High Desert Museum, Natural history museum in Deschutes County, Oregon, United States

The High Desert Museum is a museum near Bend, Oregon, on a 135-acre pine-forested site south of the city along U.S. Route 97. Its 53,000-square-foot main building, designed by Portland's GHA Architects, has slate floors and walls of volcanic rock, with a half-mile paved path linking the outdoor exhibits. Inside are the Collins Gallery, the Earle A. Chiles Center on the Spirit of the West, the Henry J. Casey Hall of Plateau Indians and a desertarium of living desert animals.

The museum opened in 1982 with a focus on documenting the natural and human history of the high desert region of the Pacific Northwest. Over time it grew to add art collections and Native American cultural objects, broadening its scope well beyond its original natural history focus.

The museum's cultural exhibits include a walk-through early 1860s town with a blacksmith shop, Chinese mercantile and stagecoach stop, and a display of Pendleton Round-Up horse tack. The Henry J. Casey Hall of Plateau Indians covers life before Euro-American settlement, reservation life and Indian casinos.

The museum has both indoor and outdoor sections, so comfortable shoes and a few hours are a good idea before you arrive. The outdoor paths wind through wooded grounds and can take as long as the galleries themselves, depending on how much time you spend at each stop.

The museum holds an original 19th-century stagecoach that once ran routes across the Pacific Northwest, displayed in a walk-around setting rather than behind glass. Standing next to it makes the scale and the difficulty of travel in that era much easier to appreciate than a photo ever could.