Photo First: Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum

K.B. Dixon takes a camera tour through the McMinnville museum, from the Spruce Goose to the world's fastest jet to replicas of the Spirit of St. Louis and Apollo Lunar Rover & more.

March 16, 2024

K.B. Dixon

Oregon / NW, Photography, Visual Art, Yamhill

Evergreen Aviation Museum, 2024

Text and Photographs by K.B. DIXON

For groundlings besotted by dreams of flight, the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville offers a fascinating and tangible history of that dream come true. A campus-like conglomeration of attractions, there is the Aviation Museum; the Space Museum; a theater; and a Wings and Waves Water Park, an extravaganza of water slides that are essentially escape chutes from the Boeing 747 perched atop the building.

The most famous exhibit in the complex is, of course, the Spruce Goose—Howard Hughes’s flying boat. With a 400-foot wingspan and weighing more than 300,000 pounds, it is the largest wooden aircraft ever built. More than a 150 other engineering marvels are on display here as well—for instance, the Blackbird spy plane (the fastest jet ever made) and full-sized replicas of the Apollo Lunar Lander and Rover.

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Catalina, 2024

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German Fighter, 2024

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Spirit of St. Louis, 2024

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Spruce Goose, 2024

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Engine, 2024

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Mentor, 2024

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Valiant, 2024

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Goose, 2024

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Spruce Goose 2, 2024

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Blackbird & Drones, 2024

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Rover, 2024

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Capsule, 2024

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Mojave, 2024

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Wings & Waves, 2024

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EVERGREEN AVIATION & SPACE MUSEUM

500 N.E. Captain Michael King Smith Way, McMinnville, Oregon
Hours: Daily 9 a.m.-5 p.m.
Website: evergreenmuseum.org

K.B. Dixon

K.B. Dixon’s work has appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, and journals. His most recent collection of stories, Artifacts: Irregular Stories (Small, Medium, and Large), was published in Summer 2022. The recipient of an OAC Individual Artist Fellowship Award, he is the winner of both the Next Generation Indie Book Award and the Eric Hoffer Book Award. He is the author of seven novels: The Sum of His Syndromes, Andrew (A to Z), A Painter’s Life, The Ingram Interview, The Photo Album, Novel Ideas, and Notes as well as the essay collection Too True, Essays on Photography, and the short story collection, My Desk and I. Examples of his photographic work may be found in private collections, juried exhibitions, online galleries, and at K.B. Dixon Images.