‘Final Lap.’ Historic Eastern Oregon race track closing down after nearly 60 years

On Friday night at the Wildhorse Resort Casino in Pendleton, Greg Walden and his staff are going to hold Hermiston Raceway’s Night of Champions.

It’s a celebration of the past racing season where division champions are honored. It’s also usually a celebration to kick off the upcoming 2025 season.

Now, Friday’s party will also serve as a goodbye to the Oregon track, which held its first race ever in 1967, when the track was called Umatilla Speedway.

In a Facebook post titled “The Final Lap at the Historic Hermiston Raceway,” written by Walden this past weekend, the Kennewick man announced the track is closing.

“This past Saturday,” the post began, “I received a handwritten letter from our landowner informing me that the facility has been sold and we must vacate the premises by January 15.”

Walden said he was caught off guard.

“We had a verbal agreement to continue in 2025 and were getting a plan together to purchase the facility,” Walden’s post continued. “We had 10 events planned and were looking forward to a promising 2025 season. But as things stand, it seems we have already held our final event.”

A few days after Walden posted on Facebook, he told the Herald that he understood the sale of the land.

With rising land values, the price for Walden was prohibitive, and the owner sold the land to a neighboring business that wants to expand.

And while it’s bittersweet, he’s ready to move on with getting Tri-City Raceway Red Mountain Event Center ready for the 2025 season.

“It’ll be fine,” said Walden. “We loved that little track (in Hermiston). We babied it along. It was a fabulous place.”

Walden said he had a lease with an option to buy the Hermiston track. But he didn’t have the desire to keep going for 10, 20, 30 years. He planned on handing the reins over to the next generation of promoters in his family — his kids.

“I’ll be 62 years old this Saturday,” he said. “It was a good run (at Hermiston), and it was fun.”

Walden and his staff were just starting to get the scheduling for the 2025 season going at Hermiston, and they were just about to reach out to sponsors.

Instead, he spent the past week clearing out all of his stuff at the Hermiston facility.

The hardest part is losing another facility.

“The bad thing is you can’t stand losing another track. This was the last paved road track in Oregon,” Walden said.

Hermiston allowed young or new drivers — or both — to learn the needed skills to move up in the ranks, which helps fill out the fields in different divisions.

With a quarter-mile oval in Hermiston, that allowed for the smaller Bandoleros division cars, where drivers could cut their chops on the asphalt in a lower level.

Eventually, some of those Bandoleros drivers might graduate to the Legends cars.

And those Legend drivers can eventually move into the ProLate Models — one of the top divisions in local racing.

So Walden is hoping to eventually put in a quarter-mile oval at Tri-City Raceway, so that the newer and younger drivers still have that chance to get better.

To do that, the track will need some asphalt inside the West Richland’s half-mile tri-oval layout.

It won’t happen in 2025, “but we would be looking at it in 2026.”

Racing roots run deep

The Walden name is familiar to local auto racing fans.

In the 1990s, Wayne and Karolyn Walden — Greg’s parents — ran Tri-City Raceway. Greg and his siblings would also help out, and as a 16-year-old, Greg was also a racer.

In 2018, Greg had a chance to take over as promoter of Hermiston Raceway.

His wife, Lora, his four children and their families, his brother Brent and his family, his niece AJ, and of course, his consigliere and father Wayne made the tracks at Hermiston and West Richland a family affair.

In 2018, the family immediately went to work to make Hermiston a great facility.

They did it despite those shut-down (or limited seating) days of COVID.

The track came out of the COVID shutdown with a number of great cards and attractions.

“We had some good crowds the last couple of years,” said Greg Walden. “It was good entertainment. And I believe we improved the image of the track.”

While the Walden and his family were running and improving the Hermiston facility, and still running the family business, Atomic Screenprinting & Embroidery in Kennewick, it was time to take on another challenge: bring the West Richland race track back to life.

In fact the Waldens — along with Eric Van Winkle, West Richland Mayor Brent Gerry, Jesse Brown and other friends and volunteers — got the West Richland track back up and running in 2021 after being shut down for decades.

And the fact that the West Richland facility is open takes away some of the sting of race fans disappointed with the Hermiston decision.

Greg Walden remembers those days in the 1990s, where Tri-City Raceway would run events over 26 weekends.

“I don’t know how we did it,” he said. “We couldn’t wait for the season to end some years. But after a few weeks, we couldn’t wait for the next season to begin.”

The West Richland facility will never have 26 racing events in a season again.

But fans could see 12 events this year.

“I’d rather it’d be less with more fans in the stands, than those nights where there was nobody in the stands and there is no energy,” said Walden. “So it just made sense to add some of our signature races (from Hermiston) to Tri-Cities.”

As for what they did at the Hermiston track, Walden believes by raising the quality of the show at Hermiston, it made other Northwest tracks raise their bars too.

That’s what happens in racing. It gets everyone competing.

“And it’s in your blood forever,” said Walden.