first came to the Gorge in the early 1990s, windsurfing was king. It was the reason I was here, and the same went for many of the people I knew. Seems silly now, but I couldn’t imagine there being a need—much less desire—for anything else. Now and then we’d see that guy with his weird kite thingy on water skis flying by us on a downwinder. What a flash in the pan, we thought. (Turned out that was Cory Roeseler, the godfather of kiteboarding, on one of his early prototypes.) The same went for other aspects of life in the Gorge. Restaurants? There were about two of them. Brewpubs? A couple. Wineries? I recall one. And for help with my cutting edge Macintosh PowerBook 100 with two megabytes of memory? Well now, there was ComputerLand, located in the Hood River Heights.
Thankfully, the Gorge is a much more well-rounded place today. So much so that’s it’s almost hard to imagine what things were like a mere 20 to 25 years ago. As we were putting this issue together, it struck me that our line-up of stories highlights the incredible diversity of activities, businesses, culture, home-grown products and interesting people in our beautiful Gorge.
Take paragliding, which is enjoying a resurgence in the area despite the challenging conditions (page 54). And there’s Aquaglide, a White Salmon business that has grown to become a worldwide leader in inflatable waterparks (page 18). A boom in high tech companies, led by those in the aerospace industry, has made a notable impact on the economy of the Gorge (page 64). A group of volunteers has been working tirelessly to maintain trails in a portion of the Mt. Hood National Forest for 25 years (page 82). Those people you see out on the river doing yoga on SUP boards are on to something, and also they’re getting a good core workout (page 88). Craft distilleries are coming into their own here (page 30). And a native son of the Gorge, Ethan Radcliffe, is coloring our communities with his considerable artistic talent (page 84).
Whew. That’s far from everything in this issue, but it makes my head spin a little. In a good way. I have many fond memories from my first years in the Gorge, but I love this place today, with all its abundance. It makes me wonder what the next 20 years will bring.
