This weekend is your chance to embrace everything downtown Bend has to offer through the lens of BendFilm. There's no other event like it for getting out of the drudgery of everyday life. No need to drive to Portland to dress up in your spiffy clothes, this is your excuse to indulge in some cocktails, fancy dinners and feel like you’re in another world within miles of your own home. Pick up a copy of the BendFilm guide around town for showings.

Your schedule in a nutshell

Thursday 11

• 4 p.m. Happy Hour pre-funk

Rainn Wilson

Claim to Fame:

Had his stapler ensconced in Jell-0 by John Krasinski, aka Jim Halpert.

Last Known Location:
Universal’s sound studio

Wilson, i.e. Dwight Schrute from NBC’s The Office, showed up in Sisters a few years back. A Northwest native who grew up in Seattle, Wilson keeps a relatively low-profile, but has made at least one cameo appearance on the Les Schwab stage in Bend. He walked out onstage with Portland’s The Decemberists and feigned as if to lead the band’s opening song. A few years earlier, Wilson riffed hilariously on Late Night with Letterman about a snake encounter at his Sisters-area home.

Saturday sucked.

I spent four hours pedaling my mountain bike, slowly, over trails that are usually dotted with king boletes this time of year. Last year, I filled my Camelback with the tasty mushrooms in less than two hours. This year—not a single goddamn one! Am I doing something wrong?

Apparently not, according to Linda Gilpin, an area fungus enthusiast who teaches a four-week mushroom education class at Central Oregon Community College. Gilpin, who is also the webmaster for the Central Oregon Mushroom Club, said that the months-long drought has made for slim pickings as we roll into autumn—usually the best time to harvest boletes and other scrumptious fungal treats.

Looking out upon the grassy lawns of Drake Park this weekend you’re more likely to spot a pack of downward dogs than you are to see Canada geese.

Hundreds of locals and out-of-towners will practice their side crows and warrior ones under the towering pines over the next few days as part of the third annual Yogis Unite!, a Bend-based yoga festival that claims to be Oregon’s largest.

“The main purpose [of YU!] is to bring the yoga community together—to enjoy each other,” said Kat Seltzer, a yoga instructor now in her third year with YU!.

Somewhat ironically, the inspiration for Bend’s barrel-aged beer festival started not with a meditation on wood, but as an homage to iron—steel specifically, according to one of the festival’s key developers, local brewer Pat O’Shea.

O’Shea said it was the experience of seeing his hometown of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania trying to preserve its 20th Century steel culture even as steel jobs were moving overseas in the 21st Century that got him thinking about Bend’s mill history and the town’s relationship to trees and wood products.

O’Shea eventually found himself at the local historical society poring over old photographs of the Brooks-Scanlon and Shevlin-Hixon mills and piecing together the area’s early mill history.