Even as hiring improves and unemployment declines, Oregon's job market looks very different today than the years leading to the recession.
Many parts of the state are still struggling with high rates of joblessness. One in nine workers are unemployed in some parts of southern and central Oregon. That compares with just one in 16 in the Portland metro area. And yet, things have been much worse.
The interactive map illustrates the past 23 years of unemployment statewide, based on the annual average jobless rate for each of Oregon's 36 counties.
Crook County has faced the worst of it: Unemployment there climbed as high as 17.9 percent, on average, in 2009. It fell only slightly the following year to 17.1 percent. Harney, Douglas, Jefferson, Deschutes and Josephine counties weren't faring much better.
But it was Grant County that suffered through the highest unemployment rate in the 1990s. Fourteen percent of its workers were unemployed in 1998.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, unemployment fell as low as 2.2 percent during the '90s in Benton County. The Willamette Valley county also lays claim to the lowest annual average unemployment rate of the 2000s (3.9 percent in 2000) and thus far of the 2010s (5.8 percent in 2013).
--Molly Young