The Sisters Journal

Stories from the high desert.

Dispatches from Sisters, Oregon — the folks, festivals, food, trails, and quiet corners that make this town feel like nowhere else. New stories added regularly, reported and photographed from a front porch on Cascade Avenue.

Festival Quilts hanging in downtown Sisters

The morning the town turns into a quilt

For one Saturday in July, every shopfront, fence, and barn wall in downtown Sisters becomes a canvas for 1,300 hand-stitched quilts. We followed a hanging crew at 5am.

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Photo: Quilt at Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show by Sam Beebe / Flickr, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Tradition A bareback rider mid-buck

85 years of dust: a Saturday at the Sisters Rodeo

When the chute opens, eight seconds is forever. Behind the scenes at the only rodeo in America where the announcer still calls names from a coffee-stained legal pad.

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Photo: Bareback rider by Tom Mathews / U.S. Forest Service-Pacific Northwest, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Wild Places The Metolius River near Wizard Falls

Following the Metolius, a river that begins from nothing

It springs full-grown from the base of Black Butte, cold and impossibly blue. A 20-minute drive from town gets you to a fly-fishing cathedral that doesn’t quite feel of this world.

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Photo: Metolius River by Forest Service Pacific Northwest / Flickr, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Mainstreet Bolts of quilting fabric

How a fabric store became the soul of a town

The Stitchin’ Post opened on Hood Avenue in 1975. Half a century later it’s still the gravitational center of Sisters. A conversation with Jean and Valori about staying put when staying put isn’t easy.

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Photo: Quilting fabric by Dvortygirl, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Outdoors The Three Sisters peaks in winter

The case for a Sisters winter

Summer gets the postcards. But January in Sisters is when the locals get the trails back. Snowshoeing the Peterson Ridge, the secret backcountry hut at Three Creek Lake, and where to defrost after.

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Photo: Three Sisters from McKenzie Pass by Bonnie Moreland / Flickr, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Tianna and Chance
About the Journal

Written by people who actually live here.

The Sisters Journal is written by Tianna and Chance — residents of Central Oregon and real estate brokers with Realty ONE Group Discovery.

New stories are added regularly. If there is a place, festival, person, or corner of this region you want to read about, send us a note.