The gear, inelegant. The methods, crude. The hair, long. The pants, flared. The fun – full tilt. Bend’s “outdoor pioneers” transformed a region that would draw people from around the world with a thirst to explore the new. They were the founders of fun, Central Oregon’s original trailblazers.

Written by Cathy Carroll and Eric Flowers

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When it comes to describing Bend’s outdoor recreation, the world has nearly exhausted the superlatives. The trails, rivers, lakes and mountain slopes fuel the area’s rapid population growth and an economy supported by a half-billion dollars in annual tourism spending. While this may be a year-round playground, it was once just a working town with a view. Whether you’re a weekend warrior or a die-hard adrenaline junkie, you have others to thank for blazing the literal and proverbial trails that now define our region.

Our Outdoor Pioneers are still outside doing nearly every activity they founded decades ago, so if you run into them on the trails or at a local watering hole, say thanks and buy them a round. We owe them one.

Nordic Skiing at Mt. Bachelor

Native Minnesotan Bob Mathews had stayed on at St. Cloud State College through the Vietnam War, and with a degree in history, didn’t know what he wanted to do this life, so he hit the road. While helping some of his high school buddies move to Bend to work at Mt. Bachelor, he got a job teaching cross-country skiing there.

“Cross-country was an afterthought at that time, so I went to Bill (Healy, a co-founder of the Mt. Bachelor ski area) to make something out of it,” said Mathews. “I typed a one-page proposal, and he said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’ It was the right time and the right place, and he was an incredible guy to work for.”

That was in 1976, when there was just one small loop for cross-country skiing, and Mathews proposed a Nordic ski school separate from Mt. Bachelor’s alpine ski school. Mt. Bachelor began grooming a few cross-country skiing trails using one of its first snowmobiles. Just like that, the Mt. Bachelor Nordic Center was born, rooted in the spirit of camaraderie from a simpler, bygone era.

“Most of the people who worked up there were—I don’t know—ski bums,” said Mathews. “They hadn’t gone to college for ski area management, so people did a lot of on-the-job training. They were there for the moment, and they liked to ski. It was a fun place to work, the whole industry was in an upswing.”

Nordic Ski Camps and Races

Mathews and Bob Woodward ran Nordic ski camps and races, drawing hundreds of people. In 1978, the year Woodward had moved to Bend, he helped stage the Cascade Crest Marathon cross-country ski race from Mt. Bachelor to Little Lava Lake and back. Racers carried their own water with no aid stations in sight.

“It was a real wilderness cross-country race and spurred interest in long-distance racing,” said Woodward, “people showed up from Portland because it was the only groomed Nordic in the state. People went home saying Bachelor was a great place to go, and that Bend was cool.”

Woodward had moved to Bend two years after he and his wife, Eileen, had first visited and vowed to make the small logging town with a population of less than 18,000 their home. Working as a freelance sports writer and photographer, Woodward shared his passion for cross-country skiing by running a summer ski camp at Mt. Bachelor, a tradition he began during his first few months in Bend and carried on for the next fifteen years.

The geography-is-destiny quotient played out on a micro level as the Klister Korner gang, a group of Portland Avenue area denizens who took their nickname from a sticky cross-country ski wax,  generated interest in Nordic skiing, mountain biking and whitewater kayaking.

“It was natural synergy, with everybody loving and living to do all that stuff,” said Woodward. “We were exploring all the time, and there was always something new, someplace new to tour. Discovery was the key word, whether it was technique or things to do on the snow like snow camping.”

Designing Nordic Trails

As Mathews designed and cut out new Nordic trails, he paid homage to his compatriots, naming Oli’s Alley for Dennis Oliphant and Woody’s Way for Woodward. By the time Mathews left his position as director at the Nordic Center in 1992, the groomed trail network had expanded to fifty-six kilometers, with several hundred season-pass holders. 

“There was a real sense of a little community that was building these sports, and it was the key to why it lasted,” said Woodward, who at 76 still skis and bikes frequently. “We got involved, stayed involved and spread it around. I’m tickled to death that there’s so much interest in Nordic. The only thing that bothers me is that people take it so seriously now. We had the dress-up days and kept a sense of humor about it at all times,” he said. “We’d get serious a few times for races, and the rest of the time was always about the fun and camaraderie. When I raced mountain bikes as the Reverend Lester Polyester and Art Deco, there were people in town who would call me Art–‘Hey Art, how you doing!’ There was nudging and winking a jaundiced eye for anything too serious–everybody was in on the gag.”

These modern-day enthusiasts were building on the earlier roots of cross-country skiing in Central Oregon, established by those such as Virginia Meissner, a mountaineer, and Bend’s Nordic first lady. She began teaching cross-country skiing at Mt. Bachelor when the ski area opened in 1958.

“They would have to go out and break a trail because they didn’t have grooming equipment back then,” said her daughter, Jane Meissner of Bend. “They had a first-generation snowmobile and would drag a sled behind them with two boards to make ski tracks.”

Throughout the ’70s and ’80s, Virginia Meissner taught cross-country skiing through Central Oregon Community College. She was known for her patience, encouragement, passion for sharing her love of the outdoors and for her perennially tan face. In the early ’70s, Meissner helped form the Central Oregon Nordic Club and served as its president, developing Nordic trails at Swampy Lakes, Dutchman Flat and Vista Butte. After Meissner died in 1988, the U.S. Forest Service named the Virginia Meissner Sno-Park in her memory.

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Bend Mountain Biking

If there is a sport more firmly rooted in Bend’s DNA than mountain biking, it hasn’t yet been discovered. The sport has its international roots in Marin County, California, where bikers in the late ’60s and early ’70s were first experimenting with off-road riding. But Bend is the official birthplace of mountain biking in the Northwest, and the founders here needed no more inspiration than their own sense of exploration and some fat tires. 

Before Central Oregon became a world-class mountain biking destination, there was Phil Meglasson riding forest roads and deer paths on a second-hand mountain bike he got at an auction in Fossil.

Phil Meglasson

This true pioneer of mountain biking in Central Oregon, along with his friends (including Bob Woodward and Dennis Heater) began riding the area’s forests and deserts at the dawn of mountain bike manufacturing in the early ’80s. Phil’s Trail was originally called Double-Cut Tree Trail, for a tree halfway up the canyon, but as mountain biking began to take hold and the area gained popularity, the U.S. Forest Service started referring to the area as “Phil’s,” and the name stuck.

In those days there were no signs. No maps. Meglasson and Heater, who founded the area’s first mountain bike fraternity, took old logging and forest service roads wherever they led, veering off on game trails that served as the precursor to what is now the area’s legendary singletrack.

Phil’s Trail in Bend

“That’s how Phil’s Trail got started,” Heater said. “We’d follow it as far as we could and then we’d start bushwhacking.” The intrepid pioneers cobbled together spare parts to turn a Schwinn cruiser into an off-road cycle. This typically meant new handlebars, motorcycle grips and oversized tires. The tools were inelegant. The methods were crude. (Heater remembers using a two-by-four to pry open the frame of his Schwinn to accommodate the new fat tires.)

“We could name everybody in Bend who had cycling shorts–and they were wool.” said Dennis Oliphant. If bike shops didn’t know what to make of these DIY “dirt bombers” as they referred to themselves, neither did anyone else, including the Forest Service, whose timberlands were quickly becoming the playground for the pioneering bikers.

“We wanted to go where no other bicycles had gone,” Heater said. “Back in the early days before the wilderness was closed (to bikes) we rode around the base of the Three Sisters in a single day. Talk about a gnarly ride.”

A Vietnam veteran with thick muscled arms, Heater grew up around Gilchrist riding his bike down gravel roads to reach fishing holes at Wickiup Reservoir. After losing his job in Southern California in the ’70s, Heater returned to Central Oregon. He started mountain biking shortly thereafter because he “couldn’t throw his motocross bike over a fence.”

A gregarious guy with a penchant for adventure, Heater organized group rides and off-road biking events around Central Oregon. He founded the Black Rock Club with a dozen other dirt bombers and a box of black T-shirts with no sleeves, printed with the club name.

“When it came to trails, it was Phil. When it came to fun it was Heater,” Woodward said.

The Grit of New Trails

What the early adopters lacked in gear, they made up for in sheer grit. They rode Waldo Lake, made the first mountain bike trip up Burma Road Trail at Smith Rock and cut the heart of the trail system west of town. Other things were done, well, just because. That includes Gary Bonacker’s seminal descent of Mt. Bachelor with Tim Boyle and Don Ipock.

Armed with lightly modified cruiser bikes outfitted with coaster brakes, the trio hiked their steel frames up undeveloped summit slopes. It was October of 1976, nearly two decades before most people would even hear the term mountain biking.

A speed record may have been set, but never recorded. It was a different time. It wasn’t about conquering the mountain, it was about proving to themselves and maybe a few naysayers that it could be done. “Every one of the sports, it was uncharted water. It was new to here,” Woodward said.

Bonacker recalls training on Tumalo Mountain for the planned first descent of Mt. Bachelor. It wasn’t unusual for the group to run into the occasional hiker on the trail. At the time, the notion of bikes on sub-alpine trails was so unprecedented that the hikers would look at them as if they were from another planet. Bonacker and his merry band of bikers may have appeared fanatics and freaks to the outside world. But they never questioned the logic. “It was there. We needed to do it,” he said.

Closing in on 70 years old, Heater looks with awe at what the sport has become. From its humble beginnings, an entire industry and way of life that is now integral to Bend has grown. Dennis is still a regular trail rider, and the sport has a great future, in large part because of its storied past.

“I’m shocked that a few people have noticed that I was part of that gang that started it all,” he said. “And I think that’s a pretty good badge. I can’t think of another sport that I’d want to promote as much as mountain biking.”

Read more about these same trails today. Our complete guide to mountain biking here.

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Bend Whitewater Rafting

Look around today and signs of river culture are everywhere in Bend. The region’s primary export, Deschutes Beer, takes its name from the river that cuts through downtown. A newly minted whitewater play park opened this past fall–the crown jewel of a paddle trail that stretches from the high lakes around Mt. Bachelor to Bend.

It wasn’t always so.

Back in the 1970s, the Deschutes River was still the lifeblood of agriculture and industry. Recreation was an afterthought. That all changed in the 1970s with the Klister Korner gang. The tightly knit group included Bob Woodward, Gary Bonacker and Dennis Oliphant who, together with a larger group of friends, started breaking down the boundaries. The approach was the same they would also take with mountain biking, substituting cheap kayaks and Army surplus rafts for their Schwinn Torpedos.

Together the group with its rotating cast of characters, including Woodward who had brought some whitewater experience and a passion for exploration, made the first kayak trips down the lower Crooked River, at that time a largely uncharted area filled with technical water and ever-changing obstacles thanks to its flood-and-drought regimen.

The group tamed Big Eddy, setting the stage for Oliphant to launch a rafting business out of the Inn of the Seventh Mountain (now Seventh Mountain Resort). He parlayed that into Sun Country Tours, the region’s premier river-guiding business.

Oliphant had arrived in Bend in the winter of 1977, fresh out of college at the University of Oregon, for a recreation management internship at the Inn of the Seventh Mountain. During that internship, Oliphant proposed and drafted a budget for a program to do rafting excursions on the Deschutes River. Commercial rafting was in its fledgling stage in those days. Cobbling together Army surplus rafts and learning from trial and error, Oliphant and the other program employees brought 4,000 people down the river that first summer.

“We certainly weren’t all-stars, but we were adventuresome enough and maybe a little crazy,” said Oliphant, whose company guided its millionth guest down the river last summer.  

When Oliphant and his running mates weren’t guiding, they were exploring and pushing untested boundaries. As usual, Woodward wasn’t far from the action.

Home Base for Paddlers

A reformed outdoor retailer-turned-adventure writer and photographer, Woodward used his industry contacts to wrangle at a super discount an entire truckload of Hollowform kayaks in 1979. They arrived on the back of a flatbed truck outside of Sunnyside Sports, one of only two shops on Bend’s west side and a gathering place for the area’s early outdoor adventure addicts.

Oliphant recalled hawking the novel, thirteen-foot (and one-inch) plastic boats around town. It didn’t take long for the idea to catch on. “It was like instant kayak community,” he said.

The group made their paddling home base at First Street Rapids, where Woodward taught Bonacker and others the basics, including how to roll a boat. “First Street was like a clubhouse,” said Bonacker, who sharpened his skills on the small wave that still attracts kayakers almost four decades later.

The First Documented Run of the Deschutes River

It wasn’t long before the ragtag group was adding more firsts to their growing list of outdoor exploits. Woodward and several others made the first documented nonstop run of the Deschutes from the Riverhouse to Tumalo State Park. It took two attempts and a small log removal project. Two weeks later, Oliphant would join them on the same run.

Soon they were venturing out of Central Oregon down the Klamath River, where they took on the expert-rated stretch below the John C. Boyle Dam at full high-water stage. It was on this stretch where Bonacker, who has lived twelve years with brain cancer and still bikes to work, had a near-death experience.

Bonacker recalls that he had attempted to “wet exit” his boat, dubbed “Fidel” for its brown, cigar-like profile, in a powerful eddy. Rather than slide out of the river’s hydraulic current as he had planned, he was recirculated. It ripped off his boat’s spray skirt–and his shoes. Unable to swim out, Bonacker was pulled down.

He remembers struggling, then, finally, relaxing. A single thought popped into his mind: the headline of tomorrow’s paper, “Bend Man Drowns.” It was then that he looked up and saw the white paint on the top of his boat. Energized, he struggled up through the current and poked his head into the inverted seat hole of the craft and the awaiting pocket of air. He was rewarded with his first breath in what felt like hours. Steadied, he maneuvered the upside-down boat out of the eddy to safety. The rest of the day brought multiple portages around the remaining rapids, and Bonacker’s nerves frayed.

His eyes are bright, soft and kind. His salt-and-pepper hair neatly combed. His skin is freshly tanned thanks to a two-week late winter stay in Baja, Mexico. His arms, however, are thin. He acknowledges that his kayak rolling days are over. Living with cancer for more than a decade, Bonacker has learned to accept some limitations even as he defies his doctors’ expectations.

Some of the risk-taking in his earlier years he chalks up to youth and ignorance. But he has no regrets. “If you start thinking about the “what ifs,” you’re probably done kayaking,” he quipped.

More than thirty years later, he’s still paddling, looking for the next adventure. Cancer be damned.

Read more about white water kayaking around Central Oregon today.

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Rock Climbing at Smith Rock

During the 1950s, Jack Watts and fellow Madras residents Jim and Jerry Ramsey started climbing at Smith Rock, putting up dozens of first ascents before it became a state park. Two decades later, Watts’ son, Alan, began climbing at age 14 with high school buddies. It was an inauspicious start to the birth of American sport climbing. Clad in the neon-colored lycra of the day, he–and Smith Rock’s standard-setting sheer canyon walls–would become world famous.

“The biggest obstacle I faced at the start was that almost no one climbed,” Watts said. “Developing the climbing at Smith Rock was not something that a young man should be doing with his life. My mom, in particular, was intensely concerned. Part of her concern was practical—I might very well kill myself pursuing my dream, but just as concerning for her was the fact that climbing wasn’t what normal young men did with their lives. Something must be wrong with me. Much like ski bums and surf bums, I was a climbing bum, more an outcast from society than a part of it.”

In 1979, traditional climbing was still the norm and sport climbing was controversial (people chopped off bolts in rock walls and got into fistfights). On top of this, Smith’s soft, crumbly volcanic rock is not the typical surface sought by climbers. Watts, however, having honed his rock climbing skills near Eugene during college, was drawn to the possibilities for the towering walls and textured spires.

“I spent so much time at Smith, I started noticing all of these unclimbed routes,” he said. “Almost everything done before 1980 followed a line up one of the natural crack systems splitting the walls. Once I started doing new routes at Smith Rock, it became apparent that traditional climbing tactics (used at Smith Rock and throughout the U.S.) wouldn’t work. I couldn’t just start from the ground and climb to the top. There was no way to protect myself in case I fell, and the rock was often dangerously loose.”

Rather than creating climbing routes from the ground up, Watts began bolting them by rappelling from the top of the wall to get a closer look at whether a route was possible, then drilling into the wall to place permanent bolts. Unbeknownst to Watts, this method of establishing climbing routes was catching on in Europe, but it was still relatively unheard of in the U.S. As a result, Watts took Smith Rock and American rock climbing to a new level.

Thanks to Watts, Smith Rock is now known as the birthplace of American sport climbing and attracts top climbers from all over the world. One classic route, Chain Reaction, became the most photographed route in the ’80s and helped spread the love for sport climbing around the globe. In 1986, the route To Bolt or Not to Be became America’s first 5.14 route and remains one of the hardest routes to this day. The origins of indoor climbing also can be traced to Smith Rock. 

The Guidebook, Rock Climbing Smith Rock State Park

In 1992, Watts created the guidebook, Rock Climbing Smith Rock State Park, which endures as the premier rock climbing resource for the park. For him, the best moments were before the rest of the world discovered Smith Rock climbing. 

“I wasn’t the only one who saw the potential of Smith Rock, and together we unlocked the potential,” he said. “At most there were a dozen of us, all living in Bend, who transformed Smith Rock into a world-class climbing area. The most fun came from hanging out with these incredible, inspiring, fun-loving individuals, sharing the dream. It became obvious after a few years that our approach was working tremendously well, and we knew that someday the rest of the climbing world would have to take notice.”

Watts was waiting in line at Jackson’s Corner in Bend a few months ago when he ran into an old friend and chatted for a moment until it was Watts’ turn to order. “In the background I quietly heard him mention to his female partner ‘He’s the one who developed climbing at Smith Rock.’ And I heard her quiet reply, ‘He must feel horrible about what he did.’”

When Watts goes to Smith Rock on a sunny day in peak season, and there’s no parking for a half-mile before the park entrance, he understands her point and shares her frustration. “But I recognize that I’m not to blame,” he said. “The discovery of the climbing potential at Smith Rock was inevitable. If I had never been born, someone else would have done the same thing.”  

Through the Eyes of Alan Watts

But despite the massive growth throughout Central Oregon’s outdoor playgrounds, Watts considers the environment remarkably well preserved. “There are still days when you can be enjoying Nordic trails at Mt. Bachelor almost alone, or riding or running on Phil’s Trail when few other people are out there,” he said. “I still go to Smith Rock from time to time and find myself alone.”

Some areas have barely changed from the early days, he added. On a sunny day in August, hundreds of people will climb South Sister, while just a few will stand atop North Sister. “We are blessed with the vastness of our outdoor recreation options … each one of us has the responsibility to treat these special places kindly, so that future generations can enjoy the same experience as the pioneers.”

 

Photos From the Early Days of Bend’s Outdoor Scene:

 

 This article was originally published April 2016. Read more about our vibrant community and Central Oregon heritage articles.

 

How a handful of citizens saved the High Desert from becoming another American news desert. (Pictured left to right: Bill Smith, Amy Tykeson, Louis Capozzi, Mike Hollern, Todd Taylor)

Amid cardboard moving boxes in her new office at The Bulletin, Publisher Heidi Wright takes a book from the sparsely filled shelves. It’s Saving Community Journalism: The Path to Profitability, by Penelope Muse Abernathy. The veteran media executive’s distillation of cutting-edge research and analysis reveals how newspapers can transform and find long-term profitability in the digital age. Wright’s notes, handwritten in fine-tipped black marker, fill the margins of the acclaimed study on shedding legacy costs, building a vibrant, multi-platform community and identifying new revenue streams.

Tucked inside the hardcover’s jacket were Wright’s talking points for potential investors — strategies outlining how her employer, EO Media Group, could rescue Central Oregon’s struggling daily newspaper, which had spent the past several years fending off creditors. By mid-2019, The Bulletin was facing the prospect of a court-administered sale to the highest bidder as part of a prolonged bankruptcy proceeding. It was the most uncertain time in the history of the paper that started in a log cabin near the Deschutes River 116 years ago. It had survived two World Wars, the Great Depression and the 2009 Wall Street collapse. Now it was on the auction block.

With a July 29 deadline approaching, two companies emerged as suitors, Tennessee-based Adams Publishing Group and Rhode Island Suburban Newspapers. A winning bid by either would mean that new owners with no other ties to the area would make editorial and business decisions. If either followed the playbook used by other corporate chains, Bend could expect a reduction in news-gathering resources and other cost-cutting measures aimed at boosting the paper’s bottom line while eroding its reporting.

But over the course of four days last summer, seven community leaders and two local foundations intervened with the hope of preserving the paper’s commitment to reliable, local journalism. They found a partner in Wright and EO Media, a family-owned newspaper company with more than 100 years of publishing experience in Oregon. They pooled about $1 million toward EO Media Group’s winning, $3.6 million bid for The Bulletin and the weekly Redmond Spokesman.

For those following the bankruptcy and sale, it wasn’t immediately clear who had stepped in to help EO Media with its winning bid. But in the days and weeks after the sale, a list of names began to emerge. It read like a who’s who of Bend business and philanthropy: The Tykeson Foundation, the Hollern family, the Taylors, Bill Smith, and others. Each of them made a different contribution, but they all shared one thing in common: a belief that a strong, locally controlled paper was critical to the political and intellectual health of a community that they love.

“People truly want to know, to be educated about issues, whether it’s the school bonds or healthcare, and I don’t know you’re going to get that from a non-local news source,” said Todd Taylor, who, with his wife, Lorri, runs Taylor Northwest construction and development. 

The Search for a Suitor 

To understand The Bulletin’s unlikely sale to a relatively small, Oregon family-run publishing company, you need to know how problems get solved in Bend. They get solved when conversations among friends inspire action. They get solved the same way they did, fifty years ago when parks official Vince Genna got tired of asking of his bosses at the city for more ballfields and instead asked his construction buddies to help him start building them. The result was a parks’ building boom.

This time, though, there was more at stake than a baseball diamond. The Bulletin is perhaps the primary news source in the tri-county area and one of the few outlets covering everything from sports’ scores to school bonds, to bills in the state capital.

As news broke that distant corporate entities might buy The Bulletin, it sparked conversations among community leaders. Louis Capozzi, a Bend resident and member of the Bend 2030 community visioning organization, was one of the first to contemplate a community-based solution. Capozzi, who also teaches in the Strategic Communication master’s program at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication in Portland, asked the dean, his longtime friend Juan-Carlos Molleda, about media businesses in the state that might want to buy The Bulletin with help from the community.

“He introduced me to nine in the state, and I couldn’t get a bite,” Capozzi said. “They either thought it was a bad investment or they had no resources, so I got a little discouraged.”

When Capozzi heard Oregon Public Broadcasting report a new potential bidder, EO Media in Salem, he called Wright.

“It was extremely uplifting,” he said. Wright pointed him to Saving Community Journalism. “I saw the quote on the flap from Dr. (Ron) Heifetz, at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government that describes a good newspaper as ‘an anchor’ because it ‘reminds a community every day of its collective identity, the stake we have in one another and the lessons of our history.’ And I thought, well that’s singing my tune.’”

Capozzi introduced Wright to Mike Hollern, Brooks Resources chairman, who helped oversee the transformation of the Brooks Scanlon sawmill into the land development company Brooks Resources. Hollern’s vision is woven throughout the community, from education and economic development to transportation and cultural resources.

Mobilizing the Troops 

Hollern said he wasn’t expecting much to come of his meeting with Wright. “But, I ended up being very impressed with her background, the whole Forrester family, the Aldriches, (EO Media owners) going back a hundred years, and what they’ve done in Oregon,” he said. “To me, it was so clearly a desirable outcome for The Bulletin to be in their hands. They’d arranged a loan from their longtime bank for the basic purchase,” said Hollern.

What they didn’t know is if it would be enough to secure the winning bid at auction.

He told them he’d like to help with that. Kirk Schueler, Brooks Resources president and CEO, quickly contacted fellow trustees of The Bend Foundation, which is funded in part by Brooks Resources. It was created in 1947 to assist injured loggers and mill workers, and to award scholarships to industry workers.

The foundation typically gives grants to local social services, arts, culture and education nonprofits, and invests in traditional equity and debt markets. Its loan to EO Media was a rare foray into social investing, which considers both financial return and positive societal benefits, said Schueler.

“It’s unconventional, but the scale was appropriate, not a vast amount,” he said. “They may not pay it all back, but there’s the expectation that they will.”

Another investor, former BendBroadband CEO Amy Tykeson, said she wanted to prevent what happened to The Register-Guard in Eugene, which lost much of its local news coverage after it was acquired by New Media/GateHouse. The company is one of the large investment groups aggressively seizing newspapers at bargain rates in small and mid-sized markets across the nation.

Next to join the party was Jay Bowerman, son of Nike co-founder and University of Oregon track legend Bill Bowerman. His participation was symbolic and significant.

“He’s a very quiet, private guy, so I was surprised,” Hollern said. “But he and (Bowerman’s wife) Teresa are also very good citizens.”

Bowerman, an independent field biologist who led the Sunriver Nature Center & Observatory for two decades, seems more comfortable doing amphibian ecology research, wiring frogs with tiny radios at 7,000 feet on Broken Top, than being quoted in news articles. “But I’ve always maintained a personal commitment to be honest with members of the media,” Bowerman said, adding that the open flow of accurate information benefits the community.

The Right Fit

Bowerman had met Capozzi at an OPB event in Bend last year and had kept in touch on issues of interest. When he’d heard from Capozzi about the support for EO Media, Bowerman met with Wright and some of her team. “I came away with the sense that this was something that needed to be done,” said Bowerman. 

He cited the Oregon roots of the Forresters, the family that owns EO Media Group. There was also a personal connection. Mike Forrester, former editor of the East Oregonian, ran track at the University of Oregon under his father. Bowerman quoted Charles Samuel Jackson, who bought the East Oregonian in Pendleton in 1882, and led it to become a respected, influential daily before it became a cornerstone of EO Media. Jackson said, “Print the truth. Fight for the right. People like a fighting newspaper.”

The tone is similar to that of Robert W. Chandler, the gruff, philanthropic owner and editor of The Bulletin. He was considered one of the nation’s most prominent small-town newspaper leaders. After buying the paper in 1953, he gradually expanded his newspaper holdings. By the time he died in 1996, he’d founded Western Communications, which had 300 employees among seven newspapers, five in Oregon, and two in California. 

Throughout the latter half of Chandler’s tenure, Bill Smith was helping shape Central Oregon’s evolution from timber outpost to outdoor mecca with Brooks Resources and development projects such as the Old Mill District. Having known the Chandlers for nearly five decades, he heard about EO Media going up against far-flung bidders and was the first equity investor. 

“I think I’m going to make money, but… it was the local paper, that’s why I did it. Bend is Bend because we have a lot of [great] things here, including the luxury of having a local newspaper with local reporting,” said Smith. Having local news is only a luxury if it’s credible. To that end, all of the investors agreed they’ll have no editorial control.  

Keep Investing

Observers say that whatever happens in the future, it’s significant that community members took a stand here for their local paper. 

Abernathy, who has written three follow-up reports expanding on her research in “Saving Community Journalism,” has spent the last decade documenting the shifting news landscape. That work includes evaluating the threat of “news deserts,” rural or urban communities with limited “credible, comprehensive news and information that feeds democracy at the grassroots level.” Her team at the University of North Carolina’s Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media has collected, researched and analyzed more than a decade of data about the state of U.S. newspapers and monitors it with a database of more than 9,000 of them. Their 2018 report, “The Expanding News Desert,” delves deeper into the implications for communities at risk of losing their primary source of credible news.

Abernathy could think of only two other such instances where a community stepped in to save a paper, once in Virginia in 2016 and in Santa Rosa, Calif. in 2012.

Investors noted that along with its storied history in Oregon, EO Media has journalistic resources and partnerships across the state. That includes a wealth of innovative strategies for digital engagement and senior management committed to being active in the community. The outlook for the bottom line is brighter, too. EO Media won’t bear the burden of Western Communications’ roughly $30 million in debt associated with the Chandler Avenue building. 

Though rightly concerned about liabilities, investors were also keen to hear about opportunities. They listened to Wright’s vision for navigating strategies in the digital age while leveraging partnerships to produce news that feeds democracy at the state and local levels. Profitability hinges on measuring how audiences engage with the content and each other, said Wright, who’s looking at how digital subscriptions and membership models might best serve their audience. 

For example, multi-tiered membership could have a community activist or community supporter level, which would allow you to convene online meetings and conversations around community topics. “I think that would fit well for Bend because Bend is so passionate,” said Wright, who lived here from 2014 to 2017 when she was chief financial officer for The Bulletin’s parent company, Western Communications.

Despite The Bulletin’s struggles, there is plenty to build upon, Wright said. EO Media’s paid print and digital circulation, including The Bulletin and Spokesman is about 66,000 and has more than two million web page views per month, she said. Oregon Capital Insider, a weekly newsletter, launched in 2014 with Pamplin Media in the face of declining statehouse coverage across the U.S., has nearly 100,000 opt-in subscribers. EO Media, including Central Oregon Media Group, the holding company for The Bulletin and Spokesman, has seventeen daily, weekly, bi-weekly and monthly publications across the state and one on the southern Washington coast. 

Abernathy said the investors’ move is an important first step. To grow, owners need to invest in the business and news operations to attract digital advertisers and readers. This long-term strategy requires owners to have faith in the future, the paper’s mission, and endurance in the face of inevitable monthly and yearly financial fluctuations.

“One thing that’s historically true with media companies and acquisitions is that they fail if they do not … invest to transform the business,” she said. “You really need the capital. Transformation is never a [smooth] process. You’ve got to know when to push on and when to pull the plug, and not live on the razor-thin edge of available capital.”

It appears the investors may have the wherewithal for the long game. Smith didn’t flinch. “I’ll hold up my hand again and invest again,” he said. “I put in some money with the expectation that I would not put in any more, and I hope the enterprise works, but if I misjudged that they’d go in and turn it around, I’m not going to orphan the initial investment because they did not deliver.” 

Though challenges remain, Wright is confident that there is a place for newspapers in America, no matter what form they take, and a home for The Bulletin in Bend. 

“We reach a lot of people, and still we keep talking about the death of newspapers, and it’s like we have more audience than anyone, and I think we can grow it still,” said Wright.

Editor’s Note: This article was published by Bend Magazine in November 2019.