Skinner Butte and Spencer Butte: The Two Hills That Frame Every Eugene View
One gave the city its name and its founder's cabin site; the other is the 2,058-foot landmark on the southern skyline. Eugene is a city that navigates by its buttes.
Eugene is a city with a built-in compass: two buttes, north and south, visible from almost everywhere. At the north edge of downtown, hard against the Willamette River, rises Skinner Butte — 682 feet above sea level, about 200 feet above the surrounding city, and the site of Skinner Butte Park. Drive or hike to its summit and downtown Eugene spreads out below you, with Spencer Butte waiting on the southern horizon in the same frame.
Skinner Butte is the city's founding document written in landscape. It honors Eugene Skinner, the settler the city is named for, who built his cabin on its slopes in the 1840s; the site is commemorated by a marker on the hillside. The butte was known as Ya-Po-Ah in the language of the Kalapuya, who inhabited the Willamette Valley long before the city existed. On its flank stands the Shelton-McMurphey-Johnson House, the Queen Anne Victorian built in 1880 by a family that once owned the entire butte, and on the summit slope sits the giant letter O for the University of Oregon, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2010.
Spencer Butte answers from the south. At 2,058 feet, it is the tallest point visible looking south from downtown, a prominent timbered butte with a bare rocky summit, reached by trails through Spencer Butte Park. Its tree cover is predominantly Douglas fir, and its summit offers the full southern Willamette Valley in one turn of the head — the reward that has made it the default hike for showing visitors what this place is.
Together, the buttes do quiet daily work. They orient drivers, anchor photographs, give runners and climbers their training ground — Skinner Butte's west side holds The Columns, a former basalt quarry turned climbing site — and divide the city's weather into before and after: the view clear, the summit in cloud, the first snow line of the year drawn across Spencer's top.
On launch night, Eugene Track Town News claims no news about the buttes, and that is the point. Some subjects a local newsroom covers because they change; these it covers because they endure. Every story we file in this city will be filed from somewhere in sight of one of these two hills. It seemed right to introduce them — and ourselves — properly.
