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?

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.

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.

Nearby Attractions:

• Corbett Country Market, the local grocery store, liquor store, gas station, and bbq joint. I don't do a lot of restaurant reviews here, but I've had their tri-tip sandwich and highly recommend this place based on that.
• The local historical society museum isn't open yet, but they have an actual building under construction.
• About a block east from the milepost are NE 365th and 366th Avenues, which I thiiink are the highest-numbered streets anywhere on the Portland-centered street grid. I think the closest competitor on the west side (since unincorporated Washington county uses this system too) would probably have to be NW 341st Avenue just outside Cornelius city limits between Cornelius and Hillsboro.
• local community website, complete with local forums that people actually use and everything, sorta like the 1998 internet was everywhere.
• The secret 100' waterfall west of the old rock quarry at the Corbett I-84 exit, near the site of a 1903 train robbery.
• To the south, and further away, there's the obscure North Oxbow area (the largely ignored eastern half of Oxbow Park), and several even more obscure Metro natural areas, including at least one more secret waterfall, and this one will knock your socks off. (Metaphorically, I mean, and no offense intended to people who don't believe in socks.) But telling you more about it (including the location) is out of scope for this current project, so you'll have to wait a bit.

HCRH Milepost 18

The next HCRH milepost we're visiting is for mile 18, which is located at a really awkward point where the highway is crawling uphill next to the Springdale Job Corps Center. There isn't a good, safe place to stop anywhere nearby, since mileposts weren't meant to be destinations themselves, not even the retro ones. But hey, that's what they said about the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas Nevada Sign at first, and look how that turned out. Anyway, I'm saying all this to explain why the photos look like they were taken quickly from a moving vehicle: It's because they were. The trick is to set up burst mode and point your phone in the right general direction, and take a bunch of photos while staying focused on driving, and then discard all photos not containing a milepost. Consider the, er, famous Michelangelo quote about sculpting David by simply chipping away everything that was not David. And TBH I just copied that existing process, merely adapting it to photos of little concrete posts. Just putting that out there cos Big Mike paid his dues and deserves proper credit.

Nearby Attractions:

• I keep meaning to stop and look at the cool metal dragon statue in front of the Job Corps main entrance and I haven't gotten around to doing it yet. I gather Job Corps is one of the federal programs on the chopping block for the next president we won't name and his oligarch pals, so I should probably get a move on about this one. More importantly, go see it while you still can, whether I do or not.
• This stretch of the highway runs right next to an unnamed creek -- I ran across a 1935 road survey map that called it "Prosperity Creek" but I have no idea if anyone still uses that name 90 years later -- so the ravine it runs through here is probably either "Springdale Canyon" or "Prosperity Canyon", though I've never seen anyone use those names. The state LIDAR map says there's a spot downstream of the Job Corps entrance where the creek goes over a couple of 20'-25' drops close together and then flows into the Sandy River at the far upstream end of Dabney State Park, but I have not actually tried looking for it, and that bit of the park is probably underwater a lot in the wet season, so investigating further may not be doable.
• South of the Job Corps property is Metro's highly obscure Springdale Natural Area, ~230 acres of Sandy riverfront land that seem to be nearly inaccessible from the outside world. The internet says this nature area is home to Smith Creek Falls, which looks to be around 50' high, and is (probably) accessible only by boat. Some joker (not me, promise) added it to Google Maps a while back, asking "Who has ever seen a more picturesque location in all the earth? 🌎🌍". I'm no philosopher, but I think the answer to this is "nobody", but only because it's a trick philosophical question: Nobody has ever actually seen Smith Creek Falls. Therefore nobody has seen both it AND other places that might be the most picturesque. Therefore the number of people who have seen it and other candidates and then chose somewhere else as the best must be exactly zero, yay, Smith Creek Falls wins.
• On a point of (much) more general interest, I keep hearing that Springdale's historic Springdale Pub is a must-visit pizza destination and I haven't been there yet. I'll keep you posted.

HCRH Milepost 17

A few of you out there might remember an old project I did around the Stark St. Milestones, a series of very old stone markers along Stark St. each carved to indicate the distance in miles from downtown Portland (measured specifically from the intersection of SW Broadway & Washington St.), with a surprising number of surviving stones, from milestone P2 embedded into a wall at Lone Fir Cemetery in inner SE Portland, out to P14 on the campus of Mt. Hood Community College, along the east edge of Gresham and Troutdale. I mentioned a few times that Stark was eventually extended across the Sandy River to join the new Columbia River Highway, and they decided to continue the existing mile numbering as the highway continued east. I didn't follow suit immediately; I was just happy to have collected the whole set thru #14. You will not be surprised to learn that I recently decided to go ahead and do HCRH mile markers as a project. I didn't see anyone else doing it, for one thing, and for another I'd recently bought a fun new car and this was a fresh excuse to take it out for a spin on several weekends over the summer.

As for the scope of this project: After MHCC there are apparently no markers for miles 15 and 16, and it's unclear whether those ever existed. Then there's a continuous stretch of mileposts from 17 thru 36 (except for the currently-missing 19 and 20). There's an odd one-off wooden Milepost 43 around the eastern outskirts of Cascade Locks, and a few sporadic ones numbered in the 50s and low 60s this side of Hood River, picking up again east of town at 67 and continuing east to around 88 on the west side of The Dalles, and I've heard there are even more of them way out in the Umatilla area with mile numbers in the 170s, but those may not be part of the same "miles from Portland" sequence, in which case they don't count. So the exact end of this thing is TBD, and for those of you following along at home (and rushing out to visit each one as the next post goes up) the important thing to know is that mile counts always reset at state lines and so there's no risk of blundering across into Idaho (where the shadows lie) by chasing these things around.

That may seem like a lot of surviving mileposts, given the originals were made with 1910s reinforced concrete and not stone. It turns out most of the ones you'll see out there are replacements that only date to the 1980s, which was practically yesterday. But -- crucially -- a couple of them did survive from way back when, and the new replacements copy the originals' design, and -- also crucially -- they didn't explain which two are the originals so it could be any of them, and the only way to be sure you have photos of these important historical artifacts is to find all of them. (Or, I guess, you could just call up ODOT and ask, but where's the fun in that?)

So with all of that background out of the way, the first milepost we encounter on the way east is Milepost 17, which is located along a shady shoulder of the highway around 1/3 mile past the Stark St. Bridge, before the entrance to Dabney State Park. Note that the shoulder is actually marked No Parking, I think because parking here would let a few visitors stroll into the park and scratch their disc golf itch without paying. So if you just pull off the road briefly to take photos of a concrete milepost, this will probably not lead to getting tasered by The Man, though you never know.

I think another thing I'll do for these posts is list some "nearby attractions", and sort of figure out what that means on the fly. (I think Wordpress is able to do that automagically based on geotags, but Google yoinked most of their Blogger engineers away to go build Google+ before they got around to building this.) Anyway, here's what's nearby:

• An old post about the Stark St. Bridge, currently closed for emergency repairs.
• Flickr photos from Dabney State Park right here, since the related blog post isn't done yet. And I could swear I have more material than the two short video clips in that set. I think I must have mis-filed them somewhere.
• Some very obscure seasonal waterfalls across the highway from Dabney, like this one maybe 300 feet past the milepost.
• A short distance past the entrance to Dabney, at the intersection with Nielson Rd., is the site of "Dabney Springs" aka "Troutdale Springs". Which until quite recently was another minor relic of the old highway, a free-flowing water fountain installed by the state Highway Commission sometime in the early years of the old highway, as a source of radiator water for your poor overheated Model T Ford. Decades later, local hippies decided it was a source of pure mountain spring ambrosia, unsullied by The Man and his chlorinated fluoridated dihydrogen-monoxidated corporate mainstream "water". Even though the water flowed out of an iron pipe, embedded in a big concrete block, and the state never actually said where the water came from or even promised that it was safe for humans to drink. Eventually (sometime earlier this year) this attracted enough hippies to become a regular traffic hazard -- I dunno, maybe they kept twirling in the street or something -- and The Man came and shut it all down. I don't have a post about this or any photos of it or anything, but a recent ZehnKatzen Times post has all the details here.
• Flickr photos from the obscure Stark St. Viaduct, another HCRH-style bridge uphill from the bridge on the Sandy River. That post isn't done yet either.
• If you crossed the Stark St. bridge and then turned left instead of right onto the HCRH, and continued around the bend in the river, you'll soon be at Keanes Creek Falls and the former Tippy Canoe dive bar, and past there a series of small roadside waterfalls on the way to central Troutdale.

Impressed Concrete

Way back in 2013 when the MAX Orange Line was under construction, TriMet used some of their mandatory public art money on a temporary installation, printing artsy phrases on some of their construction fencing. I was still trying to be semi-timely about getting posts finished, at least for temporary things like this, and I managed to put together a blog post about Orange Lining: Art Starts Now while some of the fences were still up. Toward the end of that post I mentioned that the project had an upcoming Phase 2 in the works called Impressed Concrete and I was going to hold off posting about it for a while to accumulate more photos. So now you're looking at the promised phase 2 post, over a decade later, and I even accumulated a few more photos over that time.

One fact of life of construction projects west of the Cascades is that if your project will take longer than the month of August or so, your jobsite will be rained on, possibly a lot. So you'll have mud to deal with, as well as runoff water that has to go somewhere, and that water can get you in a lot of trouble if you don't manage it correctly. If there's too much silt in your runoff and it ends up in local streams, it makes the fish sad and angsty and then the EPA fines you for violating the federal Clean Water Act. One very common way to address this is to install silt fencing, which is a sort of synthetic fabric barrier that is supposed to let water through while blocking any soil particles trying to go along for the ride. This supposedly works fairly well, at least when the fencing is installed properly and then maintained regularly (which does not always happen), and most importantly it's potentially cheaper than paying EPA fines. So when the time came to build the TriMet MAX Orange Line down to Milwaukie, the agency was set to buy a large quantity of the stuff.

Separately, the agency had (and has) a longstanding legal requirement to spend some low single-digit percentage of the total project costs on public art projects. This typically means each MAX station gets some sort of whimsical sculpture that amuses kids and perplexes adults. Beyond that, someone put two and two together and realized the miles of orange fabric were a potential blank canvas and figured out how to silkscreen black letters onto the orange background. The public was invited to submit poetic phrases, old sayings, and general aphorisms and whatnot (to a maximum 50 characters) for potential use somewhere along the long orange fence. Which is a lot of trouble to go to just to decorate a temporary fence. Fortunately(?), MAX contractors were also going to need to tear up and rebuild a lot of sidewalks over the course of the project, and pressing letters into freshly poured concrete is cheap and easy, and the practice dates back to at least the ancient Romans. So the effort got a Phase 2, largely reusing the text chosen for the orange silt fences, but reappearing this time as words in the sidewalk.

At one point the project had its own website at OrangeLining.net, and a separate project blog, because that was just how you did social media back then. Those went away ages ago (and the links go to Wayback Machine copies), but Trimet's Orange Line art guide is still online (as of December 2024), and it has this to say about the art:

Buster Simpson and Peg Butler, Orange Lining: Art Starts Now and Impressed Concrete.
Orange polypropylene fencing, concrete

• Public call for writing resulted in selection of 102 poetic phrases.
• Phrases were printed on orange silt fencing and installed temporarily during light rail construction.
• Phrases are stamped into new concrete sidewalks at 122 locations along the alignment.

Before anyone asks: No, I don't have photos of all 122 locations, and no, I'm not taking that on as a new project. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, the old OrangeLining.net page with all the inscriptions has been archived for posterity, in case anyone's curious, and tracking them all down in real life is left as an exercise for the reader.

Crown Point Viaduct

Ok, we're back in the Gorge again, looking at yet another bit of historical 1910s engineering from the old Columbia River Highway. Virtually every new visitor to the Gorge stops at the Vista House to have a look around, maybe use the restroom and have a peek at the gift shop, before continuing down the road as it winds around Crown Point and then switchbacks down the hill to Latourell Falls and points east. We're here having a look at that initial bit of road, the part below the Vista House with the sidewalk and streetlights on the outside of the curve. And the reason we're doing that is because the sidewalk (and probably part of road) aren't built directly on solid rock, but on a concrete viaduct structure similar to the ones on either side of Multnomah Falls, so it gets categorized as another historic Gorge bridge, just a curving one along the edge of a high cliff that doesn't cross over water. There aren't a lot of clues to this when you're actually walking on it, but you can see it clearly in photos taken from the Portland Womens Forum viewpoint, or from nearer spots like the Bird's Nest overlook. So I've included a few photos from those places.

Anyway, when I say it gets categorized as a bridge, I mean that all the internet resources I usually consult for semi-interesting factoids about bridges have the same kind of info about the Crown Point Viaduct too. Obviously there's a Recreating the HCRH page for the viaduct, and it had a BridgeHunter page back in the day (now available via the Wayback Machine). Its entry in the old highway's National Register of History Places nomination calls it "Crown Point Viaduct, No. 4524", and describes it briefly:

This 560-foot spiral viaduct was constructed of reinforced concrete and runs for 225 degrees of a circle around Crown Point. It functions as a 7-foot-wide sidewalk and curb with a 4-foot-high parapet wall on the outside of a 24-foot roadway cut into the rock formation. A dry masonry retaining wall stabilizes the hillside above and below the viaduct and masonry parapet walls that ring Vista House (see under “Buildings”), the sandstone public comfort station completed on top of Crown Point in 1918.

The Historic American Engineering Record collection at the Library of Congress has a writeup about it, plus several black & white photos, including two photos from underneath the deck. I wanted to point those out in particular because I don't have any photos taken from down there, so go look at those if you really want to see close-ups of that area. I did sorta-consider the idea for a moment, way back when I was taking photos for various other Gorge bridge posts in 2014 or so, but realized I just didn't want to, and remembered that nobody is paying me to do any of this, so I skipped it.

But continuing with the usual sources, ODOT's 2013 historic bridge inventory, page 214 describes it briefly as "Twenty-eight 20-ft reinforced concrete slab spans as a half-viaduct surrounding Crown Point, a rock promontory overlooking the Gorge", while their guidebook Historic Highway Bridges of Oregon elaborates a bit:

The Crown Point Viaduct was the first structure started on the Multnomah County portion of the Columbia River Highway. Samuel C. Lancaster was the supervising engineer for both Multnomah County and the State Highway Department. Lancaster located the highway to encircle Crown Point, a promontory rising vertically 625 feet about the river. (Crown Point was designated a National Natural Landmark in August 1971.) The "half-viaduct" prevented unnecessary excavation or fill to establish a roadbed on the point. The structure is 560 feet long and consists of twenty-eight 20-foot reinforced concrete slab spans. Vista House, an observatory and rest stop dedicated to early Oregon pioneers, was completed on Crown Point in 1918.

Lancaster often gets credited for everything along the old highway, but like most of the regular bridges along the road, the viaduct was actually designed by the engineer K.P. Billner, who wrote about his Gorge bridges in the February 10, 1915 issue of Engineering and Contracting, Vol. XLIII No. 6, pp. 121-123. Most of the article is about the Latourell Creek Bridge, but he included a bit about the Crown Point Viaduct too:

At Crown Point there is an abrupt cliff rising to a height of about 700 ft. In rounding the turn above the river the road follows a curve of 110-ft. radius through an angle of 225º. A 7-ft. concrete sidewalk and railing crowns this cliff. Surmounting the 4-ft. solid railing there are electric lights, at 20-ft. intervals, which are visible from the transcontinental trains and from the river boats below. A high curb protects this walk from the traffic on the road.

The accompanying photo shows the top of Crown Point with the road like it is today, but with the original natural rock formation in the center instead of the Vista House, which would not be constructed for a few more years.

I didn't run across much in the way of historical anecdotes concerning the viaduct bit specifically, but I've got two, and you can draw whatever conclusions you want from them.

First an odd episode in December 1927 when Samuel Lancaster had a freakout over accumulated ice on the road during a winter storm, insisting that everything from the Crown Point viaduct through to Multnomah Falls was in imminent danger of collapsing if something wasn't done immediately to clear the ice off the road. A couple of days later county engineers inspected that stretch of the road and confirmed it was fine and in no danger of any kind of apocalypse. I can see Lancaster being a little overprotective of his "babies", but this is not how civil engineers usually react to potential dangers to something they had a hand in building.

Oh, and in March 17th 1942 the Crown Point viaduct -- along with the east and west Multnomah Falls viaducts -- was officially placed on a list of 934 new "prohibited zones", newly off-limits to anyone considered to be an an "alien enemy", meaning anyone of Japanese ancestry. The order also added Idaho, Montana, Utah, and Nevada to a list of "military areas"; Oregon, Washington, California and Arizona were already on that list as of a previous order two weeks earlier. This happened a month and change after FDR issued Executive Order 9066, and shortly before the government started shipping Japanese-American citizens off to internment camps. The linked Wikipedia article shows a deportation order for the Bay Area dated April 1st, less than two weeks after this. And it just so happens that I'm finishing this post on election night 2024, and things aren't looking great for the civilized world right now, and the prospect of the very same 1798 law that enabled internments being used again against immigrants seems to be right there on the horizon all of a sudden, and I was kind of hoping finishing this post would be a nice distraction from watching election news, and now it's actually not helping at all. Because history isn't just a selection of quaint anecdotes, and tends to be intertwined with the present in all sorts of unexpected ways, especially when you don't want it to and least expect it.

Cradle

The next installment of my ongoing let's-go-look-at-public-art project takes us back to Portland's South Waterfront district again. It's not a part of town I tend to go and wander around in just for fun, so I'm not all that surprised that more art went in while I wasn't paying attention. Beyond that, I'm reasonbly sure I've walked along this stretch of the South Waterfront Greenway before without really noticing any of the new art a few times, because that wasn't what I was looking for at the time. So with that introduction out of the way, up first in this sorta-belated art tour is Cradle (2013) by Northwest artist Buster Simpson, located toward the current north end of the greenway at the foot of Curry Street. It's a sort of concrete frame holding some weathered logs and tree roots, like ones you'd see as driftwood on the beach, or as part of a slash pile after a clear cut, or as local construction debris after building another South Waterfront condo tower, or maybe it's a random dead tree or two that came floating down the Willamette from who-knows-where after a big storm. At first glance you might think it's not very nice to look at, which honestly was my first impression too. But I think I understand what's going on here well enough to try to explain it. Let's start with the Public Art Archive page for Cradle (linked up above), which offers this description:

“Cradle” is a sculptural gift to the Willamette River. Once a wild river with vast amounts of woody debris, the Willamette has been tamed and we have become its steward. Four anthropomorphic concrete anchors cradle three cedar root wads as if awaiting eventual deployment of their woody debris in support of habitat enhancement along the river’s edge. “Cradle” offers a dynamic encounter between the weight of the human-like anchors and the buoyancy of the tree biomass. The embrace relays an authenticity of relationship and interdependence, from the cradle on to future generations. Four words in Chinuk Wawa, provided by The Confederated Tribes of the Grande Ronde, are inscribed on the concrete anchors and invite passersby to contemplate the site’s history and fathom our complex relationship with it as we look into the future.

If you aren't immersed in Pacific Northwest environmental policy stuff, you'll probably come away from that wondering why everyone is so worked up about woody debris. All of that talk is really about endangered salmon. The idea here is that, if left undisturbed, rivers and streams naturally tend to accumulate old fallen logs, dead tree stumps, etc. from the surrounding forest, and this debris serves as an essential safe space for baby salmon, providing shelter from hungry predators and summer heat. The wood is also supposed to slow down the water flowing around it, which should allow gravel to accumulate on the creekbed nearby instead of being washed further downstream, and these gravel beds are essential as the one and only place a returning salmon is interested in laying or fertilizing eggs. After which they can relax and chill and live happily ever after. (*checks notes*) Er, actually they drop dead almost immediately and decay on the spot with all the other salmon, and it smells terrible, but if you freeze and roll the credits just before that happens it's actually the same plot as every Hallmark holiday movie: Protagonist returns to the same wholesome hometown they once outgrew; relationship drama ensues; ends up spawning; abandons entire career and never goes back to the big city. Anyway, the point is that the wood promotes both ends of the whole circle of life, if that makes any sense. Furthermore, as the theory goes, we don't have to just sit around and wait for these conditions to occur naturally on their own; instead, we can create ideal salmon habitat wherever we want, by bringing in logs from somewhere else and anchoring them in place with weights and steel cables and whatnot so they don't just float away. Which is essentially what the art here is depicting, in stylized form.

So yeah, aesthetics aside it would be fantastic if we could point to Cradle as a monument to How We Fixed The Salmon Problem. Unfortunately it's not quite that simple. As an August 2022 article (summarizing a May 2022 study) explains, some habitat restoration methods clearly are beneficial, like removing barriers to migrating fish, everything from fixing culverts under streets to removing entire dams. (And check out this Oregon Fish & Wildlife map showing roughly how many unmitigated salmon barriers are still out there.) Letting beavers build dams (which creates wetlands) seems to help a lot too. And they identified some individual cases where adding woody debris seemed to have helped, but in many cases it had no effect on juvenile salmon numbers. The tone of the report suggests they aren't ready to give up on the idea just yet, as it sure seems like it ought to work. But there's clearly a missing puzzle piece around what gives a logjam the right salmon feng shui, and so far nobody knows what that puzzle piece is. And then there's a much larger problem: While improved habitat does seem to boost salmon numbers right up to the point where they depart and head out to sea, so far there hasn't been a corresponding bump in the numbers of adult fish returning to their point of origin. And again, nobody knows why. So that's a bit of a problem, and it's possible that making art to celebrate woody debris was a bit premature, in retrospect.

As a bit of historical context, there are plenty of swanky midcentury architectural fish ladders^[1] out there too, dating back to the days when those were the thing that was going to fix the Salmon Problem.^[2]. So at least this isn't a new trend, I guess. And I'm glad these examples exist, because if they didn't I was going to have to use an analogy with fancy porcelain phrenology heads instead, and phrenology heads are creepy.

So yeah, Cradle is maybe not a crowd pleaser in the looks department, and the whole concept behind it turns out to come with a big asterisk, and it can't even fall back on being a whimsical kinetic whatzit for kids and tourists like a lot of the art the city buys. But at least I can think of a few interesting comparisons we can do between it and other art around town, which means I get to link to a few old blog posts. This is something you're supposed to do if you're writing a Serious Article about capital-A Art, to illustrate some theory you have or just to demonstrate you've looked at other Art before and have had serious thoughts about it too. Though I've never figured out whether linking to your own old posts hurts or helps when Google decides how to rank this stuff.

First, if you want to celebrate something that actually helps salmon, there are at least two statues of beavers around town, probably more than that. One is up on NE Alberta St., and one further south on the Greenway Trail at the Heron Pointe condos. The latter has been there since the 1980s and seems to be a beloved part of the neighborhood as people are always giving it fresh flowers to hold, or making costumes for it. Cradle does not seem to have inspired the same level of devotion, or at least it hasn't yet. About which, it's an established scientific fact that human beings seem to be inherently biased in favor of "charismatic megafauna" versus, say, tree roots.

There actually is a way to make woody debris more charismatic, though, and I'm going to tell you how, though I can't promise this will be enough to save the baby salmon or the world in general. When I was a small child in the late 70s, my mom had this business idea that 1.) putting googly eyes on driftwood was a legitimate Pacific Northwest handicraft, and 2.) people will pay good money for driftwood critters with googly eyes. See, the art is in picking out the wood that has inherent potential, and then putting the googly eyes right where they have to be. Stop there and change nothing else, and viewers' brains will do the rest of the work and turn that into a cute face. (Compare the story about the pope asking Michelangelo how he created his David statue. Michelangelo replied that it was simple: You just take your chisel and chip away everything that isn't David.) After a couple of family trips to the beach, a few things became clear. First, it turns out most driftwood has little or no inherent potential for cuteness, and kids are no help at all in picking out the few choice bits of wood that do. So that part is a lot time consuming than you might think. Second, you would have to find and sell a great deal of googly-eyed driftwood critters just to break even on trips to the coast, given the high gas prices and low mileage of the late 70s. And third, taking driftwood from the beach for commercial purposes was and is a bit of a legal grey area at best. So that's why mom's business idea didn't pencil out back then, and all of this is a very roundabout way of saying the Cradle tree roots would almost certainly benefit from having googly eyes. But please note that it's only Art if an actual artist with an MFA comes by and adds them. If anyone else does it's just vandalism and Legal says I have to tell you not to do that. Even you, mom, if you're reading this.

A second comparison is with Ancestor Tree in North Portland's McCoy Park, which I talked about a bit here. It was another giant tree root, pulled up and positioned above ground and displayed as art. And I say "was" because the wood wasn't preserved very well, and the art only lasted around 7 years before decay made the giant root a safety hazard and it had to be torn out. I don't know if Cradle is at the same risk of decay over time, but at least it doesn't have to support its own weight while towering over the park's soft, puny visitors, so there's that at least.

Our third comparison is with Simpson's 1991 Host Analog outside the Oregon Convention Center. Host Analog went in around the peak of the state's spotted owl wars, and it looks superficially similar to Cradle: A fallen old growth tree transported to the big city, with a support structure holding it in place, and in this case an irrigation system to try to simulate moist old growth forest conditions in an urban environment full of conventiongoers. But the concept behind it is different: The fallen tree is set up to be a nurse log for future tree(s), and the art is the very slow process of decay and regrowth over many decades as they roll by, and -- believe it or not -- it has nothing to do with migrating salmon at all. But that was then; it's the 21st Century now, and the Owl Problem fell out of the headlines years ago thanks to a muddle of federal consent degrees and a few studies saying the owls are doomed no matter what we do because of invasive rival owls. So, long story short, nobody wants owl art anymore. Instead, contemporary public art buyers simply cannot get enough awareness-raising salmon art, regardless of how much of it they already have, and I'm trying to avoid heavyhanded historical analogies with stuff like Confederate memorials, or statues of Lenin, or idealized Bible-thumpin' pioneers, or of assorted local royalty, since that's really, really not where I wanted to go with this.

Although now that you mention it, if you look at a male sockeye salmon in its migration/spawning body form, and compare that with one of the more desperately inbred Habsburgs, say, Charles II of Spain, you have to admit the resemblance is uncanny: The nose, the jawline, the hump, the difficulty in reproducing, everything. They could almost be cousin-uncle-siblings. So I dunno, man. I dunno.

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Footnotes

1. That last fish ladder link ("ladders") goes to an Art Deco fish ladder from the 1930s located in... Oklahoma, on a creek that eventually flows into the Gulf of Mexico via the Red and Atchafalaya Rivers. None of which are home to naturally-occurring salmon, nor has the creek ever been stocked with them, and this all happened close to half a century before the word "performative" came into use for this sort of thing. On the other hand it looks kind of cool, and building it created some good honest construction jobs for a while, and the engineers involved apparently meant well by it, so there's that. And semi-relatedly, the one link in this paragraph ("Atchafalaya") goes to a 1987 John McPhee essay about the Mississippi River and engineers' ongoing attempts to control it, which are almost certainly doomed in the long run. It doesn't have much to do with the art here, honestly, or salmon for that matter, but the writing is much better than anything you're likely to encounter here on this humble blog. So go read that instead if you're sick of me babbling on about about art and waterfalls and so forth.

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2. Speaking of stream restoration, I took a look at the Utilities corner of PortlandMaps -- which lets you explore the many pipes and wires that lurk beneath city streets -- and from what I can tell the closest natural stream to here is a creek that starts up in the West Hills and comes down from the West Hills south of the VA Hospital. The city sewer/stormwater map starts tracking it here where it flows under the VA hospital service road in a culvert. The creek flows naturally on the surface for a couple of hundred feet, then enters a pipe just uphill of Terwilliger and remains underground after that, trending vaguely northeast in pipes that don't align with the street grid -- which usually means it's an old pipe that followed the original course of the creek. In fact the pipe segment that the last link goes to is dated 1892 and was built with bricks. That diagonal pattern ends at the redeveloped South Waterfront district, where a lot of basic infrastructure was rebuilt in the early 2000s before the condo towers came, so it's hard to tell exactly where the creek used to enter the Willamette River, but it was either right at Curry St., or a block north at Whitaker St., or a bit further than that, somewhere in the Zidell shipyard area. But that doesn't happen anymore; instead it flows into the city's Big Pipe system, as a blend of the original creek plus storm runoff and local sewage, and flows north along Waterfront Park, then into a tunnel under the river, then it gets pumped uphill to cross the North Portland peninsula to the Columbia Wastewater Plant, and after treatment ends up in the Columbia Slough. All of this is to say that if the city (and/or developers) had been serious about doing some actual stream restoration work around here, they missed a golden opportunity to daylight an urban waterway back in the early 2000s. But I haven't seen any indication the city even considered it at the time, and are content to just do symbolic measures instead.