A Week in Silverton, Oregon

We’re spending a week at Silver Spur RV Park in Silverton, OR because it was about the only place we could find that had a vacancy. Luckily it turned out to be a very nice RV park, with well-spaced sites and great bathrooms and laundry. It’s a bit closer to the highway than we like, but the location is good, about a mile from Silverton and 12 miles from Salem, and we’ve found plenty to do in the area.

It was in the upper 80s when we arrived on Wednesday, but we had clouds and 60s on Thursday, so we took advantage of the weather and washed the car and the Lazy Daze. I didn’t see anything in the park rules about not washing vehicles, so I called the office and was told it was fine, but that the water was hard and would leave spots. It took us most of the day, but we finally got all the salt water film cleaned off both vehicles and the bikes. With it being overcast we were able to chamois off the water before it spotted up.

That evening we went to downtown Silverton to walk around the historic district and check out a brewery. It’s a very cute town on Silver Creek, and the downtown is full of restaurants, bars, antique and other shops, and lovely old restored houses on tree-lined streets. Murals abound on many of the old buildings.

My favorite was this elaborate wall with the story of Silverton Bob, a Scotch collie that got lost on a family road trip in the 1920s, then somehow traveled 2,551 miles from Indiana to his family’s home in Silverton.

We stopped at Silver Falls Brewery for a beer and discovered the Old Oak Oven just across the street.

You order from this old food cart, and can take it to the brewery to eat with your beer. Doesn’t look like much but the pizza was great.

And right next door to the pizza cart is The Lucky Leaf marijuana dispensary. Beer, pot and pizza all within just a few steps of each other. You have to love Oregon!

I liked this sign on the brewery’s bathroom door.

On Friday we drove 15 miles to Silver Falls State Park for a hike. We actually stayed at the state park campground for a couple nights back in July of 2014 and hiked the Trail of Ten Falls, but since it’s the only real hiking in the area and a beautiful park we decided to do it again. We only made it to nine of the ten falls the last time because Jim lost his sunglasses and we turned back to try and find them, so this time we started from the north side of the park to pick up the one we missed, Upper North Falls.

North Falls is nice because you can walk behind it, where we sat on a bench and had lunch.

You can also walk behind Middle North Falls.

Even where there are no named falls, the scenery on the trail is lovely.

I won’t bore you with photos of the rest of the falls. A few of them had very little water since it’s been such a dry summer, but it was a good 6 mile hike and we made it to eight of the ten falls this time so we have now seen them all. Silver Falls is a popular park but the entire loop around is almost nine miles with multiple starting points so people are spread out and it doesn’t feel crowded.

The next day we went to Salem to check out the Saturday Market, where we picked up some produce and had vegan paella and a marionberry sweet roll while listening to this interesting string band, Wild Hog In The Woods.

Can’t escape political commentary even at a farmer’s market.

We brought our bikes so we could ride from Riverfront Park across the bridge over the Willamette River to Minto-Brown Island Park, where there are 29 miles of paved and dirt trails for walking and biking. What we didn’t realize was there was some kind of festival taking place so we hit a traffic jam in the parking at Riverfront Park. I rerouted us across the river in the car to what I thought was the park we wanted but it turned out to be the wrong one. It worked out okay though since we were able to cross the Union Street Railroad Bridge, which is a pedestrian/bike only bridge that took us back to Riverfront Park where we weaved through the festival to get the other bridge.

Union Street Railroad Bridge.

Willamette Queen sternwheeler.

Trying to get through the crowds of people was entertaining but we managed without incident and made it to the Minto Island Bridge, which just opened up about a year ago.

Views from the bridge.

The bridge and downtown Salem from Minto Island.

I failed to take any photos while we were riding around the island but it was a mixture open meadows like in the above photo, along with forested areas and a couple miles along the river. Very scenic and flat riding on both paved and dirt trails, and not many other people.

Today we walked around Silverton and just had to see what was going on at the Homer Davenport Community Festival, which started Friday. Homer was a political cartoonist from Silverton who is honored with this festival every year, which includes a parade, craft fair, food court, cartoon contest, and the event which appealed to us the most, couch (aka davenport) races. We had no idea how they would get couches to race, but we found out. Silly fun!

After the races we walked to the other brewery for lunch, Seven Brides, where we had a spent grain black bean burger, a good IPA and a summer saison. We were surprised that for a town of only 9,500 people Silverton has two breweries, but we’re not complaining.

We’ll be here a couple more days and have a few other things planned before heading to Portland.