Are you having a barbecue this weekend? Well, you are now.

This week we’ve put together a collection of songs that you should — nay,  must — blare whilst grilling a few hot dogs, some corn or a few kebabs. Whatever floats your boat, really. So set out the lawn furniture, call a few friends over and fire up that $40 “deluxe” grill you picked up at Wal-Mart the other day: It’s time to get cookin’. Don’t have a lawn? Go ahead and start a fire on your balcony. We’re sure your landlord won’t care.

Editor’s Note: Do not — we repeat, DO NOT — start a fire on your balcony.

It’s time to get off the couch and go on a hike. So grab a pair of sturdy shoes and a dog if you’ve got one and check out these four local hiking spots around Eugene. And whether you’re going on a hiking adventure by yourself or with you’re bring a friend, be sure to bring enough water.

Spencer Butte

Jeff Nicholson and his daughter Camryn pose for a picture on the top of Spencer Butte. (Turner Maxwell/Emerald)

A local landmark, Spencer Butte — commonly known as ‘the butte’— has several hiking trails leading to the top and are all part of the Ridgeline Trail System. With a peak elevation of 2,055 feet, hikers can get a 360-degree view atop the treeless summit. Starting from the main parking lot, the main trail is only a 700-foot climb and is slightly more than a mile long. Spencer Butte is a 15-minute drive from campus and if you don’t know where it is here’s a tip: it’s the tallest point visible when looking south from the UO campus.

Skinner Butte

The view of downtown Eugene and of Spencer Butte from the top Skinner Butte on June 28. (Turner Maxwell/Emerald)

Skinner Butte is the perfect location for a spontaneous afternoon hike. The butte is covered equally with trees and local history — it’s named after Eugene Skinner, the city’s founder. Peaking at a drivable 682 feet, — approximately 200 feet above 5th Street Market — Skinner Butte is a great spot to view the city during the day and even better at night. Atop the butte is a war memorial and a few warn-down dirt paths that lead to a giant yellow painted “O” emblem that can be seen from the air and certain parts of the city. Not as visible as the “O” is the green-painted “Big E” symbolizing the former Eugene High School — now South Eugene High School. Both of these emblems have been a part of Skinner Butte since the early 20th century.

Hendricks Park

Donated benches are scattered among the trails in the Hendricks rhododendron garden. (Turner Maxwell/Emerald)

Almost completely covered by trees, Hendricks is a local favorite hiking spot. The entire park is practically in the shade of 200 year-old Douglas firs that cover Eugene’s oldest city park. Within the Hendricks Park’s 80 acres is the well-known rhododendron garden and a native plant garden. Visitors can walk among more than 6,000 varieties of rhododendrons and other ornamental plants. Just a mile away from the heart of campus, Hendricks is a perfect spot for students seeking the tranquility of Mother Nature.

Mount Pisgah

This isn’t your typical hiking spot.

Mt. Pisgah is 17 miles of well kept hiking trails and 2,363 acres of good ol’ Oregon country and a mountain peaking at 1,531 feet above sea level. The Howard Buford Recreation Area is the largest of Lane County’s 73 parks. But all of these trails don’t lead to the top at Mount Pisgah — hikers can find their way to the Mount Pisgah Arboretum – a 210 acre living tree museum  containing a variety of plant communities and seven miles of hiking trails. Or if you’re looking to get your feet wet and cool off, hikers are welcomed to jump in the Middle Forks river that flows around the base of Mount Pisgah. The arboretum is a quick 20 minutes of driving from the UO campus.

We’ve decided there’s been a disturbing lack of music on dailyemerald.com lately. That’s why we’re publishing a playlist every Wednesday for the remainder of the summer, each with its own theme. Today we’re going over the best summer tunes f0r cruising along the Willamette on your bicycle.

Our one command to the Emerald staffers who contributed to this playlist: Include Queen’s “Bicycle Race” and you’ll be fired on the spot (Not that it’s a bad song or anything, it’s just way too obvious a selection for a bunch of cultured college kids. At least we think hope we’re cultured.) Enjoy!

Local foodies gathered to Alton Baker Park for a taste of some of city’s finest foods at Bite of Eugene.

On a sunny Saturday afternoon, Eugene Magazine put on their fifth annual Bite of Eugene in Alton Baker park, with the help from American family insurance and local restaurants and food joints around town.

“I love seeing all the other local businesses here, you don’t have Red Robins or BJ’s,” Hannah Morton, front of house manager of The Boulevard Grill said.

Over 20 different food vendors serving food that ranged from soft serve frozen yogurt to shrimp kabobs. There were many local hot spots such as Off the Waffle and Umpqua ice cream, with a few new vendors like Kore Kombucha mixed in as well.

“The whole set up is really neat to showcase businesses around town,” Eugene resident Nate Tilley said.

Local breweries also had booths set up in a beer garden. Visiting from Coos Bay, Dan Vincent said if the beer garden wasn’t there he doesn’t know if he would have stay for as long as he did. 

“The beer garden was nice to have,” Vincent said. “But it’s nice to be able to try a few bites of what Eugene has for only a few dollars.”

After trying the event out on a Friday night last year, Eugene Magazine decided to move the event back to a full day event said event coordinator Lindsey Ferguson. 

The main event of the day was the Bite of Eugene’s Iron Chef competition. The competition included four chefs that went head to head against each other for the title of Eugene’s Iron Chef and to compete in the Oregon Iron Chef competition that is held in Portland. In each of the rounds the two competing chef’s were given a secret ingredient that they would have to include in their dishes. The chefs would be given 30 minutes to prepare their dishes for the three judges.

It took the judges twice the time to the chef’s had to decide who the 2013 Eugene Iron chef would be. In a close competition, Brad Burnheimer from Agrarian Ales edged out the competition in the final round of cooking with dishes based off the secret ingredient hazelnut.

Burnheimer said he was pleased to see people come out and be interested in the food and the community surrounding food.

“The fact that people can have an event like this and people come out to support food and local food vendors,” Burnheimer said. “And the fact that people care enough to do it.”

Tough as nails but nurturing and inviting to anyone she met. She opened her doors for everyone, any visitors were welcomed with homemade goods and her guest book.

Elfriede Prefontaine, the mother of one of the most iconic distance runners of all time, died Tuesday at PeaceHealth Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend in Springfield after suffering a fall at a Eugene assisted living facility 12 days ago. She was 88.

She was 50 when her son died at the age of 24 in a single car crash on Skyline Boulevard, east of the University of Oregon campus near Hendricks Park on May 30, 1975. Only a few hours before the car crash, she was in the stands watching him as he won his last race ever at Hayward Field.

She was born in a small village outside Berlin on March 4, 1925.

As a military wife to Ray Prefontaine, who was stationed in Germany, she was brought to the U.S. as a German citizen and settled in Coos Bay. They would go dancing on the weekends together. She also loved to travel and would go to Uma, Ariz. every year until Ray couldn’t do so any longer due to health issues. Ray passed away in 2004 at 84.

Pat Tyson, who was Steve’s teammate and roommate at the UO and a family friend of the Prefontaines, said she was the classic German and that Pre’s well-known determination was instilled in him by his mother.

“She was real strong, very discipline and was a very hard worker,” Tyson said.

While Steve was at the UO, Elfriede and her husband would drive three hours from Coos Bay to Eugene in order to watch their son compete in every home track meet. On these days, she and her husband would visit Steve and Tyson at their trailer home to catch up.

Tyson remembers Elfriede would ask Steve lots of questions, just like any other mom. Steve had a good relationship with his parents and never spoke negatively about her. Tyson says Steve was never embarrassed of his parents.

“Steve would always wave to them before the competition,” Tyson said. “And afterwards would always go up and see them.”

She attended every Prefontaine Classic meet, save for this year’s due to illness. But even when she was virtually blind from macular degeneration that occurred in the late 1990s and when she had a stroke in 2010 that damaged the visual cortex in the back of her brain, she was in the stands at Hayward.

“She was a fighter, she’d never want to give in,” Tyson said.

A memorial service in Coos Bay will be announced later.

Elfriede will be buried in the family’s plot at Sunset Memorial Park in Coos Bay, next to her mother, husband and son.

After working as a reporter at The Register-Guard for more than a decade, Rob Moseley decide to try something new. Moseley announced he has left the newspaper and will become the editor-in-chief of GoDucks.com yesterday. Although known for his Oregon football coverage, Moseley has covered men’s and women’s basketball, baseball, softball and track and field, among other UO sports. He is also a member of the Emerald’s board of directors.

Moseley spoke with the Emerald today and talked about what he will be doing with his new position. Quotes have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Emerald: Did GoDucks.com contact you first?

Rob Moseley: Well, I think what you have to realize is the guys who hired me, like Craig Pintens and Andy McNamara, are guys I’ve worked with every day in football season and basketball season. It  certainly wasn’t an out-of-the-blue thing. I guess the best way to put it is I knew they were thinking about creating a position along these lines before I saw the advertisements for it.

Emerald: What attracted you to GoDucks.com?

Moseley: Well, a lot of things. I think the first was the potential to tell stories from a different angle. I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing for 10 years and I really enjoyed it but it also was the only job at The Register-Guard that I’d really want. And so when I tried thinking about my future and how long I was going to keep doing the same thing, I started thinking about doing something different. I can tell stories from different angles, different kind of stories.

Emerald: Are you excited to finally attend UO football practices?

Moseley: Well I don’t know if that’s a slam dunk (laughs). That’s kind of been the running joke of why I would have taken the job. I think the nature of my job is going to be different as it relates to all the various personalities in the department. The access I am granted by one coach might be different from the access granted by another coach.

Emerald: What kind of articles will we be seeing from you?

Moseley: I’ll be a beat writer for football and then basketball, so in that regard I’ll be doing a lot of the same stuff I’ve been doing for the last few years. Men’s basketball will be a new thing. I’ve covered some of their games. Part of what I’m excited about is knowing I’ll get a chance to write about a lot of the different people, some of the quote-unquote “smaller sports,” less-publicized athletes and events that go on.

The example I’ve been using recently is that of Cassy Isagawa. She just finished her sophomore year on the women’s golf team and her freshman year — which would have been 2011-2012 — she had the best season in the history of Oregon women’s golf, which is a program that has been around for two decades. So she had this historically great season as a freshman on the women’s golf team and until this year when I was writing about their national championship run in spring, I’ve never heard of her. It’s sort of disheartening to me that this great story, this great accomplishment could happen right under my nose and sort of because the changing media environment, it went largely unnoticed and so I’m really looking forward to being able to tell stories kind of like that.

Emerald: What is to be seen from GoDucks.com in the future?

Moseley: I think right now GoDucks is a great resource for raw information, statistics, schedules. You go there to buy tickets, you go there to stream games online, but what I think GoDucks can do a better job of is telling stories. You know every athlete has a story, every team has a story, every season has a story, and I think fans don’t just want raw information. They appreciate a writer that can put everything that into more of a narrative context. With any luck I’ll be the guy doing that for a large portion of the fanbase — telling a story of various teams, players and seasons.

Incoming freshmen traveled to the University of Oregon to check off their last enrollment requirements and plan their scholastic future at IntroDUCKtion on Sunday and Monday. The two-day orientation prepared the straight-out-of-high-school students for what will be their first year of college.

Students arrived at the Student Recreation Center early Sunday morning accompanied by a parent or two. They would soon be separated to participate into two separate but concurrent programs tailored to address their specific needs.

During the orientation incoming freshman Ryan Reder felt a little bit nervous when he though about going off to college, but like most students, any nervousness was quickly consumed by excitement.

“It’s interesting because I’ve never really experienced it before,” Reder said. “I think it will hit me the hardest when I’m unpacking everything in my dorm and my parents are leaving and when I’m all by myself, that will be probably be the most difficult thing.”

Reder said he heard a lot of great things about the UO and decided to come visit the UO campus last spring. Reder and his mother Christine traveled from Walnut Creek, Cal. for orientation. Christine participated in the parents’ orientation and said she was nervous and a bit anxious right before high school graduation but as they went through the process of planing for college over the last couple of weeks she’s really excited for him.

“There is a sense of comfort now after having come here and gotten a feel for the passion of the faculty to the all the duck helpers and of all the volunteers,” Christine said. “I think it’s a good place for him.”

During the interest session of the orientation, students and parents were invited to visit various booths set up on the second floor of the EMU. Holding a clipboard stuffed with papers in her hand, Beya Montero sat ready for questions behind an information table near the entrance. Last year, Montero was one of the Student Orientation Staff members that would interact with the incoming freshmen and be apart of the incoming freshmen’s orientation experience. This year Montero is working more behind the scenes as one of the two Student Directors for orientation.

“Our expectations for our first sessions this year was to just get through it and getting everyone what they needed so they could start UO in the fall and be confident they’ll have a successful year,” Montero said. “Everything is going great. We’re just trying to help as many students as we can.”

The students and their parents had the option to stay in the dorms overnight, and some students were able to meet their future roommates. Grant Hawkins was one of the incoming freshman that was able to meet his roommate for this year.

“We’re like copies of each other, and really similar so I’m pretty excited,” Hawkins said.

Other incoming freshman like Reder are forced to wait until August when they move in to meet their roommates.

“I just hope he’s not insane,” Reder said.

Zachary Jacob Moitoza, 29, pleaded guilty to sending threatening and racist hate mail to a UO philosophy professor and two Diablo Valley College professors.

Moitoza entered the plea this week before U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken and is scheduled to be sentenced in October.

According to the affidavit, the emails sent to the UO professor contained several racial epithets and threatened to the lives of the professors. In the message Moitoza called the professor a “white trash race traitor” and said he deserved “extinction just like all evolutionary vestiges.”

Moitoza suffers from Asperger’s syndrome and acknowledged he is taking antipsychotic and antidepressant medications to help deal with his mental health issues.

Moitoza also plead guilty to sending similar threatening emails to two other professors at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, Calif., where he went from 2003 to 2005 according to the affidavit. He attended the UO from 2005 to 2007, graduating with a B.S. in Political Science.

Eugene is quite a hotbed of activity in the summer. From festivals in the woods to celebrations in the middle of downtown, there’s always something happening in the Emerald City. If you neglected going home for the summer in favor of sticking around town, whether it was to take a few classes or hang in the 541 during the most pleasant time of the year, you couldn’t call yourself a true Eugenian if you don’t check out these four festivals.

The Oregon Country Fair

Located along the banks the Long Tom River near Veneta, the Oregon Country Fair’s tree-covered paths alone are a sight to see. For the last 43 years, the labyrinthine wooded setting comes alive filled with people from all over the Northwest — mostly from Oregon — dressed up as fairies, goblins and many otherworldly characters. Aligning the paths, local venders sell their handmade crafts and delectable foods. With just less than 20 stages and performance areas scattered among the paths, you’re almost guaranteed to walk by one of the hundreds of entertainers and performers. Although there are set stages, it doesn’t limit the entertainment you might see just walking around. For folks unable to drive the out to Veneta, the Country Fair purchased the fare for the entire LTD bus system for the three days of the event, allowing ticket holders to ride any LTD bus free of charge. The Country Fair starts on July 12 and ends July 14.

Lane County Fair

You can never go wrong with filling an event center’s parking lot with amusement rides. With rides titled “kamikaze” and “super orbiter,” any thrill seeker can satisfy an adrenaline fix. If you’re not a fan of feeling of your stomach drop, their are plenty of classic rides — including a 150-foot high ferris wheel. Whenever you’re not reliving your childhood on the carnival rides, there are plenty of festivities scheduled every day and night for you to keep the thrill going. Live music is scheduled for every night on an outdoor stage. Although concert tickets are separate from the general admission fee, the music is always loud enough for you to hear on the top of the ferris wheel. During the day, the Lane County Fair Grounds Center open up the animal areas to the public for anyone who wants a closer look at the creatures competing in the fair. People are also welcome to watch the animal judging or watch a tweaked version of the game horseshoe that’s called redneck games, which involves using a toilet seat as a horseshoe. The Lane County Fair will be going on July 24-28 at the Lane County Fair Grounds.

Whiteaker Block Party

In early August, the Whiteaker district will be putting on its seventh annual block party. The Whiteaker Block Party is a completely volunteer-run event and is free to the public. Residents and businesses within the Whiteaker district — commonly known as the Whit — come together and invite local bands, food and craft vendors to set up a booth for one day party in the summer. The heart of the Whit, located on 2nd and 3rd avenues between Blair Boulevard and Jackson Street shuts down traffic for the massive neighborhood party. While a local band plays their hearts out on one of nine different stages available, you can enjoy freshly poured Ninkasi beer just a few steps away. And just across the street from Ninkasi is the annual block party fashion show. In the past all vendors wouldn’t have to pay to set up a booth but because of the growth in popularity of the event, craft vendors are being asked to pay a booth fee to ensure there will be enough funds for the following years. This year the volunteers are hoping to have approximately 8,000 attendees. The Block party will take place August 3.

Eugene Celebration

The name says it all. Eugene Celebration is just that: A festival meant to honor everything emblematic of the Emerald City. The three-day event features live music, booths hosted by local businesses and a bevy of other activities. The second and third days of the fair are kicked off with two different parades. The Eugene Celebration Parade starts on the corner of 18th Avenue and High Street, cruises north to 11th Avenue before looping back up Pearl Street to finish off on the corner of Pearl and 19th. The pet parade starts Sunday morning. There’s a car show, film festival and, of course, a sustainability village. The Celebration’s main entrance sits on the corner of 10th Avenue and Olive Streets and is bordered by 10th and 8th avenues on the north and south and Charnelton and Broadway streets on the west and east. The Eugene Celebration runs from Aug 23-25.

At about 2 p.m. today a Eugene police officer responded to a call from a tenant of the Von Klein Property Management complex on Patterson Street. The officer encountered an individual trespassing and drinking a beer on the porch. The trespasser started to leave before refusing, coming back and pushing the officer out of his way. A physical struggle occurred  in the officer’s attempt to arrest the individual.

“A citizen had to step in and help get the guy into custody,” Eugene Police Lieutenant Eric Klinko said. “We are really grateful that a citizen who saw an officer struggling, and the citizen stepped in and could’ve likely prevented the officer from sustaining any serious injury.”

The trespasser sustained minor lacerations in his head and was sent to the hospital. The officer was sent as well for minor injuries to his arms and legs.

Both the officer and the trespasser will be treated and released later today said Klinko.