2379 Mountain Willow Drive

Mountain View is the largest of Bend's 13 neighborhood districts by area. The Mountain View Neighborhood District was established in February 2003 and now covers more than 5,000 tax lots, bounded by Highway 20 to the south, Eagle Road to the east, Butler Market Road to the north, and Shepherd Street to the west. The neighborhood association calls it one of the fastest-growing parts of the city, and the mix on the ground backs that up: single-family blocks, apartment and condo clusters, senior housing, and a regional hospital campus, all cut through by two working irrigation canals.

Those canals, the Pilot Butte Canal and the North Unit Main Canal, are older than the neighborhood around them. The Pilot Butte Canal dates to 1904, when the Pilot Butte Development Company began digging it as Central Oregon's first large-scale irrigation project, opening the high desert around Bend to homesteading. A stretch of it between Cooley Road and Yeoman Road, cut through basalt bedrock with horse-drawn equipment and steam drills and finished on February 10, 1905, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2016 for the tooling marks still visible in the rock. Central Oregon's irrigation districts are now converting long stretches of open canal to buried pipe to cut water loss, and Bend Park and Recreation has been planning a canal-side trail through the district since at least 2022. Farmland infrastructure from a century ago is slowly turning into a walking route.