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.

Rasmus Petersen, a Dane who came to Oregon in 1900 and died here in 1952, loved rocks. To see what he managed to do with them as an artistic medium, you need to travel pretty much to the middle of nowhere — OK, a few miles outside of Redmond, Oregon — and drop in on Petersen Rock Garden, the delightful folly that Rasmus built.

Petersen’s four-acre home is run as something between an informal public park and a very low-key tourist attraction. There’s no one selling admission tickets; drop $3 a head in the box by the gift shop to cover the family’s costs.

Then wander, amid a handful of peacocks, around the incredibly weird estate, decorated with Rasmus’ strange houses, castles, and even a replica (apparently not by Rasmus himself) of the Statue of Liberty.

Almost anywhere else in the world this would be considered valuable folk art and protected; here it’s just part of the community. A must-see for anyone within 100 miles. Or more.