Hannah Wallace

Border Land: the Columbia Gorge's Budding Wine Scene

My story on the Columbia Gorge's buzzing wine scene is in the July/Aug. issue of Condé Nast Traveler. For now, it's not available online. But here's the unedited version with a few behind-the-scenes photos from various recent reporting trips. 

 

It’s a beautiful evening when my husband and I arrive at Buona Notte, a winery in Cascade Locks, Oregon, for a late spring feast. After winemaker Graham Markel, 40, greets us with a pour of his pet nat, we wander over to a table piled with melon and prosciutto. Candlelit tables festooned with wildflowers are soon filled with platters of green salad, grilled potatoes with salsa verde, and roasted pork. Soon we're chatting with Chase Silcocks, a winemaker at Little Bastions and grape grower Jason Mann. The dinner was to celebrate the seven farmers Markel sources grapes from—and without whom he would not be able to make his delicious Italian-style wines like Sangiovese, Pinot Grigio, and a rustic rosé made of Sangiovese and Dolcetto.

Markel is part of a new wave of wine and cider makers shaping the Columbia Gorge wine scene. On previous trips, I’ve visited established wineries like Analemma, Hiyu Wine Farm, and Savage Grace; this time I wanted to check out the more recent buzzy transplants I’d been hearing about. Next door to Markel are Malia Myers and Melaney Schmidt, the power couple that bootstrapped Landmass Wines, where they focus on sparkling wines. Markel shares space with Jasper Smith and Ella McCallion of Son of Man, who make wild-fermented Basque-style ciders that rival any you’ll find in Spain.

But its exciting beverage scene is only one appeal of the Gorge, an hour’s drive from our Portland home. A spectacular part of our country, the Gorge was formed by ancient volcanoes and glacial floods. For 309 miles, the Columbia River—which starts in British Columbia and empties into the Pacific Ocean at Astoria—divides Oregon and Washington. This official “scenic area”—a designation that receives federal protection—goes from Troutdale in the West and stretches 83 miles to the Deschutes River in the East. The river canyon contains dramatic basalt cliffs, waterfalls, and oodles of hiking trails. While Hood River on the Oregon side has traditionally attracted all the attention—full of craft breweries, restaurants, and a lovely waterfront—it is also the “wind-surfing capital of the world,” after all. I wanted to stay just across the river in the town of White Salmon, Washington (population: 2500). Perched high above the river, White Salmon not only has the best bakery in the Gorge and a new Slovenian wine bar, but on clear days you can see Mount Hood from anywhere in town.

The hotel scene on the Washington side has kept pace with the area's winery openings—with accommodations for all income levels. You can go glamping at Skamania Lodge in Stevenson, Washington ($600/ night); stay in the chic bunk rooms at the Society Hotel in Bingen ($45/night), which has a spa and cozy library; or overnight at the Lyle Hotel, a 1905 property with tastefully redone rooms. But on our most recent trip, we checked ourselves into the new Hotel Iconica, a 30-unit property owned by former extreme kayaker Tao Berman. It was hard to pry ourselves away from our suite because of its unimpeded view of Mount Hood. But for most of the week, our base was the Inn of the White Salmon. New owners Flo and Nicole Niemesch have updated the 22 rooms—many of which also have mountain views—and tend the garden patio, teeming with crocosmia and lilies. Flo, who hails from Heidelberg, was often at the front desk, and offered us great tips on local restaurants and shaded hikes.

Facing 103-degree heat, we woke early to hit the trails. One morning, we drove to Catherine Creek, 8 miles east of White Salmon. Known for its riot of color during spring wildflower season, Catherine Creek is a 2- mile loop with a 200-foot elevation gain and rousing views of the Gorge—Mount Hood sparkling in the distance. The next morning, we followed a winemaker’s tip and headed to Buck Creek, west of White Salmon. Past an ecovillage called the Atlan Center, the path is sheltered by tall trees—nature’s air-conditioner. After our morning hikes, we inevitably made a beeline for the White Salmon Baking Co. and its menu of delightful goodies—from blueberry polenta cake to mushroom scrambles.

One day, I made the short trek to Underwood Mountain, a high elevation site in Washington. At Loop de Loop, Julia Bailey Gulstine specializes in low-intervention wines made in an Old World style. A former aid worker in the Middle East, Gulstine got the wine bug when a Palestinian winemaker friend dropped off a bunch of grapes on her doorstep. “I bought kiddy pools to macerate the grapes and used a sheet to press and strain the juice,” she tells me. “It actually turned out pretty good.” Back in Oregon in 2012, she started making wine at colleagues’ cellars and then at a wine collective in Portland; she and her husband, Scott, bought this vineyard in 2019. We talked about her peripatetic career path—a “loop de loop” of epic proportions—and wandered into the nearby forest where Gulstine showed me the remains of a wild phantom orchid, a sign that the volcanic soil here is healthy. Maybe it was the scenery or maybe it was the magical wines—I tasted a balanced Chardonnay, a skin-contact Pinot Gris, and a lively Pinot Noir. I was transported.

An appreciation for good food runs deep in the Gorge’s lively beverage scene and the cidery Son of Man is no exception. Reserve a spot at one of their seasonal dinner parties. In April, owners Smith and McCallion open up their cidery for Txotx, a traditional Basque festival of cider where they serve cider straight from the tanks alongside grilled whole fish and steaks. In the past, Portland chefs have helmed Son of Man’s annual Summer Party. This year Smith himself will be manning the grill, making 32 oz ribeyes and grilled trout. Come November, the couple throws a Harvest Dinner with a killer family-style meal. 

Dining options in White Salmon have ballooned in recent years. There’s Pixan, a taqueria with excellent carnitas tacos; a chic cocktail bar, Gander & Goose; and Soča, the Slovenian wine bar co-founded by Jure Poberaj and Nina Jimenez. One night we dined at Henni’s, where I ordered a mouth-watering steak with crispy potatoes and a red chili aioli, followed by Malva Pudding, a South African treat reminiscent of sticky toffee pudding. (The owner is from South Africa.) But one of my favorite dishes all week is at Soča: burrata with mint pesto, studded with crispy prosciutto and locally-grown snap peas. Now-owner Bethany Kimmel, also a winemaker—she makes gamay under the label Color Collector—has kept the far-flung bottle selections and by-the-glass pours.

Jimenez and Poberaj, who is from Slovenia, have put their mark on White Salmon’s food scene. They opened the White Salmon Baking Co. in 2015 but sold it to one of their employees last summer to focus on their new winery, Poberaj Wines. To reach their 10-acre property, also their home, I drove high up in the hills of rural White Salmon and down a dirt road. Poberaj, the nephew of natural winemaking pioneer Joško Gravner, grew interested in wine when he started mingling with Gorge area winemakers at the bakery’s Monday pizza nights and they’d bring bottles to share.

Poberaj, who started making wine in 2018 at Hiyu, showed me the room where he just buried nine clay amphora and then we wander into his subterranean cellar to taste his wines directly from barrel. There’s character to this wine, made from organic Gorge-grown grapes. (The couple have planted a 3-acre vineyard with Nebiollo, Ribolla Gialla, and Fruliano—but only the Fruliano is producing fruit.) Sitting on their back deck, which naturally has a view of majestic Mount Hood, I ask if he’ll be doing tastings here at the house. Poberaj surprises me by saying yes—by appointment only, starting this fall. I can think of no better way to spend an afternoon: sipping a glass of Friulano and snacking on cheese and charcuterie while talking about the Gorge and Slovenia.

There’s a certain renegade quality to many of these winemakers. “We’re very serious about having fun,” says Malia Myers at Landmass. As she and Schmidt show me around their barrel room, I see what she means: Barrels are named after spirited female characters from TV and music—Angelica (from Rugrats), Regina (from Mean Girls), Oksana (the assassin from Killing Eve). Their first wine was named Jolene, after Dolly Parton's song. Schmidt comes from a working class background. “I thought wine was for fancy people,” she told me. But when she was a bartender in L.A., she began buying wines from Illahe in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Myers and Schmidt eventually moved to Oregon to learn winemaking at Illahe. The couple launched Landmass in 2018 in the Willamette Valley but moved to the Gorge, after Schmidt returned from working a harvest in Tasmania. They have no investors and built their business on Instagram, doing door-to-door delivery to customers during the pandemic. “Every dollar we make we put back into making better wine,” Melaney tells me.

How One Portland Neighborhood Partnered with a Homeless Encampment

I wrote this essay about my experience co-founding and running the Sunnyside Shower Project for Portland Monthly's fall 2023 issue. 

 

Faced with an influx of homeless neighbors, a Southeast Portland neighborhood association got creative.

On a chilly December day three years ago, I made the radical decision to get to know my houseless neighbors. This was at the height of the pandemic, when a homeless camp had formed around Sunnyside Environmental School, and members of the Sunnyside Neighborhood Association decided to introduce ourselves.

We sought professional help: Raven Drake, a manager with Street Roots, joined us one morning to say hello by “knocking” on folks’ tents: you say “knock-knock!” and identify yourself, and announce what gifts you come bearing—in our case, cold-weather gear and clementines. A handful of campers joined us near the school’s play area, and we slowly formed a circle on the blacktop to ask what they needed most. 

Their answers? More than anything, they wanted showers, prepaid laundromat cards, and clean clothes.  

We decided then to provide access to basic hygiene services that the City of Portland wasn’t delivering in our community. One neighbor volunteered to be the “trash coordinator,” which required calling the city to demand regular trash service. I took on hygiene: the Groves Church offered us use of its showers twice weekly at the Sunnyside Community House (formerly the historic Sunnyside United Methodist Church), as long as we always had two volunteers on site and required masks. 

I shamelessly asked neighbors, friends, and work colleagues to volunteer. Our program attracted people like S., who brought his radio to the shower and sang at top volume along with Led Zeppelin. There was J., whose bar had shuttered during the pandemic, and who sent me texts saying, “I appreciate you and what you’re doing. Thank you.” And R., a young and aimless coffee connoisseur caring for a schizophrenic former girlfriend, who made us pour-over coffee with local beans he’d bought with food stamps. 

Before I knew it, I was coleading the Sunnyside Shower Project, which is now a 38-person volunteer program providing access to showers, bathrooms, and clothing three days a week, serving around 100 locals per year with 18 shower slots per week. To be sure, we had challenges, requiring us to develop incident protocols. Some houseless folks—not necessarily our regulars—broke church windows when told they couldn’t camp on the front steps. One regular wandered into other parts of the church and stole a wireless speaker from the basement, which we replaced. Another harassed several tenants and was banned from the building. 

But these were exceptions. My greatest joy has been befriending the regulars, like Mark McCarthy, a gregarious man in his early 60s and 17-year veteran of living on the streets. He successfully kicked a meth habit, and lived in doorways rather than camps as a way to stay away from drugs. A volunteer eventually connected him to a case manager at Northwest Pilot Project, and he has since gained housing and is starting to address long-ignored health issues. Another regular, Marshall L., also found housing via Northwest Pilot Project and helps others by connecting them to us for showers and additional services. 

In fact, many of these people I write about are now off the streets—in part because of the human connections they made with volunteers at the Shower Project. Should it be a great surprise that chatting with someone week in and week out might build trust, and that they might ask us to help them find stability?

What’s astonished me and other volunteers is how this simple act of helping our unhoused neighbors access basic hygiene services—which our city and county should have figured out how to offer by now—has forged community. At a time when many people post surveillance videos of houseless residents on Nextdoor, we are laughing with our neighbors’ jokes, commiserating with their bad news, and offering trail mix and tea. While other Portlanders may perceive them as scary, I actually feel safer in my neighborhood because I know most of our houseless neighbors on a first-name basis.

These relationships are two-way streets. A neighbor named Kris regularly brought us bouquets of wildflowers when she came to shower. One regular fixed my bike, and would not accept cash as payment, so I baked him chocolate chip cookies. Mark has brought me lovely “ground scores”—from cloisonné earrings to a muffin tin. 

We’ve expanded, figuring out policies and procedures, designing flyers, organizing Narcan trainings, and running needs assessments for our guests. We’ve paid one of our unhoused visitors a small stipend for his site manager work, thanks to a grant from Southeast Uplift. I tell you this not to brag but to demonstrate that neighborhood associations don’t need to be bastions of privilege and not-in-my-backyard policies. They can be places of activism and radical social change. Or at the very least, sources of practical solutions to the very real challenges of living outside. 

I used to walk past houseless people on the street, feeling incapable of helping, let alone engaging. Now, when I jog at Laurelhurst Park or pop into the Belmont library, I say hello to the people I know, sometimes even stopping for a chat. Our unhoused neighbors are just that: our neighbors.  

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The Hunter: Billie Ritchey

I did this interview with hunter/outdoorsman Billie Ritchey for Portland Monthly in 2019. I met Ritchey through our friend Wendy Temko, who has a family cabin on the Washougal River that Ritchey took care of for many years. I was always fascinated by the many animal heads that crowded the cabin walls, and new there were interesting stories behind each one. During several hours, he told me many of the stories. 

 

Image: Stuart Mullenberg

Billie Ritchey, 78, has hunted his own dinner since he was 10. When he was growing up outside Camas, Washington, his dad would hunt deer and bear to feed a family of eight. In the 1960s, black bears were so plentiful in some areas of southern Washington that shooting or trapping them was allowed year-round. Ritchey and a buddy capitalized on that, leading bear hunts for $100—money back guaranteed. In a region home to both militant vegans and sport hunters, Ritchey is a pioneer throwback whose passion for hunting has taken him to the far corners of the world. He’s scored a brown bear from Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, a Cape buffalo from Mozambique, and mountain goats from Tibet. Diminutive deer heads—including that of a fanged muntjac—crowd the rafters of his Washougal River–area cabin. On a bedroom wall, he’s mounted a shaggy sheep head from Mongolia and tur from Azerbaijan. Ritchey’s expertise means he was regularly tapped by the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife to track livestock-menacing mountain lions. Retired from his career in construction, Ritchey still eats everything he kills, from beavers to bears, though as hunting regulations continue to tighten he mostly catches fish nowadays. “I’ve never bought a piece of meat in my whole life,” he says. “If you’re gonna kill an animal, don’t waste it.”

That Cape buffalo over there is from Mozambique. That was my last safari. It took me over a year and a half to get him here, with a lot of paperwork—and pesos. It’s not cheap to bring them into the country, and I’m [not] doing it anymore. I’ve lost a lot of stuff. The [feds and other bureaucrats], they just take it away from you. They’re not hunters.

This Muntjac is from Lord Marlborough’s estate in England. That was a long time ago. He told me he had to kill 300 of them a year—because in England they have no more land, so to keep everything healthy he had to shoot a bunch of them.

I eat them all—everything. That little critter there: That’s a mountain beaver that was getting into my garden, so I ate him. Put him into the crock pot with some potatoes, carrots, and celery. My kids were raised on bear mostly. I’d shoot a bear or two every week. I had six kids, and that’s all we ate was bear.

I’ve hunted bears all my life. That’s actually a grizzly-brown bear—he was nine-foot-two. I got it in Kamchatka. We chartered an airplane to get us there in the first place. He was actually chasing my guide, who was a Russian who didn’t speak any English. He all of a sudden learned how to say, “Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!”

I do a lot of touring when I go hunting. We always go hunt something, and if there’s anything of interest there, we do it. When I went to China, I went to the Imperial Palace and every place there was in China to see: the Forbidden City, the Tombs, you know. 

The game department gave me the permit to track a mountain lion up at Mount Norway, [Washington]. It was near some movie star’s place ... Mel Gibson. It probably has five garages. It borders a state park, so no guns, no dogs. Man, you want me to hunt this lion, and I can’t take my gun? And I can’t take my dog? [Ritchey did not end up seeing a mountain lion.]

I’ve never been in fear of my life. But in Mexico I was hunting in the jungle ... on the Guatemala border. [He gestures to several wormy-looking things, preserved in a small jar.] Well, those came from a botfly. The fly lays eggs on the tick, the tick bites you, and the eggs ... go into the hole. I was squeezing my arm and this one [he shows a photo of a two-inch-long larvae] came out. I took some kind of antibiotic. I was lucky. I was the eighth person who ever had them in the United States.

We flew into Yellowknife, in the Northwest Territories, and went a couple hundred miles north of there. That’s where I should’ve gotten my wolf that I didn’t get. The wolves up there are pure white. Beautiful! I got pictures of him and video of him, but I don’t have him hanging on my wall.

I haven’t been [to Portland] in years. The farthest I’ve gone into Portland in 25 years is the outdoor sports show that’s across the bridge [at the Expo Center]. I often wonder what those people in town would do if all of a sudden they had nothing. There would be a lot of people starving, probably, because most people don’t know how to cook anything that’s not in a package or a can, to do the skinning and butchering. I always have enough to eat.

How to Reach Across a Divide With Curiosity Instead of Hate

Earlier in January, I interviewed Mónica Guzmán for Reasons to be Cheerful to ask her how opposing beliefs can connect and find common ground, even in polarizing times.

 

As the White House changes hands, America seems more polarized than ever. Though it may be tempting to retreat into our silos, bridge builder and journalist Mónica Guzmán would caution us not to. 

In her book I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times, Guzmán shows us why siloing — particularly in our digital worlds — can lead to dehumanizing the “other side.” In the book, she explains the importance of remaining curious and building bridges. She also reveals the magic of an “I never thought of it that way” (INTOIT) moment — when something surprises you, challenges you or freshens your thinking — and why we should seek out more of these moments. 

A liberal whose Mexican immigrant parents have voted for Trump three times now, Guzmán has personal experience talking to the “other side” with respect and curiosity. Though she does not agree with her parents on most political matters, she understands them. Guzmán is also senior fellow for public practice at Braver Angels, a cross-partisan organization dedicated to political depolarization, and hosts a podcast, A Braver Way. 

Recently out in paperback, I Never Thought of It That Way offers a step-by-step toolkit to ditching your assumptions, getting outside of your silo, embracing complexity and staying insistently and ferociously curious. RTBC spoke to Guzmán about where to read less-biased journalism, why misinformation flourishes in a culture where we can’t talk to one another, and how engaging with people who think differently than we do helps build lasting social movements. 

You write that you had an INTOIT moment while reading an article in the New York Times about protests against the COVID shutdowns. The story complicated your assumptions about these protesters and got you to see where they were coming from. Even though “the media” is vilified by both left and right, do you think that journalists have an important role to play in listening to — and reporting on — the “other side”?  

They do. And you’re hearing sadness in my voice because I don’t believe that that part of the job has been fulfilled to its potential. I think journalists could play an extraordinary role in helping people see that about each other. What if more of our stories included not just what you know — why Mary Sue hates this policy — but tell me one thing about Mary Sue’s life that helps me understand why that resistance to that policy is coming out of something she loves or supports. Or something she’s afraid she’ll lose. That is so much more true than giving me a logical book report-type answer that doesn’t help me see people. I no longer think that reporting on issues without reporting on the people whose concerns animate the debate is useful.

Mónica Guzmán. Credit: Asa Mathat

To those of us who identify more with the Left, it sometimes appears as if lots of the reaching out is happening in one direction, with blues trying to understand reds. 

Can you think of examples of right-wing media trying to understand Democrats?

The election put one side on its heels, not the other, so it makes perfect sense that there’s more reckoning and curiosity on the losing side than the winning one. 

In the book I talked about certainty and fear being arch-villains of curiosity. Since I published the book, I’ve spent a lot more time being drawn to the internal work of curiosity. And out of that has come an interest in the trauma response. 

Fear is so important to understand. The theory I’m playing with is that in 2020, we were super polarized, of course, and when the right lost — you know how there’s “fight or flight” trauma responses? What the right did was fight. So there were many folks who said, “No, we didn’t lose the election.” There was a fight against the whole narrative that they had lost. They fought and they fought. And then in 2024 the blue side lost. And if I were to look at the trauma responses, I would say the response of choice was flight, not fight. The blues didn’t fight the result of the election, but they fled from people in their lives who would have supported that.

You write in the book’s introduction, “I’m done, too, going along with the idea that if we could just rid the world of ‘misinformation’ everything would be fine. As if mowing down weeds would keep new ones from sprouting. … Misinformation isn’t the product of a culture that doesn’t value truth. It’s the product of a culture in which we’ve grown too afraid to turn to each other and hear it.” Can you say more about this?

I wrote that line in 2020 and I believe it so much more now.

As a journalist, I’m steeped in a certain way of thinking about truth — it’s really just about facts. It’s about what happened, what didn’t happen. And it’s easy to include in what happened and what didn’t happen, not just, “The Syrian leader fled Damascus to Moscow,” but also why. Why the Syrian leader fled to Moscow, and whether it’s good or bad, and what America’s interests are now. And those questions are about interpretation of events, and those are not necessarily in the same category as factual things. But I think that they can get really easily conflated as being all one package. 

 

 

That’s problem number one. People start to think that if someone has a different interpretation of events, that they are denying facts. And then we start to draw lines between each other and say those people are unqualified to have this conversation because they don’t see my facts. But what they’re really disagreeing with you on is the interpretation.

What I really meant in that line was that what people are concerned about is a form of truth. It’s a deeply relevant form of truth that we don’t value. 

Later in the book, you mention a project called “Walk a Mile in My News,” founded in 2021 by Wynette Sills, who was part of the Braver Angels group in Sacramento. The idea is to get out of your media silos by a) reading articles from the other side of the political divide, and b) getting to know someone who appreciates what those articles are saying. 

This seems a radical concept. Would you say it’s successful?  Do you see any other good signs of the depolarization of our media? 

I do think it’s successful. It’s been picked up by a lot of Braver Angels chapters across the country. I wrote a blog post about this program a few years ago. 

I’m really excited about the news outlets that are getting more popular because they are making a practice of making their work resilient against overly polarizing habits. My favorite example is a guy named Isaac Saul. He created a newsletter called Tangle News. He was invited to do a main stage TED Talk in the last year. His newsletter has been growing like gangbusters. For years, he’s been at war against partisan-leaning news that doesn’t serve the public and doesn’t serve our collective search for truth. There are a lot of folks at Braver Angels, and a lot of folks in the bridging space, who read Tangle News.

Courtesy of Mónica Guzmán

My other favorite one is called The Flip Side, which was started by my friend Annafi Wahed. The Flip Side picks one political issue a day, gives you the best commentary from the right and the best commentary from the left — just like a paragraph. And every time I read The Flip Side — whatever judgment I came in with — I usually still agree with my side of things, but I leave a little more room for, “But I want to know more about that thing that the other side is saying.” Or, “Why didn’t my side report on this detail?” 

Are there other daily ways of eavesdropping on the “other side’s” media?

My mother sends me articles that move her. Reading them, I’ll follow my own advice. I tell folks to practice curiosity across the divide in this “safe” way where they’re not actually in conversation with someone, but instead are just reading an article by the other side. And the two pieces of advice I give are first, as you read the article, ask yourself, “What’s the strongest argument on this other side?”

And then I also ask myself, “What are the deep-down honest concerns that are animating this perspective?” And that’s super important. It can be very hard to do, because sometimes what you’ll hear is so much anger and hyperbole. And so the trick is to try to get behind the anger and hyperbole. To ask yourself, “What’s motivating this? What do they think is really under threat?” Those questions can be so cool. 

What recommendations do you have for people who are stuck in their silos and don’t know many people who have different political beliefs than them? 

There is an organization you should know about: The American Exchange Project. It’s basically an exchange program to connect people across the urban-rural divide. It helps high school seniors travel and meet youth from different sociopolitical backgrounds. It’s awesome! 

For Braver Angels, we have 100 chapters all over the country. If you don’t have a chapter near you, you can start one. And some chapters are just so active and so amazing — there’s always something going on. It’s just regular people. 

What do you say to individuals who hesitate to be involved in bridge-building interactions because it feels like selling out their values, or due to concerns about personal safety if those they’d be interacting with might hold more discriminatory views on social identities to which they belong? 

There’s so much to say on this. 

One is that it is impossible to have a curious conversation when you are afraid. So no, if there is a sense of the lack of safety, if there is a deep fear, if your brain is only capable of those things, it’s not going to work anyway. So forget it. Take yourself off the hook. 

As an example, when it comes to trans issues, the stories and the rhetoric out there are not exactly encouraging a sense that you will be received with compassion. Which, to me, is a problem with our media. It is not representative of people’s hearts. And I’m pissed off about that!

But all that said, no wonder people are terrified. And there are real policies being put forth. On the Braver Way, I interviewed Kai Cheng Thom, who’s a trans woman and an advocate and an extraordinary bridge builder. The kinds of things that for me are a headline are for her extraordinarily impactful, right?

But here’s where I see things differently. Everything I have learned about social movements that endure, actually persuade people, bring people along — that sustainable kind of movement tells me that flight doesn’t work. If too many people take the flight path, then we’re just going to keep bouncing around like ping-pong balls, not having the debates we need to have, and not advancing more common-sense policies that are compassionate and nuanced.

Go slow. And for crying out loud, don’t engage with someone on social media! Get one-on-one with somebody you trust on everything, but you have this one thing. Find the place where you are safe enough to be curious — your edge. And if you listen to Episode 17 of a Braver Way with Kai Cheng Thom — talk about courage. Here’s this trans woman who absolutely has seen her way to engaging with the other side. She is a fierce activist. It’s not one or the other. It really should be both.

This Portland psilocybin clinic is designed to take magic mushroom therapy mainstream

The founders of InnerTrek are lighting the path for psychedelic therapy in Oregon and beyond.

This story appeared in Fast Co. in March, 2024.

 

Toward the end of Dee Dee Patterson’s training to become a licensed psilocybin facilitator in Oregon, she took her own hallucinogenic trip. 

A 46-year-old corporate healthcare director from Hood River, Patterson had used psilocybin several times before, but always on her own. And though a psilocybin journey is not required to become a facilitator, many trainees think it’s wise to experience the magic of mushrooms first hand. 

At InnerTrek, a psilocybin service center in southeast Portland, her facilitator held her hand for “lift-off”—the first ten minutes that the mushrooms take effect, when patients sometimes become apprehensive—and checked in with her periodically throughout her six-hour journey, offering water. Patterson’s intentions for the journey—to resolve emotional trauma from a failed relationship and from the death of her father—were both realized. 

[Photo: InnerTrek]

“I had a visit from my dad,” she tells me three months later, her voice cracking. “He helped me see some really beautiful things that he never expressed to me when he was alive.” Later, she was visited by a court jester. “In these journeys you see some wild things!” Her interpretation was that she needs to invite more play into her life. “I’m a very serious person,” Patterson says. “The jester was a lighthearted reminder to not take myself so seriously.”

When Oregonians resoundingly voted for Measure 109 (55.75% for; 44.25% against) in 2022, Oregon became the first state to legalize the use of psilocybin, a psychedelic compound found in more than 200 species of mushrooms. But you can’t just waltz into a dispensary and purchase magic mushrooms the way you can a joint or pot brownies. The authors of Measure 109 had read the science and determined that the new law should require anyone wanting to purchase mushrooms do so at a facility under the supervision of a licensed facilitator. The law also requires that clients be 21 or over, and they must complete a health screening. Research suggests psilocybin may help address depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and addiction as much if not more effectively than the medicines or treatments now in use.

So far, 22 clinics have opened in Oregon—and they crisscross the state, from Ashland to Bend. The licensing process, which consists of three 12- to 15-page forms and two checklists, is appropriately thorough but not unwieldy. However, it is pricey. After a non-refundable $500 application fee, a service center license costs $10,000 per year, unless the owner qualifies for a reduced license fee ($5,000). 

Since it opened on January 2nd, InnerTrek has been one of the most talked-about of Portland’s legal psychedelic service centers. (The company also runs the facilitator training that Patterson completed.) This is partly because it was cofounded by Tom Eckert, a psilocybin activist and clinical therapist, who, along with his late wife, Sheri Eckert, was one of the architects of Ballot Measure 109. It’s also because of its central location at the foot of the Burnside Bridge—the crossroad between North and South Portland, and East and West Portland. 

 

[Photo: InnerTrek]

It doesn’t hurt that InnerTrek is located in the iconic Fair-Haired Dumbbell building, clad in a colorful psychedelic mural by artist James Jean. The whimsical design continues inside InnerTrek’s wood-floored space, with life-sized tree murals festooned with mushrooms; custom-made “journey beds” for lounging on during your trip; a riot of plants; and windows with views of bridges and the city skyline. It feels a bit like an urban treehouse. 

InnerTrek’s location on the 6th floor of the Fair-Haired Dumbbell building is not coincidental. Developer Kevin Cavenaugh at Guerrilla Development took advantage of a provision in the 2012 JOBS Act that allowed non-accredited investors (i.e., people worth less than $1 million) to invest modest amounts in private companies. This means the building was entirely financed by small investors, rather than a traditional bank loan, which makes it an ideal spot for a psilocybin treatment center because (since the drug is still federally illegal) they can’t be located in buildings that are owned by a federally-insured bank.

[Photo: InnerTrek]

Nathan Howard, director of operations at InnerTrek, says the Fair-Haired Dumbbell is a perfect fit. “The building is one of the first big examples of a democratized form of real estate, where people share in the wealth,” Howard says.

The center has also developed relationships with KEX, the Icelandic hotel across the street, where patients can stay for a discounted rate, and Knot Springs, a high-end spa in an adjacent building, where clients can relax prior to their journey. At press time, InnerTrek had 1,500 people from all corners of the country on its waitlist. The whole undertaking of preparing for a psilocybin trip takes 2 to 3 weeks, and the InnerTrek staff is still streamlining the process. For this reason, the center is only averaging one client per day for one-on-one sessions or 8 to 10 clients per day for group sessions. The center has seen 50 clients since it opened in January. 

“It’s very exciting,” says Eckert of the center’s official opening. “There are transformative experiences occurring in the space. People speak of what happens there as life-changing, creating new beginnings, new outlooks.”

[Photo: InnerTrek]

The state of affairs

Oregon isn’t the only state pursuing the legalization of psilocybin; others, like Colorado and Massachusetts, are following suit. And these states are looking to Oregon to see what is and isn’t working in the new regulatory landscape. The leaders at InnerTrek are sharing lessons learned with activists in other states to help them navigate their own regulatory processes.  

Howard, who was an advisor for the Measure 109 campaign, is also the executive director at the Sheri Eckert Foundation, named after Tom’s late wife. The Foundation raises money to ensure equitable access to psilocybin education and services. Wearing this hat, Howard serves as an unpaid consultant to activists in other states who are trying to pass ballot measures like Oregon’s.

In Colorado, voters approved Proposition 122, the Natural Medicine Health Act, in November 2022. “They’re in their two-year rule advisory process,” says Howard. “Hopefully by July they’ll have rules in place [for psilocybin] and they’ll be where we were in January of 2023.” But Colorado’s law, which decriminalized three hallucinogenic plants in addition to psilocybin and psilocin (a psilocybin alkaloid), will also eventually add these other “natural medicines” to the regulatory program. Ibogaine, found in the root bark of the iboga plant, will be added to the state-regulated program upon the recommendation of the advisory board, while dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and mescaline (excluding peyote) will have to wait until at least June 2026, according to lawyer Joshua Kappel, founding partner at Vicente law firm and one of the key authors of Prop. 122. In Massachusetts, where six cities have already decriminalized psychedelics, a ballot initiative is currently in the state legislature and will likely go before voters later this year. Modeled after Oregon and Colorado’s measures, Massachusetts’ initiative calls for a state commission to license “psychedelic therapy centers” staffed by trained facilitators. 

Howard meets regularly on Zoom with advocates around the country who share what’s working and not working in Oregon and Colorado. Some of the groups that these calls join include Rick Doblin’s Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (known simply as MAPS in psychedelic circles)  and the Oregon and Colorado-based Healing Advocacy Fund, a nonprofit that focuses on psilocybin education, advocacy, and fundraising. Big-name psychedelic and drug policy reform supporters like Mark Zuckerberg, Kimbal and Christiana Musk, TOMS founder Blake Mycoskie, and David Bronner, “Cosmic Engagement Officer” of Dr. Bronner’s, are expected to pour funding into the Massachusetts initiative—the first of its kind on the east coast. Howard predicts that members of entrepreneur (and former Zuckberg roommate) Joe Green’s  Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative will also financially support the Massachusetts measure. (The PSFC has also funded research into MDMA, which is expected to be cleared by the FDA later this year.)

In early October, Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would’ve decriminalized psychedelic drugs In California, but released a statement that signaled he was open to creating a regulatory framework in the future, once “guardrails” around dosing and treatment are set. The Sheri Eckert Foundation will work with Newsom’s team later this year to create a program similar to Oregon’s for psychedelics.

Oregon’s approach to regulation is helping inform how the industry will take shape elsewhere. Unlike with cannabis and ketamine, psychedelics will likely remain a small, less capital intensive industry. “I think psychedelics get compromised in a corporate sphere,” Eckert says. “I don’t think it’s a big VC attraction in Oregon, partly because of how we set up the [regulations].” At least not yet. The state requires that over half of the ownership interest in each psilocybin business be held by a person who can prove Oregon residency for two or more years—but that provision expires in January of 2025. The regulations also limit each business to five treatment centers and one training program. These regulations help to avoid a too-fast expansion of the sort that felled Field Trip, the Canadian ketamine-clinic company that burned through $100 million Canadian before imploding in March last year.

InnerTrek is entirely self-financed. Eckert won’t disclose how much his start-up costs were, but says, “it was fairly steep.” At the moment, he can’t imagine expanding to more than one treatment center. “If we were to have done five . . . ” Eckert tells me, his voice trailing off, “it would’ve been crazy complex.” Instead, he’s focusing on making InnerTrek a sanctuary with intuitive facilitators. “It’s important that we have the right orientation to what this work is. It’s really sacred and delicate,” he says. “It requires meshing as a team and growing into the role. You really have to be a stable, open, caring human being to do this work as a facilitator.” 

[Photo: InnerTrek]

The price of treatment

One of the challenges in Oregon is making psilocybin services more affordable and accessible. Because the legal program is meant to be self-sustaining, the license fees—both to become a facilitator and to open a treatment center—are high. “License fees are 20 to 100 times higher than the licenses for people who practice [western] medicine,” says Howard, noting that an DEA license (which you need to dispense pharmaceutical drugs) is just $300 per year. In Oregon, a psilocybin facilitator license is $2,000 annually (and that’s not including the training, which can run as high as $10,000). That and the $10,000 service center license fees are out of reach for many. “It makes no sense and it’s based on a broken model,” says Howard. 

[Photo: InnerTrek]

This means that facilitators will often pass these fees on to the clients that they serve. At InnerTrek, it costs $1,800 for an individual trip or $1,200 to do it as part of a group. The fees include a lengthy health screening, two preparation sessions, the actual mushrooms (produced at Satori Farms, in Southeast Portland), six hours of a supervised trip, and up to two optional “integration sessions” a few days later. “The whole thing takes two-to-three weeks,” says Eckert. (The health screener and the two preparation sessions can be done digitally or online.) 

Some treatment centers, like Bendable in Bend, where the “psilocybin wellness program” costs $3,000, offer full scholarships for need-based clients, as funding allows. (Bendable only offers scholarships to Oregonians at the moment). Other treatment centers have sliding scales. But Howard thinks it’s only a matter of time before many center owners realize they can’t afford this kind of largesse, righteous though it is.

“It’ll be wild,” Howard cautions. “The first year of business, people could be very generous and then they’ll be hit by 280E,” he says, referring to the section of the IRS tax code that forbids any federally scheduled drug businesses from deducting expenses on their U.S. taxes. “Then they’ll either go away or realize that they need to raise money,” he adds. 

Many Oregonians—those who are on the state Medicaid program or just those who are used to the lower cost of shrooms procured from illicit sources—are shocked by the steep treatment center prices. To help off-set the high cost, Howard just launched a campaign at the Sheri Eckert Foundation to raise $1 million this year for an Oregon fund where low-income clients can apply to access funds for psilocybin services. “Some donors want their $50,000 spread to 25 people who were recently incarcerated youth. Others want to focus on LGTBQ+ folks, and many other funders will want to contribute to a general access fund so anybody can apply,” Howard says.

There are only three reasons that would disqualify someone from getting psilocybin treatment in Oregon: if they have taken lithium in the past 30 days; if they have a history of active psychosis; or if they have current thoughts of harming themselves or others. Doctor Franklin King IV, a psychiatrist and director of training and education at the Center for the Neuroscience of Psychedelics at Massachusetts General Hospital has publicly stated that psychedelics can destabilize previously stabilized psychiatric patients. This is one of the reasons it’s vital to screen—and to have a trained professional with each person who is ingesting the mushrooms.

InnerTrek is going a step further by strongly discouraging anyone who has schizophrenia, major depressive disorder with psychotic features, bipolar disorder, or other mental health issues to not continue with the intake process. The list of contraindications on InnerTrek’s website is, in fact, quite long, and even includes those with heart conditions, kidney disease, or even those with a first degree relative with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or any psychotic or dissociative disorder.  That said, when I ask Eckert about these contraindications, he sounds more open-minded, emphasizing that their health and safety director, Seth Mehr, M.D., evaluates each client’s digital screener on a case-by-case basis.  “We work with clients to ensure safety, which sometimes means delaying services until certain safety conditions are met,” Eckert says. “Some chronic conditions make it unsafe to move forward.” 

[Photo: InnerTrek]

For people like Eckert and Howard, it feels nothing short of miraculous that transformative experiences with psilocybin are happening at InnerTrek every day. “There was so much work on all the different steps—whether it was campaigning or building a training program. All of these things in their own right were massive undertakings,” Eckert says. “They were all leading up to this simple idea of creating a space where people can come and experience a special state of consciousness under facilitation and care.”

One of the reasons Patterson, the facilitator from Hood River, wanted to take a trip as part of her six-month training program is because she thought it would give her a deeper understanding of how to serve future clients. “Sometimes these experiences can be so difficult to explain in words,” she says. 

Nonetheless, I ask her to try. 

“Every time I experience the medicine, it’s like going home,” says Patterson. “Your heart—it just gets blown wide open. All of that shit that we deal with on a daily basis just to get through life? It all becomes like, ‘Oohhhh! It’s not that bad, it’s actually beautiful.’”