French Prairie State Park

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This is the grand entrance to French Prairie State Park, an obscure little state park on the Willamette River, just downstream of Champoeg State Park and upstream of Wilsonville. The is one of the state's many obscure Willamette Greenway sites; they don't appear on most maps, the state parks website doesn't list them, and the only road sign indicating you're in the right place is the tiny one pictured above. I'll cover the Willamette Greenway park system further in a later post about a place I was actually able to visit. This one was "Closed for Winter" when I stopped by, even though it was after Memorial Day. The sign doesn't give any indication about when winter ends in these parts. In reality it's probably closed due to the state's budget woes, or maybe vandalism, and all they had was a "Closed for Winter" sign.

But suppose winter really has persisted into the summer months in this one small area, and there's a sheet of glacial ice here that isn't visible from the front gate, and ice floes on the river, plus drifting snow and so forth. What supernatural cause might be responsible for all this? Does a Snow Miser live here? Or maybe a white dragon from D&D has taken up residence. I lean toward the latter hypothesis, because white dragons are always chaotic evil, and that would explain why the gate is closed locked and visitors are quietly discouraged and the place's very existence is not exactly shouted from the rooftops. And the state certainly wouldn't undertake all these dragon-mitigation measures if dragons didn't actually exist, which to me is kind of a big deal even apart from the whole state park thing. It all makes perfect sense, right?