cyclotram

Fishing Rock

2026-03-08T15:41:00.000-07:00

Next up we're visiting Fishing Rock, an obscure little state park on the Oregon Coast a few miles south of Lincoln City, at the south end of the Lincoln Beach area. It's a small forested headland between a few miles of broad sandy beaches to the north, and dramatic vertical sea cliffs to the south.

This is one of the more obscure state parks on the Coast, I think for a couple of reasons. First, there aren't any signs for it out on US 101. So you have to already know that it exists and then have some idea of how to find it. (Hint: If you're coming from the north on 101, turn right just after the bead shop.) It wouldn't surprise me if the lack of a sign was intentional; the parking lot for the park is not very big, and it's in the middle of a quiet residential neighborhood full of narrow and sometimes unpaved streets, and it would quickly become disruptive if hordes of visitors descended on the place. I am not really worried about causing that kind of mass tourism rush here; I've already posted it to the 'Gram without ruining the place, and if that didn't do it, featuring it on an obscure 20-year-old blog is definitely not going to do it.

And let's be clear, it's not like there's zero information at all about the place out here on the interwebs. It's still part of the Oregon Coast, and there's a hard limit to how obscure an obscure place can really be here, so (for example) here are two pages about the place at Oregon Coast Beach Connection and one at 101Oregon, and if you're interested in the, I hesitate to say 'hiking', but at least 'walking around' aspects of the place there's an AllTrails page for the little trail through the park, and an OregonHikers page for the stroll down the beach.

The second reason I think this place is so obscure is that it's one of the newer state parks on the coast (as in 1991) and probably isn't part of as many longtime family traditions, the common practice where you always return to the exact same place on the coast every time you go, rain or shine (but probably rain, let's be honest), and you bring the kids and the dogs and have a giant bonfire on the beach, complete with s'mores and beers and illegal fireworks and lots of shivering, and hand that tradition down to your kids for them to hand down to their kids and so forth. By the time the state finally bought the place, most people had already picked a family beach spot that wasn't here.

Actually there's a third reason, which is that getting to the beach involves a short hike through a weird dark forest, and then a steep trail down a slippery muddy slope, and lugging a cooler full of hot dogs and brewskies through all that would be kind of a chore. Don't get me wrong, I'm actually a big fan of the weird dark forest here. I mean, I like weird dark forests in general, and coastal ones tend to be weirder than most, and they aren't all weird in the same way. The specific feeling I got here was "cozy", like you're under an umbrella, maybe, or hiding inside an enormous blanket fort. And there's a small but nonzero chance that around the next corner you might encounter some cute forest creatures having a tea party, and I mean that in the twee Beatrix Potter sense, not the Tumblr fursuit not-safe-for-work variety, which is a whole other forest, if you know what I mean.

I probably ought to point out that this place does less handholding than many of the better-known parks along the coast. There are cliffs here, and there aren't always safety railings, and the standard list of universal cliff dangers applies here (i.e. small children, excitable brainless dogs, taking selfies with your back turned to something dangerous, doing stunts to impress your bros after a few drinks, etcetera.) In fact, that whispering sound you might be hearing right now is Legal telling me to tell you to absolutely not attempt anything discussed in this post, no matter how mundane it might sound, up to and including coming here in the first place. Professional driver on a closed course, bearing no resemblance to any real or fictional person, or non-person, or any animal, vegetable, or mineral, alive, dead, undead, or otherwise. Legal says you should just stay home and watch TV instead, ideally one of those courtroom shows where all the good guys are inexplicably lawyers, somehow.

So regarding the park, and how it came to be, and why it's like this, here's a circa-1990 interview with David G. Talbot, the recently-retired longtime director of the state Parks & Recreation Department, who had run the agency in its various incarnations since 1964. Fishing Rock gets a quick mention on page 4 -- apparently it had been on the state's wishlist for a long time but they had never managed to make a deal for it, and Talbot noted that buying it now might get expensive.

The point is, that kind of thing will happen increasingly on the coast. They aren't making beachfront anymore. The prices are going to go up. If we wish to save Fishing Rock and the other undeveloped coastal properties that come up intermittently, we may have to shed our conservative mentality and pay whatever it takes because we'll not have many other chances. We haven't thought in those terms for a long time.

Speaking of which, his department may have been deep in negotiations when he said this, or were about to talk, or possibly had a deal in hand already; I don't know the precise timeline, but Lincoln County property records show that the state bought the land on September 3rd 1991 from the previous owner, "Fishing Rock Enterprises Inc.", for $570,000. That comes to about $1.3M in 2026 dollars, which seems like a real bargain, at least by Oregon Coast standards. The deal came with deed restrictions that limited developing the land for anything other than a park, and gave the seller a right of first refusal to buy the land back if the state decided to dispose of it, though that expired back in 2021. The terms do allow the state to transfer the land to Lincoln County, so long as the county agrees to abide by the same deed terms.

But Talbot was right, in a way: The state wasn't able to buy the whole property, just the northern half with the rock. The southern half of the property was subdivided (by the aforementioned Fishing Rock Enterprises) into an upscale gated community, also named Fishing Rock, and the picturesque sea cliffs to the south of the park are now owned by the HOA. You can get some idea of what the area used to look like by comparing HistoricAerials photos from 1982 -- which shows undeveloped land south of the park and 1994, which shows the southern half of the property in the early stages of becoming a subdivision.

The state's 2017 South Beach & Beverly Beach Management Units Master Plan includes a short section about the park and covers some of its identified issues:

Fishing Rock is a small, day use park perched on sandstone bluffs above the ocean. There is a trail leading through shore pine forest to grassy cliffs and to the north down to the beach. The park contains some difficult to access tidepool areas and offshore rocks. The parking lot is located in a residential neighborhood and it not signed from the highway at the request of the neighbors. The majority of park users are local residents who use the trail to access the beach. The beach access trail is steep and the cliffs are unfenced, which, combined with the spectacular natural scenery, lends the park a wild, undeveloped feeling.
...
The majority of the park is in good ecological condition. Vegetation consists primarily of mixed shore pine and stunted sitka spruce forest, with some native shrubs and open grassy areas at the cliff edge. There are no known populations of invasive plant species in the park.
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Land for the majority of the park was acquired in 1991, with a small additional property purchased in 2002 for development of the existing parking lot. This area was once the location of Major Ludson’s Siletz tribal allotment.
...
ISSUES:
The beach access trail is steep and eroded in many places.
• There are several informal trails leading into the park that are used and maintained by neighbors.
• Some fencing along the cliff edge was installed in the past, but the bluffs are eroding and a large portion of the fencing has been lost. Currently, the bluffs are mostly unfenced, and there is existing signage to alert visitors to the safety hazard.
• The park is not visible or signed from the highway and is not listed in OPRD’s online informational materials. As a result it is relatively unknown to the general public.
• The park functions primarily as a community beach access.

If we're going to split hairs here -- and I'm pretty much always up for that -- strictly speaking the actual Fishing Rock is the largest of the big black basalt rocks just offshore, right off the tip of the headland here. And the deal with offshore rocks, all of them, of any size, is that the federal government kept them for itself at statehood, on the theory that they might be needed for lighthouses someday, and lighthouses are a federal responsibility, per the Lighthouses Act of 1789. And then once the feds were done building lighthouses the other rocks became a National Wildlife Refuge as well as a federally designated wilderness area, and are strictly "Keep Out" unless you have a special permit that they almost certainly won't give you. So if you were hoping maybe the state would build a rickety catwalk or rope bridge or zipline or something out over the churning ocean to the rock, you're out of luck, sorry. I dunno, mostly I mention this at all because it's one of a handful of parks on the coast where the park doesn't actually contain the place or thing in the name. The little state wayside at Twin Rocks, south of Rockaway Beach, is another one of these.

Speaking of the rock, the May 1974 issue of The Ore Bin, (a publication of the Oregon Dept. of Geology and Mineral Industries) was a special issue all about coastal geology between Lincoln City and Newport. It discusses Fishing Rock briefly as an outlying example of "Depoe Bay Basalt":

This middle Miocene basalt flow was described by Snavely and others (1965) and named by the same writers (1973). The flow is exposed along the shore at Depoe Bay and forms the wall that separates the inner and outer bays (Figure 6). Here the rock is a pillow basalt breccia consisting of more or less dense ellipsoidal masses (pillows) of basalt enclosed in a matrix of angular basaltic glass fragments formed by the sudden chilling of hot lava coming in contact with sea water (Figure 9).
...
Numerous dikes and sills of this type of basalt cut the Astoria Formation just east of Depoe Bay, and it is believed that lava erupted from local fissures and flowed into the ancient sea (Snavely and Macleod, 1971).
...
The Depoe Bay Basalt extends northward from Depoe Bay but lies inland from the shore until it appears again at Boiler Bay, where small isolated masses, through their superior resistance to erosion, impart an irregularity to the inner edge of the bay. It lies along the shore north of Boiler Bay as far as Lincoln Beach. The rock knob at the mouth of Fogarty Creek (Figure 8) and the sea cliff northward to Fishing Rock (Figure 11) are of this basalt, and an isolated remnant of the flow forms a reef opposite Lincoln Beach Wayside, just north of Fishing Rock.

(The "Lincoln Beach Wayside" mentioned above is another, even more obscure, state park, but that's a topic for a whole other blog post.)

A more recent DOGAMI publication, "Landslide and Erosion Hazards of the Depoe Bay Area, Lincoln County, Oregon" (1994) includes a mention of Fishing Rock in a section about seismic risks:

Faults at a high angle to the shoreline offset the 80,000 year marine terrace deposits downward about 18 feet on the north side of Fogarty Creek and down another 15 feet on the north side of Fishing Rock. It may be that these faults are somehow related to the offshore faults. Since many of the offshore faults may be active (Goldfinger and others, 1990), these local faults may be as well. If so, they pose a dual threat of earthquake shaking and direct offset of the surface. For example, the fault that probably follows Fogarty Creek could conceivably cause offsets in the highway bridge there. The fault at Fishing Rock could affect local houses and roads, including Highway 101. Detailed mapping and age determination of these faults is recommended.

The authors go on to note that their study was about landslides, not earthquakes, and had only looked at the latter as a potential trigger of the former, but since you're already reading their paper they might as well grab you by the lapels and pitch the followup earthquake study that somebody really ought to do at some point before the Big One hits.

Seismic studies of expensive real estate have a curious way of just not happening, and I don't know whether this proposed followup study ever took place.

So I think we've got the "Rock" part covered pretty well, but what about the "Fishing" part? I didn't see anyone fishing, but the internet says yes, fishing is a thing here. For a few quick examples, here are some mentions in the Oregon Fishing Forum forums: two threads from 2017, a 2015 one, and a 2009 one. Meanwhile over on iFish.net: Two threads from August 2015, and one from 2013. Apparently the thing to catch here is something called "surfperch". The state Fish & Wildlife dept. has a page on how to fish for them, which claims they're one of the state's "most underutilized fisheries", I imagine because their habitat is not really conducive to commercial fishing. It seems that their niche in the Great Big Circle of Life involves swooping in and nomming on tidepool creatures during high tide, in the middle of the crashing surf, pretty much exactly where you don't want to be in a boat of any size. And apparently nobody invented a workable tide-powered fishwheel during the era when that would have been allowed, and that might be the only viable way of hoovering them out of the sea on an industrial scale.

Among the many fun surfperch facts I have encountered recently, I was surprised to learn that their favorite of the many items on the tidepool menu is the Pacific mole crab, better known locally as the "sand flea". I say locally because other parts of the world have unrelated creatures that also go by "sand flea", and some of them are bitey while others (including our tiny "mole crabs") aren't. Surfperch will happily eat other things, but apparently the key to success at fishing is to catch some sand fleas at low tide, then use them as live bait once the tide comes in. Which, I dunno, that sounds really tedious and maybe harder than the actual fishing part, and the more I look at them, I'm starting to think they're actually kind of cute. Like if peanut M&Ms were an inch and a half long and came in grey and had lots of tiny little legs on the bottom.

The "underutilized fishery" lament above doesn't mean this is a no-rules free-for-all zone. As of 2024, Fishing Rock is now bordered to the south by the newly-designated Fogarty Creek Marine Conservation Area. That page indicates the rules aren't finalized overall, but it does say "No take of shellfish and other invertebrates in the intertidal or subtidal zones. No take of fish from a boat." Which seems to indicate you can still fish from on shore there, but you can't use sand fleas as bait, or at least not sand fleas that you caught within the conservation area. This is not legal advice, but I suppose it might be legal if you took up raising sand fleas at home like some people do with earthworms, and managed not to become too attached to them over time, and they don't all escape into your car when you hit a pothole on the way to the coast and go randomly boinging around the interior while you're trying to drive, or something.

Anyway, the conservation area extends south to about Fogarty Creek, the next state park down the road, and south of there is the Boiler Bay Marine Research Area, a marine protected area covering the intertidal zone from the mouth of Fogarty Creek, which is about half a mile south of Fishing Rock, south to Government Point at Boiler Bay, the next park after Fogarty Creek. In the research area, you are not supposed to remove anything at all from the intertidal zone (including mole crabs, or fish, or minions of Cthulhu), but further offshore is not a protected area. And let me point out if I haven't already, this is not my area of expertise, and I don't know the rationale for protecting these areas specifically, whether it's because they're relatively intact ecosystems, or degraded and imperiled ones, or just average chunks of ocean that can be protected without impacting the local fishing industry too heavily, to juice up our marine protected area numbers.

That whispering you hear again is Legal butting in with one more disclaimer. It seems they're concerned that you, o Gentle Reader, might see this surfperch business and high-tail it out to the coast to partake of Neptune's infinite bounty, only to catch nothing that day. (Purely by luck of the draw, I should add; you're plenty good at it, as far as I know.) And Legal worries that if this happens you might catch a case of mental anguish and/or emotional distress, and sue for that plus triple gas money. So this is where I remind you that (as the old saying goes) there's a reason it's called Fishing Rock, not Catching Rock.

Stainless Dreaming

2026-02-15T14:13:00.000-08:00

Next up we're looking at Stainless Dreaming the large Lee Kelly sculpture at the Portland Community College Rock Creek campus. The college's art collection page about it describes it thusly:

Lee Kelly's unmistakable sculptures can be found in many public collections in the Northwest. Stainless Dreaming exemplifies the artist's style and technique, in which he welds together pieces of stainless steel, working the surfaces to create pattern and gesture. His abstract forms address and often shape the spaces around them, as if they were doors or openings. Kelly, who was born in Idaho, attended the Museum Art School (now the Pacific Northwest Museum of Art.) He has traveled widely, particularly in India and Nepal, whose architecture, colors, and patterns have had a profound effect on his work.

The Portland Art Museum's Kelly walking tour (which actually involves a lot more driving than walking) gives this a date of 1995. PCC info page gives a date of 2003, but that's just when they bought it. By random luck I just happened to wander up to it during a brief bit of sunshine, so I think I was able to capture the look of the worked surfaces the description talks about. I have no idea how that effect is created -- maybe by randomly attacking it with an angle grinder and then polishing it up afterward? In any case, you absolutely don't get the full effect of it without direct sunlight. Which is kind of unfortunate, if you think about it, since we don't get a lot of nice sunny days in this part of the world, and most of those come during the summer when the fewest students are on campus to maybe notice it. Still, if you were in the market for a large Kelly sculpture, your most important decision was whether you wanted a shiny stainless steel one, or a rust-brown Cor-Ten™ steel one, because those were your only two choices. The latter would have gone really well -- almost too well -- with the groovy 1970s look of the original Rock Creek Campus buildings, if the school had wanted to embrace that particular aesthetic as an identity. But all of the more recent campus buildings went with a respectable, generic suburban office park look, and installing a big Cor-Ten™ whatzit among those just wouldn't fit; it would be sort of like installing a disco ball in an Intel clean room.

Sandy Milepost 14

2026-01-28T18:21:00.000-08:00

While I was plotting out the ongoing HCRH Milepost project, I realized the Stark St. Milestones (which lead right into the HCRH series) have a solitary cousin to the north, on the later historical route of the old Columbia River Highway along Sandy Boulevard. And when I say 'realized', I mean I saw a photo of it on a Recreating the HCRH page and figured I needed to go see it for myself. This little orphan oddity is right at the point where Sandy peters out in an older industrial area, east of the intersection with NE 238th and just past a large RV dealership, and the milepost is here because the road used to continue from here along into downtown Troutdale. But it was cut in two by the shiny new Interstate 84, and for whatever reason they didn't see fit to put in an overpass. The road does continue on the other side of I-84, and goes by W. Historic Columbia River Highway over on that side.

As far as I know this is the only surviving milepost along the Sandy route. I've looked around on Street View at a few places where previous or successive ones might have been at one time, and haven't seen any traces of any others. I think this may be the one and only part of old Sandy Road that was never widened into a highfalutin' Boulevard (ok, let's be honest, Sandy is only semi-highfalutin' at best, here and there, on a good day, in a non-recession year, but you get the idea.) I mean, it's also possible this was always a one-off and there never were any other mileposts on the Sandy route, but that isn't something highway departments usually do.

(Incidentally, one portion of Sandy is still a state highway. This vestigial end bit isn't, but starting at 238th and continuing west to the tangled Parkrose intersection with I-205 and NE Lombard the road doubles as "US 30 Bypass" and triples as "Northeast Portland Highway No. 123" in ODOT's internal Highway Number system. Which is a long story I don't feel like rehashing again. Anyway, Sandy turns south and heads toward downtown at the Parkrose tangleweb, while US 30 Bypass / Highway 123 continues due west as Lombard, crosses the St. Johns Bridge, and rejoins the main US 30 on its way to Astoria.)

Anyway, you might have noticed that this milepost has a "14" on it, and you might have wondered 14 miles from where, exactly? Luckily I think I've got this one figured out. Measuring along Sandy from its origin at SE 7th to here, the distance comes to 13.0 miles. That origin point also happens to be right where the long-vanished Milestone 1 (of Stark St. milestone fame) would have been, so it's quite possible the two routes shared it. I mean, if they didn't share it, there would have been two mileposts or stones marked '1' within a block or two of each other, which is not really ideal. Meanwhile, milepost or milestone zero would have been across the river in downtown Portland, at the corner of Broadway and Washington St. Or at least distances were measured from there; I have no idea whether an actual stone or concrete marker ever existed at that spot or not. If you ask your favorite online map for directions from that point to where a common Milepost 1 would have been, it will send you over the Morrison Bridge and the total distance will come to something inexact, somewhere around 1.1 miles. But the key thing to know here is that the Stark milestones, at least, predate the Morrison Bridge or (I think) any other bridges on the river, and so the distance is measured over the former route of the old Stark Street Ferry, and that gets you to 1.0 miles to the first milepost, right at the point where Sandy and Stark branch apart, and then 13.0 more miles to the milepost we're looking at.

Continuing east from this point, over on the other side of I-84, Sandy milepost #15 would have been right around the intersection with Troutdale Road (aka NE 257th Avenue), which is a major road now and might have been back then too. Number 16 would have been just over the Sandy River bridge, and just south of the big parking lot with the National Scenic Area sign. And after that we have a bit of a problem, if we want the Sandy milepost numbers line up with the HCRH ones we've been visiting. For that to work out, the distance from number 14 here to number 17 near Dabney State Park ought to be... well, exactly 3.0 miles, but the actual distance is more like 4.5 miles. So that's not great.

Ah, but the road east from Troutdale did not always continue south along the river all the way to Stark Street. Originally it climbed away from the river via what's now Woodard Rd, and continued roughly due east from there, via a fairly direct route that changed a couple of times, including one alignment mostly along NE Mershon Rd. and another following NE Bell Rd., and either way -- assuming Google Maps is measuring distances accurately -- the Stark-based and Sandy-based milepost sequences would mesh back together cleanly right around the (sadly missing) Milepost 20, right at the point where both Mershon and Bell reconnect to the old highway. That would be kind of a neat trick if that was intentional, and a fun coincidence or near-coincidence otherwise.

Milepost 43, Cascade Locks

2026-01-27T20:56:00.000-08:00

The next installment in the ongoing HCRH Milepost adventure is a bit of a mystery. The mostly-unbroken series of mileposts we were following since Troutdale ends at HCRH Milepost 36, at the Ainsworth interchange with Interstate 84. Now we're a few miles east of there, in Cascade Locks, toward the east end of Wa Na Pa Street (which is what the old highway is called within city limits) as the road heads toward merging onto I-84 eastbound. If you find the city fire station, across the street and a short distance east of there is a weathered wooden post with "43" inscribed on it. It's clearly not of the same vintage as the mileposts we've looked at so far, and it's not included on the ODOT map of official historic mileposts. I only know about it because Recreating the HCRH has a page about "Wood Milepost 43", and they don't seem to know any more about it than I do. One comment speculates that it can't be much older than the late 1990s seeing as it's made of (seemingly) untreated wood and it's exposed to the elements right in the middle of the Gorge, and that would roughly line up with some of the earliest work on the HCRH State Trail.

So that probably explains why the post is here. At least, off the top of my head I can't come up with any other reasonable explanations for why a post marked with a "43" might be here. Unless maybe it's a nerdy Hitchhiker's Guide + Spinal Tap crossover, and 42 is the answer to life, the universe, and everything, and then going one more in the same way that Spinal Tap speakers go up to 11. And that doesn't seem very likely, if you ask me.

Unfortunately I don't think this is where the original Milepost 43 would have been. First off, numbering on the old highway was about a mile ahead of I-84 mile numbering back at the last milepost, such that Milepost 36 was located at the freeway exit numbered 35, and after that point the present-day interstate The freeway exits on either end of Cascade Locks are both numbered 44, but the one closest to the sorta-milepost is around actual freeway mile no. 45., so it's ten miles on the interstate, and Google indicates it's 9.3 miles as the crow files, so the old road pulling it off in just 7 miles seems unlikely. The road does seem a bit magical at times, but usually not in that particular sort of way. And as far as authenticity goes, not only is it made of wood, it's also not triangular, and they seem to have -- gasp! -- used a different sans-serif font than was used on the originals. It's probably still inspired by the original mileposts, but it's not really a meticulous high fidelity reproduction, I guess is what I'm getting at here. Kind of similar to how the Stonehenge replica in the Gorge is a low-fidelity concrete design sort of inspired by the original, and did not involve making casts of the original stones, or doing a GPS-assisted laser scan of the area or frankly even looking at any detailed photos or sketches of the original.

Another issue is that at an intersection just east of here, the old highway route continues east as Forest Lane, and the stretch of present-day Wa Na Pa St. where this post is located was never actually part of the original highway.

So maybe it's just fan art of the original milestones, and it says 43 because someone especially liked how those two digits look in the font they used. Or maybe it was created for someone's 43rd birthday, or it was installed sometime in the 2000s to celebrate George W. Bush, the 43rd President of the United States. Ok, that probably isn't it. Wikipedia says 43 is a prime number, and the larger of a pair of twin primes (with 41), and the subject of a 2009 Dutch math paper, Ode aan het getal 43 ("Ode to the number 43"). Per Google Translate, it seems that in the original 1986 edition of David Wells' The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers, 43 was the smallest number that was not (yet) considered curious or interesting, and the author set out to find something interesting about it, and came up with a variety of factoids about it, mostly from number theory and group theory, none of which are likely to be why there's a 43 here.

Or maybe it was originally somewhere else; the original HCRH Milepost 43 would have been somewhere near Bonneville Dam, and maybe this post was once in the right place along that early stretch of HCRH Trail for a while, and was eventually moved here for some reason. Although it's a weird place to move something that needs a new home, and seeing as it's wood and all you'd think it would be cheaper to just recycle or burn the old post and carve a new one with the right distance on it.

In sum, I think this was probably inspired by the 'real' HCRH mileposts, but I don't know who put it here and I can't explain the location or the number on it, and if 43 really is the answer to life, the universe, everything, and one louder, the exact question must be a very peculiar one.

HCRH Milepost 36

2026-01-27T18:38:00.000-08:00

Ok, it's time for another installment in our occasional tour of Columbia River Highway mileposts. The next one up, heading west to east, is number 36, which is the eastern-most of the ones along the main tourist corridor in the Gorge. This one also has the least picturesque and tourist-friendly setting of the series so far, and maybe the series as a whole, stuck by the side of the road in the middle of the Interstate 84 Exit 35 interchange. (I have a feeling this is one of the mileposts that was lost and then recreated in the 1980s, since its original location would have been torn up as part of freeway construction.)

Scenic and historical points of interest are a bit thin on the ground around here, but there are a handful of them:

The old highway continues east from here for another two miles or so, if you follow the signs for "Yeon State Park", which is where you'll find the trailhead for Elowah Falls, which is worth a visit. But if you're jaded about waterfalls and just want to look at little concrete mileposts, there aren't any along that stretch of road. From my reading of what's in ODOT's GIS system, those two miles are now considered just a frontage road for I-84 and not a separate state highway of its own, and frontage roads don't get their own mileposts, certainly not ones that are out of sync with the main highway.
Besides Elowah Falls (and the upper falls I covered recently), the first car-free stretch of HCRH Trail starts there and runs all the way to Cascade Locks.
Closer to where we are now, the little-known Dodson Trailhead marks the east end of the first segment of Trail 400; the trail picks back up at Elowah Falls too, and from the late 1970s until the 1996 floods it was one big happy continuous trail through here. I do have a small photoset of the little-used Ainsworth-to-Dodson segment of Trail 400 if anyone's curious. Overall it isn't the most spectacular stretch of trail, but it was pretty good for "social distancing" back when people cared about that sort of thing.
At one point in recent years there was a short stretch of HCRH Trail that allowed bikes and pedestrians to get around the Exit 35 interchange without riding in traffic or walking along the side of the road, but that has disappeared from recent maps, possibly also a victim of flood damage.
Once you're east of the intersection, you're in the tiny burg of Dodson, or what's left of it. At one point, before the freeway came, Dodson had a couple of motels, a general store, a gas station, and a few houses off on side streets. A few people still live around here, but the commercial buildings are all just ruins at this point, and mostly not in a picturesque Route 66 kind of way. Still, if you're here and you happened to bring the semi-trusty old Holga or Diana+ along, there might be a hip artsy photo or two to be had. I have to tell you that's never been my personal experience around here, but your inspiration probably works differently than mine and you may have better luck.
A short distance east on Frontage Rd. is a quiet residential side street, wider than the others and grandly named "McLoughlin Parkway". A century ago developers had big plans for this area. The parkway was to be the grand entrance to a new subdivision or suburb to be named "Bonnie Park", and the larger "Ellahurst" next door, and would then lead to a large public park and campground to be named for Dr. John McLoughlin, the omnipresent historical figure from early pioneer days. It seems that Ellahurst never really took off, beyond a few scattered houses and commercial buildings along the old highway. The park first belonged to the City of Portland, believe it or not, as this was a couple of years before the state park system was created, and decades before Multnomah County tried to build up a county park system, and Metro's regional park system only got going in the late 1990s. As far as I know, this was the furthest-ever outpost of the Portland city park system, except maybe Dodge Park at Bull Run, which is a unique special case anyway. The city never developed the place, and spent years trying to convince the state or the Forest Service or someone to take it off their hands. The state finally relented in 1957 and McLoughlin State Park (now a 'State Natural Area') was born. The state also hasn't done anything with the place, though at one point there was apparently a trail connection through to Trail 400 at one point. I have heard rumors that the short bit of trail between the Dodson Trailhead and McLoughlin still exists, faintly, if you know where to find it, but I haven't personally tried this and I have no idea where to look. I'm just pointing this out so I don't get sued if someone goes to look for the trail and can't find it, or they find it and are deeply underwhelmed, or they find it and it leads to Shell Beach, or the secret Truman Show exit door and they (understandably) get a case of mental anguish about our entire world being fake. I mean, hypothetically.
There's another frontage road on the other side of I-84. Over there there's a private marina, and you can go peek at the Tumalt Creek Railroad Bridge just for the sake of completeness, and there's a small residential area along the river that technically isn't gated but does not exactly welcome visitors, per the hostile signs on either end of NE Tumalt Rd.

After this, there's one isolated milepost at Cascade Locks, another at Hood River, and then a stretch of them from Mosier to The Dalles. The good news is that I already took the photos I need for all of these; now I just need to find something interesting to say about each of these places.

Upper McCord Creek Falls

2026-01-05T17:20:00.000-08:00

The next installment in our ongoing waterfall thing takes us back to McCord Creek in the Columbia Gorge once again, where we're finally paying a visit to Upper McCord Creek Falls. The main event here is the much larger Elowah Falls, which I did a post about wayyyy back in 2008. As I recall -- this was like 18 years ago now and I may have some details wrong -- I had a rare and precious morning of no AM meetings (or at least none where my absence would be noticed), and headed to the Gorge for a short hike with a shiny new DSLR I was trying to get the hang of. (The linked post shows I came away with distinctly mixed results, I have to say in retrospect.) The traditional McCord Creek hiking route is sort of a Y-shaped twofer: After a short distance in from the trailhead, you hit a signed trail junction. The path to the left goes to Elowah Falls, and the other one to the right heads to Upper McCord Creek Falls. So you just pick one, follow it to the named waterfall, then backtrack to the junction and do the other. So that was the plan, but I got busy fiddling around with the new camera at Elowah Falls and ran out of time for the "B side" of the hike that day. As I recall, I had to get back to the office in order to leverage some proactive synergies outside the box on a go-forward basis, thereby placing all the wood behind the arrow, and my presence was essential for this one. I did jot down a TODO item to go back and take a few photos of the upper falls for the sake of completeness, but doing that by itself just never seemed compelling enough to become a top priority.

I did swing by in mid-2017 to take some bridge photos for a different project, but shortly after that the Eagle Creek Fire put the whole area off limits for several years. These photos are from May 2021, which IIRC was just days or a week or two after the area finally reopened, coinciding with the fun and all-too-brief "Mission Accomplished" phase of the not-really-post-pandemic era.

Before we get into the big rambling historical timeline section, a quick comment about the name situation. The lower falls are "Elowah Falls", while the upper falls go by "Upper McCord Creek Falls", and it's weird and inconsistent and I don't like it, and we'll cover how it got that way down in the timeline part. So I thought I'd check the shiny new and improved USGS place name GIS server to see what it said about the upper falls and exactly who came up with this silly naming scheme. And I saw... absolutely nothing. There is no database entry for the falls under any name, which means the dumb current naming scheme is still fixable. So I'm hereby launching a national, no, global but mostly national lobbying campaign to call them "Upper Elowah Falls" instead. I'm going to conduct this campaign in my usual way, by explaining how things ought to be once or twice on the Internet and then waiting patiently for public opinion to come around, which I've noticed can sometimes take quite a while. In the meantime, the two names are equally legal, so don't be surprised if you see both names. "Upper McCord" because old newspaper articles tend to use it, and it (hopefully) keeps the search engines happy, and "Upper Elowah" because it's just better.

Timeline

January 1910 article on the proposed new highway goes into great detail on the proposed route, including how the route at "Kelly Creek" would avoid conflicting with the railroad. A March 1915 construction update used the same name. A May 1915 update also used "Kelly Creek" while noting "Pierce Creek" was an alternate name for the same place.

A January 1915 list of scenic crown jewels of the area, mentions "Pierce Creek Falls", a few months out from the Big Renaming

The invented name "Elowah Falls" was unveiled in April 1915 along with a number of other fanciful quasi-sorta-Indian place names throughout the Gorge. The Mazamas committee that did this made it very clear that they were only renaming the lowest and most accessible waterfall on any given creek, which resulted in our destination today being named "Upper McCord" instead of "Upper Elowah", and the creek somehow not being "Elowah Creek". Turns out they made "McCord Creek" official at the same time Elowah was introduced, naming the creek after the early pioneer who built the first fishwheel on the Columbia right here at the mouth of the creek, beginning the era of modern industrial-scale overfishing. So that's not entirely great, if you ask me.

W.R. McCord's 1923 obit -- so yeah, he was still around when they named the creek after him, which is also not great -- states he was a carpenter by trade and came to Oregon by wagon in 1850, where he helped build the first steamboat on the Willamette that same year, and ended up building fishwheels since that was a big growth industry at the time. Eventually he invented the snailshell fishwheel, which was the proverbial better mousetrap except for salmon, the world beat a path to his door, he beat a patent troll in court and lived happily ever after, basically.

As an aside, regarding fishwheels: This device is incredibly simple and far too effective. It's just a waterwheel that spins in the current like any other, but with nets or baskets instead of regular flat paddles. You would search around and find a spot where salmon tend to congregate on their migration upstream, and build your fishwheel there. As it spins in the current, any fish that happen to congregate in the wrong spot are simply scooped out of the river and transported away for, er, processing. Any fish that notices something might be amiss here and swims off to congregate somewhere else is home free, and yet this is all it took to drive most salmon species to near-extinction within a few decades. This leads us to the inescapable conclusion that salmon are literally dumb as rocks, even dumber than the average fish in the sea, and will just sit there watching placidly and doing nothing for self-preservation as the other salmon around them are scooped up by the barrel-ful. Frankly, between salmon and the local smelt industry, a lot of local fortunes in the Northwest were built by preying on perhaps the two biggest imbeciles in the ocean. Delicious imbeciles, but still. And then, just adding insult to injury, eating them has been promoted as a "brain food" on and off for decades.

OregonHikers thread with an old photo of McCord Creek circa 1915, showing the falls, and the old pipeline that ran along where the upper trail is now. The blog side of Curious Gorge has some photos of the old Myron Kelly pulp mill here. A caption explains that the mill consumed fast-growing cottonwood trees, not Douglas fir. The main thing for right now is that you can see that the CCC workers had a head start on making a trail here.

Sources differ on exactly what sort of business Kelly was engaged in. Some say he had a fish processing business, others say it was a pulp mill, but either way it needed a steady water supply, and somehow just taking water out of the creek as it flowed past his business wasn't sufficient. And beyond the piping, apparently he even dug a canal connecting McCord Creek with Moffett Creek, one watershed to the east (right about here, I think), presumably to divert more water into McCord Creek than would otherwise be there, or maybe it worked the other way around in case the creek was at flood stage, to protect his pipes and infrastructure downstream. I dunno, none of this makes a lot of sense to me. But then, I've never claimed to be that kind of engineer, so who knows. And I always try to remember, just because somebody built something doesn't mean it was a good idea or that it was built properly and worked as designed.

Some of this may be confused with Frank Warren's Warren Packing Company cannery nearby in Warrendale. At its peak in the early 1880s, the company operated as many as 14 fishwheels at various locations along the Columbia, about a third of the total. And the Columbia was the global epicenter of the canned fish industry at the time, which meant Warren and his company were kind of a big deal for a while. The hamlet of Warrendale (or what's left of it now) is named after him, and for a time the business was profitable enough to support the Warrens in a life of luxury, such that after a long trip to Europe they set out for home aboard the shiny new RMS Titanic. As the story goes, after getting his family into a lifeboat, Frank Warren stayed behind helping others and became the only Oregon resident known to have died in that disaster. Salmon stocks had been in decline since the early 1880s, and the Warren company shut down not long after the sinking. And that's the point when Rod Serling cuts in and says something about the endless mysteries of the deep, and cosmic balances, and accounts being settled one way or another.

The fishing and timber industries along the Columbia basically ran themselves out of business in the 1910s, by catching all the fish and cutting all the trees as fast as they could. After all of that cratered, obviously it was time to build a scenic highway and invite the world to come experience the pristine natural wonders. Usually a pivot like this takes a generation or two of waiting for the oldtimers to die off, but here the change happened within a couple of years. For example here are two articles from January 1916 explaining that an additional $12,855 would be needed in order to build out the initial, rather ambitious trail plan for the Gorge, and backers hoped the feds could be persuaded to chip in toward that number. Just $100 would be earmarked for the proposed McCord Creek Trail, as this was one of the less technical proposals at the time.

Note that the original McCord Creek Trail was quite different from the present-day trail. It began right at the old McCord Creek bridge, back before it was incorporated into I-84 (and eventually replaced), and simply followed the creek 1/4 mile upstream until it got to the lower falls, and ended there.

A September 1917 guide to the Forest Service portion of the Gorge reads like the trail had been built and was now open. It goes on to say "The trail is being built so that you can go back of the falls and look through the ever-moving, transparent curtain of water", which is a bit surprising since the present-day trail doesn't do this. I don't think there's even a side trail that does this. Maybe they never got around to building that part, or maybe it was closed at some point due to rockfall hazards.

August 1919, early Trails Club group hike to the McCord Creek area, described as one of the wildest and most beautiful areas along the new Columbia River Highway. The invite mentions requiring hobnail shoes, and says they'd be exploring around the rock rim of Elowah Falls, as today's trail didn't exist yet. Getting there from Portland was another story, though: Would-be explorers were told to catch the early O.W.R.&N. train east from Portland and get off at the Warrendale station a short distance from McCord Creek.

An April 1926 hike blurb stating that the Trails Club would be paying another visit to the upper falls. Which, again, sounded like a serious challenge:

Trails Club To Climb. -- A hike along McCord creek to the upper falls, involving some steep climbing, will be made by the Trails club Sunday. The party will leave the Park and Yamhill stage terminal at 8:30 and hike seven miles from Warrendale. Members of the party will wear mountain climbing outfits, including hob-naled boots and gloves for rope work. The hike will be led by Fred Steeble.

The reason for all the gear is that the present-day trail inset into a sheer cliff did not exist yet, and would be built as a Depression-era CCC project. The place wasn't entirely pristine; as part of local logging operations, there was a water pipeline running along where the trail is now, built into a relatively soft rock layer that was easier to work with. Which gave someone the idea that a trail could run through the same spot. I have no idea what route this intrepid party might have taken in lieu of the current path.

The 1927 Metsker map of the area indicates the land around the falls was still private property at this point, labeled as "Cont. Com. Bk.". Maybe that's short for "Continental Community Bank", or maybe it's "Commercial" instead of "Community"; the name doesn't ring a bell either way. but I don't claim to have an encyclopedic knowledge of historical local banks, and there isn't a whole lot of continuity between pre-1929 banks and present-day banks.

September 1930: upcoming Mazamas hike noted they would be exploring the shiny new Nesmith Point Trail. Today it branches off the Elowah Falls trail before it encounters the main trail junction. But I'm not sure what the route was like originally; I haven't found a trail map from back then to verify this, but it's possible that today's trailhead only went to Nesmith Point at that point, and got repurposed after the original McCord Creek trailhead was lost to freeway construction. Or it may have not been the present-day trailhead, exactly, but there was a separate trailhead that just went to Nesmith Point.

A May 1936 story belatedly telling readers all about the shiny new McCord Creek Trail extension to the upper falls, built the previous year by CCC work crews. Apparently this original trail was a bit different from today's version; the old trailhead was right at the old highway's McCord Creek Bridge, and hikers just followed the creek upstream to the falls, and continued on to today's Upper McCord side trail to get to the top. Or that's what I gather from the description, as no map is provided. The trailhead also featured a large log of petrified wood that had been uncovered by construction at some point. This log had recently been fenced off to discourage souvenir hunters, and I gather it was later dynamited as part of I-84 construction by aggressively unsentimental highway engineers. The paper had already written about people trying out the new trail for a while; they must have realized they had never actually done a grand opening announcement for the thing.

Nov. 1935 -- Benson HS hiking club had a go at the new trail
Same month, Jefferson HS students involved in dedicating the new trail
February 1936: A photo on the Oregonian's "Pictorial Highlights" page showing a man in silhouette pondering a frozen Elowah Falls.

1937 photo of the now-sorta-protected petrified tree mentioned earlier.

June 1936 brought a deeply weird bit of amateur archeology by the Oregon Journal's editorial board, seemingly not their first excursion into the topic. Here it is in full, presented in Comic Sans for effect:

By Extinct Races
The world over, and in all time, men have been killers. The cave men, in jungle days, were no exceptions -- the story of mankind has been war, war, war, even down to the late conquest of Ethiopia.

Rock fortifications near Mosier, in the Columbia Gorge and down the river from The Dalles, were recently described on this page. They are believed by geologists to have been the work of a race of pigmies in which the men were only 4 feet in stature and to have existed about the time of the Mayans.

Similar formations of piled rock are found near the summit of Wind Mountain, east of Carson, on the North Bank highway. The formations consist of several groups of rock terraces or breastworks in rows, one above another, at irregular intervals on the south and east slopes of the mountain. That the rockpiles were defense works of an extinct race seems certain, as behind the artificially built walls are trenches. Inquiry in the long ago of Indians in the district brought out no information as to when or by whom the fortifications were built. Back in 1908 there was a clearly defined trail up the mountainside on the north slope, but in 1926, when examination was made, it was difficult to locate the trail.

Another curious formation that is clearly the work of man is a source of interesting speculation. It is on the left side of the cliff, at the end of the ravine leading to McCord Creek Falls, on the upper Columbia River Highway. It consists of a roughly rounded mound about two feet high and about three feet in diameter. It was the top of a small bluff, the sides of which were cut away to form a narrow, flat platform surrounding it. At a lower level is a slightly wider platform, similarly formed. It, too, is unmistakably the work of man, and, being in full view of the falls, one can easily imagine impressive Indian or other ceremonials of savages being performed to the beat of the tom-tom and the "tum-tum" of the falling waters.

These mystic formations are the only written story of a past age and lost races. Geology should unravel them, and their meaning be interpreted to people in language they can understand. So translated and explained, the rock piles and other formations of the long, long, ago, converted into carefully kept parks in The Dalles area, would become a lure to attract many a sightseer.

Ok, so the piled rock structures on Wind Mountain are still generally seen as artificial, but the fortification theory went out of vogue decades ago. People eventually realized that mountaintop fortifications beyond a watchtower don't make sense unless you also have cannons and gunpowder so you can actually do something about the invaders besides just watch helplessly from above. I'll just note this theory was most popular in the decades right after World War I, when anything that might look a bit like a trench transported people back to the horrors of Flanders fields.

A present-day popular theory says something about young people going on vision quests and finding their spirit animals. But that really sounds like something New Agey white people would have dreamed up in the 70s, or something they'd have Chakotay go on about on Star Trek: Voyager in his role as a "rainforest Indian" of no particular tribe. (A situation Paramount got into thanks to inadvertently hiring a fake-Indian consultant to help define the character and his backstory.)

As for those elaborate ceremonial platforms at McCord Creek, I don't recall seeing any such thing anywhere near the upper or lower falls. I suppose if you're in a mindset to expect ancient ruins everywhere, you're going to see them everywhere, even if nobody else does. Of course we're a much more rational and advanced society now in 2025, and you don't just go around blaming unexplained maybe-structures on mysterious extinct people of a lost age. No, these days if you think your local present-day native people could not have pulled off a given construction project centuries ago, you can just claim they had help from space aliens and leave it at that, because nobody can really prove they didn't.

Upcoming Pathfinders hike in July 1940, one of the few announced group hikes after the initial burst of enthusiasm.

A very detailed article in the May 26th, 1940 Oregon Journal about the classic Mt. Hood - Columbia Gorge scenic loop drive. This was about the height of the route's scenic-ness, before highway engineers began bypassing the road's many attractions in the name of speed and efficiency and capital-P Progress. Naturally Elowah Falls gets a mention, though sharing the limelight with the petrified tree.

1942 letter to the editor, in regard to wartime scrap metal drives and the proposed scrapping of the old Battleship Oregon, pointing out there was plenty of rusty old metal just lying around the McCord Creek area and maybe we should gather it first before chopping up any major historical artifacts.

The 1944 Metsker map shows the land was now (unsurprisingly) owned by "State of Oregon", and it even shows more or less where the falls are. It also highlights the first waterfall over on Moffett Creek, and shows that the old YWCA campground on the 1927 map was gone by 1944.

The upper falls trail was the scene of a harrowing rescue in May 1945: A couple and a friend of theirs were descending the trail and stopped to admire the view. The friend leaned against the pipe railing along this stretch of trail... and the railing promptly gave way, depositing him on a small just-less-than-vertical spot 50-60' below the trail, perched a few inches above the remaining 750' or so drop down to McCord Creek. The couple quickly took their clothes off to construct a makeshift rope. It was a few feet too short, so the woman tried lowering her husband on the rope to reach the guy. Still too short. Then they searched around and found a ~20' stretch of wire in the bushes, lowered the husband again, and had him stretch the wire to the rapidly-tiring friend. That was finally enough length, and they gingerly made their way back up to the trail. The article concludes:
Secor [the friend] was given first aid at the Eagle Creek ranger station. The rope could not be photographed Tuesday night. Mr. and Mrs. Short had put it back on.

If I had to pick one object to have on hand for an outdoor emergency, I'd still probably choose a mobile phone with bars, but if that isn't available it's hard to go wrong with some quality 1940s tailoring, I guess. Also, do NOT lean your weight on that pipe, or really any pipe that you didn't personally install.

The other thing that occurs to me -- and I have no idea how to turn this into useful general-purpose advice -- is that if enough people had done like that 1942 letter proposed, and scoured the McCord Creek area for scrap metal, there might not have been a random 20' length of wire just lying in a bush nearby, and the whole rescue might have come up short in that case. And there's just no way people in 1942 could have known or planned ahead for any of this. It's just one of those spooky details, I guess.

July 1952 article reminding readers that taking kids out to the Gorge is a great summer activity. The described route sounds the same as it was after 1935, but that would change in the next few years as the road was transformed piece by piece into a modern interstate freeway.

In 1959, Elowah Falls was obscure enough to figure in an Oregon geography quiz in Dick Fagan's long-running "Mill Ends" column. You know, the column the tiny park with the leprechauns is named for.

1960: Narrow escape for a tugboat crewman just off the mouth of McCord Creek when the boat capsized while it and two other tugs were repositioning a dredging ship. Not really related to anything else in the story, but the newspapers were pretty light on Elowah Falls news in the 1950s and 1960s. In other news on the same page, a Troutdale foundryman was declared the victor of the town's annual smelt-eating contest, after gobbling 122(!) of the greasy little fish during the two-hour contest.

And before you get the idea that 1960 was a sweet and innocent time in Oregon, the main story on the page concerned the state Eugenics Commission, which had just refused an unnamed woman's request to have her tubes tied due to not wanting any more children, and being unable to afford the procedure. They turned her down, stating they only acted to "protect society from those who are mentally ill or defective", and by law had no official interest in people's economic conditions. The article notes that a month earlier, Governor Hatfield had angrily denied accusations that he favored sterilizing "unwed mothers". The article tentatively suggests that just maybe it might be a good idea in some cases, strictly on a voluntary basis, given the high cost to society of "illegitimate children". And today, over six decades later, one of the two major political parties in the US is still trying to drag us back to those days. But I'm digressing, and you didn't come here to read about politics, and the more I write about politics the more stressed and unhappy it makes me.

Mentioned in a 1964 article on driving the Gorge-Mt. Hood loop. It calls the falls "McCord Creek Falls", which was common for a while. Around the same time people started using "Tanner Creek Falls" instead of "Wahclella Falls", and "Moffett Falls" or "Moffett Creek Falls" instead of "Wahe Falls", and in general the use of romanticized Indian and pseudo-Indian place names assigned by white people just sort of fell out of favor for a while, but somehow not in a way that was of any benefit to native people.

March 1975 article is a tale about what exploring the Gorge was like before the internet. The author glimpsed Elowah Falls from the freeway a few times, and finally she and her husband went looking for it, finally running across the modest trailhead at Yeon State Park. The signage at the time mostly talked about Beacon Rock across the river, and the doings of Lewis and Clark and the Oregon Trail pioneers, and not so much about the trails that started here or where they went, so the couple went into the trip not knowing what to expect. Sounds like they were rather bowled over by the experience. Which is about what it was like when I went there the first time, circa 1990.

A letter to the editor in response reminds everyone that the lower falls are called "Elowah Falls", not "McCord Creek Falls", despite what you might think going by what the other falls are called. It would have been so easy to avoid this naming mess almost exactly 60 years earlier, but no....

A July 1977 article describes the trail without all the pre-internet research difficulties, and grumbles about people picking all the wildflowers (which is kind of an anachronism too). Like the 1975 article, it notes that the trail to Elowah Falls ended at the creek at that time. At one point it mentions the iron railing on the way to the upper falls, which (she says) is there for you to lean against. Please recall the 1945 incident I mentioned earlier and note that this railing is now close to 90 years old at this point and substantial parts of it may be original, and any extended warranties the state may have bought on it have long since expired, and it just flat-out looks sketchy, and even if it's in perfect condition, recall that the average hikers of 1935 (and, frankly, 1977) were, um, a bit more svelte than their present-day counterparts. I am not pointing fingers at you, personally, of course, or at myself for that matter; I'm just saying that the combined weight of either of us, or both of us, along with that one mysterious stranger up ahead who's also leaning on the same pipe while gobbling donuts from a box, taken as a whole, may verge on exceeding certain engineering tolerances.

The upper falls figured in several Roberta Lowe columns in the Oregon Journal over 1981-82. The paper was in the throes of going out of business just then, which might have emboldened her in adding some of the more advanced details in her hike ideas.

April 1981 column inserts the Elowah Falls trail and Upper McCord side trip into a longer route covering a chunk of the shiny new Trail 400. Starting at the McLoughlin State Park trailhead, heading east thru the McCord Creek area and then continuing on to Tanner Creek and our waiting car shuttle. The whole stretch west of McCord Creek was abandoned after the 1996 floods so this exact route is not currently possible. I've heard that this stretch of trail was not really very scenic anyway. Further east, she casually mentions that a certain unmarked side trail is the start of the unmaintained, highly unofficial, and highly scenic Munra Point Trail

Other column came in June 1982, and really swings for the fences with another unusual route. As in, first you hike the nice trail for normies that gets you to the upper falls. Then you cross the creek and start an uphill scramble/bushwhack for about a mile, gaining 1100 vertical feet in the process, while your boring friends chill at the picnic table that used to exist down at the upper falls. If you do it correctly you end up at little-visited Wauneka Point, home to panoramic views and a large collection of native rockworks, similar to those found in a few other places around the Gorge. The official Field Guide route is longer and easier and generally follows established trails (albeit for small values of "established" in some cases), and that page mentions the existence of the Lowe route and points at at least one trip report that followed it. But they say it's only suitable for the very experienced hikers of the present day. But that's the route that was once published in a family newspaper. One may feel more empowered to do this when a.) you're an established journalist writing for an established newspaper, and b.) said newspaper is on the brink of going out of business in a few months so it's not like there's any money in suing you if somebody gets hurt. At one point she even suggested leaning out over the railing on the upper falls trail to get a better view.

In passing, the article points out where to find the equally unofficial Nesmith Ridge Trail, which goes the same place as the official Nesmith Point Trail, but starts at the upper falls and is generally considered a better and more scenic route. She had actually covered this route more extensively a month earlier, framing it as the next logical step after reviving a number of other vintage trails from the golden days of yore. I missed this article at first because she -- correctly -- called the falls "Upper Elowah Falls".

You'll also see boot paths here that just sort of follow McCord Creek further upstream. As far as anybody knows there's nothing interesting to see up that way. No waterfalls on LIDAR, no viewpoints, nothing historical or archeological to look for, just a little mountain stream burbling along thru the forest.
A third Lowe column from the same time period bypasses both waterfalls, and instead informs us that the long-abandoned Moffett Creek Trail had just been repaired and reopened, and she was ready with a guide to this rustic backcountry trail. The name suggests it's a trail up along Moffett Creek, something that was proposed back in the mid-1910s but never built due to the high estimated cost of labor and dynamite. Instead, it branches off the nearly-as-remote Tanner Creek trail (which starts near the far end of Tanner Creek Road / Forest Road 777) and switchbacks up and down to cross the upper reaches of the Tanner, Moffett, and McCord Creek watersheds, passing through some Bull Run infrastructure just outside the closure boundary along the way. I have never even cast eyes on this trail, much less hiked any distance on it. Anyway, Lowe cheerfully explains the sights along the way and offers tips on safely fording the various creeks you'll encounter, getting you as far as the top of the Nesmith Point Trail, the return leg for your car shuttle loop. The description of that last part is pretty much a handwave; maybe it was edited for length, or she just assumed everyone knows that part already. Either way, after completing the hike as described you'd still need to drive up sketchy Road 777 again to pick up your other car. Except that it's been gated and closed to the general public since the late 90s, due to being a Forest Service road that was too easily accessed by people who don't know what Forest Service roads are like.

I am slightly tempted to feed these and other Lowe articles into the latest GPT-style AI and have it generate an endlessly cheerful practical guide to taking the One Ring to Mordor, explaining how the ring may chafe a bit and become heavier as Mordor approaches, but the usual first aid for blisters ought to do the trick. But I digress again.

A 1986 list of tallest waterfalls in Oregon, sorted by height, accompanying an article on waterfall geology. This was back when the local newspaper of record had a regular geology columnist, which they did for a number of years after the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens.

January 1994: Terry Richard column naming the Elowah + Upper McCord twofer the Hike of the Week.

Sometime after that, the bike-centric HCRH State Trail project reached McCord Creek, and the state added a paved trail between the existing Yeon trailhead and Cascade Locks. I don't recall whether it all opened at once or in phases, but it was the first new trail option here since the 400. The HCRH trail and the 400 intersect repeatedly on their sorta-parallel paths through the Gorge, creating new ways to turn out-n-back hikes into loops. The HCRH trail is nobody's idea of a pristine wilderness experience, and to me the main reason you might want to use it would be to shorten the return leg, in case a storm system moves in or that knee you hurt back in 2013 starts twinging again, or you're being pursued by Mafia goons from out of town who don't know there's a back way back to your car now.

April 2016 article suggests spending Spring Break week visiting as many Gorge waterfalls as possible. There was a time not so long ago when you could do this and come away thinking you'd done all the major attractions. But now you'll come to realize you've barely scratched the surface of what's out there. The upper and lower falls get a shout out because they're an easy twofer if you're going for sheer numbers.

Of course the Eagle Creek Fire happened the very next summer, and the area was closed for several years afterward. During that time the only glimpses we got of the area were some aerial photos taken by the state for damage assessment. A Wy'east Blog post on the Gorge after the 2017 fire includes a bunch of these photos and tries to make sense of what had changed.

A May 2019 article similar to the 2016 "see every waterfall" challenge, but not limited to the Gorge this time for obvious reasons.

January 2021 OregonHikers forum post about a recent visit, by someone who had volunteered with the post-fire restoration work. He explains the restoration work included repairing a lot of long-neglected CCC stonework, including a long-closed viewpoint that gives a higher-elevation view of the lower falls.

Great Salmon

2025-12-30T14:53:00.000-08:00

Our occasional tour of public art around Portland is back on the OHSU campus again. This time we're looking at Great Salmon by Oregon artist Frank Boyden. Which is clearly another example of the Heroic Salmon genre I've mentioned here once or twice before, but I do actually like this one. Boyden founded the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology out on the coast way back in 1970. It's always nice to see that at least one other thing founded in 1970 is still alive and kicking.

I say that because this is located on an exterior wall just outside the ER. See, back in March of this year I had a routine medical appointment for something unimportant, but they took one look at my blood pressure numbers -- retried it a couple of times in case they'd done it wrong the first time -- and told me to go directly to the ER to have it looked at, stat. Which I did, where they decided it was not an immediate crisis but I probably ought to start some blood pressure meds. So I'm doing that now, and things seem to be going pretty well since then. But it was another of those annoying little reminders about not being a spring chicken anymore.

And yes, I did notice this on my way home from an alarming medical thing. I saw art, stopped and took some photos, the same as I would if I was just visiting, and here they are. So say what you will about the quality or frequency of posts around here in recent years, but at least nobody can fault me for a lack of dedication. I've got that going for me, at least.

Kingfisher Natural Area

2025-12-30T14:20:00.000-08:00

Next up we're checking out Metro's Kingfisher Natural Area, another of their cluster of little-known properties along the Sandy River. The part we're visiting has only been owned by Metro since late 2020, though it was added onto an existing natural area along the river that was only accessible by boat until that point. You can also see the main gate on Street View here, so that's what to look for if you read this post and still want to go check the place out for yourself.

The added area was a commercial tree farm, with a house or some sort of building on the property. Like Metro always does, any buildings on the property were demolished right away (to avoid squatters) but beyond that they don't seem to be in a big hurry to change anything else here. One particular thing they generally don't do is is remove the previous owner's "Private Property! No Trespassing! Keep Out!" signs, so a sign here informs you -- the visiting taxpayer and theoretical co-owner of the place -- that you are under 24/7 video surveillance. However if you ignore all the leftover security theater and keep going into the park, there's one obvious trail or service road that goes downhill past where the house used to be. The trail curves a little and goes behinds some trees, and only then do you encounter the standard Metro Natural Area sign, seemingly positioned so it's not visible from the street. I kid you not, I burst out laughing when I saw this. Like they were trying to say "Ok, fiiiine, you got us, welcome to the Natural Area".

The other half of the joke, o Brave Adventurer, is that once you've passed this test and proven yourself worthy, there's really not much to see or do here. Depending on how much tree thinning they end up doing here, someday, there could potentially be a cool scenic viewpoint here someday, just going by what I could see through the trees when I was there. But that's about all there is. In particular, there does not seem to be any way down to the river from here, unless you have a plan how to get your river raft down a pair of 150-200' cliffs with a low bench between them. I know what you're thinking: A few of you doubters out there are about to object because you've seen Indiana Jones pull this off before:

But Mythbusters did a segment about that scene and your odds of pulling it off without the benefit of plot armor are actually quite low:

And if I haven't made this really superabundantly clear yet, Legal is telling me to tell you NOT to jump off the cliff here in a rubber raft. Or really any cliff, frankly, in any sort of raft, or without a raft, for that matter. On the off chance that you were considering it. Your actual best bet, if you want to see the other half of the park that badly, is probably to go to the Chinquapin West Natural Area upriver of here and float down the river from there, and then continue floating down the river until you get to a good pullout spot, maybe somewhere around Gordon Creek, or keep going til you get to Oxbow or Dabney State Park, since you aren't going to have better luck getting up the cliff than you would going down. (Also, you really ought to check out the amazing secret waterfall at Chinquapin West while you're there.)

Anyway, since we're already off on a wild tangent anyway, here's the bonkers opening scene from Temple of Doom, which also involves a bit of movie magic. Legal doesn't have any really specific guidance about this part, but they suspect bending space and time and causality to pull off the tap dance bit may have unintended consequences, and things would be better, generally, if you didn't, but if you do they'd like to learn your secrets, thanks.

If you're curious about the name of the place, it's named after the Belted Kingfisher, the local member of the kingfisher bird family. The halcyon birds of Greek mythology were apparently people who were turned into kingfishers for their hubris, per Wikipedia, although the gods granted them a few "halcyon days" of nice weather right around the winter solstice. Which basically describes today, a sunny though not especially warm day at the end of December. Which makes it kind of appropriate to finally finish and post this today.

As kingfishers are found all over the world, there are lots of places and things named after them. I started putting a list together when I realized I might have to pad this post out a bit:

Kingfisher, Oklahoma, seat of Kingfisher County, and former home of Kingfisher College. The college disbanded over a century ago, and is largely remembered today for being the losing side of the second-worst rout in college football history, losing to the Oklahoma Sooners by a whopping 179-0 back in 1917.
Since you asked, the most lopsided game of all happened the year before that, in a game where the losing school had ended its football program the preceding year but was somehow legally obligated to play Georgia Tech anyway, and had to scrounge together a team of alumni and fraternity bros on short notice.
Kingfisher Point on way out toward the far end of the Aleutian Islands

one part of a larger natural area in Seattle
Kingfisher Point in Ft. Collins CO
A major brewery in India
A defunct airline, also in India, and connected to the brewery somehow.
A Mississippi blues guitarist nicknamed 'Kingfish'
also a Vietnamese restaurant in San Diego
and a European home improvement chain

Seventeen Mile Falls

2025-12-21T14:50:00.000-08:00

Since we're in atmospheric river season again, I thought I'd post a few photos of some seasonal waterfalls that are really only visible (or at least visible and worth seeing) this time of year. In the post just before this one, we had a look at "Chicken & Dumplings Falls", nicknamed (by me) after the defunct landmark restaurant across the street. This time around we're a few miles further along the old Columbia River Highway, right around HCRH Milepost 17, but across the road and uphill from there. Again, you can catch a brief glimpse of it while driving by, and strictly speaking you aren't supposed to park along the road here -- although I think the main reason for that is to push you to use the paid parking lot at Dabney State Park right next door. Actually if you look at a map the land containing the waterfall is also part of the park, so if -- hypothetically -- you wanted to get a closer look at it, you at least wouldn't be trespassing if you tried it. It's just that I don't see any trails over there, official or otherwise, or any abandoned roads or railroad grades or whatever, and the whole hillside facing the main section of the park seems to be choked with invasive ivy and blackberry vines, so bushwhacking anywhere near it looks like it'll be a huge hassle.

Still, if we pick reasonable top and base points on the state LIDAR map and subtract one from the other, this one comes to about 165' high counting the two tiers together. So it looks fairly impressive at the times when it's actually running. If we had wetter summers around here, we would probably have an official maintained trail to this one, and Instagram would be full of influencers doing yoga poses in front of it, and it would have a real, official, legal name instead of me just making up names on the fly as needed. But we don't have that kind of climate, and highlighting waterfalls that only run outside of prime tourist season is just going to make visitors unhappy, leading to lots of one star Yelp reviews, and angry letters to the editor demanding that somebody do something about this outrage ASAP, and they probably figured it's just not worth the trouble.

Chicken & Dumplings Falls

2025-12-21T14:06:00.000-08:00

It's atmospheric river time again in the Pacific Northwest, and (among other things) that means the local seasonal waterfalls are back in business. So it seems like a good time to take a look at one of them, since right now you can read this post and then rush out and go see it for yourself, which is usually not the case. This one is across the street from the Tad's Chicken & Dumplings restaurant, behind and uphill from the restaurant's overflow parking lot. You can catch a brief glimpse of it from the road if you know where to look. Right now there's usually room to park in front of the restaurant if you want to stop and take some photos, since the building is currently vacant and for sale. (The Portland Mercury called it a a classic must-stop back in 2020, but I don't think it ever reopened after the long pandemic closure.) And in the unlikely event someone asks what you're up to, you're an early-stage potential investor trying to visualize the possibilities here before moving forward. And who knows, maybe you'll get a closer look at the building and suddenly be inspired to go into the restaurant business.

Note that the forest behind the parking lot belongs to someone else and is not for sale, and it's signed as if they're used to interlopers trying to visit their waterfall and are sick and tired of it, so this one is strictly look from afar but don't touch.

Looking at it on the state LIDAR map, and picking out points for the top here and the base here, that gives us a height of 128 feet. Which seems reasonable, I think, and overall I think this would be a scenic highlight of the gorge if only it ran more often. Though that would only be possible if it rained more, and/or Chamberlain Hill (the mini-volcano that's responsible for the higher elevations around here) was a bit taller. And the only way I know of for a volcano to get taller is by erupting, so I'm not sure it would be worth all the extra trouble.

Twenty

2025-12-20T13:28:00.000-08:00

Today is this humble lil' blog's twentieth birthday, believe it or not. This feels like kind of a big deal, and tradition holds that I should probably try to say something vaguely interesting about the experience. So I went back and looked at very first post here, and the one, five, ten, and fifteen year birthday posts for ideas. The ten-year one mentioned something about making a list or retrospective of my favorite posts so far, or posts that I enjoyed writing that I think haven't gotten enough attention, or something along those lines. The fifteen year post notes that I never got around to doing that, and explained why I wasn't going to do one for that anniversary either, and I can't say I've developed a keen interest in retrospectives since then. Maybe I'll consider it in 2030, since 25 years is a nice round number, but I wouldn't bet money on it.

One of those earlier posts also points out that either yesterday or today is the 35th anniversary of the first website, info.cern.ch, going online, and explains that this humble blog had existed for 40% of the entire time the World Wide Web has existed. And -- purely due to sticking it out this long -- it has now been around for about 57% of the time since the first website went up. Which is an odd fact, when you put it that way, and I'm not sure that I like the sound of it.

Instead of doing a bunch of navel-gazing for twenty years, I thought I'd dabble in the Spirit of 2025 and run a little experiment, asking three of the leading AI chatbots to describe what this here blog is all about. I wanted the machine-generated text in this post to be clearly labeled as such, so I made it all Comic Sans. I actually don't intend that as a pejorative editorial comment here, especially since most of it is kind of flattering. It's just that I thought the words looked too authoritative in Times New Roman and needed to be taken down a couple of notches.

Google's Gemini

This one turned out ok, but with one major hallucination: It thought it needed to include an RL name for me, couldn't find one, and made something up. I redacted that part because the person it identified is a real person who lives in Portland and is about the same age as me, and we even seem to share a couple of common interests. But he did not, in fact, write any of this humble blog, nor has he never claimed to have done so, and the problem is more that the machines think we all look alike.

Cyclotram is a long-running, eclectic blog authored by an individual known as -b- (or **********) that focuses on the obscure history, geography, and urban landscapes of Portland, Oregon, and the surrounding Pacific Northwest.

Key Characteristics and Content

Subject Matter: The blog is highly regarded for its deep research into "hidden" local history, including old bomb shelters (notably Kelly Butte), obscure neighborhood parks, public art, historic bridges, and forgotten monuments.

Photography: It features extensive original photography, often documenting mundane but fascinating details like street benchmarks, contrails, local flora, and transit infrastructure.

Writing Style: The text is described as erudite and stream-of-consciousness, often blending personal anecdotes with historical trivia.

Consistency: Having started in 2005, the author has maintained a "once-a-month" posting streak for nearly two decades.

Popular Topics and Tags

Portland History: Detailed explorations of the city's changing urban fabric, from the Thurman Street Bridge to the legacy of local sculptors like Lee Kelly.

Natural Landscapes: Frequent posts about waterfalls in the Columbia River Gorge and geological features like glacial erratics and flood-formed ridges.

Transit and Aviation: Occasional focus on bicycling infrastructure and "window seat" photos from flights across the region.

The blog is hosted on Blogger at cyclotram.blogspot.com and also maintains a small Google Sites page for KML file storage and static assets.

ChatGPT:

cyclotram.blogspot.com is a personal travel/adventure blog where the author (often posting as brx0) writes about local explorations, outdoor places, history, and niche interests — especially focused on the Pacific Northwest (Oregon and Washington) and nearby sites.

Content & Style

Travel & Outdoors Exploration: Many posts describe visits to parks, waterfalls, trails, and historic or overlooked spots, often with detailed personal observations. For example, one recent entry covers a trip to Iron Mountain Park near Lake Oswego, mixing descriptive narrative with local history and humor.

Historic & Local Interest: Some entries focus on historic sites or regional features along routes like the Historic Columbia River Highway.

Personal Voice: The writing has a conversational, often lightly snarky or humorous tone, with personal anecdotes and commentary woven into the descriptions.

Older Posts: Archive pages go back many years (e.g., 2006–2010), showing early posts about urban curiosities like Portland’s tram or technical rants about blog layout.

Themes & Topics

Outdoors / Nature — hikes, waterfalls, parks, trails.

Regional History — especially Oregon and the Columbia Gorge region.

Local Culture & Oddities — quirky posts or personal reflections beyond pure travel.

Who It’s For

It’s geared toward readers interested in regional exploration and storytelling — people who enjoy off-the-beaten-path travel, local history, and personal essays rather than a formal travel guide or commercial site.

Microsoft's Copilot

Persuading Copilot to produce something similar was more work than the other two. Its initial attempt was just a bunch of generic travel advice, advising the reader to go to Powells and to try the local food carts, and it also suggested that you go do some international XTREME™ sports I have no intention of ever trying, like cave diving in Mexico, or volcano boarding in Nicaragua. I had never heard of the latter thing and assumed it was another AI hallucination, and after reading the wikpedia article about it I still think it's an AI hallucination. Also I have no idea where Copilot came up with those suggestions, but it certainly wasn't here. In fact, Legal wants me to put in a little disclaimer here: If an AI tells you to do something dumb or dangerous, and cites this humble blog as a reason why you should go ahead and do it, the AI is lying to you, and I can't be held responsible for whatever nonsense a random datacenter full of overpriced GPUs dreams up. In any case, the trick to getting it to actually look at the website (instead of just spewing a list of travel-related advertisers) was prompting it with "summarize" instead of "describe".

cyclotram is a long‑running personal blog that blends Portland‑centric exploration, photography, and deep‑dive research into local places, infrastructure, and oddities. The author posts original photos—often of parks, trails, bridges, public art, and overlooked corners of Oregon—and pairs them with researched context, history, and personal observations.

The tone is casual, curious, and slightly nerdy in the best way: the writer clearly enjoys wandering, documenting, and uncovering stories behind places most people walk past without noticing.

What the Blog Covers

Photography & Field Notes

Frequent photo essays of Portland‑area parks, trails, and natural spaces

Occasional vacation photos from outside Oregon

Short video clips appear sometimes, though the author jokes about not being a great videographer

Portland Infrastructure & Geography

Bridges, rail lines, obscure public works, and forgotten bits of urban history

Posts often include GIS references, historical notes, or links to public datasets (e.g., railroad bridge IDs)

Personal Adventures

The posts often start with a personal anecdote—like getting a COVID booster at a CVS and then exploring a nearby park afterward

Style & Personality

The author describes the blog as “hard to describe,” but acknowledges it’s often labeled a Portland blog or photoblog—both partly true. The writing is conversational, lightly humorous, and driven by curiosity rather than self‑promotion.

Iron Mountain

2025-12-15T01:35:00.000-08:00

Here's a slideshow from Lake Oswego's Iron Mountain Park. It's been on my list for a while but I'm not often down there with free time on my hands. Then one day, not so long ago really, a reason to go there appeared out of the blue: The Lake Grove CVS was the first one in the Portland area, possibly the whole state, that had the latest Covid boosters right when they became available, and for good measure I also got a flu shot in the other arm to keep things interesting, and afterward I figured I needed something to do to get the ol' blood flow circulating and maybe head off some arm soreness later. Definitely mixed results on that part, but the park was a success at least.

Most of the park is a steep south-facing hillside, just short of being a sheer cliff. This oddly rugged terrain was largely created by the city's brief 19th Century cameo as the Pittsburgh of the West. The raw iron-rich volcanic rock was mined here, then turned into iron ingots down by the Willamette in present-day George Rogers Park, which is why there's a big industrial smokestack in the middle of the park.

I think Lake Oswego has technically owned it for quite a while, but the park's current form is quite recent, opening in early 2021 after several years of design work and then construction.

Because this is Lake Oswego, the park has some unusual neigbhors. For one thing, there is -- improbably -- an actual working winery on the slope up above the park. As in, actually growing grapes on your oversized view lot. It's even named "Iron Mountain" in Italian. I think. Though I don't actually speak the language, and never got around to signing up for Duolingo, and Google Translate gives different results depending on whether you spell it as one word or two and whether it's capitalized or not, so who knows. In any case I don't think you can actually see it from anywhere in the park, so if you came here expecting sun-dappled Tuscan vistas you'll have to look elsewhere, I'm afraid.

Other neighbors include: The LO Hunt Club, a country club (one of several archrival country clubs scattered throughout the city), and the municipal tennis center. Because I am not a rich person, I saw "hunt club" and immediately worried about stray bullets, before realizing it's an equestrian club, for when your kid is crazy about horses and wants to learn show jumping and maybe be in the Olympics someday. Or at least not resent you forever for failing to invest in their dreams. The fun part is that you might also encounter horses along the trails, due to some sort of understanding with the city. It's not the first time I've encountered horses on trail, but the other times have all been way out in the Gorge or up in the Cascades. And just like these other times, it was fine; at least the couple of horses I encountered seemed pretty mellow. It sort of stands to reason that a skittish racing thoroughbred is not the sort of horse you want for jumping over things, even if their their spindly legs could handle the landings, which I doubt.

The view from the trail is primarily of Cook's Butte, the city's own mini-volcano (and a close cousin to Mt. Tabor, Mt. Sylvania, Kelly Butte, Highland Butte, and all the others). Which, seen from this angle (and maybe no other angle) seems to loom over Lake Oswego like the big scary volcano in Dante's Peak

Weirdly, however, at no point along any of the trails do you catch a glimpse of semi-fabulous, semi-forbidden Oswego Lake itself, not even a glimpse, even though it's literally just a few blocks south of Iron Mountain Boulevard and the park's own parking lot. It could just be due to the topography; if you have a lakefront house due south of the park, you'll have a commanding view of the lake from atop a high cliff. But it also seems possible that the trail layout deliberately avoids views of the lake, and local homeowners may honestly believe their special magic lake could be spoiled somehow by too many peasants simply gazing at it from afar. Either way, you can't see it from here, and you'll have to go somewhere else to sneak a peek at it. And I hate to burst anyone's bubble, but if you came from afar to see it based on seeing it in that one episode of 24, that version of the lake is completely fictional. For one thing, the real lake looks nothing like that. And furthermore, the real city would never tolerate a black person fishing on their lake, especially if he's the President. Also don't eat the fish; the city's primary sewer main runs right down the the length of the lake, above the lakebed, just deep enough so you can't see it, but it's there. They replaced it a few years ago and the new one is said to be much less leaky than its predecessor, but yeah. Also the lake stagnates and fills up with stinky algae in the summer. But I'm told it's fancy European а̀lgæ, and it's what makes the lake the blue cheese of lakes, a thing only a true conoisseur of lakes can appreciate, which is why the peasants mustn't look at it.

Ok, so I snark and snark about LO, but the park really is quite nice. It was a warm September day and parts of the park reminded me a lot of the eastern Gorge around Hood River or so. Dry rocky terrain with garry oak trees and such. And yes, I get that it's a weird microclimate caused largely by the old mining industry here, probably drier due to groundwater draining out thru the many tunnels.

Yes, I said tunnels. Signs explain that the seemingly-solid hillside contains a swiss cheese labyrinth of tunnels, though we're told they're all blocked up and concealed so nobody can get in and get hurt, or maybe crash thru a tunnel wall and end up in someone's wine cellar or art vault or Y2K doom bunker or luxury bondage dungeon or whatever. Still, it's important that you know about all this, just in case. Suppose (for example) that a weird mustache-twirling Lake Oswegan acquaintance of yours invites you over to sample some of the oldest and finest amontillados in existence, and long story short, you somehow end up behind a brick wall in an old mine tunnel deep underground. Your ungracious host might not be aware of all of these old secret entrances to the catacombs, leaving you free to dig your way out in peace, then make your way down to Iron Mountain Blvd. and hail an Uber or something. I mean, it might work, assuming you can find one of these hidden entrances. At least your odds are better than just sitting there yelling for help like an idiot.

As usual, here are a few selected news items from over the years, this time largely chosen for snark value:

A September 1932 article on scenic hikes close to the city includes a 7 mile loop hike from downtown Lake Oswego out to Lake Grove and back, which (like most of the listed hikes) is accomplished largely by walking along the shoulder of various busy streets that lack sidewalks. The description of this one is kind of confusing due to changed street names, rerouted roads, and neighborhood names that have fallen out of use, but it describes a trail portion of the route that sounds a lot like the main trail thru the park, as it heads east and ends near the country club. In most places I would put in a little caution here that people are driving much larger vehicles than they did when the article came out, and walking along the road is probably not safe anymore, but in 1932 Lake Oswego you risked being squashed by a variety of classic luxury cars. Cadillacs, Duesenbergs, Packards, Pierce-Arrows, Hispano-Suizas, etc., undoubtedly driven by a prominent businessman, or the spouse or mistress thereof, on the way home from a favorite speakeasy, and a twisty film noir plot ensues. Not that it does you any good, having been squished during the first reel of the film and all.

Anyway, other suggested hikes in the article include a romantic moonlight hike up and over Kelly Butte (!), and a casual stroll from Linnton (way out in far NW Portland, out past the St. Johns Bridge) out to Orenco (now a trendy part of Hillsboro), which back then involved a 10 mile stroll along rural backroads bracketed by scenic rides on the Linnton and Orenco streetcars.
A 1958 article recapping a little LO history up to that point, as a local historian had a new book out on the subject. The article includes a couple of then-contemporary photos, and sketches of yesteryear, and it notes briefly that the tunnels extended well beyond the present-day park, including under the adjacent country club.
The earliest mention of the place as an actual city park in the Oregonian was in 1984, when the city was looking at adding sports fields to existing parks and decided Iron Mountain wasn't a good candidate for one due to poor drainage. So they were probably talking about the small flat area around the parking lot. Either that, or these fields would be set up on the hillside for special LO versions of various sports, where the home team kids play with the field overwhelmingly tilted in their favor, and everyone is supposed to pretend not to notice.
A 1987 article about the Hunt Club fighting with the Lake Corporation over manure and water quality. ODOT was hauling it away as free compost but learned that a Tualatin company wanted to haul it away for their yard debris recycling program (I am not clear on how that would work, I'm just repeating what the article says). The recycling firm did this exactly once and had second thoughts, saying it was too much work and impractical, which in context might mean it was more disgusting than expected and they couldn't imagine repeating the process every week from here on out. Meanwhile, ODOT found a couple of other equestrian clubs in the area who were quite happy to take over as the state's official manure vendors. And thanks to this misunderstanding, the Hunt Club accumulated a large pile of the stuff -- said to be the size of a barn -- over the next couple of years, and runoff began to get into a nearby creek and then into the lake, at which point lawyers got involved and many billable hours were generated. And in the end it someone finally checked in with ODOT again and it turned out that the state government had a near-infinite demand for the stuff -- even when the legislature wasn't in session -- and they were quite happy to swing by and haul the whole barnload away. Seems the whole debacle could have been avoided with a phone call or a fax or two, but as far as I know everyone lived happily ever after. It would have been a much bigger debacle, but a better story, if the ODOT work crew had arrived with unclear instructions and assumed they were supposed to remove the manure mountain by dynamiting it, like they did with that whale back in 1970.

Upper Rock Creek Falls

2025-12-13T19:53:00.000-08:00

For our next adventure, we're paying a visit to Skamania County's amazing Upper Rock Creek Falls, right on the outskirts of Stevenson, Washington. I am not exaggerating when I tell you this is one of the scenic highlights of the entire Gorge, and yet the big guidebooks and tourist info sites all seem to ignore it, local tourism folks included. I think the main reason for this is that up until quite recently the falls here were surrounded by private property and there was no way to even get a glimpse of them without trespassing. After the interwebs came along, word got out about the falls to a very limited degree, along with a set of highly sketchy instructions on how to get there. My IG post about the falls described the problems with this route:

Maybe 10-15 years ago the internet briefly discovered the place, via a route on the other side of the creek that involved sneaking through a cemetery, avoiding angry locals, and then scrambling down a steep landslide-prone 100' bluff, and then climbing back up, and being sneaky again, and hoping your car wasn't towed or torched in the meantime. It slowly dawned on people that no part of this route was in any way public property, at which point a lot of local outdoor-adjacent websites marked it as off-limits and removed any info on how to get there, and the place was effectively memory-holed.

We are not following those instructions today. It turns out that for the entire time this was going on, there was another route on the other side of the creek that was apparently known to locals and nobody else. This route was also private land up until quite recently, but apparently passing through was tolerated, maybe in exchange for not telling outsiders about the place, but that last bit is just me speculating. Then in 2022, Skamania County quietly bought close to 11 acres (in three tax lots ) near the falls so now it's public land the whole way to the falls. Those links go to the Skamania County Assessor pages for these properties, for any skeptics out there who think it's still private; you can go check for yourself and do not need to trust me about this.

So with that preamble, the correct way to visit the falls is as follows: Go to the intersection of Ryan-Allen Road and Aalvik Road, here. There's a wide bit of shoulder just west of the intersection, with room for maybe 3-4 cars, and you can park there. There's a red fire hydrant right at the intersection, and you'll see an unsigned but obvious gravel trail starting to the left of the hydrant. Take this trail. After a while you'll go thru a powerline corridor with another trail thru it. Going straight takes you to the Upper Falls, while heading off to the left takes you toward the Lower Falls, and I'll talk about the Lower Falls a bit later, although I didn't visit them on this trip and have no photos to share. Note that there are a couple of sections of stairs to watch out for, and right at the end there's a steep bank to scramble down. Just something to keep in mind, especially if you're on a bike, or you have small children or maybe over-excitable dogs in tow.

The one and only historical item I've found about the place is a June 1927 tourism ad by local Skamania County boosters with a photo of the falls, promoting the county as the Vacationists' Paradise, now easily accessible via the shiny new Bridge of the Gods. Full of trout streams, hiking trails, and hot springs resorts.

Oh, and back in 1896 there was also a brief gold rush on Rock Creek that was initially reported to be here (which is how I came to read about it), but turned out to be happening deep in the forest 20 miles upstream of here. So it wasn't an event at the falls, per se, but I only realized that after digging up a bunch of links about it (so to speak), and c'mon, gold rush stuff is always fun, so I kicked it down to the footnote area instead of just deleting it.

One bit of photo advice: The stretch of creek around the falls faces roughly east, so as the afternoon rolls on it's harder and harder to keep the sun out of the frame, and you might be better off visiting in the early morning. I'm not a big morning person, and if you aren't one either there are some decent hotel options in the area. The well-known local golf & destination wedding resort was not a great fit for us, but a lot of people seem to like it.

So you might have seen the "Upper" in the name and now you're wondering about the Lower Falls. The short answer is that it really depends on when you read this. Back in 2007 there was a huge, slow-moving, unstoppable landslide starting in February of that year. Here's a March 2007 Oregonian profile of an elderly neighbor whose house was slowly being torn apart by the slide.

Some striking AP wire photos from May 12th: Another homeowner had tried to move his house back away from the unstable slope, but didn't move it back quite far enough to avoid the massive slide damaging his house beyond repair. They ended up burning the house as practice for the local fire department, which is not that unusual in situations like this. The twist here is that the homeowner was a firefighter in the department, and participated in burning down his own house for work. There's a photo of him watching that could be the dictionary definition of "mixed emotions".

After things settled down a bit, word got out in the regional outdoor community that the lower falls were gone forever, destroyed by the massive landslide. But things erode quickly around here, and 2007 was almost two decades ago, and apparently they've more-or-less returned to a state resembling the pre-slide falls. I mean, I don't have before-and-after photos to compare, but current Google Maps imagery indicates there's a tall waterfall there again.

It turns out this is not even the first time this has happened. Here's a small December 1921 news item titled "Flood Destroys Falls", which actually undersells the scale of what happened. The lower falls were buried by debris and all infrastructure downstream was destroyed and washed away, including an entire hydroelectric plant, which was never rebuilt. A 1956 map of the area shows the dam site still owned by the local public utility district at that point, though they apparently sold it later. I'm not absolutely sure that the new owner turned around and built a house there, or that said house was one of the houses trashed by the next big slide, but it seems kind of probable, doesn't it? There are no really benign forms of geology happening on human timescales; anything that happens quickly is seen as a disaster, even if nobody dies. And then when geology so much as pauses for a few decades everyone forgets all about it, and it always comes as a huge shock when things inevitably start moving again, wash, rinse, repeat.

So I guess what I'm trying to say here is that, from the look of things, I would not bet a penny that 2007 was the last-ever landslide here, which is why I said "it depends" about the Lower Falls. It's there now while I'm writing this, but could be buried in rocks and dirt and once again written off as lost forever by next spring, and could be completely back again by spring 2029. It's anybody's guess really.

So apparently the lower falls and the land between the two falls are also owned by the county, but the only area where you can take photos of it from below isn't public as of late 2024. And Zach Forsyth's waterfall book makes a really great point that photos looking down from the top of a waterfall are almost always a letdown. Often they're just a view of the parking lot, or looking down at a generic chunk of forest, and certainly not worth risking life and limb over. And that chunk of private land is also ground zero for the 2007 landslide, and seems to be zoned to prevent any future structures in that area, I think with the hope that the remaining landowners will eventually get a clue and sell at a price the county can afford. To that end, legend has it that county code enforcement will swoop in and taser you if you so much as snap two Lego bricks together while standing there.

While you're lying there getting tasered and sort of disassociating from the whole mess, you might wonder idly why it's county code enforcement that's tasering you and not someone from the city. To that end, here's a City of Stevenson "critical areas map" from 2018, showing overlapping areas of steep slopes, unstable soils, previous historical landslides, debris hazard areas downstream of known landslide areas, etc., I guess as sort of a guide when figuring out where not to build your dream home. The map also shows that, whether by pure coincidence or incredible foresight slash cynicism, the worst of the hazard area lies juuuust outside city limits, which jog south quite a bit here and just so happen to exclude most of Rock Creek. And as a result of this, the whole Rock Creek landslide situation is strictly a county problem that the city doesn't really have to care about, which is pretty convenient, I'll give them that at least.

So we've covered historical events for the upper and lower falls, but as for Rock Creek overall the most newsworthy happening came back in the summer of 1896 when the creek was the subject of a bona fide (but rather brief) gold rush. Seriously. Here's how it played out:

July 30th:
ONE MORE CRIPPLE CREEK FOUND

Word has been received that there is considerable excitement at Stevenson, the county seat of Skamania County, opposite the upper cascades, on account of the discovery of gold-bearing quartz. In Rock Creek, about 15 miles back from the Columbia. Parties who were fishing on Rock Creek a few days since say Stevenson was practically deserted, all the men having gone up to the mines. Parties from East Portland discovered the vein, and have been exploring and developing it, and have already a considerable quantity of rock “on the dump”. When they have had a milling test made, they will be able to judge of the value of their discovery.
August 2nd:
There is no question about the richness of the quartz recently discovered on Rock Creek, near Stevenson, says the Dalles Times-Mountaineer. Thursday, Captain Waud was shown specimens of the ore that were streaked with gold, and that were said to assay from $3000 to $4000 to the ton. The captain says the excitement both at Stevenson and Cascade Locks over the new discovery is intense.
August 5th, clarifies that the new mining district is 20-25 miles from town, near the origin of the creek near Lookout Mountain. Describes the area as "as inaccessible as could be desired by the most ardent sensationalist". The article continues:
The ore seems to be rich in gold, silver and copper, and is easy to mine. There has been a number of claims staked out, and the country is full of prospectors, and strikes are reported daily. There are now four tunnels being driven and the ore is showing up better as they go. There is also some placer gold found near by, which is being worked with success. Many new miners are now at Stevenson getting outfits and preparing to go out — mostly from Portland. Pack horses can be obtained at Stevenson, which is the nearest town to the mines.
August 6th: "Gold Is In Skamania", recaps the heady events of the past week and interviews one F. Woodworth, an experienced longtime prospector, who immediately bailed out of his boring railroad job and headed to the Rock Creek goldfields, immediately staking out some mining claims and grabbing a sample for the nearest assay office. His sample had just come back from the lab that morning, and was valued at a mere $4/ton, but he took that as a sign of success given how little time and effort he had invested so far. He was headed back to Stevenson after being interviewed, and averred that after his many years of searching, he had finally found the Mother Lode, the key to untold riches, for real this time, not like all the other times he thought the same thing and it didn't pan out, so to speak.
Then on August 16th the worst possible thing happened to the gold country at Rock Creek: Not a mine cave-in, or a dynamite accident, or it turned out the whole thing was a big fraud, or there was a mass outbreak of weapons-grade syphillis, or any of the other kinds of confernal tarnation common to gold rushes. Instead, the news came of massive gold discoveries in the far north of Canada, in the area around Dawson City, Yukon. The Klondike Gold Rush was on -- a gold rush so famous they named an ice cream sandwich after it -- and just like that every gold-addled adventurer in America and across the globe, plus everyone else who made steady money off of prospectors, was off to the Arctic wastes in search of the Mother Lode. Which was definitely, absolutely, positively out there this time, if you just had the good luck or intuition to dig in the right place, and if you didn't find it on the first try, maybe the ten-thousandth try would turn out differently.
July 1897, a year after the brief mania along Rock Creek, came "Mines of Skamania", an update on the current state of the local industry. It seems partly aimed at the many locals who had run off to Alaska a year earlier and had returned emptyhanded, noting that a fair number of people had found modest-to-moderate quantities of gold all over Skamania County at this point, and you might not get rich but at least a steady-ish income was available, potentially, if you knew what you were doing, and you probably won't freeze solid like poor Sam McGee, or suffer the various other calamities common to the poems of Robert W. Service, and you most likely won't share any of the grim fates of the humans in The Call of the Wild, and then be abandoned by your semi-loyal sled dog, who heads off to run with the wolves. You probably won't even have to turn to crime and then be brought to justice by Sergeant Preston and King the Wonder Dog, and it's equally unlikely you'll find yourself stuck in a lesser John Wayne movie with an earworm soundtrack.

In short, the Skamania Gold Country just didn't offer the same exotic dangers as its northern competitor, so it may be just as well that the local gold rush ended before producing its own poet laureate. It just wouldn't be the same, somehow. Maybe some scary tales about catching hypothermia even though it's 51 degrees because it's a very humid cold; or maybe the sad tale of a lonely miner being ripped apart by an equally amorous but very clumsy sasquatch. I dunno, maybe there's some potential here in the right hands, but to do it now you'd first have to spend half an hour explaining the Rudely Interrupted Gold Rush that Really Happened Nearby, which kind of ruins the mood.
And because some things never change, there's a semi-related coda from 1910. At this point it was time for a very different kind of land rush, with promoters insisting the former goldfields were perfect as orchard country. This was a common thing around the whole Northwest; there was this idea going around that fruit trees were a license to print money, which would pay for that gracious country estate you've always wanted, with virtually zero manual labor. So essentially the same dream that was sold to a lot of Boomers from the 1970s onward about starting their own wineries: Most of the work is simply sitting around in the golden sunset light and endlessly sampling the finished product, and maybe coming up with a genius-level new food pairing every now and then. Just as a general rule, if someone is trying to sell you any variant of farming that's somehow really easy and also profitable and also 100% legal, and they're trying to sell you on it instead of just doing it themselves, they're trying to pick your pocket.

Eagle Creek Railroad Bridge

2025-12-13T16:26:00.000-08:00

Next up we're checking out the train bridge at Eagle Creek. I said something earlier about doing these in order, west to east, and we really are doing that, more or less, but we've already visited the ones at Moffett Creek and Tanner Creek, so we're skipping right ahead.

Unlike the last couple of posts in this series, this one definitely counts as a bridge, at least; it even had its own Bridgehunter page, back when that was a thing. Which is helpful because I can save a little time and just block-quote the page's 'Facts' section:

Facts

Overview
Pratt through truss bridge over Eagle Creek on Union Pacific Railroad

Location
Multnomah County, Oregon
Status
Open to traffic

History
Built 1935

Builders
- Bethlehem Steel Co. of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (Fabricator)
- McClintic-Marshall Co. of Chicago, Illinois & Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Fabricator)
- Orino, Bell & Malcolm of Portland, Oregon (Contractor)

Railroads
- Oregon-Washington Railroad & Navigation Co. (OWR&N;)
- Union Pacific Railroad (UP)

Design
The Union Pacific Railroad Bridge at Eagle Creek is a two span bridge consisting of two standard Pratt through trusses. The bridge is of a standard style used by the railroads in the early twentieth century.

Dimensions
Length of largest span: 160.0 ft.
Total length: 320.0 ft.

Approximate latitude, longitude
+45.64046, -121.93121 (decimal degrees)
45°38'26" N, 121°55'52" W (degrees°minutes'seconds")

Approximate UTM coordinates
10/583292/5054657 (zone/easting/northing)
Quadrangle map:
Bonneville Dam

Inventory number
BH 38508 (Bridgehunter.com ID)

About the design of this one, I will just note that the 'Design' field is just two sentences, and both sentences include the word 'standard'. Also note that the the year of construction listed -- 1935 -- is quite late for the Gorge, about 50 years after the rail line opened. This is because the rail line was relocated around that time to make room for Bonneville Dam. Or strictly speaking the reservoir behind the dam.

Regarding the firms credited with the bridge, a history page at Lehigh University says McClintic-Marshall was "the world's largest independent steel fabricating firm" before its acquisition by Bethlehem Steel Corp. in 1931, and goes on to note that the company also fabricated all the locks for the Panama Canal, while Bridgehunter credits the firm for a number of notable bridges of that era, particularly the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, plus some other lesser-known suspension bridges like the Anthony Wayne Bridge in Toledo, OH; The I-74 Bridge over the Mississippi River at Moline, IA, and the Mount Hope Bridge in Rhode Island. The last one was named 1929's "Most Beautiful Steel Bridge, Class A", by the American Institute of Steel Construction. Recall that the McLoughlin Bridge on the Clackamas River (which we visited wayy back in 2008) won the same award in 1933, albeit in Class C since it's a much smaller bridge.

Meanwhile the Orino, Bell & Malcolm firm was apparently as the local contractor that performed the actual assembly work on the bridge That firm is credited for exactly three projects within the Bridgehunter site, all in the 1930s, and all of which are related to the Bonneville Dam project: The viaduct over Tanner Creek; a train tunnel under Tooth Rock that I have no photos of; and the bridge here. Which kind of feels like an afterthought compared to the other two. They were on the hook for building a major concrete viaduct and digging a train tunnel and getting it all done before your tracks disappear under the rising waters behind the dam.

Since Brigehunter now only exists in Wayback Machine form, it appears the only info on the internet now (or at least in Google) about the company is my Tanner Creek Viaduct post along with a page about Clay v. Rossi, a court case stemming from the relocation project and surety bonds related to that work, which somehow ended up in the lap of the Idaho Supreme Court. And I'd tell you more about the case, but the text disappears behind a paywall before indicating who won the case or why, or (this being Idaho) even whether it was resolved the ordinary legal way like they do in other more forward-looking states; or maybe they did an old-fashioned trial by combat, with duelling pistols at high noon; or maybe they dunked both parties in icy water to see who sinks and who floats, on the theory that engineering is just a fancy type of witchcraft from out of state that involves lots of fancy math, so they might as well make a witch trial out of it. Or who knows, really.

Rosemont Bluff

2025-12-12T17:57:00.000-08:00

Next up we're visiting Portland's obscure and very small Rosemont Bluff Natural Area. It's a triangular bit of hillside, just 2.3 acres in all, in a neighborhood of mid-1950s suburban-type houses. From what I've been able to figure out from county survey data, the subdivision to the east ("Rosemont Addition"), was platted out in 1891, and to the south "Marchmont Addition" was filed back in 1889. A bit to the west was "Parkhurst Addition". But the present-day park was part of a larger parcel that was never subdivided, for whatever reason.

Being a large single parcel may have helped clear the way when Multnomah County needed a site for a new modern "juvenile home". The main advocate for building it had been County Judge Donald E. Long, and it was eventually named after him, and it's still in operation under the same name now. Most of the lot was a flat area at the base of the bluff, and "juvie" was built there, served by an extension of NE 68th avenue that curves along the base of the bluff. I haven't seen any evidence that the county ever had specific plans for the bluff itself. So I think what happened is that it became a sort of unofficial neighborhood park. Maybe it was neighborhood volunteers, maybe teenage inmates next door, that info doesn't seem to have made the papers either way. It did happen around the same time the county divested itself of its chronically underfunded, ok, largely unfunded county park system, and maybe that's what prompted them to spin off Rosemont Bluff to the city too. Possibly local residents pushed for the county to do this, thinking they would get a better park out of it. That's just me speculating, but it seems like a reasonable theory in the absence of actual documentation.

It seems like this was successful for a long time; the park got a well-designed trail that connects the upper and lower ends of the bluff, complete with a couple of switchbacks. It felt like it could be a little corner of Mt. Tabor or Washington Park. It was really nice, and somehow felt much larger than it is. Then COVID hit, and apparently the park became a huge homeless camp for a while, and contributed to the general sense that public order had broken down across the city and police were basically just not doing their jobs anymore. I mean, I have a lot of questions about the supposed post-COVID crime wave, how much of it was real and how much media hype, and what the actual causes and effects were, but we're not going to resolve that today.

The key takeaway right now is that the city appears to have decided to abandon the place permanently and walk away and dropkick it into the nearest memory hole, sort of like what they did with Kelly Butte a few decades ago. The City Parks website used to have a page about the place here, but not anymore. There isn't even a copy of it in the Wayback Machine, which is remarkably thorough by city standards. Maybe this was on the theory that homeless people might hop on a computer at the library and use their advanced research skills to find new places to set up camp, and not mentioning it on the website will somehow prevent this from happening. I have my doubts that it really works this way, personally. And call me a cynic if you want, but I think it's just as likely that some well-connected developer wants the land and they just need the public to forget it's supposed to be a city park. Of course they'll also need to move the juvenile facility somewhere else, so if there's a sudden chorus of local movers and shakers insisting that needs to happen ASAP, you can reasonably assume there's a done deal and the fix is in.

So, here are a few items from around the interwebs, offered as evidence that the park really does exist, because apparently I need to do that. Eppur si muove, there are four lights, and all that.

The two lots on PortlandMaps, showing that the city does technically still own the place, for the time being.
One Yelp review
It appears on the old "efiles list", which given the dates on that list probably means the city was already doing occasional maintenance work on the place while the county still technically owned it.
The park was first mentioned in the paper in 1997 in a brief item about a volunteer cleanup effort
Those PortlandMaps pages up above will tell you the park is in the North Tabor neighborhood, in fact the eastern park boundary is also the official boundary between North Tabor and Montavilla. But back in 2008 there was a short-lived movement to officially name the whole neighborhood "Rosemont" (after the park) instead, after residents narrowly rejected "North Tabor" in favor of remaining "Center". Which seems thoroughly, hopelessly nondescript, and possibly inaccurate, but the article notes this was one of the city's very first neighborhood associations, dating back to the early 1970s, and the name was originally "CENTER", an acronym standing for "Citizens Engaged Now Towards Ecological Review". Eventually after enough of these proposals the local citizenry relented and went with "North Tabor", which is clearly the most realtor-friendly option. Maybe it finally passed after enough of the local activist Boomers shuffled off to the great big Woodstock festival in the sky, I dunno.
For what it's worth, a brief Willamette Week item from May 2017 insists that the geographic center of the city is a dive bar on NE 28th in Laurelhurst, but they just say that without proof. I also don't have proof, but I do have a nagging suspicion this isn't the right place either.
The park was the subject of a 2013 post at Unauthorized Guide to the Parks of the World
Was the subject of a No Ivy Day event in October 2015
And of course a 2020 Urban Adventure League post

Lewis & Clark State Park

2025-12-12T15:46:00.000-08:00

Next up we're visiting Lewis & Clark State Park, at the west end of the Columbia Gorge just across the Sandy River from downtown Troutdale. Let me start off by saying this post is not an adventure through pristine wilderness; the the park's essentially a glorified highway rest area -- it officially opened in October 1955 along with the nearby segment of I-84 -- surrounded by a few recreation options. (The park is classified as a "State Recreation Site", if we're going to split hairs.) The park is best known as a Sandy River access point for fishing and boating, and the high bluffs above the river have become a popular rock climbing spot in recent decades. The park is not famous for hiking, but it does have a few trails, and that's what we're here to check out. None of them are very long and most are easy, but one has sort of a weird mystery associated with it, which we'll get to in a bit. And don't miss the historical odds and ends down at the bottom, stuff that didn't fit anywhere else.

Lewis & Clark Nature Trail
Broughton Bluff Trail
Lewis & Clark Trail No. 400

Lewis and Clark Nature Trail

So the first trail, and the only one with a sign, is the "Lewis & Clark Nature Trail", which is a mostly-paved loop around the landscaped "rest area" part of the park, with a few signs describing various native plants. In practice I imagine it's largely used by people and dogs who need a stretch after a long drive along I-84. When I started writing this post I sort of assumed the trail and the dated, weathered sign were original features of the park, but it turns out they were added in 1980 for the 175th anniversary of the Lewis & Clark expedition camping here for a bit in November 1805. And yes, a bit of my surprise is due to being of just the right age where 1955 is ancient history, while 1980 is a year I have clear childhood memories of, and therefore things from then cannot possibly look dated or weathered. (And yes, I have yet another birthday this month, why do you ask?)

An April 1980 Oregon Journal article described the upcoming trail:

When completed, the trail will feature many of the 150 flowers, shrubs, and trees identified and described by Capts. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in their journals which, besides an account of their travels, were a compendium of scientific data covering botany and other disciplines. The one-half mile loop trail, with a gravel covering, is in place and site preparation has been finished. Only a start has been made on the plantings.

The article then notes that they only had Oregon grapes in place so far, but a vine maple was coming soon. The article continued:

Plans are in progress for various planting areas to be “adopted” by garden clubs, civic and educational groups, each to plant and maintain its own plot. Twenty-two such groups have been enlisted so far. ... The nature trail is a project of the Oregon Lewis and Clark Trail Committee, chaired by Dr. E.G. Chuinard, Portland orthopedic surgeon. Dr. Chuinard is a nationally known Lewis and Clark scholar, and the trail has been a dream of his for many years.

The article goes on to mention that, as an orthopedic surgeon, he was proud that the new trail would be wheelchair-accessible, at least by the pre-ADA standards of 1980. Chuinard later wrote a book that more or less combined his professional and personal interests “Only One Man Died, the Medical Aspects of the Lewis & Clark Expedition”

An August 1979 Oregonian article described the proposal in similar terms, adding that this would be a great new use for the park, replacing the overnight campground that had been there since the park opened. Apparently the campground was considered a nuisance and drew 'undesirable' people to the area, though I'm not sure whether that meant partiers or something worse. A November 1978 letter to the Oregon Journal opposing removal of the campground explained that it was the only low-income camping option for people passing through the area in the summer, and Ainsworth was (and is) the closest alternative, much further from Portland and Troutdale. The Oregonian article went on to quote someone with the State Parks Division who hoped they'd be able to get rid of the adjacent dirt bike area just north of the park as that was considered a nuisance too.

1979, the oregonian editorialized in favor of the trail. The editorial board may not have paid close attention to the proposal up to this point, and it's hard to imagine a bunch of cynical old-school newspapermen caring a whit about gardening, but one historical constant about the Oregonian, from the 1850s to the present day, is that they will always endorse any proposal that involves being mean to poor people, whether as a deliberate goal, or as foreseeable collateral damage. So with this editorial, the project was virtually a done deal.

The nature trail was dedicated in October 1980. For the big event, the paper interviewed Roger Mackaness, a Corbett landscape architect, nursery owner, and part-time Job Corps instructor, who was handling the practical side of the project, translating Chuinard's daydream into an actual garden full of live plants.

“I can’t guarantee that anything will grow”, said Mackaness, explaining that certain plants such as sagebrush and prickly pear have to be grown from seed. “Eastern Oregon plants take special care.” Varieties of plants to be found on the trail include cliff dwellers, desert lovers, high mountain and shore plants, he said. Making the task even more difficult, the plants will be ordered in the manner in which Lewis and Clark discovered them, and each planting will be landscaped to mirror the topography found in the plant’s natural habitat. “This will be a trailhead for a 90 mile hike to The Dalles”, Mackaness said. “In the 1/4 mile nature trail you could see the same kind of plant life you’d see if you hiked to The Dalles.”

The article goes on to explain that the plantings should be complete in another two years or so. An Oregonian article on the trail dedication notes that the trail had been in the works since 1974, and the very first mention of it I saw came in a 1975 article by Chuinard, which mentions that a group in Charlottesville, VA was proposing an "all the Lewis & Clark plants" garden there.

In April 1982, a Lewis and Clark mini-garden opened at the Oregon Zoo, featuring some of the same plants, with Chuinard and other members of the trail committee in attendance. The Journal assured readers that

The new garden also is intended to complement, not compete with, the nature trail at Lewis and Clark State Park near the mouth of the Sandy River, which, when completed, will have examples of all or most of the plants identified in the Oregon country by the famous explorers. A sign in the zoo garden calls attention to the Sandy River project.

It's not clear what happened after that, as the Oregon Journal went out of business later that year and they covered the garden effort much more closely than the Oregonian ever did. Probably the same thing that often happens with efforts that start as one person's dream and that rely on volunteers to keep going. Especially when that one person was already a retiree and eventually retires "for real" from civic efforts too and moves out of the area to be near family, as the Chuinards did in 1987. He had already moved on to a new project at that point, trying to persuade the city to build a Lewis and Clark museum out at Kelley Point Park. He and the committee had originally wanted to build the museum here, piggybacking on a proposed ODOT port of entry, as Chuinard explained in a 1984 op-ed in the Oregonian.

He argued this was a great location for a museum (although the State Parks Division and environmental groups disagreed) and a logical follow-up for the still-incomplete nature trail. The museum would have been located in the still-barren 12 acre plot north of the 'main' park, between the railroad and I-84, which I think is where the county's short-lived offroad motorcycle park was located during the 1970s. an August 1985 article has more details about the proposal.

The problem with the trail, Chuinard said, is that the flowers do not bloom at the same time, and most are not at their peak during the short season of pleasant weather in the Columbia Gorge, when visitors are not subjected to rain or the cold east wind.

Which is true of the entire Northwest, frankly. He went on to suggest that we were rapidly falling behind Washington State in both quantity and quality of Lewis & Clark visitor centers, which is an odd sort of arms race to have. But I suppose that was how things got funded in 1984.

The present-day trail does not exactly look as though it has 22+ garden clubs and civic groups avidly maintaining their individual plots. Some of the signage has been updated fairly recently, though, possibly for the Lewis & Clark bicentennial in 2005. One of the newer signs concerns native medicinal plants, and has a sidebar snarking about the Lewis & Clark expedition dosing themselves to the gills with mercury and other toxic patent medicines of the era, I guess for a little contrast. Which is a fair point, and not one a circa-1980 sign would have mentioned, necessarily, even if the nature trail's main proponent wrote an entire book on the subject.

Broughton Bluff Trail

The second trail is an obvious but unnamed trail that heads south and upward from the landscaped area. This is the access trail for the popular rock climbing area along the southwest-facing part of Broughton Bluff. This area is enormously popular when weather permits, which was not the case the day I visited. Which is great if (like me) you just want to take photos of the rocks and not try going up them. I only followed the trail to the point where you're looking almost straight down at the old Columbia River Highway bridge over the Sandy River, but I gather it dead-ends at the state park property line, not much further south from there. The potentially-climbable cliffs continue for a while south from there, but they're on private property and it seems the owners don't want the liability issues, and also don't want to sell. In terms of the trail having other features, there's one small and (as far as I know) unnamed waterfall along the way. I don't know whether it runs year round or it's just seasonal. Either way, I can't say it's worth going out of your way to see if you aren't there to climb any rocks, given all of the vastly better hiking options a few miles to the east. Small bit of trivia here, the place is named for a junior officer on the the George Vancouver expedition who made it roughly this far upriver, and is best known for naming Mt. Hood and Mt. St. Helens, along with a bunch of other names that didn't stick, like calling the Sandy the "Barings River", after the British bank that imploded in 1995 after a rogue trader lost all their money. Broughton didn't name the bluff after himself, though. That came later, after a 1926 lobbying campaign by local Girl Scouts.

In addition to the main trail, a scramble route goes to the top of the bluff, starting right at the point where the main trail rounds the sharp corner from the north face of the bluff to the southwest face. I only found out this existed afterward so I don't have any photos from the top, but blog posts at Casing Oregon and Columbia River Gorgeous include photos from up there, and a video from TheCascadeHiker shows both trails, first the main one, then backtracking to the one to the top. Unfortunately the park boundary also runs along or very close to the top of the bluff so you can't really go anywhere once you've made it to the top. A century ago (early November 1920) you could take a streetcar here from downtown Portland, climb the bluff (which went by "Troutdale Butte" back then) and then east and up to the top of Chamberlain Hill and back, but I get the impression that hikers and climbers and random tourists wore out their welcome here decades ago. In any event it's just ordinary farm country up there once you're away from the edge, and not one of those weird Venezuelan islands in the sky, especially not the kind with dinosaurs. Could be worse, though; if Portland's urban growth boundary didn't exist, the entire top of the bluff would likely be a nasty gated community full of ugly McMansions, and security goons from the HOA would pour boiling oil down on anyone who dared to climb here. So there's that.

As it is, the top of the bluff is just ordinary farm country growing normal farm products. It did have one brief brush with semi-importance back in 1961, when the top of Broughton Bluff was part of an elaborate surveying project by the US Coast & Geodetic Survey, the agency behind all of those pre-GPS vintage survey markers. This project involved a team of engineers, families in tow, traveling from place to place, marking and surveying, building and disassembling survey towers, measuring and remeasuring until the exact position of everything was nailed down to 1/300th of an inch, then going somewhere else and starting the process all over again, like the world's nerdiest traveling circus. I imagine that probably made for a weird childhood. The article mentions that the survey had been delayed by higher-priority projects like laying out Cold War missile bases.

September 1974 article on climbing here, mentions in passing that there are a few other things to do, like smelt dipping (no longer possible since the smelt runs collapsed in the 80s), camping (replaced by the garden), and dirt bike riding (also abolished, and replaced by an empty lot). While chain smoking or working your way through a case of Blitz beer or both whenever you had a hand free.

Lewis & Clark Trail No. 400

And finally, at the far corner of the landscaped triangle, an unsigned trail heads east into the forest, and off the edge of most maps of the park. It's clearly a "real" trail, constructed by people who knew what they were doing, and not just a random use path, and it seems to get some level of regular maintenance, and you get the distinct impression that a trail like this is bound to go somewhere interesting, sign or no sign. So you keep going, doing a roughly flat, roughly straight traverse east, part of the way up the bluff and parallel to I-84 and the railroad (which you are never out of earshot of). But after a couple of miles it just sort of fades out and ends, and you can either turn back at that point or try bushwhacking further for a while and then turn back. The only real destination along the way is a stretch with several house-sized boulders toward the end of the (obvious) trail, known to local climbers as "The Zone". I can't say it's an amazing nature experience, but if you think of it as more of a very easterly city park along the lines of Portland's Forest Park, it's actually not that bad. I feel like I need to say this because the OregonHikers page about the trail snarks about it (which is quite uncharacteristic for them), saying they only did it just for the sake of completeness.

So why is there a trail here, if it just sort of ends at a random spot in the forest? That isn't typically what trails do. One clue is that although there's no sign for the trail in the park, if you look at the right maps you'll see occasional scattered references to it here and there calling it the "Lewis and Clark Trail 400" or some variation thereof. (I'm almost positive the name also appeared on an official PDF map of the park at one point, but I can't seem to find a link to that map now.) The "400" is the key detail: Under the longstanding trail numbering scheme in the Gorge (which I think is a Forest Service thing, although some trails on state land use it as well in the name of consistency), trails are all numbered 400-something, (other than the Gorge bit of the Pacific Crest Trail, which is #2000 for its whole length), and the number 400 was reserved early on for a hypothetical east-west trail stretching 90 miles or so from Portland out to Hood River or possibly The Dalles, depending on who you ask. This trail has never really existed over that full distance, but a few segments do, and it's slowly grown (and occasionally shrunk) over time when people take an interest in the idea for a while and funding becomes available. A couple of segments further east are known as the Gorge Trail #400, which I'm sure I've mentioned here once or twice. So right now the official west end of the westernmost existing chunk of Gorge Trail is at Angels Rest, which is obviously nowhere close to Troutdale, and that's how it's been for decades. That is, except for the obscure bit of dead-end trail we're visiting here. Which I guess makes it the trail equivalent of a freeway ghost ramp.

Note that Trail #400 is not the same thing as the under-construction Historic Columbia River Highway trail. It covers more or less the same ground but is a very different proposal, a paved path aimed primarily at road cyclists, often immediately next to the freeway, and encompassing surviving bits of the old highway where possible. I've walked on a few parts of it, and it's fine, I guess, but it's nobody's idea of a relaxing nature experience. And since the entire theme of the effort is around the old highway, the initial part of the route involves riding on the old road, sharing it with Winnebagos and monster SUVs and so forth. Which is not doable at all if you're on foot.

It's also not the same thing as the Hatfield Memorial Trail, which is supposed to be an east-west backcountry route, staying as far away from civilization as possible under the circumstances. A trail along these lines was proposed by the Sierra Club way back in 1971, and a fairly long route can be assembled out of parts of several existing trails, though some of these trails receive little or no Forest Service maintenance and it's an ongoing struggle to keep them from being taken back by the forest.

An early version of that idea (or part of it) was the proposed Talapus Trail, which would have connected Larch Mountain to Wahtum Lake by way of the Bull Run Watershed, a large area that's normally closed to all public access because it's the primary source of Portland's drinking water supply. I am not sure how that was supposed to work, whether they were going to tweak the closure boundary or just accept that a few backcountry hikers wouldn't be a problem, or they just hadn't figured that out yet. The notion being kicked around as early as 1974 (back when calling it "Hatfield Memorial" would have alarmed Senator Hatfield), and an August 1980 article was already looking ahead to a third east-west linkage once Gorge Trail #400 and the Talapus route were done and dusted. This third route would have run right along the Columbia shoreline, which isn't even on anyone's long-term ideas list anymore, as far as I've seen. It always shocks me to see how many grand plans of the 60s and 70s came to a crashing halt on election day 1980; I'm sure that there were a few clunker ideas in there, but I'd love to go visit the timeline where the entire Reagan Administration never happened, and the wingnuts and their ideas never took over, and just see how the year 2020 played out over there versus here. It can't have been worse, anyway

The notion of a Trail 400 that specifically started here seems to have burst onto the scene in 1979 with the state's new Columbia Gorge parks master plan, which envisioned what it called a "low-level gorge trail":

Proposed development of trail head parking for the "low level gorge trail", which, when fully completed, will complete a link for hikers from Troutdale to The Dalles, a distance of 90 miles. Portions of the trail have been completed, but access through some western properties is still being examined.

Toward the end of the article it mentions that funding was uncertain, and construction probably wouldn't begin until 1981-83 on any of the listed projects, and that was dependent on federal money coming through. Other interesting and sadly unbuilt ones include a trail between Rooster Rock and Latourell Falls, and a railroad underpass connecting Wahkeena Falls and Benson State Park. The plan mentions that the old Rooster Rock Wagon Road -- which we visited a few years ago in the Palisade Falls post -- would connect to the low-level trail as it passed through the area.

So the first problem with the trail and the rest of these grand plans was the date: 1979 was immediately before Ronald Reagan was elected and began slashing non-military budgets, and stomping on anything that looked vaguely environmental just to spite the hippies. The envisioned construction period also overlapped with Oregon's deep multiyear recession of the 1980s. So without money or political interest, the project fell by the wayside and has never been revived, just like other grand projects of the 1970s like switching to the metric system.

As for why it stops where it does, the current trail extends past the eastern edge of the park and out onto Forest Service land for a while, and remains largely federal as far as the Corbett area other than some assorted bits of ODOT-owned land and one stretch owned by the Union Pacific railroad. It's as if the state built as much as they could on their own and then the feds never picked up the baton. As for the railroad bit, I didn't see anything saying they were blocking the proposal, which I think would've been newsworthy if that had happened. I did see that they'd tried subdividing it into residential(?) lots at one point but didn't sell any of them, and the land hasn't been buildable since 1986 due to National Scenic Area rules). So maybe they'd still be up for selling that area, or at least doing an easement for a trail, though I obviously have no way to know that.

November 1981 - Multnomah County closed a mile of Henderson Road between Latourell & Bridal Veil, though holding on to the old right-of-way to maybe become part of trail #400 someday. The article mentions that the old road had once been part of the 1870s wagon road between the Sandy River and The Dalles. I gather the steep, long-closed, long-forgotten (but again never-vacated) Latourell Hill Road was once part of the old wagon route too, but I don't know if it was ever envisioned as a trail route.

Small calendar item from September 30th 1983, noting volunteers could come join a "work party clearing new low-level Gorge Trail No. 400 east from Lewis & Clark State Park".

Further east, the state was trying to arrange a land swap with the federal Bureau of Land Management for land further east along the proposed trail route; the article describes the 2 mile long parcel as 100 acres of steep north-facing bluffs next to the rail line, but I can't pin down which parcel they're talking about or who owns it now. The Friends of the Columbia Gorge was strongly opposed to the idea. It seems that a couple of rare and potentially endangered plants were known to live in the area: Sullivantia oregana and Dodecatheon dentatum, and the Friends figured they would no longer be protected properly with the plants in state hands. Thinking BLM would do a better job than the state would of protecting the environment seems a bit odd in the 2020s but maybe things were different back then.

The trail also ran into a degree of local opposition, as the park had a sketchy reputation back in those days, beyond the usual urban legends about highway rest areas. The trail was proposed around the same time the campground was removed, and the county-run dirtbike park next door was still there, and rural residents to the east found it easy to imagine the trail would funnel an urban crime wave in their direction. For example, a 1979 article about a longtime resident of the tiny town of Latourell (it's just downhill from Latourell Falls, but not visible from the Gorge highway) raised concerns about a proposal in the new state plan to turn a local historic house into a youth hostel for people through-hiking the new trail. Local residents strongly opposed the idea, the word "youth" being even more loaded then than it is now.

As another example, a 1982 article lamenting that 37 different government agencies were involved in managing the Sandy River area. mentioned rowdy campers at Dodge Park as one of the issues facing the area, holding all-night beer parties and such and driving away respectable visitors. A State Parks representative mentioned that similar problems had receded at Lewis & Clark after the campground had been removed. Other people wanted to talk about habitat protection, but the paper reported that toward the end, after the lurid stuff and the riling people up about big gummint bureaucrats.

By 1984 the Oregonian was wringing its hands again about the now campground-free, dirtbike-free park, as the area nearby saw its second homicide in as many years. I haven't looked up the news stories about those but it sounds like both were related to arguments between transients. The mayor of Troutdale was freaking out and blaming the park, conveniently outside city limits. A spokesman for the county sheriff's office explained that "Other than those two murders, we have no phenomenal problem at Lewis and Clark state park", to which the mayor responded "Don't you think one murder a year is too much?", as if this was now a long term trend. The article went on to lump in a recent homicide at a truck stop half a mile away, a sexual assault in Troutdale Community Park (now Glenn Otto Park) three years earlier, and the general unruly crowd atmosphere at Glenn Otto as if those were valid data points about Lewis & Clark being scary. I've complained before about how bad crime reporting was in the 80s, but it still startles me. Nobody was even trying to figure out actual cause and effect, just pointing fingers at everything randomly and freaking out even further when that approach didn't move the needle.

Despite all that, the effort forged ahead for another couple of years. Here's a 1985 interview with the Oregon State Parks regional administrator. The article explains that a trail from Troutdale to Hood River had been a longtime dream of his, noting however that some of the remaining parts would be expensive, like at Tooth Rock west of Eagle Creek. There's also a bit about another then-ongoing project to build a four-mile trail between Bridal Veil and Latourell Falls, with improved views of the falls at Shepperds Dell, which I imagine would have doubled as another Trail #400 segment. Seems this was never constructed either, which is a shame. The interview was in conjunction with the grand opening of another Gorge Trail segment further east, between Ainsworth and Yeon State Parks. Unfortunately that entire segment was destroyed by an enormous landslide in 1996 and has never been rebuilt.

Someone giving a presentation about the proposed trail at Portland State in 1986.

The 1986 talk was the last mention of the proposal that I could find in the newspaper archives, but I still had several open questions, like exactly what the intended route was, for example. I ended up looking for old planning documents to see if they offered any more clues, and luckily the 1994 state parks plan for the Gorge mentions the proposed trail a few times. (For whatever reason, all of the state parks department's master plan archives vanished off the net sometime in the last few months as part of a site redesign. But as usual, Archive.org has our back, or mine anyway.) From page 15:

Trail connections and/or trailhead development is proposed for a low elevation route from Lewis and Clark to the OPRD properties just west of Hood River via segments of the HCRH and via other new routes, and from the east side of Hood River to Mosier along the Historic Columbia River Highway (HCRH) to Mosier.

and then on page 26:

Trail use continues to be popular in the Gorge especially at the higher elevations. There has been an effort by recreationists for many years to see the establishment of a series of connections through the gorge at a lower elevation and along the river where possible. Most notable among these efforts are the Historic Columbia River Gorge Highway (HCRH) connection projects, the trail 400 project, and the Chinook Trail.

(If the name "Chinook Trail" is unfamiliar, you aren't alone; I had never heard of it before either, but it's a long-term effort to build a backcountry trail over on the Washington Side of the Gorge, eventually connecting with either the Gorge Trail, or the Hatfield Trail, or a fresh new backcountry trail on the Oregon side to form a big long loop.)

Anyway, in a later section of the plan, we finally get some details about what they had in mind. (The acronym NSA in this context means the then-new Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, not the shadowy intelligence agency.)

#1 Lewis and Clark to Portland Women's Forum, MP CRGNSA trail proposal No. T27. Trail Maps 1 and 2

OPRD's proposal for this trail deviates from the NSA proposal in that Chamberlain Road is used rather than trying to build a trail through the complex ownerships near Corbett Station. By constructing a pedestrian walk along the county road, a trail connection could be accomplished much sooner and at less expense. Easements will be needed across the north face of Chanticleer Point.

The connection of this trail to Portland Women's Forum cannot be accomplished until parking is expanded at Portland Women's Forum to accommodate the long term parking requirements of trail users. Additional trailhead parking could be developed at the Corbett Station quarry if a suitable trail route from the quarry to Portland Women's Forum or from the Lewis and Clark to Portland Women's Forum trail route could be found.

Google Books has the 1992 Federal management plan for the new scenic area, which describes that proposal in a couple of paragraphs:

Trail Description: The land is primarily in private ownership. This trail would provide a link between the Portland/Vancouver metropolitan area and the Scenic Area. The trail would provide views of both the Columbia River and the pastoral landscape of the western Gorge. This trail would form part of a loop trail that links to the Sandy River Delta Trail. Recreation Intensity Class: mostly 1. Development Proposal: Four miles of new trail are proposed to provide opportunities for hiking and scenic appreciation. There is an existing trailhead opportunity at Lewis and Clark State Park; a parking area is proposed at the existing borrow pit at Corbett Station in the GMA. Some sections of the trail traverse steep bluff lands and would require sophisticated design and construction.

For whatever reason, the Management Plan "as amended thru September 1st 2011" deletes the entire section of concrete proposals and just speaks somewhat vaguely about high level goals.

Getting back to the state plan, it has maps after page 100, which show the trail eventually connecting to the old wagon road between Portland Womens Forum and Rooster Rock, and then making its way over to the Vista House. The maps also show that the proposed trail would be both Trail 400 and the Chinook Trail; following the maps further east, the two routes diverge above Multnomah Falls, Trail 400 following its familiar (if currently closed) route, and the Chinook Trail taking a parallel route further south/uphill, and this arrangement continuing all the way to Hood River. I imagine this would let you hike to Hood River and back mostly as a loop (albeit a long, skinny sort of loop), or put together more reasonably-sized loops out of parts of the two plus connecting trails. The key detail here is that significant chunks of the Chinook route would be new construction, and as the first route to Hood River is not exactly making rapid progress, it feels like building a brand-new second route is a bit of a longer-term vision, to put it mildly. Maybe it'll be ready around the time the gorge has fully regrown from the Eagle Creek fire, who knows.

Metro's 1992 Metropolitan Greenspaces Master Plan described the proposal: "The Chinook Trail is a proposed Columbia River Gorge loop trail that will connect Vancouver Lake, Maryhill State Park, Biggs, and Portland. It will travel in part on existing trails. The concept was formalized in 1988 as a rim-top trail where possible."

These plans only get a very brief mention in the 2011 Master Plan for Lewis & Clark specifically, which mostly focuses on parking and congestion, and improved river access. It does acknowledge that the trail exists and ideas for it are out there, but doesn't propose doing anything about them.

[I]t is a hub for a series of existing and proposed trails that will eventually connect Portland with the City of Hood River. This includes an eventual link with the famous “40-Mile Loop” trail network on the east side of the Sandy River on federal and state land and with cycling routes along the Historic Columbia River Highway

and a few pages later:

There is a walking trail at the foot of Broughton Bluff along the edge of the lawn that extends northeast along the north face of the bluff at least as far as the eastern property boundary.

The state's 2015 Gorge master plan (which I guess supersedes the 1994 plan) more or less includes the 2011 plan by reference and repeats the ideas from there (chapter 8, pages 148-149, here). The map on page 149 incorrectly shows the trail heading off onto private property, which (as I noted above) is not actually true. Which is not an encouraging sign.

More recently, Metro -- Portland's regional government, which runs Oxbow Park further south on the Sandy (among many other things) -- has taken an interest in the long-running proposed trail, calling it the "Lower Columbia Gorge Trail". A 2014 map from Metro shows it as a "proposed regional trail" heading east off the map as a connection from Portland to the Gorge. The agency's 2017 "Green Trails" guide describes it as one of several future "inter-regional" trails, along with the Willamette Greenway south to Eugene-or-so, and two routes west to different destinations on the coast. The interesting thing about this is that, per a 2019 map, the "Sandy River Connections" project area is one of 24 "acquisition target areas" where they're interested in buying land or paying for easements. Historically they've just been interested in property along the Sandy, but the maps shows their "ok to buy within this area" radius, which looks like some number of miles past the urban growth boundary, and everything out to Rooster Rock seems to be fair game, in theory. And it's basically all state and federal land east of there, so that might be sufficient to fill in the gaps. Metro has local bond money specifically dedicated for this, too, where the state rarely does, and the feds are rarely interested these days (though that might change after the inauguration in January, unless Trump blows up the world before that.)

Which brings us to a "Now What?" section. For the sake of argument, let's assume first that schools, healthcare, housing, antipoverty programs and other concrete human needs are being funded properly, and there's money left over after that, and we don't need to have a zero-sum argument over what to cut in order to build something new. Let's also assume that within the recreation budget, maintenance and repair is already funded, so we aren't trading off against restoring Eagle Creek and other fire-damaged areas, reviving ones that were abandoned or relegated to unmaintained status like the old Perdition Trail at Multnomah Falls, the viewpoint at the top of Wahkeena Falls, and so on.

This is not the most wild or scenic stretch of the route. not aware of any key points of interest along the route, and land ownership around corbett is an issue. and I'm not personally sold that it would be important enough to buy except from willing sellers. the current thing that attracts funding is the bike-centric HCRH Trail, which follows the 1916 route of the old highway. eventually there may be an interest in doing the same thing for the circa-1940 pre-I-84 water-level route (per the Tunnel Point post), for cyclists who'd like to skip the tourist traffic (or just the additional elevation gain and loss) along the initial chunk of old highway. So a hiking trail could maybe piggyback on that in spots where there isn't space or money to build both. with or without HCRH trail involvement, one slightly-outside-the-box idea might be to cross the overpass at Corbett and walk along the river for a bit, either to Rooster Rock (where there's another existing overpass) or maybe to a new pedestrian bridge over I-84 at Tunnel Point and heading east from there to squeeze past Palisade Falls

Historical Odds and Ends

The very first piece of the park that the state owned was actually the gravel parking area just across the river from Glenn Otto Park, purchased way back in July 1936, probably for the sake of public fishing access. They don't appear to have named it right away, and the old survey map for it just calls it "Parking Area".
land acquired in 1954 in a 3-way deal: Timber co. buys the land, swaps it for non-scenic BLM land elsewhere, BLM donates it to the state. Article says the goal was to eventually assemble a big park running the whole length of the gorge, which I suppose the National Scenic Area basically is.
September 1955 article on the soon-to-open park

An article from December 1965 about what would eventually become Estacada's Milo McIver State Park explained that it was needed as a safety valve because existing parks along the Sandy and Columbia were overflowing with visitors. Rooster Rock and Dabney each attracted 250k visitors that year, and Lewis & Clark pulled in 350k people, who were packed into the park's "anemic" 56 acres like an "outdoor sardine can". For contrast, in 2019 Rooster Rock was the 19th most visited state park with 667k visitors, down 29% from the previous year for some reason. I can't find numbers for the others since they didn't make the top 20, or the bottom 20.

A 1965 article inventorying parks and recreational opportunities in East Multnomah County mentioned Lewis & Clark as one of the area's shiniest and newest parks, and explained that we would soon need even more parks like it. The author explained that in the time before white settlers arrived, local tribes had a word for the ennui that comes with having too much free time and no work that needed doing, in the months after the salmon and berries had been dried for the winter and so forth. He argued a similar situation was looming for Americans of the near future: "The Portland urban dweller of A.D. 2000 — perhaps even sooner — will find himself suffering from the same malady, what with the coming 30- and 20-hour week, the extended leisure time, and an increasingly easy life." .

October 1967, in the upcoming election Troutdale voters were being asked to approve a controversial sewer bond issue, which on one hand would result in the city no longer dumping raw sewage into the river, just upstream of the park's public beaches. On the other hand, doing this would cost money.
1969, a Multnomah County Commissioner was bound and determined to site a new metro-area garbage dump in the sandy river delta, just downstream, although locals opposed the idea. Residents must have prevailed eventually, since there's no dump there now.
A 1969 article explained that conventional wisdom among local park rangers -- including one responsible for both Dabney and Lewis & Clark -- was that out-of-state visitors were typically cleaner and nicer than local residents, contradicting a widespread public notion of the time. A visiting family from Pendleton at Lewis & Clark reported that someone had knocked their tent over, accusing them of being Californians and demanding that they leave the state.
August 1970, county turned down a proposed rock quarry south of the park, after turning down another proposal in corbett, 2 miles from Crown Point. The developer couldn't see why people opposed the idea, explaining that the quarrying was temporary and he planned to build houses on the site as soon as the mining phase was done.
August 1971, park hosted a unit of Green Berets who were retracing the Lewis & Clark route for some reason.
October 1972, bit about historical sites being gobbled up by development. seemed to focus on lewis & clark sites, including here, which had no historical marker at the time. gov. mccall promised to fix that particular detail
May 1974 E.G. Chuinard of the Lewis & Clark Trail Committee (seen above/later) writes in response to an earlier editorial about typos on a sign at the park. He explains that the typos are how Lewis & Clark spelled things and are thus historical in nature and not incorrect.
the aforementioned editorial, titled "History in Misspelled Words".
the coming-soon article

the unveiling, with photo
December 1975, a columnist waxing on about a seasonal waterfall a bit upstream of the park. (w/ photo)
March 1976, the county had leased land for the motorcycle park as an alternative after passing a restrictive off-road vehicle ordinance. forgot to rezone the land for the new use at first. . a story on the same page mentions the shiny new Trojan Nuclear Plant was being swarmed by smelt and had to report it to the feds.
March 1977, report on the annual smelt run
September 1977: In an extremely 1970s episode, the park was the destination of a 5 mile river race from Dabney State Park, sponsored by the local 7-Up bottler and US Army recruiters, as one of many local festivities organized around the annual Jerry Lewis Telethon. (!!) Local telethon content was hosted by Ramblin' Rod. Other events included a 3-day CB radio jamboree, and a disco car wash at Beaverton Mall. leading up to this were a few weeks of danceathons, skateathons, bike races, raft races, waffle feeds, and shoot outs.
July 1978, mentioned on a list of good picnic spots around the state. The list is interesting. hagg lake, blue lake, baldock rest area were state parks, cook park was washington county, belle view point was publicly accessible
May 1981, legislative hearing endorses the so-called "40 mile loop", now "the intertwine", which
August 1981, adjacent county land had been operated as a motorcycle park, but closed due to budget cuts. Recall that the county had opened it after an ordinance cracked down on offroad motorcycles. But closing the motorcycle facility did not revive o

Highland Butte

2025-12-06T17:58:00.000-08:00

Visitors to Portland are generally subjected to a pile of trivia that's meant to show how weird and quirky we are. World's smallest city park, various things that were filmed here, donuts, Shanghai tunnels, quirky food carts. They're told to check out all the breweries, giggle about all the strip clubs, and so forth. The trivia will have a whole section on Local Nature Facts, so you'll hear about the coast and the gorge, and maybe something about Forest Park being the world's largest city park (which is not actually true), and sooner or later the list gets around to volcanoes.

This, admittedly, is not something you'll encounter in most major US cities. But we've been promoting it all wrong for the last century or so. The original claim was that Mt. Tabor was the only volcano within city limits anywhere in the world. Or at least anywhere in the US. Or, at minimum, in the US excluding Alaska and Hawaii. And obviously we're only talking about major cities here, and stipulating that little fun-sized lava domes like Mt. Tabor count as individual volcanoes (and volcanic vents in the West Hills don't). And then City Hall went and moved city limits outward, which brought a few more lava domes into the city, although they obviously don't count due to being east of I-205, or (in the case of Rocky Butte) just barely west of it, and still east of 82nd Avenue. Meanwhile, Gresham and Vancouver and even Lake Oswego expanded to include a few of their own, but any geologist will tell you that suburban volcanoes absolutely do not count, period. And technically most of the Northwest east of the Cascades sits on top of a deep layer of Columbia River flood basalts, but that doesn't count, because reasons, and the hair-splitting just goes on and on. Frankly this all seems like overkill, since the point of all of this is to impress random tourists and conventioneers from the Great State of Corn Rectangle, who have never seen a hill of any kind before.

Another approach is to forget about Mt. Tabor and run with Mt. St. Helens, which is obviously not within city limits but is at least visible from here. The winning move here is to point out the mountain and reassure your audience -- as nonchalantly as you possibly can -- that there's no need to worry, it hasn't erupted at all since way back in 2008, and that one was no big deal, and besides, we're upwind of the mountain and almost never get volcanic ash falling from the sky. This is their cue to look at each other and chuckle nervously, which is the effect you're going for. This will be great fun for a while, but there are a couple of potential downsides. First, your visitors from Corn Rectangle will see this as an opening to tell you about their many white-knuckle tornado encounters. Which is only fair, frankly. Second, it's 2025 now, and sooner or later an impertinent teen in your audience will agree that 2008 was a long, long time ago -- before they were born, in fact -- and so long ago that the mountain is probably extinct by now. And this will not only make you feel old, it might be enough to troll the volcano into erupting again.

And let's be honest here, neither Mt. Tabor or Mt. St. Helens is exactly on brand for us these days. Mt. Tabor is in a ritzy, unaffordable neighborhood and none of its superlatives are actually true, and St. Helens is in a whole other state -- a state with sales tax -- and biking to the top is probably a nightmare. They also have their own Wikipedia articles, and are featured prominently in coffee table books about the region, and just in general are way too mainstream, and thus desperately, terminally uncool.

So with all of that as an intro, it's time to meet Highland Butte, the subject of this post and an obscure local volcano you probably haven't heard of. It's not the tallest volcano in the Boring Lava Field -- Larch Mountain out in the Gorge wins that one by a wide margin -- and I've seen conflicting things on whether it's the southernmost, but it may be the oldest and widest of all of them. A 2009 paper on the Boring Lava Field notes that Highland Butte rocks have been dated to around 2.4-2.6 million years, making it the oldest, or among the oldest of the Boring volcanoes. A lot of other sources say it's around 3 million years old, but I don't know if that's from a different measurement or just someone rounding up to the nearest million. For comparison, Mount Hood is estimated to be no more than 1.3 million years old, Mount Tabor is a bit over 200,000, and Beacon Rock -- the youngest of the bunch -- is only around 57,000 years old.

The summit is a sort of Mt. Tabor-sized dome in a wider rural area known as "Upper Highland", but by the time you see that hill you've already been driving or riding on the volcano for several miles. It's a roughly circular area about 7 miles in diameter centered on the summit and gently sloping away from there, and all streams for miles around drain away from that point. Then there's an extension to the north all the way to Oregon City and the Willamette. I don't know if that's as far as the lava got, or that's where the river cut a path thru later, but it explains the present-day cliffs along the river, and probably the rocks that form Willamette Falls too. I had a vague recollection that I'd read something to the effect that the large rounded boulders here at the main entrance to the Clackamas Community College campus were thought to be volcanic bombs thrown to the campus from the summit, nine miles to the south. I finally located the article where I got that idea from, an April 1986 column about the boulders by the paper's geology columnist. He specifically ruled out the volcanic bomb theory on the grounds that the boulders were too big, and they lacked the distinctive markings rocks take on when they form as blobs of lava hurtling through the air. Instead, he explains, this is just a weathering pattern typical of Boring lava rocks when exposed to the elements, and they just sort of become spherical over time as their exteriors degrade into iron-rich red dirt. Apparently Columbia flood basalts (the other common type of basalt you'll see around here) are denser and darker and they just don't come apart like this.

The summit peak doesn't look all that impressive, but it's still the highest point for miles around, which is why you can visit the place now. First, nobody claimed it as farmland back in pioneer days, or at least nobody successfully claimed it, and the ill-fated Oregon & California Railroad seems to have had no better luck finding a buyer for it, so it was still federal land in the early 20th Century, at which point someone realized it would be a great place for a forest fire lookout.

So here's a 1927 article on the summit's brand new modern Forest Service fire lookout tower. The article explains that while this is the first tower, the summit had been a GLO fire lookout for years before that, in the form of a "peg tree". What you would do is pick out a tall tree near the summit, and hammer wooden pegs into the tree trunk in a spiral pattern, forming a sort of primitive spiral staircase up the tree, like something Ewoks would have in Return of the Jedi. In this case, the stairway used 114 pegs and circled the tree 5 times, taking the fire observer to a point in the treetops, 142' off the ground. Once you were up there, you would just sort of hang out in the top of the tree with a pair of binoculars looking for forest fires and swaying with the breeze. This doesn't sound like a very effective way to keep an eye on the horizon with binoculars, and a great way to get motion sick, but may have been all the GLO could afford. The forest service built a tower, plus a house at the base of the tower for the rest of the lookout crew when they were off shift, plus the road to the summit, and they were even considering putting in a telephone at the base so would-be visitors could call uphill and check if anyone was on the way downhill before trying to drive up.

The article included a photo of the peg tree, so it seems to have been spared when the summit was logged, sometime between 1911 and 1927. I was (and am) kind of curious whether that tree still exists (though I'm pretty sure the pegs either wouldn't be there anymore or wouldn't be climbable). I didn't see any one particular tree that was much bigger than the others, and didn't see one with a spiral of wooden pegs sticking out of it, so it's anybody's guess.

If you want to visit now, the road to the top is gated and locked, but it's simple to park so you aren't blocking the gate and then walk the rest of the way. Or you could come here by bike and ride to the top, though the fresh gravel along the road seemed to be of the especially sharp and tire-puncturey variety. Either way, the road is a bit steep at times, but it's not very long and you only go up a couple of hundred vertical feet from this point. One sort of unfortunate thing is that there isn't much of a view from the top at present due to all the trees in the way. I say "at present" because the land here is designated as part of the O&C Lands, and it's clearly been logged before and most likely will be again, and there will be more of a view from here once they get around to that. So I guess there's that to look forward to.

Over the years the lookout tower existed, Highland Butte was occasionally in the news. Not for erupting or anything earth-shaking like that, but minor news items came up every few years:

The summit was visited by a Trails Club hike in 1934, so there was presumably still a view at that point.
There was a small forest fire nearby in 1951. The article doesn't say whether the fire lookout helped or not.
A field trip by the Geological Society of the Oregon Country visited in 1957
The summit gained a second tower for a while starting in 1960, a microwave communication tower for an emergency system bypassing Portland in case the city was destroyed in World War III. The new tower would talk to another antenna to the south near Silverton, and one near Mt. Livingston to the north, somewhere out in the back of beyond due north of Camas.
A full-page photo of this tower with Mt. Hood in the background appeared in AT&T's 1962 corporate annual report, I guess as one of their more photogenic recent technological advancements, if you can avoid thinking about why it was built. Not quite photogenic enough to make the cover of the report, which features a phone operator wearing a headset and smiling while she pages through an enormous phone book.
The fire tower lasted until the 1962 Columbus Day Storm flattened it, and they never built a replacement, and after that the place languished in even deeper obscurity than before. Then sometime around 2019-2020 the summit got a new tower, this time a shiny new Clackamas County EMS radio tower, built to close some coverage gaps in this hilly, rural area.
You might have noticed that the BLM got the land back from the Forest Service at some point. I don't know any more details about it than that, but I can see that happening if it wasn't going to be used for a lookout tower anymore. There isn't any other Forest Service land nearby, while there's an actual BLM facility with actual people a few miles SE of here, namely the agency's Walter H. Horning Tree Seed Orchard. The sign at the front gate includes sort of a mission statement, which is readable on Street View: "To produce seed for growing trees of superior quality which will best use the productive capacity of forest lands.", and a few of its Google reviews indicate it also hosts trail rides by local equestrian clubs and even the occasional Civil War reenactment (!). In any event, it was probably just more practical for them to send somebody around to keep an eye on the place now and then instead of having the Forest Service do it.

McCord Creek RR Bridge

2025-12-06T17:57:00.000-08:00

Ok, here's the next Columbia Gorge train bridge, and this is one I was initially not going to bother with, even in this already sort of dubious sub-project, because it sure looks like it's just a big concrete culvert under the tracks, and those don't count because there would be no end to this project if I did that. But I saw that the Federal Railroad Administration GIS layer for train bridges has a database entry for it, so I guess legally it counts as a bridge. And thanks to that db entry I can tell you it has a Design Type of "Unknown", and a UniqueID of "W31_OR79215". And more importantly, and regardless of whether it's really a bridge or not, this is a low-stakes and (as far as I can tell) completely harmless golden opportunity to shrug and publicly go along with at least one federal government decision that (just between us) may not be entirely fact-based, I mean, if you look at it from a pre-2016 standpoint.

If you'd like to go see it and decide for yourself whether you think it even counts as a bridge, one way to do that is to park at the Elowah Falls trailhead and take the HCRH Trail (i.e. the paved path next to the freeway) to the retro-styled trail bridge over the creek, or a short distance just past it, and look through the trees and under the freeway bridges, and this probably works best when the trees are bare. If you want a closer look, there's a small parking area under the I-84 overpasses that I think is usually used for fishing access. I've never actually been over there, and I'm not about to make a special trip just for this one blog post, but it looks like the access road for this parking area turns off of Warrendale Road at the first right just off the westbound Warrendale exit.

Tumalt Creek Railroad Bridge

2025-12-06T14:25:00.000-08:00

Next up we're looking at yet another really obscure Columbia Gorge train bridge. This one is on Tumalt Creek, which is in the Dodson/Warrendale area just east of the main tourist corridor, and we're on a dead-end back road instead of continuing down the old highway since the road and train don't run parallel through here. This one is behind some trees and bushes and we can't see it as well, but the federal GIS system I'm getting this info from says that like the others we've looked at, it's single track, non-moveable, and this time the design type is just listed as "Unknown", with a unique ID of "W1007_OR24756". From what I could see of it, this one seems to be on a concrete beam instead of steel, and if I had to guess when it was built I would probably guess no earlier than the 1990s. The reason for that is the creek it's on, which is the largest of about a dozen in this stretch of the gorge, all of which are prone to massive landslides of mud and rocks and giant boulders, and this creek specifically was one of those involved in the 1996 slides that closed I-84 for weeks. I don't know whether this bridge was ever physically washed out at any point, but at minimum all that material coming down and trying to flow underneath is at least going to cause a bit of excess wear and tear over time.

The name "Tumalt" is not the result of Lewis & Clark trying to spell "tumult", although that would be a reasonable guess. This was one of the names bestowed in 1916 when the Mazamas (a prominent local mountaineering club) decided that prominent sights along the new Columbia River Highway should generally have Indian names, with a few melodramatic bits of European mythology tossed in. (Note that these were not actually what local tribes called these places before settlers showed up, but a selection of exotic-yet-pronounceable words, often with background stories that white people found appealing in 1916. In particular, the creek is named after Tumulth, a member of the Cascades tribe, and a tragic figure of the Yakima War of 1855-1858, and specifically the 1856 "Cascades Massacre", a raid on the white settlement of Cascades (near present-day North Bonneville, WA) by members of the Yakama and allied tribes. The local Cascades tribe was apparently not involved in this incident, but became the focus of settler retaliation afterward as they lived nearby and it was more convenient, and Tumulth was one of several men who were summarily hanged for their supposed involvement. Here are a few links for more info about him and the whole conflict:

HistoryLink article. HistoryLink is basically Washington's Oregon Encyclopedia, and the article comes across as basically fair, though it largely only cites Euro-American sources.
2016 Quartux Journal article
An Oregon Encyclopedia article about his daughter, Kalliah Tumulth, written by a great-grandson of hers.
2022 post and comment thread in the Yakama Nation Hunters and Gatherers Facebook group, including comments by at least one descendant.
a biographical sketch by another descendant, in a 2022 quarterly newsletter from the La Center History Museum.

Before the current name, the creek was widely known as "Devil's Slide Creek" due to its ongoing geological tendencies. Yet despite that name two distinct towns sprang up in the main landslide corridor, Dodson right around here, complete with its own train station, and Warrendale a mile or so to the east, both named after local canned salmon tycoons of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Frank Warren, namesake of Warrendale, was possibly the biggest and wealthiest of them all, but his fishy empire quickly fell apart after his watery demise on the Titanic, which roughly coincided with a crash in the salmon population. Seriously. You can't make this stuff up. Or, I mean, technically you can, but reviewers will roll their eyes and make fun of your ridiculous hamfisted plot twists.

Horsetail Creek Railroad Bridge

2025-11-30T23:20:00.000-08:00

Next up we've got a few photos of the train bridge at Horsetail Creek, just down the tracks from the Oneonta Creek one we looked at in the last post, and just downstream from the HCRH Horsetail Creek Bridge, which we visited back in 2018. Federal railroad GIS says this one is like the others we've looked at today in that it carries a single set of tracks and is not a drawbridge or any other kind of moving bridge. Like its neighbor to the west, the ridge type is listed as "Regular Steel Beams/Girder + Misc. Steel bridges", and it has a UniqueID of "W811_OR24818", for whatever that's worth. This one does look different than the Oneonta one and I don't think it's of the exact same design, like it's being held up by multiple smaller steel beams rather than one large girder. Like the others I have no information on how old this bridge might be, and I don't think I could even guess a correct range of a few decades. Regardless of that, the sorta-handrail on this bridge looks like a later addition and may coincide with the advent of modern personal injury law.

I have two mildly interesting and not particularly old items to pass along this time around:

A 2012 Horsetail Creek floodplain restoration design doc. This project re-engineered the large low-lying area between the old highway and Interstate 84 to make it more friendly to baby salmon, implementing various things from the standard baby salmon playbook, like plenty of woody debris in the water. Regarding that, let me point you at this post from about a year ago -- it's technically about some new-ish salmon-themed art in the South Waterfront area, but while putting the post together I came across various sources indicating we don't actually understand the various needs of baby salmon anywhere near as well as we think we do. Also I think that post is one of my better recent ones, and is probably more entertaining than the one you're reading now. And if you're wondering why I'm mentioning all this stuff, the link to the 2012 plan came up in search results because the bridge here and the one on Oneonta Creek mark part of the boundary of the study area.
A 2009 Multnomah County planning approval doc for placing power lines underground, explaining how the proposed work complies with all sorts of regulations. A window into what it takes to get anything done when your proposed project is going to take place within both Multnomah County and the federal National Scenic Area. Behold and despair as a maze of agencies endlessly consult and re-consult with each other and struggle to get anything done, even though nobody actually objects to the proposal.

Oneonta Creek Railroad Bridge

2025-11-30T22:26:00.000-08:00

So next we've got some photos of the train bridge at Oneonta Creek, continuing east on this little speedrun. We visited the ones at Bridal Veil and Wahkeena Creek in the previous two posts, and saw the one at Multnomah Falls back in 2018, so I guess this one is the logical next step. Federal railroad GIS says this one has a unique ID of "W925_OR24624", if that means anything to you, and lists the bridge design type as "Regular Steel Beams/Girder + Misc. Steel bridges", which I don't think is exactly a technical engineering term. You can see that this one is supported by a steel beam or girder underneath the bridge instead of two on the sides, and you can also see that it has substantially more clearance above the creek than the Bridal Veil one does, so the designers didn't have the same design constraints as the Bridal Veil bridge.

This one also sits just downstream of the two HCRH road bridges, which brings us to the one and only mildly unusual detail I have about this one. Before civil engineers got their hands on it, the Columbia River once ran fairly close to the bluffs at Oneonta Creek, close enough that at one spot just east of the creek the railroad took up all the usable space between the river and the cliff. A few decades later, when the Columbia River Highway got here, the railroad wouldn't budge and highway engineers ended up having to dig the Oneonta Tunnel to continue the road east from there. Eventually the state decided to build a river-level road to replace the winding and twisting old highway, which involved quarrying vast quantities of gravel and filling in some areas along the river where there was no existing flat land available. Once that had happened through here -- on the taxpayer dime -- the railroad was suddenly much more amenable to moving, and in 1948 a sort of switcheroo was arranged: New, rerouted tracks were built, and then the existing bridge was somehow moved sideways to the current bridge location, and train traffic was shifted over to there. Then a new stretch of road was built where the train used to run, complete with a shiny new modern bridge. And when that was finished, they shifted traffic to the new road around the cliff, blocked off the Oneonta Tunnel, and used the original 1914 highway bridge for parking.

That last detail actually resolved another problem with the original alignment, which was that there was nowhere to park if you wanted to stop and wade up Oneonta Gorge. As a 1946 doc explains, the state ended up leasing a bit of railroad land for a parking lot and grandly declared that little area to be a new state park, which then quietly fell off the rolls after the realignment.

The switcheroo details come from February 2000 nomination designating parts of the highway of as a "National Historic Landmark", which I gather is similar to the National Register of Historic Places but with stricter rules on how intact a thing has to be, such that the whole road qualified for the National Register, but only certain parts were good enough to be a Landmark. The doc went on to explain that the 1948 road bridge here was a "non-contributing structure", but its presence was not enough to derail the whole nomination since the original bridge was bypassed and left in place instead of being removed. So that's nice, I guess.

Wahkeena Creek Railroad Bridge

2025-11-30T18:50:00.000-08:00

So next up we're looking at the little railroad bridge over Wahkeena Creek, which is the next train bridge east of the one at Bridal Veil that we just looked at. This one sits on top of a girder (either steel or concrete, I'm not sure which) instead of having two of them on the sides, and in general it looks like it might be a recent replacement of an older bridge, but I don't know that either because federal railroad GIS doesn't have that info. What I can tell you is that it has a unique ID of "W1012_OR24759", and a design type of "Unknown". If you had high hopes that this bridge was made with advanced alien technology or something you're likely to be disappointed. I think it just means the data entry intern didn't have that info or couldn't be bothered typing it in.

The one semi-interesting thing about this one is that the rail line also serves as a physical divider between the Wahkeena Falls area (the side I took these photos on), which is a Forest Service day use site, with free parking, and Benson State Park on the far side of the tracks, which has been a pay-to-park fee site as long as I can remember, long before anywhere else nearby was. This is possible because Benson is set up as sort of a walled garden, with no official trails (or, ideally, a railroad-approved skybridge over the tracks) between it and either Wahkeena Falls or Multnomah Falls next door. Otherwise people of the cheapskate persuasion could just park at Wahkeena Falls and haul an inflatable raft over to Benson Lake without paying the state a penny. And now it works both ways: During peak tourist season, the demand for parking at Multnomah Falls far exceeds the available supply, and if visitors could easily use Benson as overflow parking it would probably mess up the whole timed entry ticket scheme they've been using to try to manage crowds over there. And that demand would probably swamp the smaller numbers of people who just want to fish the lake or grill some burgers or whatever else there is to do at Benson itself. And I'm sure these are all very good and responsible reasons for things being how they are, and why they have to stay that way forever, but when you're standing on one side and you can easily see the park on the other side, and there are signs saying you are strictly forbidden from going over there, the whole arrangement just seems incredibly dumb.

Bridal Veil Railroad Bridge

2025-11-30T17:35:00.000-08:00

This may surprise some of you, but not every weird project I have a go at turns out to be a winner. Some years ago, I did a series on old historic Columbia River Highway bridges, which was fun because they were all a little different, and the engineers who designed them had gone the extra mile to show off what was possible with modern concrete technology, where "modern" meant roughly 1914-1920. So I eventually ran out of those, or more to the point, I hit the long tail part where the remaining items on the list are either small and not very interesting, or far away and hard to visit, or often both. It occurred to me at some point that instead of driving for hours on end, further and further east out into the desert wastes, there was a whole second set of old bridges through the Gorge, used by the Union Pacific railroad that often ran right next to the old highway, and by and large they're at least as old as the highway ones, and it ought to be fairly straightforward to go see a bunch of them and then share some fair-to-middlin' photos and whatever fun trivia I can dig up. That formula usually works out ok; the problem this time around is that there seems to be precisely one interesting train bridge on the Oregon side of the Gorge, the Tanner Creek Viaduct, the big sorta-Roman-aqueduct structure next to Bonneville Dam, and we already visited it way back in 2014. The others fall into two basic categories: Rivers and larger creeks get a steel through truss bridge, like the one on the Sandy River (visited way back in 2009), and anything smaller gets a simple steel beam or girder design, like the one at Multnomah Falls, but without the vintage sign giving mileages by train to various semi-distant cities.

The bridge you see in the photos above is one of the latter category. This is the old railroad bridge at Bridal Veil, downstream of the falls and the trail and next to the site of the old Bridal Veil Lumber sawmill. What little info I know about it comes from a terse database entry in the Federal Railroad Administration's "Railroad Bridges" ArcGIS layer, which informs us this is a "Steel Through Plate Girder" bridge, it crosses over water, is "fixed - non-moveable" (as in not a drawbridge or something), carries one set of tracks, length is not specified, and has a UniqueID code of "W712_OR24695", whatever that means. And that may be all the info Uncle Sam knows about it. I think the db essentially has whatever info the railroad feels like sharing voluntarily, so no details about stuff like the last time a bridge built sometime around 1907 was inspected for rust and structural soundness and whatnot. And I'll just point you at the Steel Bridge and Portsmouth Cut posts if you want to know how things go when your city depends on railroad-owned critical infrastructure and they don't have to tell you anything if they don't want to. The state government knows how little leverage it has, which explains things like a state Fish & Wildlife map of Fish Passage Barriers, which flags every last tiny creek, stream, and seasonal rivulet as a potential fish barrier where it passes under I-84 or the old highway, but not where it passes under the railroad, like they know they can't do anything about that particular barrier and would rather not poke the bear if they can avoid it.

I did find a railfan page that briefly explains what a "Steel Through Plate Girder" bridge is and how it works. See those railings along the length of the bridge? They aren't a safety feature for derailments, and they aren't a pedestrian feature from the old days when passenger trains stopped here. No, those heavy duty "railings" are actually the main load-bearing structure of the bridge: Each girder has a post on each end that attaches it to the concrete bridge piers, and then the bridge deck is attached to the beams, and then the bridge deck is a relatively thin layer attached to the bases of the two girders. The page notes the main reason you might use this design is if you don't have a lot of clearance between track level and whatever it is your bridge needs to cross, which is certainly the case here. Listed along with that are several limitations: "Easy to damage", "Difficult to replace", and "Limited to one track between girders (two possible with depth increase)".

Those design concerns may also explain why I don't think I've ever seen a regular motor vehicle bridge of this design. For one thing, a road bridge is bound to have the occasional vehicle banging into the railing for any number of reasons, and it sounds like this could be rather consequential, both for the bridge and the driver, since these support girders probably don't have the same degree of give on impact that a regular highway guardrail would. And with a road bridge you can usually get around any clearance issues by just building the bridge higher up and putting a ramp at either end, which you can't really do with trains.

Anyway, those bridge design concerns probably explain why the line is single track over the bridge, but is double track for about a mile immediately east of the bridge, ending somewhere around Old Boneyard Road. This was probably done to accomodate freight trains that used to stop at the lumber mill that used to exist here, and the railroad still keeps Bridal Veil on the books as an official train station. This is per federal GIS data, again, which says the station's unique station ID is "UP06258853437", though before anyone gets excited about this, note there is no actual freight or passenger infrastructure in place. Maybe they do this on the off chance the Columbia Gorge timber industry stages a big comeback, or there's a huge boom in the mailing of wedding invitations from the tiny Bridal Veil post office here, or the Oregon side of the Gorge gets passenger rail service again, or who knows.

Baker Creek Falls

2025-11-15T17:36:00.000-08:00

Next up we're taking a peek at Baker Creek Falls, a small waterfall in rural Washington County, in the hilly area west of Sherwood. This is part of Metro's Baker Creek Canyon Natural Area, an obscure greeenspace area the agency purchased in 2011 or so. These late summer photos don't really do it justice; a Waymarking page for the falls has a photo of it when it was running at a much higher volume. I meant to go back on an early spring day and get better photos of it but getting there is a bit of a long drive to the far end of the metro area and then a few miles past there, almost into Yamhill County.

This a Metro Natural Area, as opposed to a Nature Park, so there are zero visitor facilities beyond the cute little Natural Area sign (if you can find it) and the agency does absolutely nothing to get the word out about it to potential visitors. Some Natural Areas like this may never get more development than they have now. Others will be upgraded to Nature Parks someday, but not during your lifetime or mine. The thing to understand here is that Metro takes a very long-term view of things, surprising for a government agency in this country. They prioritize buying land above building amenities, on the theory that nobody is making new undeveloped land; what's there now is as much as there will ever be, and it's not going to be any more affordable in the future than it is now.

The good news is that the falls are right next to a road and easy to get to, so you're not going to need much in the way of facilities. Have your favorite driving directions app guide you to the intersection of SW Kruger Rd. and Dutson Dr., which is right at a sorta-hairpin corner on Kruger. This is also where Baker Creek passes under the street. Just west of there, immediately past the bend, there's a flat stretch of shoulder on the westbound side of the road, on the inside of the turn, with enough space for maybe 2-3 regular-size vehicles, or quite a few bikes, or between 0.5 and 2 luxury SUVs. I mention that last bit because this area is a short distance from the vineyards of Yamhill County, and seems to be rapidly filling up with McMansions and hobby farms. So you can kind of sense the urgency of Metro's land-buying efforts here. On the positive side, on the way here you'll see lots of cute llamas and alpacas randomly hanging out watching the world go by, so you can look at them and just ignore the ghastly 6000 square foot Tuscan-Victorian chateaus and whatnot where their people live.

So assuming there's room to park, park there and look for a really obvious unofficial trail heading downhill to the creek. Follow it toward the creek, then look upstream for the waterfall. At this point you can decide for yourself whether it was worth the effort to get here, which is obviously going to depend on the season and how far you had to drive to get to this point. If you're just coming from Sherwood or maybe Tualatin, it probably counts as a cool local attraction, kind of like Cedar Hills Falls in Beaverton. If you're coming from downtown Portland, like I was, it's a lot of trouble to get to for how small it is. I thought it was still worth visiting, but I also recognize that doing things "for the sake of completeness" motivates me a lot more than it does most people, plus even if it had gone completely dry when I visited I'd still get a blog post out of it.

I don't have any news stories to share about the falls, or the creek, or the rest of the general area, but I did come up with a short list of Metro documents and press releases that refer to it, so here we go:

2009 press release about salmon returning to the area.
A 2011 portfolio doc said public access is incompatible with water quality
2016-2018 Parks & Nature System Plan softens that policy a bit, and merely says public access is not a high priority because they're busy with water quality work.
2019-2022 plan refinement doc
2021 news items about restoration work
News release about a 2022 expansion of Metro holdings in the area

Beaver Creek Canyon, Troutdale OR

2025-11-15T17:15:00.000-08:00

Next up we're doing the hike around Troutdale's Beaver Creek Canyon. This particular Beaver Creek is a large tributary of the Sandy River that begins somewhere south of Oxbow Park and flows north, roughly parallel to the Sandy River, eventually joining the river at Depot Park in downtown Troutdale. On its way there it flows thru a surprisingly deep and narrow canyon for a couple of miles. Surprising as in one stretch seems to be over 150' deep, so not on the same scale as the Columbia Gorge to the east of here, or the Sandy River Gorge south of here, but it's big enough to make you forget you're still technically in suburbia. Which you can do here because it's a Troutdale city park, and there's a trail through it, or at least part of it.

If you look at a map of the area, like the one above, you'd think this would be a straightforward hike: You'd park at Glenn Otto Park, which borders Beaver Creek for a bit, and the trail would head south from there. But right at the mouth of the canyon are several private landowners, served by a private road with a big "No Trespassing" sign posted. As far as I could tell there isn't an interesting or dramatic backstory to this situation, or if there is the story never made it into a newspaper with searchable archives. Whatever the exact details are, the 50,000 foot version is probably just landowners not wanting to sell, and/or the city not having the money to buy. In any case, the "actual" route is a bit longer but possibly more interesting than the direct route would have been.

So the route we're taking goes a lot like this: Starting at Glenn Otto, cross Beaver Creek on the pedestrian bridge and stroll along the sidewalk heading for downtown Troutdale. After a few blocks you'll see signs for the Harlow House Museum, a house belonging to the city's colorful founder. Behind the house, there's a small landscaped garden, and behind the garden you'll find a trailhead marked something like "Harlow Canyon". Because this initial stretch follows an entirely different creek with its own watershed. The trail heads uphill briefly, crosses the tiny canyon's tiny creek right where it makes a cute little mini-waterfall, and then ends at a trail junction. One option seems to dump you out onto a suburban city street, while the trail on the left continues in a narrow corridor right along the edge of the bluff, a near-sheer drop on one side, and a bunch of backyard fences on the other. There isn't a city parks page for this bit of trail, but it appears to be called the "Strawberry Meadows Greenway", named for the subdivision here. Which in turn (following the usual practice with subdivisions) was named for the strawberry farms that once dominated the area. This part is a fairly popular community walking trail, so you might get waylaid by chatty retirees unless you look like you need to be somewhere on a tight schedule. Eventually this trail ends too, I think right at the subdivision boundary, dumping you out on a regular suburban street, SE Beaver Creek Lane. Luckily this is the kind of suburb that has sidewalks, because that's the next phase of the hike. You're looking for either of two entrances to Beaver Creek Canyon, which start as nondescript paths between houses. There aren't any big signs announcing where they go, either. The first one is across the street from the intersection with Chapman Ave. The second one is across from tiny Weedin Park. Pick either one, and before you know it the concrete path becomes several flights of stairs down into the canyon.

Either entrance puts you on the same sloping trail down into the canyon, which brings you to the park's main trail junction. From here you can turn right and follow the creek south/upstream, or follow the trail as it turns left and follows the creek north/downstream. The exact distance you can go in either direction varies a lot over time, shrinking when a winter flood or landslide rolls through, and expanding when the city finds grant money or volunteers to repair flood and landslide damage, or even (once in a blue moon) to expand the trail network. There will be anywhere between zero and two footbridges over the creek; if the current number is one or more, you may have access to a parallel trail on the east bank of the creek, and -- if it's a good trail year -- that trail might connect to another entrance here. If there's currently a bridge in existence at both bridge sites (which is rarely true), you can do this part of the park as a loop. The southbound trail may also connect to trails in Kiku Park, depending on current landslide/repair conditions, which would be a third way in from the west side. I didn't check on this when I was there and it may have changed since then, and could change again between when I'm writing this and when you're reading it.

Even further south, there's yet another westside entrance here, which apparently goes to a small loop trail disconnected from the rest of the trail network. I didn't visit this area and have no photos of it. It's separated from the rest of the park by the deepest and narrowest stretch of the canyon, so I don't know whether connections to the rest of the park once existed and don't anymore, or whether they never got funding in the first place, or whether it's even physically possible to build a trail through that part. Upstream from there, Beaver Creek passes through a jumble of public land and farmland without trails, and the canyon starts somewhere in that area. Continuing upstream, Beaver Creek flows through a city park that's called either "Bellingham Greenway", "Mountain Vista Greenway", or "CEF Open Space" depending on whose map you're looking at, with an entrance here and another somewhere around here. And on the south side of SW Stark St. is the Mt. Hood Community College campus, which has a ~65 acre Metro wetland area running along either side of the creek, and a small trail system we'll meet in another post. South of the college, the creek runs more or less along the edge of suburbia (as of 2024) for a bit, incuding a few disconnected units of Gresham's Beaver Creek Management Area here, here, and here, the last two possibly with trails connecting them. Then it's just farmland all the way south to where the creek begins, a bit west of Oxbow Park.

The park is like this because of the Great Troutdale Land Rush of the late 1970s. Subdivisions sprouted like invasive weeds all across east Multnomah County generally, and Troutdale in particular. I think it was largely because it's where the large blocks of cheap land and motivated sellers were. The local strawberry industry had been rapidly outcompeted by larger, cheaper, and completely flavorless, styrofoam-like strawberries from California, mostly because their strawberry varieties can survive long bumpy journeys in an 18-wheeler while ours don't, and theirs hold up under being dipped in molten chocolate and then sitting on grocery shelves for weeks. And our strawberries... don't. Long story short, it was a great time to sell around here, and most of the land on either side of Beaver Creek became housing over a few short years, right up to Oregon's mega-recession of the early 1980s. It probably helped too that house hunting is largely a spring and summer phenomenon and prospective buyers wouldn't get to experience what Troutdale winters can be like until it's too late. In any case, the city responded to this wave by being surprisingly forward-looking by Portland suburb standards, and not immediately bowing down to whatever developers wanted. A 1977 Oregonian article, "Wilderness survives amidst housing" explains that the city generally required developers to hand over some land for city parks as part of getting your subdivision approved, and in this part of town that included any land in the canyon. You couldn't build there anyway, for flood control reasons. The city also required that private property along the canyon rim had to be in natural vegetation, to limit the visual impact of subdivisions up above. Which probably also reduced the risk of distracted gardeners taking a big tumble while weeding.

Somehow this actually worked, and the parts of the canyon that are protected now are protected because of adjacent subdivisions. This is not how things usually turn out, to put it mildly. But thanks to the county surveyor's office putting records online we can look at the subdivision plats for Sandee Palisades phases I (1/77), II (2/78), III (12/78), and IV (12/90) on the east side of the creek, and the ones for Corbeth (6/77), Rainbow Ridge (5/76), Kiku Heights (2/77), Beaver Creek Estates (2/78) Weedin Addition (7/77), Mountain Vista (1992), Bellingham Park (5/97) and Strawberry Meadows (4/95) on the west side, each one showing the concessions developers made in exchange for the privilege of building here. Not just donating land that was probably unbuildable anyway, but providing access points into the park.

The 70s were a time of grand plans, and there was indeed a grand plan for Beaver Creek. The hot new idea back then was the "40 Mile Loop", a future regional hike-n-bike trail network encircling the Portland metro area. Eventually someone remembered the "circumference equals Pi times two times radius" formula from high school and realized that encircling the metro area would involve quite a lot more than 40 miles of trails, and a few years ago they rebranded the concept as "The Intertwine". In any case, no version of this loop has never been anywhere near completion, but I would guess that it has a cameo in every last urban planning document produced in the Portland area since the Tom McCall era. I think the idea is to not do anything to preclude a future bit of Intertwine in your project area even though you aren't actively working on it just now. So the working idea has been that Troutdale's part of the loop follows Beaver Creek into town from the south, drops into the canyon at some point, and continues to the Sandy River and then along the Columbia on what eventually becomes the Marine Drive Trail, taking you back toward Portland. Or you could hang a right at Glenn Otto Park, cross the bridge, and follow either the HCRH Trail (i.e. bike in traffic until Elowah Falls) or get on Trail 400 at Lewis & Clark State Park (as soon as they get around to building that initial 5-10 mile stretch of trail) and follow it east to Cascade Locks where it intersects the Pacific Crest Trail, and simply walk to Canada or Mexico from there, as one does.

Which brings us to the usual timeline section of this post, which is basically a list of old news stories and other items I couldn't work into this post any other way. Nothing really earthshaking to share here, but you can see the decades-long pattern of the city scratching its head trying to figure out what to do about the place and how to pay for it.

1978, meeting notice that Sandee Palisades III was in the city planning approval phase
1982 article about the growing Troutdale park system. Mentions summer maintenance jobs were paid for with CETA grants. (CETA was the "Comprehensive Employment and Training Act of 1973", a late, lamented federal program that would pay for just about anything if you had a good grant writer.)
A similar 1983 article mentions the park briefly, director said the trails were too steep for bikes
Another article from around the same time noted the trail was now part of city's comprehensive plan, mentions that planned 40 Mile Loop route at the time was through the canyon.
Report on a mid-1990s project clearing invasive plants. Which sort of morphed into a restoration effort after the 1995-96 floods. A consultant told the city to move trails away from the creek and get rid of a bridge for causing erosion.
another project nearby in 1997, maybe in connection with the Strawberry Meadows subdivision going in.
2004 city council minutes, discussion of parks master plan, with a member of the public blowing a gasket over another such proposed development deal, as it would be in exchange for low income housing this time. Thinks connecting the north & south chunks of park would cause crime, and if a park happens it should be a human exclusion area
Parks Master Plan, adopted 2006. The plan of record is to extend the existing trail along the creek in both directions, bypassing the current harlow creek / strawberry route. You could hike from Glenn Otto to MHCC. Discusses maybe obtaining easements for the gap to Glenn Otto vs buying, maybe owners aren't interested in selling or city can't afford
2014 study connecting trail south to springwater corridor
2020 OregonHikers thread about the park