Determining Bend’s most visited outdoor locations is harder than it seems! Below we outline our methodology.

First and foremost, this study seeks to look at outdoor access for Bend residents on a day-to-day basis. So we limited candidate destinations to within a radius of 5 miles from the city center. We did not include destinations further out, such as Lava Butte, Badlands, or other areas outside of the city proper. These are wonderful spots — but, given the distance, tend to elicit only occasional visits from Bend residents, as opposed to regular daily or weekly visits.

Determining overall volume to within-Bend destinations is still difficult, though, as they are often managed by different agencies — BPRD manages Drake Park, for example while Forest Services manages Good Dog Rimrock. Different agencies collect data in different ways, making direct comparisons between data sets difficult.

Fortunately there is an available data set that crosses all jurisdictions. As a rule of thumb, the volume of Google Reviews is directly proportionate to the overall volume of visitors to a given location: more reviews equals more visitors. Therefore we sought out the 20 most-reviewed outdoor destinations in the greater Bend area.

We then added an additional criterion. A destination can attract reviews for the wrong reasons — e.g. if people dislike it and want to complain online. Therefore we included only destinations with the most favorable reviews (generally 4.7 stars or above).

That method yielded these destinations: Good Dog Rimrock Trailhead, Shevlin Park, Riverbend Park/Farewell Bend (consolidated), Drake Park/Harmon Park (consolidated), Pilot Butte, Sawyer Park, Alpine Trail, Big Sky Park Trail, Discovery Park, Pine Nursery Park, Riley Ranch, Phil’s Trailhead, Aplenglow Park, Pioneer Park, Hollinshead Park, Ponderosa Park, Larkspur Park, Miller's Landing/McKay Park/Bend Whitewater Park (consolidated), Columbia Park, and First Street Rapids.

To complete the study we then took the geographic midpoint of each of the 13 Bend neighborhoods and measured distance to all of the above locations (in miles). We also included Bend’s 14th neighborhood, Deschutes River Woods. The average drive for each neighborhood is displayed in our results table.