cyclotram

Friday, March 21, 2025

HCRH Milepost 27

Next up we're stopping at HCRH Milepost 27, roughly halfway through a mile-long stretch where the old highway runs right along the base of a ~100' bluff to the south. Nearby on the north side of the highway is an inexplicably large gravel parking lot, with no obvious signs saying what it's for. This parking lot is the only legal place to park anywhere near the milepost, so our list of the various and sundry sights and sounds of mile 27 starts there.

Now that you're off the road and can look around more closely, you might notice a small and probably unofficial sign labeling it "The Oasis". I don't know why it's called that. The sign's perched on top of a very official "Camping Prohibited" sign, and there are no other amenities to the place. No restrooms, no drinking fountains, no picnic tables, no gift shop or snack bar, no rentable hammocks in the shade, nothing. It doesn't even offer any protection from cruel desert bandits or ill-tempered camels, so it's not the original kind of oasis, either. If anybody knows why it's called this, feel free to drop a note in the comment section because I'm stumped here.
Just north of the parking lot there's a sort of low rocky rise covered in trees. If you look semi-closely you might notice a trail or two heading uphill into those trees, and you might be wondering if it goes anywhere interesting. The "Oasis" link above goes to an Flickr photoset including some photos from up that extremely short trail, such as it is. From the top you can see the river, and I-84, and more low-lying farmland that sometimes floods in the winter. There's no indication that, say, D.B. Cooper has been hiding out back there with his money, unseen and uncaught since 1971, although that would certainly explain the "Oasis" sign, assuming he's the one who put it there, which I admit is a real stretch.
Once upon a time there was a restaurant here. For a while it was caled "The Dell" and was owned and operated by members of the Shepperd family who still lived nearby, and it might have been called "The White Elephant" at some point either before or after, unless that was the place up by the Vista House. Apparently there's a Facebook group for people who grew up in the Gorge, and this is what they've pieced together from childhood memories, at any rate, and the "Jack O'Lantern" was definitely not located here, it was way over by Horsetail Falls. Anyway, there hasn't been a restaurant here since sometime in the mid-20th century, probably around the time the local stretch of I-84 opened. Long enough that National Scenic Area rules would seem to prohibit any new businesses from ever setting up shop here again, even something as simple as a coffee cart or a lemonade stand.
Meanwhile on the south side of the old highway, the road runs right along the base of a roughly 100' bluff, with numerous seasonal waterfalls spaced across it in the wet season e.g. Cruiser Falls and Huerta Falls, and a popular ice climbing area on the increasingly rare occasions when the gorge stays below freezing long enough.
The east bookend to that mile-long bluff is right about here, a point just west of Shepperds Dell, where a narrow ravine cuts down through the bluff to almost street level. Looking up the ravine, about 150' back from the highway, there's a seasonal waterfall maybe 40'-50' high that's usually flowing outside of the core summer months, though it's really not that impressive even at the best of times. The creek crosses under the HCRH in an old culvert, then exits a pipe and tumbles further downhill next to one of the most impressive stone walls that I'm aware of along the old road. And it's covered in ferns, at least in the wet season, reminding me a bit of the groovy ex-Weyerhaeuser headquarters building in Federal Way, WA (in suburban Seattle). And on the north side of the road, instead of an Oasis you have a very small area with room for just a couple of parked cars, and prominent No Parking signs. So for the sake of argument let's just agree that I parked somewhere else far, far away and used antigravity boots to drop in here and take some photos. As you might notice on that photoset, I figured I needed a nickname for this spot and came up with "Forbidden Falls", which makes it sound kind of remote and fearsome, like it could be the subject of a National Geographic cover story someday. But the name is like 98% tongue-in-cheek silliness, since it's really just about the inexplicable no-parking signs. The other 2% is just doing it for the sake of alliteration, and also for clickbait value in case I ever get around to doing a blog post about the place. Surprisingly according to the internets there doesn't seem to be a single waterfall in the whole northwest already named "Forbidden Falls", just a "Forgotten Falls" near Lolo Pass on Mt. Hood, and another in the far NW corner of northern Idaho, and it may not even exist, plus Idaho doesn't really count anyway.
Further east, we finally get to the main event of mile 27, namely Shepperds Dell itself, plus the famous HCRH bridge over the aforementioned dell; and Bishop's Cap, the large rock formation just east of the dell and the bridge. Which, if I'm not mistaken, is so named because the road passes uncomfortably, unavoidably close to it, and if the rocks catch you unaware they might reach out and grope your car and then shame you for tempting them, and then declare bankruptcy so you can't sue them over it. I mean, in a sort of metaphorical way, and I think we'll just move along to the next item now and not explore that metaphor any further.
Further down the road, but still short of Milepost 28 (because them's the rules), you might catch a glimpse of the historic highway's one and only cow underpass. Now, photos from odd angles can be deceiving, and unused (I think) tunnels under the street will tend to fill up with mud and gunk over time in this climate, and I have never actually owned any cows and maybe I'm underestimating what they can get used to over time, but that tunnel does not look anywhere near tall enough for cows to mosey through, and maybe not wide enough either, and getting in and out of the uphill side of it looks pretty steep and cramped, and you do not want your cows in the tunnel getting panicky when a loud truck drives over the top or somebody honks nearby. It just does not seem up to the job, not fit for purpose if you ask me, and I realize you didn't, and come to think of it the extensive National Register of Historic Places paperwork never actually asks "Did it work?" or "Was it any good?"; it just needs to contribute to the overall vibe of concretey 1916-ness, which it certainly does.

If you were thinking of switching careers in 2025 and going into cattle rustling, be aware that this might be the spot where the sheriff's posse inevitably heads you off at the pass. At least I don't know of any other passes suitable for cows, over-, under-, or by-, around these parts so it'll have to do, even if it's a squishy undignified mud tunnel. I still say it's a relatively honest living, though, at least compared to contemporary jobs like "influencer", "AI evangelist" or "dogebro".
Circling back to Shepperds Dell for a moment, there was an interesting series of occasional posts over at Wy'east Blog about Shepperds Dell and the history behind it:
The first article tried piecing together a bio of George Shepperd, who famously donated the land around Shepperds Dell in memory of his late wife. That post noted this was his second marriage and the first had ended in divorce, and while looking for something else entirely I happened to stumble across more details about the exceptionally ugly and contentious 1893-95 divorce case that once roiled the Greater Latourell Falls - Bridal Veil metro area. And let me preface this by saying I'm not picking a side and not judging anybody, and I have no special insight into which allegations were true and which were false or exaggerated, and we should all recognize that people are complicated and always have been, even back in the 1890s. Also I feel like I need to explain that I'm only covering this episode at all because the key people in the case are all historical figures who have major scenic highlights of the Gorge officially named after them (or at least after their families), and it's only natural to be a little curious about the people these places are named for. On another note, you might notice that the exact spellings of both "Shepperd" and "Latourell" vary over time and between articles. This didn't seem to trouble anyone at the time, so basically I went with whatever spelling each news item adopted.
- December 12, 1893. "Alienated her Affections". George Shepard (how it was spelled in this article) sued Joseph C. Latourell (son of the town's founder) for $10k for alienating his wife's affections.
  
  Both parties live at Latourelle Falls, and there was a large delegation of spectators from that section here to witness the trial. Most of them were friends of Shepard, but his recital of his trials and tribulations provoked amusement rather than sympathy. There was no trouble in his family, so he said, until Latourelle began calling at his house. In the summer of 1892 he went East, and while he was away his wife became very indiscreet and attended dances and entertainments with Latourelle, and occasionally remained away from home all night.
- June 29th 1894: "Latourell Must Settle"
  
  It was in March 1893, that George Sheppard filed suit against Joseph Latourell for alienating the affections of his wife, but the case was not tried until the following December, when the plaintiff got a verdict for $1000. During the interim, however, Latourell sold his farm and stock for $500 to his brother Henry, and was in a position to laugh at Sheppard when that person got his verdict. Sheppard’s attorney was George W. Hazen, who at once instituted suit to get the property transfer set aside, on the ground that it was expressly made to defeat the collection of Sheppard’s judgment.
  
  The article goes on to note that the sale was indeed set aside and Latourell was ordered to pay up. I am not sure what to make of the greatly reduced award and am curious how 19th century courts went about estimating the true dollar value of someone's affections.
- November 14th, 1894 news item, in which the tables were suddenly turned.
  
  George Sheppard, of Latourelle Falls, will have an examination before Justice Bullock this afternoon on an information filed by his wife, Matilda Sheppard, charging him with adultery.
- The next day the paper had a longer report on the hearing. It seems the day was spent arguing over postponing the case due to an absent witness, and the attorneys expressing their great personal and professional dislike for one another. The article goes on to note It is alleged the case is the outgrowth of spite work on the part of Mrs. Sheppard., possibly stemming from the earlier court cases.
- Another hearing in the case on November 20th. Mrs. Sheppard was the first witness, though the article just says "she told her story very clearly" without sharing any details. Two additional witnesses stated they had seen Mr. Sheppard in the company of young Miss Bertha Williams (also of Latourell Falls, and attending the Sheppard hearings along with her mother) going in the direction of Brower, which was another mill town just up the road from Latourell, and this news quickly spread at the speed of small town gossip, though one of the witnesses later denied reporting it to anyone. And as far as I can tell this was all the evidence they had, just two people seen publicly "going in the direction of Brower". Which seems a bit weak, unless maybe that phrase was an oddly specific local euphemism for something else entirely.
  
  I mention that last bit because the (long-lost) town of Brower was named for George Brower, a local timber baron, though the general public mostly knew him (and his wife Marion) for their ongoing ugly divorce saga. Two earlier attempts in Multnomah County family court were denied on the grounds that hating each other and wanting out was not a good enough reason to meddle with society's sacred institutions and so forth. George Brower ended up selling his local businesses and moving to Colorado, which was the (relatively) easy divorce state at the time, like Nevada was in the mid-20th Century. After remaining there for the required full year, he was finally granted a divorce, and he headed straight off to the UK after that. Where he promptly met and married an actress in Liverpool. When the happy couple moved to Portland, Marion had them both arrested for polygamy. She claimed to have evidence he had ventured outside the borders of Colorado at least once during his year there, which she argued invalidated both the divorce and remarriage, and doomed the newlyweds to many years in jail. A grand jury failed to indict the couple, and the Brower case faded out of the news after that.
- January 11th 1895, "A Nasty Case on Trial". The Sheppards were back in the courtroom, this time a divorce case, while in parallel George had filed adultery charges against his wife and Mr. Latourell. The article doesn't delve into the day's testimony in detail, describing it as "of a prurient nature"
- January 19th 1895, also titled "A Nasty Case on Trial". We're told the case drew a large crowd of spectators again. As a little background, the article explains that "The parties accuse each other of all manner of infidelities", and notes that "Nearly all of the Latourelle Falls community has been called to testify in the case".
- Matilda's 1942 obit listed her as Matilda Latourell, aged 82. Meanwhile the Wyeast Blog post above noted that a year or so after the divorce George married Martha Williams, Bertha's recently-divorced mother. So it's possible that while everyone pointed fingers and acted deeply scandalized by young Bertha, she was apparently covering for her still-married mom the whole time.
So my big takeaway from all that is that both parties apparently ended up with people they were happier with. You could go so far as to say the people they were meant to be with, if you believe in all that destiny stuff. But because this happened in 1895 and not 2025, and no-fault divorce didn't exist, getting to that point involved multiple years of lurid, breathless news stories and a knock-down, drag-out court battle, and general humiliation in the public eye. And this sort of thing played out in court daily across the country, turning people's unhappy private lives into a cruel and tacky public spectacle, then inviting the public to come and wallow in it for fun. Sort of like daytime talk shows since the 1990s, or putting offenders in the stocks and letting the public throw vegetables for a small fee, or bullfights, or bear baiting back in Elizabethan times. And the worst part is that our new orange president and his followers want to drag the country back to those days. Which they'll do as soon as they figure out how to exempt themselves from ever being on the receiving end.

Thursday, February 20, 2025

HCRH Milepost 26

Next up we're at HCRH Milestone 26, which is located right at Latourell Falls. Specifically at the west side of the Latourell Creek Bridge, by a wide spot in the road that serves as summer overflow parking. There's an old monument to Guy Talbot here -- he was the state park's primary donor-slash-namesake, and nearby is a crosswalk for the park's loop trail, so you could just start the trail from here if you wanted to. The crosswalk doesn't have crosswalk stripes, I think because it didn't have crosswalk stripes in 1916, and traffic safety would not be historically accurate. And the reason there weren't crosswalk stripes here back then was because the trail used to cross the road on a sort of skybridge over the highway, and no crosswalk was needed. If you look closely you can still see a concrete support for the old skybridge on the north side of the road, mostly overtaken by underbrush now.

Going from that to having a mere crosswalk here is kind of suboptimal, since a lot of traffic on the road isn't disposed toward noticing pedestrians. Some of the traffic is going to be cars or motorcycles racing the clock, going for a new personal best Vista-to-Latourell-and-back time. Others are visitors from rectangular corn states, a bit white-knuckled about the twisty drive but also giddy about seeing a waterfall for the first time and maybe not watching for road hazards that closely. A crosswalk signal for the trail crossing seems like overkill, but a crossing guard during the summer might help. Rebuilding the old skybridge like it once was is a non-starter, since modern RVs and shuttle buses would probably struggle to get under it. And going by current trends, the average family SUV will expand to be at least that size in a few years. But do I have an idea for a little adaptive reuse. And this isn't one of my usual dumb ideas, nor is it very expensive, at least not directly. You know how local bike activists are always saying there aren't enough bike trails in the Gorge, even with the HCRH State Trail now mostly complete? My idea helps with that too, a little. So, back during the 2019 Tour de France, someone jumped a BMX bike over the race and made it onto all the daily highlight reels, and maybe the old skybridge piers are a place where regular people could finally give that cool bike trick a try without having to learn French and go overseas and take a bunch of advanced performance-enhancing drugs and so forth. The lack of a bridge also means there won't be a lot of hikers on that particular stretch of trail, at most probably just a few parkour runners, and I think they might legally count as bikes for jumping purposes (Note: I am not a lawyer, so don't cite me as an authority on this.)

After passing through Latourell the older old road crosses the HCRH again, becoming Alex Barr Road (County Road 566 at first, then as CR 648 after the junction w/ Toll Road), and immediately starts climbing again. It's one of two surviving backroads into the Gorge, and two "local access" roads branch off of it: Henderson Road (Road 634) runs above and parallel to the HCRH along the stretch between here and Bridal Veil Falls, and if reopened to hikers and cyclists would open up access to the top of Shepperds Dell Falls, Huerta Falls, and all the other seasonal falls along the way. Further up, a road now called Toll Road (and once known as the Latourell Falls Toll Road, and either way numbered as another part of Road 566) climbs sort-of diagonally uphill to a junction with Brower Rd. near where it crosses Young Creek, and where the old Brower sawmill used to be. The Donohue Creek trail system is nearby, and in theory you can go all sorts of places via roads 458 and 550, the latter climbing up Larch Mountain and ending up somewhere deep in the forbidden Bull Run Watershed. For a while during the area's logging heyday, the road's right of way was shared with a log flume, starting at the mill in Brower and ending at another mill in Latourell. It's not surprising that the flume was either torn out or (more likely) burned many decades ago after the area ran out of loggable trees. I'm not saying I wish it was still there, much less that someone ought to build a new one, but back when I was in third grade my teacher got married over spring break and honeymooned on either Maui or the Big Island, and showed us lots of photos when she was back, and they had gone to... it was either a former log flume or an old irrigation canal or aqueduct, that was either officially repurposed as a waterslide, or at least locals used it as one whenever The Man wasn't looking, and she said it was really fast and scary compared to the ordinary waterslides at the mall, and I thought that sounded really fun and exciting at the time. Whereas now the first thing that comes to mind is all the many reasons -- entirely reasonable reasons -- an authentic log flume waterslide would be shut down or sued out of existence on day 1.

As for the town itself, it still has a number of sorta-historic old houses, but has no hotels or restaurants or antique shops or gas stations or any other businesses these days, and no city hall or public library or any churches, not even a post office. Despite the town's heyday as the entertainment and nightlife capitol of the western Gorge, today there are no nightclubs, no dance halls, no music venues, or anywhere else dedicated to carousing and carrying on into the wee hours. In short there's nothing for you as an outsider to see or do there, and there's no reason to linger around there annoying the locals. They do happen to have a local water utility, the Latourell Falls Township water system, a topic I was curious about after learning about the disgusting medieval water system used by the old company town over at Bridal Veil. That state filing says it's a local government entity, and Townships are a common form of (mostly rural) local government in a lot of other states, largely in the Midwest, where they function as a sort of sub-county, delivering various public services on a smaller scale. And technically the Oregon state constitution does mention "towns" and "townships" a few times, mostly when saying "cities and towns". But there aren't any state laws that spell out exactly how they're created, or how they're run, or who runs them, or what they can and can't do, and and I (possibly naively) assumed that meant we didn't have any townships here. And maybe we don't, and I'm just misreading the scarce factual info I've come across. At one point I was up to around six footnotes of a paragraph or two each, just for this one item, speculating about what might be going on here, and going off on further tangents about special districts and local justice-of-the-peace courts and whatnot, and I realized I would never, ever finish this post if I included all of that stuff. Alhough, apropos of nothing, here's the relevant Oregon state law on organizing and operating a local Weather Modification District, if you're into that sort of thing.

This township stuff did remind me of an old, old post I did about the little town of Greenhorn, OR way back in 2006, which has had an average population in the low single digits for decades now, just enough to keep the state from abolishing the city government due to it being a ghost town. Various sources claim Greenhorn also operates under a "township charter", without explaining what that means any further. I dunno, I guess I'm intrigued by the idea that we might have a whole tier of local government that was vaguely authorized by the 1859 state constitution and promptly forgotten, and it's just been off doing its own thing ever since, a bit like Starfleet's Section 31 except they send you a water bill every month.

Sunday, January 26, 2025

HCRH Milepost 25

So here we are at Milepost 25 on the old Columbia River Highway. We're surrounded by an average bit of forest, with no real views to speak of, and no geological marvels or historical curiosities to stop and check out. Instead the highway itself is the main attraction for a bit, since right after the milepost the road begins a series of tight horseshoe switchbacks, usually known as the "Crown Point Loops" or "Figure-Eight Loops". I don't actually own a dashcam, so probably the best way to give you an idea about this part of the road is with a few videos I found on the interwebs:

Someone drifting the loops a few times in a 1986 Toyota Corolla
Somebody's dashcam video from a few years back
A fast descent on a bike, and not even a racing bike.
Oh, and here's a helmet cam video of someone on a Kawasaki chasing a Harley down to Latourell Falls and back.

There are a few other places like this along the old highway, just east of Hood River then the famous ones at Rowena (as seen in an endless number of car commercials, like these 2012 Infiniti ads), plus Rainier Hill Rd. and the ones that used to exist near Bradley State Park, both along the Lower Columbia stretch of the highway. Then there's the famous Maryhill Loops just across the river (and not far from the local Stonehenge), which are in no way part of the HCRH but served as a kind of prototype for some of the engineering ideas used in it. Here's a short video of someone tackling the Maryhill Hillclimb in an actual race car, doing it in just 1:46 at speeds up to 155mph. And here's GoPro footage from a big longboard and street luge event from fall 2024. You know, street luge, the thing from the 90s Mountain Dew commercials.

The one common bit of trivia you might encounter about this corner of the Gorge is that the surrounding 61.48 acres used to be a separate Crown Point Loops State Park, beginning sometime after November 1935 when Multnomah County donated the land to the state, and ending sometime before 1946, when an official history said it was now part of Guy Talbot State Park next door. Nobody explains why it was a separate park, and nobody explains why they were merged later. Maybe it saved the state a few bucks by not having to put up any "Welcome to Crown Point Loops State Park" signs, I dunno. You might think it's a weird idea to have a state park that's meant to be enjoyed from a moving vehicle, but the state park system includes an official "State Scenic Corridor" category and recognizes fourteen of them around the state ^[1]. This might reflect the system's origin as a side hobby of the state highway commission, one way to convince the public to drive more and pay more gas taxes.

Ok, that isn't the most compelling bit of historical trivia, but I do have a vintage crime story to pass along too. And believe it or not, it's not about someone being nabbed for speeding or reckless driving. You see, back in 1932, and into the 1960s in some places, the old highway was the only highway, and until I-84 opened gawking tourists had to share the road with impatient commuters and even commercial truck traffic, which caused endless traffic jams, which led some trucking companies to move cargo around late at night to avoid paying drivers to sit idle in traffic. But that led to new problems, and in July 1932 the Crown Point Loops were the site of a series of truck robberies.

Two men who had been robbing trucks of The Dalles truck line for several weeks were nursing shotgun wounds somewhere today… More than 40 parcels had disappeared from Dalles-Portland trucks in recent weeks. Last night George Spickerman, one of the owners of the line, hid in one of the trucks with a sawed-off shotgun. As the truck was proceeding slowly up the Crown Point loops at 2:30 this morning two men jumped on the end of the truck and started throwing off sacks of beans. Spickerman ordered them to hold up their hands, but instead they fled. Spickerman fired three shots at them and is confident that a number of bullets took effect.

The more I read that, the more it sounds like a news story from the early 2020s: People met with gunfire for stealing food, the satisfied tone of approval in the local media, the lack of curiosity as to what could possibly motivate someone to steal sacks of beans off a moving truck at 2:30am, as if 1932 was just another normal year for the thriving US economy.

Anyway, after the loops the road approaches the tiny burg of Latourell, which once had its own train station and steamboat landing back in its heyday, but is now down to a few dozen residents at best. On your left, Latourell Road branches off and goes downhill into the town, where there's also more parking for Latourell Falls. Across the highway, on your right, there's a house, and just before the house is a gated dirt road with a "No Trespassing" sign on it. This is the point where the old pre-HCRH road into Latourell continues more or less straight uphill to a junction with Larch Mountain Road. This was called Latourell Hill Road (aka County Road 377) back in the old days, and it's the old highway's even older, narrower, shorter, and steeper predecessor through this area. It isn't quite the very first road here, but it was built way back in 1885, probably to replace earlier road access (via the Rooster Rock Wagon Road) that was being lost to railroad construction.

Instead of 100' curves and 5% grades, and a full traffic lane in each direction, the old road to Latourell was a single lane dirt road with a few steep sections with around 20% grades. That means you gain or lose a foot (or a meter if you prefer) for every five you travel horizontally. That's equivalent to some of the steepest roads they use in the Tour de France and other pro cycling races. There's a famous 1915 birds-eye map that the Oregonian published showing the then-brand-new highway, includes a photo captioned "Thor's Heights and Highway from Point on Old Latourelle Road", another common name for road 377. The map includes the old road and highlights a scenic viewpoint on it labeled "Goat Point", which is potentially where that photo was taken. That name and place have fallen out of living memory over the years, but evidently it was well known enough back then that the Oregonian included it on their map of HCRH highlights, even though the new road was about to bypass the place. Goat Point was also the one serious hairpin corner on Latourell Hill Road, much tighter than anything that would have been allowed along the HCRH.

One curious detail is that it's still legally a county road, or most of it is. If you can find the unmarked intersection with it along Larch Mountain Road, you might notice there's no gate preventing you from turning there and driving down the road toward Goat Point, and the only barrier is your basic common sense. Well, that and there are likely fallen trees blocking the road here and there, since the county considers it a "local access road", meaning they have jurisdiction over it but have no obligation to ever do any maintenance on it. There's a middle section of road, roughly the part nearest the Loops, that was vacated at some point, and LIDAR it looks like there used to be a few structures there, maybe a sawmill or something, though that's strictly a guess on my part. Then the lower section is the part closest to the gate and No Trespassing sign. I gather the property line with the house next door runs down the middle of the road, and the owners don't want people driving on it, and dispute the current legal status of the road. And who knows, maybe they're right, and either way it's been like this for as long as I can remember, and resolving stuff like this is way over my pay grade. I do have some ideas around what to do with this and a few of the other "local access" roads in the area, but I wrote about that stuff at (maybe excessive) length here if anyone's interested.

Footnote(s)

[1] Since you asked, the other State Scenic Corridors are:

Friday, January 24, 2025

HCRH Milepost 24

After curving around the Vista House in the last post, the HCRH heads south a bit and then bends again, avoiding a steep, deep ravine. The creek tumbling down through that ravine turns out to be the same one that forms Palisade Falls , and shortly after we cross that creek we encounter Milepost 24, and for the next couple of miles there is -- officially -- nothing much to see or do until you get to Latourell Falls. Which is technically not true, but it's fair to say this mile of the road wasn't designed with the thought that visitors would want to stop and look around here. Here's what I've got for sights and attractions and whatnot:

First off, it looks like the milepost has been knocked over since I took these photos, joining what seems to be a trend. A common thread among the ones this has happened to is that they're on the outside of a left-hand curve or bend in the road, so maybe they're getting sideswiped by people trying to drift their large rear wheel drive cars around corners but not being very good at it.
Second, you might notice a few signs saying "No Trespassing" or "Area Closed" along this stretch of the road, which were posted maybe 15-20 years ago after a high-profile hiking accident, and I don't recall off the top of my head whether it was a fatal accident or just a very technical and expensive rescue operation, but either way it led the state to declare a permanent closure here. I haven't been able to find a map spelling out exactly what area is closed, but at minimum it includes the ravine leading to Palisade Falls, and the narrow ridge on the other side of it. Beyond that it's anyone's guess. That said, that was a long time ago now, possibly even before this humble blog existed, and memories fade and law enforcement priorities shift over time, and I don't know how strictly this is enforced here and now in the mid-2020s, and you may very well see people out on this ridge if you look east from the Vista House on a busy touristy day. So just to be really clear, anything you read or see here on this humble (and risk-averse) blog is strictly informational only, and I am not encouraging you try any of this stuff, and I don't want to be responsible for any consequential life choices you might make. Are we all clear on that? Good.
After the curve I mentioned above, and just past the straight bit where the milepost is, or was, the highway hangs a right, and the wide spot on the opposite side of the road is a good place to park if you're visiting the Milepost and maybe also if you're peeking down into the ravine. I say that because of a Google Review I ran across that says it's for Palisade Falls, but the pushpin for it marks a spot somewhere down in that ravine. The reviewer called it a small waterfall and said it's only visible from a short trail off one of the turnouts along the road here, and possibly other places, and includes a photo that's clearly not of the same Palisade Falls that we visited that one time. And checking the state LIDAR map there are a few spots that look like possible waterfalls, the tallest of which (here) might be up to 100' high. So yeah, we may be looking at an Upper Palisade Falls down there. And possibly a Middle one below that, and maybe an Uppermost one above it, depending on how you want to split the hairs. At this point I need to point out that I didn't notice any trails like the one she talks about, and I don't even know which turnout is the one she stopped at or exactly where her photos were taken from, and there are a couple of other turnouts further back, at or before the first bend in the road.
A short distance to the east is the Forbidden Trailhead, and the trail that begins there starts with a steep scramble uphill straight from the highway, and right at the top of the scramble is a big "No Trespassing" sign that continues "Danger - Steep Drop-Off!" As for what's beyond that sign, someone has posted a panoramic photo to Google Maps here, and you can see that the trail ends up on top of a narrow, exposed, treeless, and very picturesque ridge, just wide enough for the trail and a token line of grass on either side of it. There are a lot of places in the Gorge that look like this and aren't closed to all entry. The difference here, I gather, is that it's just too close to the Vista House, and if you're out on the ridge part you can be seen quite easily from there, and merely seeing you will put the idea into the heads of clueless people who have no idea what they're doing, and reckless people who don't care, and then whatever happens to them somehow becomes your fault, depending on what sort of mood the local media is in and whether the idiots' next of kin have good personal injury lawyers, and maybe you can start to see why I include all these tedious disclaimers and also why the Apple license agreement has more pages than a typical fantasy novel, with entire chapters in all caps seemingly at random, and every few pages the EULA denies once again that the product works at all for any particular purpose, and it most definitely cannot do what the manual claims it does, and insists over and over that the product has zero "merchantability", whatever that is. Whatever it is, I'm fairly sure I have even less of it than Apple does, so consider yourselves (and your heirs, assignees, and creditors) hereby duly notified thereof, etc.
There isn't a lot that I know about the ridge or the Forbidden Trail beyond what I've told you already. It was undoubtedly given a melodramatic sorta-mythological name once, back in the days when they were handing those out, probably by the same people who wanted Crown Point to be called "Thor's Crown". Given the shape of the ridge, they could have reasonably called it something like "Odin's Razor" or "Poseidon's Diving Board", but any name it may have once had has long been forgotten, and that makes it hard to search for. Terms like "ridge east of Crown Point" or "looking east from Vista House" have scared up a few old photos of it, at least. This one from 1932 seems to clearly show the trail out onto the ridge, just short of a century ago. The trail is less obvious in some 1963 snapshots in this Oregonhikers thread but they do show the ridge looking bare and treeless, like today. An undated stereo photo from not long after the road opened in 1916 lets you check it out in 3D. And a more recent photo shows a small group of people hanging out atop the ridge, for scale.
Continuing east from, er, Odin's Razor, it looks like there's another unnamed creek and ravine on the east side of the blade, and what looks like a 40' waterfall somewhere down in that ravine
and then another ridge beyond that. I don't see a trail or a No Trespassing sign on this one, and I'm not sure if you're visible from the Vista House at all if you wander out on it, and I've never seen or seen photos of people doing that.
Another source of governmental anxiety about the public wandering around in this area comes to us from Chapter 3 of Multnomah County's 2016 Community Wildfire Protection Plan:

September 24th, 2005 Vista House Fire was ignited .5 miles east of the Vista House , just off the Historical Columbia River Highway about 1 mile south of I-84. The exact cause of fire ignition is unknown, but since it started down a non-designated trail the most probable source is a recreationist. The fire grew to be about 10 acres in size, with Corbett RFPD providing initial attack.

The really peculiar thing is that I can't seem to find any other references to this fire, other than this anecdote that keeps getting passed around as they update the fire plan every few years. No other references. At all. State wildfire records don't mention it, maybe because 10 acres is very small by wildfire standards. I also haven't found any local news records about it, and this was a bit over a decade past the 1991 fire that threatened the Multnomah Falls Lodge, so you'd think anything that seemed to threaten the Vista House would've been a major headline. And in aerial photos I don't see anything that looks a 10 acre wildfire burn in the area. So yeah, I really don't know what to make of this.
After those two ravines and two ridges the road just descends gently toward the next milepost, and if there are any further points of interest along the way they're apparently so subtle and obscure that even *I* can't find them.
Switching briefly to things that only exist on paper, Milestone 24 is also right around the point where the proposed but unbuilt County Road 788 (map) would have joined the present-day HCRH route. 788 was a 1912 proposal for a new road between Crown Point and the town of Latourell, similar to the present-day road in most respects, but different in a couple of places. First, it would have split from Larch Mt. Road several block east of where the HCRH does, skipping Crown Point entirely and heading downhill from a point near Milepost 24, though of course Milepost 24 would have been somewhere else if they'd built this version of the road. Second, at the point where the highway has the famous figure-eight loops, 788 would have headed downhill with no switchbacks at about a 10% grade (which was still a serious upgrade over the then-current road.) And third, the road would have continued downhill and through the middle of Latourell. The reader will not be surprised to learn this proposal was backed by commercial interests in Latourell (including several people named 'Latourelle'), and opposed by backers of the Thor's Heights subdivision atop Crown Point. The Crown Point side of the argument seems to have won out; not only did the eventual highway provide multiple access points to the premium view lots of Thor's Heights, it also bypassed the town of Latourell entirely, such that it's down to a handful of old houses now instead of sprawling along the highway and out to the river like it easily could have done.

Saturday, January 11, 2025

HCRH Milepost 23

Next up we're at HCRH Milepost 23, at the intersection of the old highway with Larch Mountain Road. At this point the highway veers off to the left and vaguely downhill, heading to the Vista House, while Larch Mountain Road veers off to the right and starts climbing right off the bat. At one point not so long ago I might have gone off on a tangent here about whether this spot is where the "real" Gorge starts, but I'm going to pass this time -- it's one of those arguments where you spend the first hour defining what "real" means, and you can define it to mean anything and get whatever result you want, and that can be fun if you're debating with friends over beers and nobody's taking it too seriously. And I'll have you know that I come off as a reasonably normal and well-adjusted human being in person, and friends and even coworkers have never witnessed me chasing internet rabbit holes all the way down. But I digress, so let's skip ahead to the attractions and points of interest and places of note.

Nearby Attractions, and Points of Interest,
and Places and Things of Note, roughly ordered West to East:

Before you get to Milepost, you obviously have to stop at Portland Womens Forum, the little state park where you stop for 30 seconds and take a quick photo of the Vista House. I don't think this practice is even for good luck or anything; you just sort of have to do it anyway in the name of tradition, no matter how many photos you already have of the Vista House from the exact same location. The light and the weather conditions do vary a bit, and I guess if you keep at it you'll end up collecting the whole set of those conditions eventually, so there's that. And right behind the famous viewpoint is a gated gravel road. There are no signs telling you what it's for or where it goes, but this is the old wagon road down to the railroad tracks and almost to Rooster Rock (except for I-84 in the way), and more importantly it's part of the secret path to Palisade Falls.
Immediately east of the viewpoint is a stretch of road known as the Galaxy Note 20 Memorial Highway, due to an unfortunate yet spectacular incident back in December 2023, as I explained on the 'gram here.
Out-of-town visitors: At some point on this journey you might decide you love the look of columnar basalt (which you'll see at a couple of future stops on this lil' tour) and want it to be part of your domestic environment. But -- record scratch -- you hate the cold, wet weather here (which is understandable, quite honestly), and have zero interest in moving here permanently. Never fear, there are other ways to live your dream. One of these would be to turn right at Knieriem Rd. and go hit up the Howard Canyon Quarry, a couple of miles south and outside of the official protected scenic area. They specialize in ornamental basalt columns and will happily sell you literal tons of the stuff. You could just set the columns up around the house, or out in the yard somewhere, maybe as part of a nice realistic water feature. For the rich Texans out there, you can tell your friends and neighbors that you shot a real Northwest waterfall while you were here and had it taxidermied up real nice.

However: If you want to make the really big bucks, have your basalt shipped to Florida instead -- any old vacant lot in Florida will do -- and charge admission and tell everyone it's the ruins of a temple from Atlantis, 100% built by the ancient aliens from TV. Most people -- or at any rate enough people -- will believe you and automatically buy whatever snake oil you feel like selling, because Florida, and soon you'll have an army of true believers at your command... right up until the first moment they get bored, and then you've lost them. So the secret is just to keep the escalating PR spectacles coming as long as you can, and then flip the place to some ambitious ~~sucker~~ investor just before you run out of ideas. Couple of free starter ideas to get you going: 1. Lady Esmerelda, the Fortune-Telling Alligator, specializing in horoscopes and lottery numbers, and really generic advice for the lovelorn. 2. Fake a UFO sighting with some cheap weather balloons. These days if you stage it well enough the Air Force will freak out and shoot it down right over your Jacksonville Temple of Atlantis, and hordes of tourists will descend on your tourist trap, but somehow you were ready for this onslaught with a whole warehouse full of "And all I got was this lousy T-shirt" T-shirts. Those two ideas should be enough to get you started, and you can thank me later.
Just shy of the milepost and off to your right, you might notice an open-sided steel cube, a couple of feet on each side, balanced on one corner atop a black-painted metal post. Some of the cube's edges are painted red, others white, and a couple of them are blue with white stars. If you look closely, there's a small wooden cross lying inside the cube. Older street view images show it standing up vertically from the 'base' corner, inside the cube, so it must have fallen over fairly recently. I am a bit frustrated to report I cannot find any info at all about this thing -- specificially who created it and why. Frustrating because I could swear I once read a story about it in some local media outlet, maybe Willamette Week or the Tribune, but neither has searchable archives online and I only vaguely remember the story, or I only think I remember it and I have this completely wrong. Two competing maybe-memories are saying the backstory is either a.) it was added just before the Scenic Area Act went into effect in 1986 and was grandfathered in, or b.) it was added not long after the law took effect, but so far the feds have shied away from enforcing the usual rules and regulations because of that little wood cross in the cube, since the Supreme Court would jump at any opportunity to strike down the whole law over someone's little wood cross and generally privilege religious stuff over all other things. I still have no idea what the cube stands for though, since cubes don't really appear in mainstream Christian iconography, or in traditional USA patriotic imagery for that matter. I dunno, maybe someone caught wind of the Pythagoreans and their weird obsession with the dodecahedron, and figured they ought to claim at least one regular polyhedron for Jesus before somebody else claims them all for their made-up false religion. And I admit that isn't a very good theory even by my usual standards.
You might notice that the photos above show another small cross and sort of diorama next to the milepost. This is not a roadside attraction or a scenic highlight or even a historical marker, exactly. I thought I should explain briefly, though, for any visitors from overseas who might encounter it or another like it and don't know what it is. This is a little roadside memorial, and these usually honor a person or people who died in a car accident at this spot. They aren't official in any way, and are built and maintained by friends or relatives, pretty much for as long as people continue taking care of it. I haven't checked yet, but there are probably strict but largely unenforced laws on the books in Oregon limiting the size and duration and so forth of roadside memorials, because it's hard to imagine the state legislature passing up a chance to invent a new misdemeanor. I recall first seeing roadside memorials in Georgia and South Carolina in the mid-1990s and first seeing them in the Northwest in the early 2000s.
Since the milepost marks the turnoff for Larch Mountain Road, Milepost 23 is the closest milepost for everything up that direction, starting with the famous
View Point Inn, as seen in the first Twilight movie, specifically the prom scene. Also from the olden days of the old highway, but mostly the sparkly vampire movie, let's be honest here. For a little reality check, the place's Yelp reviews from before the fire were all over the map. We're told the current new owners (as of January 2025) have big plans and are going to fix up and reopen the place, for real this time. So we'll see how that turns out.
If you were to turn left at the once and fugure sparkly vampire hotel and continue along Columbia Avenue, you'll see that there's a small residential neighborhood back there, and the road extends north to the Vista House, though that end is gated off to deter tourists. This area was actually platted out as a subdivision called "Thor's Heights" way back in 1913, and then scaled back in 1917 after (I assume) prospective homebuyers came to realize what the weather was like here most of the year.
Continuing on the Larch Mountain side trip, there are a lot of closed roads up there -- mostly old logging roads -- that can kind of double as trails, at least if you aren't too picky about where you're going. I spent a lot of time exploring this area during peak Covid as a way to get out and get some steps in my legs without encountering any other human beings whatsoever. And I realize this list might be ruining a bunch of prime secret spots just before the H5N1 bird flu mutates and sweeps the world and causes another lockdown wave, and that wouldn't be a great outcome, but hey, there's always the coast range to explore. So in that spirit, here are a few explorable Forest Service roads, and some BLM and even Multnomah County roads too since we're in the area anyway.
Also the trails at Donohue Creek, Buck Creek, and Pepper Mountain -- though to be honest two of those three are also old logging roads.
And then there's the famous (but still not famous enough) Sherrard Viewpoint at the uppermost tippy-top of Multnomah County's hometown favorite shield volcano. Which turns out to be an excellent place to view the Aurora Boralis, on the rare occasions it deigns to visit us.
Backtracking all the way back to the intersection and then hanging a left at the milepost, there are a couple of turnouts along this narrow cliffside stretch of the old highway. First up is a spot with a couple of large, raised concrete disks, which turn out to be the tops of old water tanks, formerly the water supply to the Vista House. I don't know how deep they go or if they're currently used for anything. If not, I have an idea. The dumb idea I already regret proposing is to remove the concrete tops of these tanks, and turn them into large public hot tubs with a nice view. Probably need some kind of shuttle bus since there's nowhere to park here, and things like better guardrails to arrange, but honestly I'd like to stay focused on the big picture for once and let the detail folks figure that stuff out. It would be amazing on a chilly drizzly afternoon toward the tail end of fall foliage season, and I can already tell that keeping drains clear of fallen leaves that time of year is going to be a mess, just as an example.
The other turnout you'll see is the Bird's Nest overlook, a small viewpoint with the usual Gorge-style stone railing plus some actual seating, if you feel like lingering around to watch the sunset. The surprising thing is that this was just a gravelly wide spot in the road until 1995, when ODOT designed and built it in the style of the old highway.
And just like that, ta-daaa, we're at the Vista House, which hopefully requires no introduction because this post is quite long enough already. It has always seemed like there ought to be more to the place than there is; in a recent Instagram post I suggested it ought to have a secret level below the lowest one we know about, ideally home to a fabulous Art Deco speakeasy and jazz club that the authorities never got around to busting, which remains secret to the present day because it's tradition at this point, and also because letting tourists in would ruin it. Anyway, poking around looking for secret doors is probably a waste of time, but be sure to have a stroll along the sidewalk as it circles around the Vista House, and then check out my Crown Point viaduct post to see what's under that sidewalk (spoiler: not solid rock). Or you could look at the post first, but where's the fun in that?

Friday, January 03, 2025

HCRH Milepost 22

The next HCRH milepost on this weird little excursion is Milepost 22, which is right in the midst of the highway's farm stand corridor. The milepost looks a bit worse for wear right now, tilted and possibly broken off at the base. Street View imagery from June 2023 shows it tilted like it is now, while previous versions from October 2021 back thru October 2007 all show it upright.

Nearby Attractions:

Obviously the farm stands are the main event on this stretch of the highway, specifically the blueberry farm right across the highway, and the lavender farm next door to it. This is also your big chance to sneak a peek at the fallen milepost without looking like a suspicious weirdo poking around in someone's yard. So of course I procrastinated until past the end of farm stand season because the place always seemed crowded, so instead I had to roll by and take photos from the car like at Milepost 18. But you don't have to do that.
A couple of religious retreat / conference centers just down the road, almost next door to each other: Menucha (Presbyterian, specifically First Presbyterian in downtown Portland) and Crestview Manor (very conservative Christian), both of which began as early 20th century grand manor houses owned by local captains of industry, built during that brief window of time before rich people realized they could just high-tail it off to Palm Springs during the wet months and do all their conspicuous consumption down there instead, while maintaining a low-key residence here for the tax-free shopping or whatever. Anyway, one tidbit for this humble blog's usual readership is that Menucha grounds map shows a number of trails and viewpoints around the site. I seem to recall that at one point you could buy a day hiking pass and wander the grounds taking photos without attending a conference, but I don't see any mention of that on their website anymore, so it may have been discontinued during the pandemic or thereabouts, I don't know.
There's also a historic Grange hall just off the highway and behind some trees. Fortunately this Grange doesn't seem to have gone all militia-y like some others around the Northwest have. So if you're in the market for an indoor wedding venue in the Gorge, this might be a good option. If, on the other hand, you're planning a large, traditional outdoor wedding in the Gorge, any time of the year, with hundreds of guests, dozens of contractors, and tons of rented stuff that absolutely must not get wet or dirty, or be blown over by the wind, or hit by lightning, or stomped by krakens or kaiju, please be aware that hubris angers the gods. Mostly the rain gods, but the wildfire ones sub in over the summer, and I just feel like I shouldn't be a party to this and have no useful advice to offer except to reconsider. There's a whole genre of event they call an "elopement wedding", which is kind of like actually eloping except that you can tell people about it ahead of time, even your parents if you want to. So you and your intended, and your officiating friend who got ordained online last week, and your photographer, and a reasonable number of friends go for a hike somewhere in the gorge and have a brief ceremony (and extended photoshoot) wherever the mood strikes you, and roll with it and adapt if the weather goes sideways, and it's cute and looks spontaneous and doesn't bankrupt anyone, which is always a plus. Note: I'm not in this business and don't know anyone who is, and am not selling anything. I just like the idea and can confirm that this sort of event almost never triggers a kraken release.

Thursday, January 02, 2025

HCRH Milepost 21

We're starting the new year with another Historic Columbia River Highway milepost. Milepost 21 is at the HCRH intersection with NE Evans Road and (sort of) with Corbett Hill Road. This is more or less the center of Corbett: To the west are the post office, the water district office, the elementary and high schools, and an incongruous tech company of some sort. To the east are the local general store, the rural fire department, the (future) local history museum, and an incongruous biotech food lab of some sort. To the north, Corbett Hill Road connects to I-84, while Evans Rd. heads south into the wilds of rural east Multnomah County, becoming SE Gordon Creek Road at the intersection with Hurlburt Rd., then winding south through various adventures and ending up in Sandy or thereabouts.

If you were expecting posts about mileposts 19 and 20 before getting here, you may be in for a wait. Milepost 19 is clearly visible in Street View imagery from June 2023 but I've looked for it several times and I'm mostly convinced it isn't there now. Up ahead we'll see at least two others that have obvious, recent vehicular damage, so if I had to guess what happened to #19, that would have to be the leading theory. I haven't been paying close attention to the subject over time, so I don't know if this is part of a wave of milepost damage or this actually happens all the time and the state just grumbles quietly and replaces them as needed. I would believe either, frankly.

I think Milepost 20 would be somewhere near the HCRH intersection with Mershon Rd. if it existed. It's not there now, wasn't there the last time Street View rolled through, and also wasn't there during any previous Street View visits, back thru 2007. The semi-interesting thing about this location is Mershon Rd. may be the oldest of several east-west routes predating the famous old highway, and sufficiently old road survey docs (like this one from 1889) refer to it as the "Portland and Dalles County Road", better known as the Dalles Wagon Road. Which was the HCRH's predecessor, though I don't think it was ever built all the way to The Dalles. Little remains of it today, as it was largely built over by the O.W.R.&N. railroad well before the HCRH went in. Which is a strategy that works amazingly in the original 1980s SimCity since the devs never imagined anyone doing that and did not penalize you for only building transit and nowhere for cars.