Peter Skene Ogden State Scenic Overlook

Great view. Worth the stop if you are on hwy 97. Good place to stretch legs and take pictures.

An awesome park just off the freeway. The view is amazing and a camera is a must. So glad we stopped as the train trestle was beautiful — only wish I could have seen a train crossing it. As someone else mentioned there are rest rooms and it was not crowded when we visited the first week of August.

We love this little rest stop… it’s got some cool history, but most of all… a canyon in the middle of Oregon with a few cool bridges.
If you are into photo op places, this is a great stop. It’s never been crowded when we went, and they do have bathrooms, yay for that!
The long haul between Portland and Bend, after the mountains, it’s pretty much barron land, so to stop and see this canyon is pretty cool.
If you do have a fear of heights– be warned, it’s a looooong way down! The first time we stopped, we saw a bike at the bottom, it looked like a teeny tiny lego bike from way up above!

******** Ta da~!! 600^th review! I rarely do review for non food places, but I guess I start adding more for travel stuff ;)
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— Locale Destination —
It’s on US 97 N, 9 miles north of Redmond, Terrebonne, OR.
You can see it right off the 97 highway. You can see the parking right by it. There’re several viewing spots for your picture taking.
You often see this kind of bridges in OR but this was just GRAND!
You can do picnicking and bird watching, as well. There’s a restroom!
— Gluttony Expedition —
This Crooked River Canyon is very very very very high — looking down is just terrifying for the people who don’t like the heights like me. The sign said «watch out for the dog falling into the canyon». I’m sure any living creature won’t survive if it fell…
The view was great. Bridges, canyon, rocks, rives etc. Definitely a good picture spot.
— Conqueror’s Deduction —
The view /​overlook was pretty amazing, though I couldn’t see much — only from away — just because of the heights. My pictures turned out alright, but it’s hard to capture the height with pictures. I was so scared to look down ;(

Excellent review for a fascinating place. Do be careful there with your dog. There must be a reason for the warning signs posted at the parking lot. (See posted photo.)

A view of three bridges crossing the Crooked River Canyon that also span 100 years of construction history. A walk across one of them to see the canyon and river below. A big, grassy park area with paved paths and picnic tables. Good bird watching. And running water restroom facilities to boot.
In spite of all this, the Peter Skene Ogden Scenic Viewpoint (Ogden) is often a «drive by» for folks headed to Smith Rock State Park about a mile away. Which is too bad as this is a great place. It was lovely on a crisp but sunny winter day when we visited and strolled along the path that parallels the overlook and walked over the footbridge. But there are lots of reasons to enjoy the outlook any time of year. (See photos.) And note that this should not be confused with the Peter Skene Ogden trail /​trail head which is substantially south of Bend near La Pine. Two very different places.
That’s probably enough review for those who don’t care about the history of things. Just remember to take your camera and your binoculars when you visit Ogden. (And to keep small children and dogs away from the canyon edge, as warning signs instruct.)
But for those interested in the history of things, as we are when we visit a place, and who might be curious about the individual for whom the site is named as well as the bridge open for pedestrians, read on.
If you were schooled in Oregon history as part of a 1960’s era grade school education (yep…dating myself), you would have learned that Peter Ogden was a Canadian who worked as fur trader and explorer for the Northwest Company and later for the Hudson Bay Company. You also learned he explored parts of Oregon starting in the 1820’s and discovered the Crooked River area. You learned he was key to the rescue of a couple of dozen survivors of the infamous Indian attack on the Whitman party near Walla Walla, Washington in the 1840’s. So it might make sense that there were multiple sites named after this Ogden.
But, if you grow into a critical thinking adult to know history is never as «ducks and bunnies» as school text books want to make it, you would learn this about Mr. Ogden. Known to be brutal towards Native Americans, when he was an employee of the Northwest Company in 1816 he butchered an Indian in Hudson Bay Company (HBC) territory and so enraged the HBC decision makers that he was actually charged with murder. An unusual thing in those days. To appease HBC, Mr. Ogden’s employer transferred him out of the area to continue exploring and trapping elsewhere.
Eventually all was forgiven, if not forgotten, of Mr. Ogden’s murderous past. In the early 1820’s, he was given a position of some stature in HBC. Times were different then but it has always been so that economic expediency sometimes makes folks look the other way on «ethical lapses». Mr. Ogden went on to make a fair amount of money for the HBC with a charge of exploring and doing enough animal trapping as to create a «fur desert» in parts of the Oregon territory as to make it unattractive to others. All parts of his life are equally important in the balance of the story if you like to understand something about the «who was». Yet, even today the information sign erected at the Ogden Viewpoint is selective — see photo.
But that’s only part of the history at the Ogden Viewpoint. More modern history involves three bridges, all of which are viewable from this site. The one built in 1911 that was, and is, a railroad trestle bridge over the Crooked River Canyon. The one built in 1926 that was the only car bridge across the Crooked River Canyon until 2000 when the new bridge, called the Rex Barber Memorial Bridge, opened. Today the 1926 bridge is a pedestrian bridge over the Crooked River from which you can see the canyon and the old and new bridges on each side. What might make the experience all the more amazing as you see the canyon below, is to know that «back in the day» when the old bridge was built, workers camped in the canyon below and climbed up a 350 foot ladder to get to work each day. Talk about a challenging «commute»!
As to «who was Rex Barber» after who the new bridge was named, you’ll find a memorial to him at the walkway site. A WWII veteran, fighter pilot in the Pacific Theater who called central Oregon home.
A grisly historical footnote, the Ogden viewpoint was where two women threw two little children over the canyon wall to their deaths in 1961. Not commemorated at the site, but the murders were just a handful of years before my grade school exposure to the — hero or murderer — Peter Skene Ogden in Oregon history classes and also part of my college years discussion decade later regarding the evolution of death penalty legislation in Oregon. I’m not sure how the two are connected, but they both occurred to me as I wrote this review.
Then again, I’ve found in life that everything is connected to everything else.