A Sports Bar for the Rest of the Sports

Walk into The Pedaler and you will not find the usual rotation of football and baseball. The Springfield bar is built around sports that rarely get a dedicated screen anywhere: skateboarding, snowboarding, mountain biking, surfing, and pretty much anything else that, as the owner puts it, rolls, slides or floats. That means you can pull up a stool for the Tour de France or the Mountain Bike World Cup and actually find people around you who care.

The menu holds its own alongside the programming. The blackberry habanero margarita is the drink the owner singles out as most notable, a combination that earns its reputation on the bar's own terms. On the food side, chicken tenders are breaded to order, wings get a strong mention, and the fries, called Dipper fries, are something the bar is especially well known for.

The owner's connection to action sports is personal and long-running. Snowboarding has been part of his life for more than thirty years, and he describes it as the sport he was best at, pointing to the freedom of choosing your own line down a mountain, whether that means the half pipe, the terrain park or fresh powder through the trees. That kind of firsthand feeling is part of what The Pedaler is trying to put on the wall.

That phrase gets used a lot about places, but in this corner of Oregon it is grounded in geography. The owner notes that you can be at the beach or in the mountains in roughly the same drive time, with trail systems and skateparks filling in the middle ground. The Pedaler exists partly as a community room for people who take that access seriously.