Somewhere in the Northwest

Through four decades, Pat Wilkins was a familiar face and a voice to thousands of Northwest television viewers who tuned into his newscasts, yet Wikins’ true calling lay outside the studio and along the less traveled roads of Oregon and Washington. Here, far beyond the usual range of TV cameras and crews. Wilkins searched for the people, places, and events that shaped what a colleague calls “his first love, feature reporting.”
In following this love, Wilkins spent twenty years of his working life on the road somewhere in the Northwest, roaming the countryside in search of stories that capture the history and hear of the region. “Kind of like Charles Kuralt,” he says, “but with a smaller territory.”
Contained within these pages are more than thirty of Wilkins’ favorite stories collected from thousands of miles of travel, with subjects ranging from a red rooster that captured the heart of a town a man who defied a volcano, from a desert cave that reveals ancient secrets to an underground city that shelters the homeless, from a herd of goats that predict the weather, to a restaurant that serves the “worst food in Oregon.” Toss in some native mythology, regional history and modern technology—and you have a recipe for a series of armchair excursions that will steer you along the road to adventure, somewhere in the Northwest.