Published July 31, 2026 02:04PM<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The Deschutes River is crowded. There\u2019s no other word for it. It\u2019s 92 degrees when I wade into the river with a bright, orange tube to float through Bend, Oregon, and hundreds, maybe thousands, of people have converged on the cold, mountain river to do the exact same thing. It\u2019s a summer time ritual in this popular mountain town. You might spend your morning hiking or climbing, but in the afternoon when the temperature rises, you tube the Deschutes.<\/p>\n
I have a tinge of guilt as I set my tube on a downstream course. I\u2019m one of millions of tourists who flock to this town throughout the year, and anyone who lives in a mountain town will tell you: more people equals more problems. But Bend is tackling them head on, I learn on my visit.<\/p>\n
\u201cUnless we\u2019re talking about Disneyland, few towns had tourism in mind as it was developing,\u201d says Todd Montgomery, a Bend local and director of the Sustainable Tourism Lab at Oregon State University.\u00a0\u201cMountain towns are typically small, so the infrastructure to handle lots of people isn\u2019t set in advance. Trails get crowded, parking lots fill up, just getting around town becomes difficult because of traffic. Tourism has its impacts on the quality of life of locals.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bend (population 106,000) sits at the base of Mount Bachelor and the Cascade Range in Central Oregon. Like many popular mountain towns, it has an incredible portfolio of outdoor adventures, from an in-town whitewater park to hundreds of miles of trails just outside the town limits. Go a little further and you have skiing, climbing and big backcountry adventures, while breweries, outfitters and food trucks punctuate downtown.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a hard recipe to resist, and people flock to visit Bend. For more than 20 years, I\u2019ve lived in a similar mountain town (Asheville, North Carolina) with a robust tourism industry, so I understand the love\/hate relationship locals have with interlopers like me. We infuse the economy with money, but we also crowd its rivers and trails. Best case scenario, we take all the reservations at local restaurants. Worst case scenario, we overwhelm its emergency services and degrade the natural resources that we\u2019re all hoping to enjoy.<\/p>\n It\u2019s called the \u201camenity trap,\u201d when the attributes that make a community attractive are the very things that threaten the quality of life within that community. Housing prices soar and the town\u2019s infrastructure is strained. Resident sentiment turns against tourism and tourists.<\/p>\n So yeah, I feel guilty as I float the Deschutes, one more person adding to the congestion of the river and Bend in general.<\/p>\n According to a study<\/a> prepared by Visit Bend, the town\u2019s tourism bureau, the city saw almost a million visitors in 2024, an estimated 90 percent of whom explored the outdoors in some form or another. Tourism is an integral part of Bend\u2019s economy\u2014those visitors pump more than $386 million into local businesses. But with that money comes long lift lines in the winter and a sea of people\u00a0<\/strong>on the river in the summer. So many businesses in my own town depend on tourist dollars, but damn it\u2019s hard to get a campsite in the summer, or a reservation at my wife\u2019s favorite restaurant on a weekend.<\/p>\n Bend has been wrestling with how to handle the volume of tourists that float through its borders for years, and tourist-resentment reached a fever pitch during and after the pandemic.<\/p>\n \u201cThe issue had been boiling up for years and Covid pushed it over the top,\u201d Montgomery says. \u201cAfter the pandemic, we saw \u2018Defund Visit Bend\u2019 bumper stickers on cars all over town.\u201d<\/p>\n But here\u2019s the difference between Bend and most other mountain towns: Six years ago, Bend decided to address the problem head on, first by studying resident sentiment towards tourism, and then by using tourist money to make its community more livable.<\/p>\n OK, a little background on how tourism bureaus, or Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs), work.<\/p>\n Most municipalities that are tourist destinations collect an extra tax on hotel rooms, usually about one percent of your total bill. That lodging tax typically goes towards promoting that destination so more tourists will visit. It\u2019s how tourism organizations are funded, and those organizations have a mandate to use that money to generate more tourism. And it\u2019s standard operating procedure across the country, and those tourism dollars are how the Florida Keys or Crested Butte or Asheville pays for ads in magazines like this one.<\/p>\n The lodging tax in Bend contributes more than $14 million a year into Bend\u2019s general fund, some of which goes towards the town\u2019s essential services like the police department, and some of which is used to promote the city as a destination. But another piece of that $14 million annual pie is allocated to the Bend Sustainability Fund<\/a>, which pays for projects designed to increase the quality of life for locals and tourists alike. We\u2019re talking about mountain bike trails, river access points, park expansions,\u00a0 and theater restorations. During the last six years, Bend\u2019s Sustainability Fund has invested almost $4 million visitor-generated tax dollars to fund 42 different projects across town.<\/p>\n More than $350,000 of tourist-generated money paid to create the Big Sky Bike Park<\/a>, a pump track and skills area that\u2019s accessible to adaptive cyclists. The fund has rehabbed climbing route hardware at Smith Rock State Park<\/a>, a world-class sport climbing destination, and built the Wanoga Mountain downhill bike par<\/a>k. It\u2019s also\u00a0restored the trail at the iconic Tumalo Falls and erected lights on the local pickleball court. One of the latest projects in the works is the Central Oregon Wash Hub<\/a>, which will establish washing pods for reusable plates and silverware so restaurants can move beyond single-use plastic and styrofoam.<\/p>\n During the four days I spent in Bend, I got to see a handful of projects seeded by the Bend Sustainability Fund. I hiked restored trails at popular destinations like Tumalo Falls and Pilot Butte. I launched a tube at a new river access point at Riverbend Park<\/a> on the Deschutes.<\/p>\n And these actions from Visit Bend seem to be working. One of Montgomery\u2019s jobs at the Sustainable Tourism Lab is to measure resident sentiment towards tourism in Bend and at a variety of other destinations across the globe, essentially asking residents if the cost of tourism outweighs the benefits of tourism.<\/p>\n When Montgomery first started surveying Bend residents six years ago, the majority of locals polled felt the costs outweighed the benefits. But in the last two years, he\u2019s watched as resident sentiment has steadily improved to where now, the majority of locals feel like the benefits of tourism outweigh the costs.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve seen resident sentiment improve a little each year for the last few years. It\u2019s not a complete turnaround. We\u2019re seeing maybe 51 percent of residents who think the benefits of tourism outweigh the costs, but it\u2019s moving the needle,\u201d Montgomery says. \u201cWhen you fund 10 or 15 of these projects a year, you start to touch a lot of different groups of people. That\u2019s when the calculation starts to shift, and people start seeing the benefits from tourism.\u201d<\/p>\n Bend isn\u2019t the only town that\u2019s reallocating a piece of their lodging tax for community good, but the western town is at the forefront of the movement, so much so that Bend recently hosted Destination Think<\/a>, a regenerative tourism conference with the goal of transforming travel into a vehicle for sustainable good. This was the first time a U.S. destination hosted the conference, which chose Bend specifically because of the town\u2019s success in the realm.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not to say everything is perfect now in Bend. Traffic and crowded trails are still a\u00a0 concern for locals. Steve Roti is the director of the Meissner Nordic Ski Club, which manages and grooms more than 30 miles of cross-country ski trails at the Meissner Snow Park<\/a> that are completely free to use just 13 miles outside of Bend. He\u2019s been living in Bend since 2003 and has seen the population in Bend double during that time, and the use of the ski trails grow exponentially.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s definitely caused some tension within the ski community. We can\u2019t expand the parking lot anymore, so it\u2019s routinely filled up, and traffic on the Cascade Lakes Scenic Byway is often a bottleneck.\u201d<\/p>\n The ski club is looking to develop another trail system to spread out some of the usage. To start addressing and to start addressing the traffic issues on the highway leading to the snow parks and Mount Bachelor, the ski club partnered with a mountain bike guide service last year to run a shuttle to the Meissner Snow Park on weekends. That shuttle was funded in part by Visit Bend. Roti is hoping to expand the shuttle from weekends-only\u00a0 to seven days a week this winter if a grant comes through.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have to get innovative,\u201d Roti says. \u201cThe people aren\u2019t going to stop coming.\u201d<\/p>\n And then you have housing prices, which aren\u2019t directly linked to tourism, but they are related as tourists who will occasionally become second home owners in their favorite mountain towns.\u00a0<\/strong>Then they can price out locals whose job is tied to the tourism service industry. Bend housing prices continue to soar, rising almost four percent from last year alone with an average home price over $700K\u00a0according to Zillow.<\/a> I don\u2019t know many raft guides or bartenders who can afford that kind of home.<\/p>\n![\"Phils](\"https:\/\/cdn.outsideonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Phils-trailhead.jpg?width=3840&auto=webp&quality=75&fit=cover\"\/)
How Bend Is Tackling Overtourism<\/h2>\n
![\"Deschutes](\"https:\/\/cdn.outsideonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/deschutes-river-trail-1-scaled.jpg?width=3840&auto=webp&quality=75&fit=cover\"\/)
Funneling Tourism Dollars Back Into the Community<\/h2>\n
![\"Downtown](\"https:\/\/cdn.outsideonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/2014-Downtown-Bend-Nate-Wyeth-1-scaled.jpg?width=3840&auto=webp&quality=75&fit=cover\"\/)
Can Other Overcrowded Towns Follow Bend\u2019s Lead?<\/h2>\n
![\"Whitefish,](\"https:\/\/cdn.outsideonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/2014_02_24_Schott_9999_17HRWhitefish-Montana-scaled.jpg?width=3840&auto=webp&quality=75&fit=cover\"\/)