The Real Oregon

We don’t know whether it’s the two-headed calf, the delicious patty melts or the 21 stillborn fawns that are stuffed and mounted along the walls — but we love this place.

The Mohawk Restaurant & Lounge in Crescent — that’s right where Highway 58 from Willamette Pass runs into Highway 97 — has been there since the mid 1930s. Somewhere along the line they started collecting taxidermy. Then people started bringing them dead animals. No one apparently knew when to quit.

The result is a marvelously over the top collection of dead fauna, from native Oregon deer (all those babies’ mothers were road kills, the menu points out, presumably along the highway out front) and a bobcat, to more foreign critters.

Also proudly displayed are about a billion of those cheesy old whiskey bottles. How good does it get?

Oh yeah — the food’s great, too.

Put simply, Oregon is berry heaven. Those cool rainy winters, those warm, dry summers and the abundance of ground up tree bark to use as an acidic mulch all make this a great berry growing state.

Oregonians of a certain age practically all remember — usually fondly — picking strawberries to make money during childhood summers here.

But there’s plenty more than strawberries — which are just about in their prime in the Willamette Valley — in those berry patches. Blueberries are just coming on; raspberries can’t be far behind.

Wild berries abound. Blackberries are so common they’re considered a pest, except during those perfect days in August when you can pick them for free in just about any rural roadside ditch. Huckleberries and salmon berries are in mountain forests.

If you don’t happen to know someone with a berry patch where you can pick for free, the U-pick industry is ready for you. That means a commercial berry farm where you can pick a few pounds or a few flats of berries for a fee that’s much cheaper than buying them in the store — and much more fun.

Find a U pick farm in Oregon at pickyourown.org.