cyclotram

Tuesday, November 05, 2024

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.

Saturday, November 02, 2024

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.

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.

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.

Tuesday, October 29, 2024

Portland Music Mural

Here are a few photos of the new-ish Portland Music Mural, next to the MAX turnaround on 11th in downtown Portland (and near the RBG mural we looked at recently). Painted by the Pander Brothers, and featuring prominent local musicians past and present, and backed by various movers and shakers in local music, the mural got quite a media blitz when it was created in 2023. Here's an Oregonlive story, one at Willamette Week and one at the Portland Tribune, a KATU story, and probably others I missed in a quick search. Which, ok, that may not seem like much of a media blitz, but it's more than new murals usually get around here.

The worst thing about it has nothing to do with the mural itself. It got a generally positive reception here, so its backers concluded the next logical step would be to rapidly take the concept nationwide, to finally celebrate local music in places like Austin, Nashville, New Orleans, Seattle (ugh), and even Boise, where the local music scene is just cave people hitting rocks with sticks and grunting on the 1 and 3. I dunno, it just reminds me too much of what happens whenever a beloved local business sells out to private equity: First there's an aggressive nationwide expansion, and then the whole thing craters a couple of years later, and after that -- instead of losing their shirts over this -- the private equity dudes just use the loss to cancel out profits elsewhere and end up owing precisely zero dollars and zero cents in taxes again, year after year. I'm not suggesting there are big piles of cash changing hands behind the scenes here; just that taking things nationwide ASAP usually doesn't work out as planned, and it makes me sad to see dumb ideas from Wall Street popping up in the arts.

The best thing about the mural is that the website includes a key to who's on the mural, which you should probably commit to memory in case someone challenges you to Portland's traditional bloodsport, a "You Probably Haven't Heard Of Them" duel. Be aware that merely identifying semi-obscure musicians is not enough to win the duel most of the time, so come prepared with bonus facts and opinions: Be ready to name all of their albums, ordered correctly best-to-worst, and identify which of these albums you own on vinyl. Then explain when and how that artist sold out to The Man (because everyone does eventually) and discuss why their early work up until that point was better. Score even more points for each artist on the mural who is totally overrated and doesn't belong there, and for ranting about exactly who should be up there instead, double points if your opponent hasn't heard of them. Whoever loses the duel has to skip town on the next Greyhound to Boise, while the winner gets to stay, for now. But the price of victory is eternal vigilance; new bands you probably haven't heard of are constantly forming in garages all over town, even while you're asleep, and some might escape detection for a while by not putting out a vinyl EP right away. And inevitably, one of these days, a younger, hipper challenger will say a name that doesn't ring a bell, and it'll turn out to be a 15 year old beatboxer from Hillsboro who also raps in Tamil and has over 10 million TikTok followers, and she's never even touched a music CD or a vinyl record, and has no idea why somebody would want to make one in 2024. Therefore, send not to know for whom the Boise bus rolls; it rolls for thee.

Saturday, October 26, 2024

Flying Together (MHCC)

Next up we're looking at another sculpture on the Mt. Hood Community College campus, this time Flying Together by Oregon sculptor Tom Hardy. If this looks vaguely familiar and you don't spend a lot of time at MHCC, you might be thinking of Hardy's other Flying Together, which is similar but not identical to this one. The other one is located outside the Oregon Historical Society, on the South Park Blocks in downtown Portland, and before anyone asks, the downtown one is still there, these are definitely separate sculptures, not a single one that moved to MHCC from downtown like "TriMet" in the previous post. Meanwhile if you're only familiar with the MHCC one but you like Hardy's style, clicking his name above will take you to more posts about other public art he's done around the region.

"TriMet" (MHCC)

I recently had a wander around the Mt. Hood Community College campus in east Gresham, which I hadn't visited before, and ran across this familiar sculpture in its new home. This is Robert Maki's TriMet (1977), which is named for the local transit agency because it used to be located on the bus mall in downtown Portland. From 1977 til the start of Green Line MAX construction, it was the centerpiece of the so-called Bathtub Fountain, which was removed for the new rail line. After that line opened, the sculpture was briefly located outside one of the Standard Insurance buildings downtown, still on the bus mall but now without a fountain, which is when I took photos for a previous post about it. Apparently it wasn't suitable for that location, for reasons still unknown to me, and left town for suburbia while that post sat in Drafts. I didn't know where it went until a commenter pointed out it was at MHCC now. That's a bit of a drive for me so I didn't rush out immediately to go find it, but I eventually realized there was other art on campus to look at, and a Metro natural area next door to visit, so I wandered around taking photos for an afternoon. Which was nice, except for being followed around by an overzealous security guy in his tactical golf cart. Maybe he saw me taking photos of the art and figured I was some kind of gentleman art thief, scoping the campus for an elaborate heist, like something out of a 1960s David Niven film. I mean, it's much more likely that he was just bored and on a power trip, randomly picking out people to hassle, and has probably never seen or heard of 1960s heist films, but I like the art heist explanation better and am going to go with that.

Saturday, October 12, 2024

Nesika Falls

Next up we're having a look at Nesika Falls, another very tall but little-known Columbia Gorge waterfall right in the middle of the main tourist corridor, a just a little over a mile east of Multnomah Falls and even closer than that to the Oneonta trailhead. If you're heading east on the old Columbia River Highway, you might notice a small parking lot with some sheer cliffs and mossy boulders behind it, and absolutely no signage of any kind to tell you why there's a parking lot here. Its most common use seems to be as a turn-around spot for tourists trying to score one of those $20 VIP parking spaces at Multnomah Falls Lodge, which may involve a slow crawl thru the tiny lodge parking lot followed by flooring it down the road (or continuing a slow crawl down the road, depending on traffic) to the closest turnaround (i.e. here) and back (i.e. here), and coming back for yet another slow crawl thru the completely full lot. A useful rule of thumb here is that if you find yourself using any driving techniques you learned during holiday shopping, you should accept that you are not currently having fun, will not begin having fun anytime soon, even if a parking spot opens up, and should probably rethink your plans for the day.

The second most common use of this lot is as unofficial (but free) overflow parking for Multnomah Falls. People who park here to use this spot as Multnomah Falls overflow parking tend to just trudge along the road, ignoring all the "No Pedestrian Access" signs along the way, including the ones on the narrow East Viaduct, and trying to duck in time every time an RV with extra-wide side mirrors rolls through. I tried that route once way back in the early 90s (as described here) and absolutely do not recommend it. What you want to do instead is look for trails heading up into the forest, and take the westbound one. There are no signs to tell you this, but this spot is an access point for Gorge Trail No. 400, the still-incomplete trail that might connect Troutdale to Hood River someday. The eastbound trail is easier to find, right at the east end of the parking lot, but it's not the trail you want right now. To find the westbound trail, cross the little road bridge or culvert immediately west of the lot, and look for a trail a few steps beyond there. When you cross the bridge, look down at the little creek it crosses. This is the same stream that forms the falls we're here to look at, so if it's just a trickle or it's dry entirely there's nothing to do but come back another day in a wetter season.

Assuming the creek's flowing, follow the trail uphill a short distance, maybe 50'-100', look uphill, and try to work out the route of that little creek as it comes downhill. If the creek's flowing but you don't see the falls, try going a bit further, or go back a bit, and look for gaps in the trees and underbrush, and keep trying until you see something resembling the photoset above.

Once you see it, look back toward the parking lot and note the large rock formation that completely blocks the view of the falls from the highway. If that wasn't there the waterfall would probably be a bit less obscure than it currently is.

After you've seen the falls from a distance and taken a few photos, continuing westbound on the 400 will take you to Multnomah Falls, specifically to the first switchback past the bridge. So you can either continue uphill to the top and skip most of the crowds, or you can head downhill, elbow your way thru the crowds, and hit the snack bar for a plate of genuine Multnomah Falls nachos, or whatever. Before choosing your adventure, look behind you at the junction. A vintage plaque, low to the ground, announces this is the "Ak-Wanee Trail", though nobody really uses that name anymore. This trail officially opened in 1978, and the name honors a young Yakima tribal member who worked on trail construction here and died in a car accident shortly before the trail opened to the public.

The trail figured in several Roberta Lowe newspaper columns over the next few years, primarily in the Oregon Journal:

A 1979 Journal column explaining exactly how to find the unofficial and very, very steep Elevator Shaft trail.
A 1980 Journal column explaining that the new trail had not been properly manicured yet, and was still a bit rough.
1984 Oregonian column (after the Journal went under), on hiking the 400 from Multnomah Falls through to the obscure Exit 35 Trailhead east of Ainsworth State Park. (That point marked the end of the trail until the short-lived Warrendale-Dodson segment opened a few years later, and it became the end of the trail again in 1996 after a big chunk of trail was erased by massive landslides a bit east of that trailhead.) The column mentions a dead-end bit of abandoned trail uphill from the present-day trail, built as an abortive attempt to route the trail closer to Nesika and Waespe Falls (another seasonal waterfall we'll visit as soon as I finish that post). They would certainly be less obscure if that had worked out, but we're told that the necessary blasting could have posed a hazard to cars and trains below so they dumped that idea.

The abortive spur trail seems to still exist, according to the state LIDAR map, with the trail junction located right about here. Though so far I have completely failed to find this trail at ground level. That's one limitation of LIDAR maps, especially in this part of the world: You can make out exactly what the ground is shaped like, but when you go to visit in person that ground may be under an impassable layer of brush, fallen limbs, poison oak, devils club, rusty nails, broken glass, old barbed wire, etc., and there's really no way to be sure until you get there. Another limitation is that LIDAR really just tells you that a potential creekbed intersects a cliff at a given spot and obviously can't tell you if there's any water in the creekbed.
Also nearby, unofficially, or maybe closer to Waespe Falls next door, is the lower end of the Fire Escape trail, which is marked at the upper end by an ominous sign that reads "Fire Trail - Emergency Only". Peope often confuse it with the very similar Elevator Shaft trail which is a mile or so to the west, closer to Multnomah Falls. Even the OregonHikers Field Guide page about the Elevator Shaft manages to confuse the two. The key thing to know is the Elevator Shaft is supposed to be uphill only, while the Fire Escape is said to be down only, and for the life of me I have no idea why. I suppose it reduces the odds of people having to pass each other on these precarious routes, if nothing else. I have never done either one, but my understanding is that the main difference between the two is that the Elevator Shaft has an actual trail carved into it, with over 100 tight switchbacks, and you can see it on LIDAR and even Google Maps' satellite view, while the Fire Escape is just a talus slope that's known to be descendable in a pinch.

One unsolved mystery I have: If the bridge and maybe the parking lot date back to around 1916, and the trail only arrived in 1978, what was here before that? Was it really just a turnaround spot for heading back to Multnomah Falls all that time? I have no idea.

The name is fairly recent; it's just named after the Trails Club lodge near the creek, way up above the falls. It sort of fits with the existing pattern of real or invented Indian names bestowed on various places by non-Indians, mostly in the early 20th century. Which is not really ideal, but the lodge is about the only named landmark anywhere nearby, so I guess it'll do in a pinch. The other idea that's been proposed is some variation on "Farula Falls" or "Caddisfly Falls", as it's one of a handful of Gorge waterfalls that are home to Farula constricta^[1], one of several rare caddisfly and stonefly species endemic to the Gorge. It's not a terrible name, but the thought of using it makes me sort of anxious, like I can't shake the idea that it'll attract the wrong kind of attention, from the sort of people who would happily wipe out the last survivors of an endangered species just to own the libs.

To summarize uses of either name across the interwebs: We've got two old OregonHikers forum threads in January and May 2011, followed by a 2013 thread about a then-new trails layer in Google Earth. IIRC one of those threads mentions what might be the abandoned spur trail, referring to it as a "convenient game trail". The name also appears on someone's WentHiking page and another photo linked from there. And that's about it, really.

If I'm not mistaken, under the right weather conditions this area becomes a celebrated ice climbing spot known as "New World Amphitheater", as discussed in two threads at Cascade Climbers, and featured in the Gorge ice climbing chapter of Northwest Oregon Rock. Translating their maps and names into non-climber, I thiiiink Nesika Falls freezes into "Black Dagger", while "Brave New World" is either a different route up the falls or it goes up one of several ephemeral streams immediately to the east, I'm not totally sure which. And "Blackjack" corresponds to a creek west of Nesika but I'm not 100% sure which one. I don't think I've seen any of these theoretically rather tall waterfalls actually flowing, so this is kind of a moot point, and it's why I generally don't bother with ephemeral waterfalls in this project: The only reliable way to see them would involve visiting while a major storm is in progress, which in turn means spending lots of time getting drenched and being cold and wet and miserable, which I can't recommend.

As I understand it, to be a great Gorge ice climbing spot, a place needs a couple of things: A fairly low-flow waterfall (ones that dry up in the summer are great for this) so it'll freeze all the way and not be a firehose in the face of anyone climbing it, and it should be one that runs down the face of a cliff instead of projecting outward like a lot of the major ones do, so it'll freeze on the cliff and not just make a big ice stalagmite at the base. This is not the case everywhere, btw; Helmcken Falls in British Columbia is supposed to be the world's ultimate ice climbing spot, and it's on a major river and forms a giant ice cone over the winter. But around here, if those conditions are met, then it's the taller the better. Speaking of which, I haven't seen any numbers on exactly how tall Nesika Falls is, so let's have a look at the state LIDAR map and see if we can work that out ourselves. I usually do this by trying to pick points above and below that clearly aren't part of the falls but as close to it as I can get, and subtract the altitude of one from the other. This tends to give numbers on the high side of the range but hopefully not by much.

First off -- starting at the old highway and proceeding uphill -- LIDAR says there's a small lower falls below the main one, maybe 15'-20' tall and hidden sort of behind the big rock formation here. (top; bottom). I haven't actually seen this one; it must be hidden in the dense brush back there, and you may need a machete to get a better look at it.

Then we have the main falls, which I think is what's shown in all of my photos. Given a top point at ~815', and a bottom one at 395', that gives us a 420' main waterfall. Seriously.

Then we have a number of smaller upper falls that are set back a bit from the main one and I suspect aren't visible from below. These miiight be visitable from above with a bit of bushwhacking, but I haven't tried this myself and this is not a legally binding warranty. Also, most of these drops are fairly short, and short drops on a small creek may not be very impressive in person, and your photos of them may not necessarily bring fame and fortune, just so we're clear on that. With those disclaimers out of the way, here's what LIDAR says is up there:

Upper falls #1 (100') (top, bottom)
Upper falls #2 (~30') (top, bottom)
Upper falls #3 (~20') (top, bottom)
Cascades(~50') (top, bottom)
Upper falls #4 (~25') (top, bottom)
Upper falls #5 (~20'?) top, bottom
And another 20' one on a small tributary east of the main creek (top, bottom)

Just west of there, the one on the next sorta-obvious stream to the west (top, bottom) might be the "Blackjack" of the ice climbing world. It seems to drop a whopping ~550', which would be pretty impressive if there was any water at all going over it most of the year. But then, the lack of water means it erodes slower and stays taller longer, so whatever.

Before we wrap this up, let me point out a few other points of interest nearby, two of which are completely gone now, and another that never made it past the proposal stage but is kind of interesting anyway:

One of these points of interest was right by the parking lot until quite recently. The creek passes under the highway on an original 1914 bridge, or maybe it's just a culvert, and either way it's pretty small and boring. Around 1979, a local Eagle Scout decided this just wouldn't do and did some amateur masonry here as his Eagle Scout community service project, adding an ornamental bridge railing to the existing bridge. Thus reminding people why we don't usually task Eagle Scouts with civil engineering projects. Recreating the HCRH calls it the "Eagle Scout Bridge", and has a photo or two of it in its post-1979 state. There's even a photo of it in the Library of Congress archives. The National Register of Historic Places nomination for the highway labeled it a "non-contributing structure" and had a few brief and opinionated words to say about it:

Historically, there has been a structure at this crossing of an unnamed creek since the CRH's construction. The present masonry parapet walls on this small span date from the early 1980s, and represent an unsuccessful attempt to "restore" this bridge in the highway's style.

I started calling it the Monkey Jesus Bridge: In both cases a well-meaning member of the public decides to improve a thing that doesn't need improving, and... doesn't. It's said that for many years afterward, if you hung around nearby at dusk on the right evening, sometimes the ghosts of ancient Roman engineers would appear and poke at it with sticks and make cutting remarks in Latin about the crooked arches and the barbarian tribes that must have built them. It helps to remember that these guys have been guzzling wine from the same ghostly lead flagons for the last 2000 years and have become a bit irritable over the years. But that's all a moot point, because it's gone now. At one point during the pandemic there was an extended closure of the highway due to a combination of winter landslides and trying to clean them up in a full social distancing environment, and ODOT took advantage of that long closure to quietly make the 70s bridge railing vanish without a trace. There was no public outcry; in fact almost nobody noticed it was gone. And the esteemed Romans have switched to haunting the McMansions of Mt. Scott. Imagine something like Poltergeist, but the ghosts are just unreasonably angry about classical orders and the Golden Ratio, and barbarian tribes who don't even know how to build a villa properly.
There was also an Oneonta train station or platform somewhere right around here in the early 20th century. A 1927 Metsker map has an all-caps "ONEONTA" label right around the turnout location, while the inset bit of map shows the locations of the "McGowan's Cannery", "Columbia Beach", and "Warren's Cannery" train stops, all in the Warrendale-Dodson area east of here. I haven't come across any historic photos of any of these stations, and most likely they were cheap and rustic, just enough platform so people could get on and off the train with a little dignity. The original road survey map for this stretch of the HCRH, aka County Road 754, covers the Multnomah Falls thru Oneonta Gorge area on page 2 of the PDF, and it definitely shows a train station named "Oneonta" that's separate from and some distance west of the "Oneonta Falls" label. It seems awfully strange to me that any train stop would be anywhere except right in front of Oneonta Gorge, or as close to there as is practical. There was never a town here, or farmland, or or any other reason to come here besides the famous wade-to-the-waterfall spot. Even the Oneonta Trail (which accesses the additional falls upstream of the gorge) wasn't built until the 1930s. Also note that although the tracks seem to be right next to the highway here, and it kind of looks like you could drop someone off or pick them up for their train commute into the big city, the space in beween the two is a roughly 100' cliff, and the highway engineers of 1916 neglected to put in a grand staircase to connect them.
The mystery not-a-trailhead also appears to be the exact spot where the Columbia River Highway would have intersected the never-built eastern half of County Road 625 (map pdf; ordinance pdf), since it was supposed to intersect the highway near the old train platform. This proposed road dates back to the 1890s, and the unbuilt part was a truly absurd idea. The western, built segment of road ran roughly parallel to -- and uphill of -- the Palmer Mill Road that Gorge fans may be more familiar with, which is actually a former railroad grade. The parallel country road might still exist as part of the maze of unmarked trails, tracks, and goat paths up in the Palmer Mill - Angels Rest area. The built segment ended around the location of the long-gone Palmer sawmill and its vanished mill town, and it won't surprise anyone to learn that the Bridal Veil Lumber company was the primary force behind the proposal.

From the Palmer area, the unbuilt segment would have made its way sort of northeast, descending into Multnomah Basin, albeit by a somewhat different route than the Multnomah Basin Road that was eventually built. Which brings us to the absurd part: From there, starting just east of the top of Multnomah Falls, the road would have dropped toward river level, or at least railroad level, by a series of tight, precipitous switchbacks immediately east of the unofficial Elevator Shaft trail. If you're ever tried that trail or even looked at it up close, it is very difficult to imagine how a usable road could ever be built there or anywhere nearby, especially back in the horse-and-wagon days. That segment ended right around the trailhead here, and then continued east along more or less the present-day route of the old highway as far as Elowah Falls, then home to another sawmill. The Bridal Veil timber company was behind the proposal, and some suspected that the plan wasn't to actually build the road as proposed, but to establish a public right of way across the land of nearby landowners, with the goal of eventually putting an enormous log flume through there. Some neighboring landowners were surprised to find their signatures had been forged on the petition, when they didn't actually support the proposal. One filed an objection noting that the road would be useless to him, as it was too steep for horses to climb while pulling an empty wagon.

So what next? What's the future of this place? The key thing to know is that the land is a piece of Benson State Park (like the lake next to Multnomah Falls) and is not owned by the Forest Service, and the state will probably never have the money to do anything with this place; they may not even know they own it. The lot was recently added to Google Maps as "Parking to hike to Multnomah Falls", and as that idea takes hold it'll start filling up before sunrise like every other place marked as Multnomah Falls parking. If you put up an official sign and drew attention to the place, either as Multnomah Falls economy parking or for the falls here, you would immediately have a parking nightmare on your hands, and I'm not sure where additional parking could possibly go; the other side of the road is a cliff, but (looking at street view from I-84 not quite a sheer cliff, so maybe a few parking spots could go there with a bit of creative cantilevering. And then revive the bit of spur trail so people have somewhere nearby to go instead of it just providing a longer way to either Multnomah Falls or the Oneonta area. And figure out how your signage should break it to midsummer tourists that the falls might have gone dry for the year and they really should have visited back in March while they were still semi-awesome. It would almost certainly accrue a bunch of one-star Yelp and Google reviews from the sort of tourist who doesn't get the whole "nature" thing, and thinks there's a hidden control room somewhere behind the scenes where a bored bureaucrat controls all the valves to turn the waterfalls off and on, while people at the other control panels handle the weather and the animatronic wildlife.

Footnote(s) 1. Insect stuff

More specifically, the species is known from one male and one female specimen, both collected here in April 1989, along with several collected at Mist Falls around the same time. All of them are now part of the 10 million specimen Entomology Collection at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. The 1992 paper describing F. constricta is here:

Wiggins GB, Wisseman RW. NEW NORTH AMERICAN SPECIES IN THE GENERA NEOTHREMMA AND FARULA, WITH HYPOTHESES ON PHYLOGENY AND BIOGEOGRAPHY (TRICHOPTERA: UENOIDAE). The Canadian Entomologist. 1992;124(6):1063-1074. doi:10.4039/Ent1241063-6

The paper is unfortunately paywalled and I'm not sure I want to shell out $36 just to read it, JSTOR doesn't carry the journal, and unfortunately Sci-Hub has an incomplete copy of that issue, ending before it gets around to the paper in question. So that appears to be a dead end, but that's modern science for ya. Here's the abstract for it, at least:

Three new species are described in the caddisfly family Uenoidae: Neothremma prolata, from Hood River County, Oregon; Neothremma mucronata from Lassen County, California; and Farula constricta from Multnomah County, Oregon. Following examination of the holotypes of several species, misinterpretation of the male genitalia morphology of Farula wigginsi Denning is corrected, leading to the recognition of that name as a junior synonym of F. petersoni Denning. Interpretation of male genitalic morphology in the original description of F. geyseri Denning is revised. Phylogenetic relationships are inferred from male genitalic morphology for the species of Neothremma and Farula. Biogeographic patterns of the species in both genera are highly congruent with the phylogenies.

Let me just point out that coauthor Wiggins had the rare privilege of debunking Farula wigginsi, a proposed new species that someone else had named in his honor.

Tanner Creek Bridge

Next up we're looking at the Tanner Creek Bridge an old Columbia River Highway bridge that I somehow skipped over back when I was doing posts about a lot of the others. ODOT's 2013 guide to historic highway bridges has an entry for it, with a brief description:

Bypassed and no longer in use, the Tanner Creek Bridge is a reinforced concrete deck girder, 60 feet in length. The bridge is located near the Interstate 84 entrance to the Bonneville Dam and is now owned by the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission. Completed in 1915, the bridge was constructed by the State Highway Department. Charles H. Purcell was the state bridge engineer, and Samuel Lancaster was the engineer for the Columbia River Highway.

Honestly this is not one of the major scenic or engineering highlights of the old highway. As a general rule of thumb, just because I went out of my way to go see something doesn't mean it's worth seeing. Especially when it costs $5 to park at Wahclella Falls, which has the nearest parking spaces to the bridge. (Although it looks like a lot of visitors park on the road just outside the lot to avoid paying.) This bridge wasn't considered a "contributing structure" when the old highway was added to the National Register of Historic Places, per the nomination paperwork. Which is unlike its closest neighbors, the arch bridges at Moffett Creek to the west and Eagle Creek to the east. I just realized I've never actually done the stretch between Tanner Creek and Moffett Creek on either the HCRH Trail or Trail 400 (the long but incomplete trail that was -- and maybe still is -- supposed to connect Troutdale to Hood River someday), and making a short loop out of the two looks pretty straightforward. I may have to try that at some point. And possibly try to find the first waterfall up Moffett Creek while I'm in the neighborhood, since that seems to be the most interesting sight along the way. It looks like you get a good look at the Tanner Creek railroad viaduct from the HCRH Trail, if you're into bridge stuff, which I gather most people aren't. Plus there's the unofficial Munra Point Trail, which I've never done, but I keep hearing it's sketchy with lots of exposure, and it's also usually packed with influencers doing dumb risky shit for TikTok or the 'Gram, and I'd really rather not watch anybody fall in person. Second only to not falling myself, of course.

As usual for HCRH bridges, there are pages about this bridge at Recreating the HCRH, Columbia River Images and BridgeHunter, though you might notice the last two are Wayback Machine links, as both sites have gone offline since the last time I did one of these posts (and Recreating the HCRH was down for a long while a few years ago). I'm saddened to report that both sites went down for very final reasons: The retired lady who ran Columbia River Images passed away in 2022, and the guy behind BridgeHunter died in a 2020 hiking accident.

Both sites were one-person operations with (I assume) occasional hosting and domain name bills that needed paying, and occasional admin tasks that needed administrating, and any of these things could be the thing that takes a website offline permanently. Not to make this about myself, and not to be morbid, but the humble blog you're currently reading is a one-person operation too, and the fate of two longtime resources I've relied on for years got me thinking about what will become of this place in the end. As a Blogspot site, I don't have regular hosting bills that need to be paid or else the site goes down. I do pay for Flickr, though, so photos will stop working whenever charging my card stops working, or I guess if Flickr goes away someday. And then there's Google's new policy on inactive accounts, where your stuff gets deleted if you haven't logged in for three years or so. I don't know whether that just means your bulging folder of never-to-be-read emails gets deleted, or blogs go away too, or what exactly. So this site could also go away due to a current or future inactive account policy, or Google could just decide Blogger as a whole is not profitable enough to keep around anymore (which is probably true already, quite honestly) and kill off the whole thing, and then this humble lil' blog will go the way of Google Reader, Google Groups, and Google+. Or, in theory, Google could go out of business entirely, or a giant meteor gets us, or yeah.

For reasons I don't recall now, I poked the Wayback Machine really early on and it's been taking occasional snapshots of this humble blog since sometime in 2006. So at least offsite backups are happening, archived by an idealistic nonprofit that aspires to keep and share every last bit of the interwebs forever. Which is cool as far as that goes, but the record industry is currently trying to sue them out of existence, and their password database was breached by Russian hackers a few days ago. And even if they survive the current BS, chances are the internet wouldn't survive a Big Rip, or a false vacuum decay event. So it's anybody's guess what "forever" really means in this context.

Thursday, October 03, 2024

La Lucha Sigue (RBG Mural, SW 11th & Yamhill)

Next up, here's a mural by artist Allison McClay, honoring the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. You might recall that she passed away shortly before the 2016 election, and the linked post is dated November 13th, 2020, shortly after the 2020 election, when ol' whatshisname was rummaging through his bag of dirty tricks looking for a way to overturn the election, and everyone wondered just how far he'd really go.

The mural is on the side of a building at SW 11th & Yamhill, next to the MAX turnaround. This half-block is home to a couple of other murals, including City United, Country United (2007), and a recent one honoring Portland music history that I haven't finished the post for yet. This post lingered around in drafts for a while too, but it seemed apropos to post it now: It's been four years since the mural went up, and ol' whatsisname is on the ballot again, and the polls are way too close, and I just deleted a whole paragraph wringing my hands about if and when elderly Supreme Court justices ought to retire, and I already know I'm not going to feel any better about all this after posting this, and I'm pretty sure New Zealand simply doesn't have room for all of us if the worst case scenario plays out. So anyway, 3...2...1... posting...

Instagram Cat Photos of 2012

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As promised, here's a post full of my old Instagram cat photos from way back in the distant year 2012 AD. Taz was just two years old then, but already had a lot of things figured out: Which human blankets are best to sleep on, why wand toys are the best toys, exactly when various sunbeams will appear and disappear around the house during the day and when to relocate to the next one, and many other critical life skills, as depicted here.

And since you asked: Wand toys are the best toys because they involve a person waving them around, and he could have quality time with his people, sometimes for hours on end, sometimes with those hours occurring at 2-5am, without resorting to being snuggly. His ideal level of snuggling was to sleep somewhere near you, positioned just right so he could brush the tip of his tail against your arm, almost like he was petting you back. And he'd do this while maintaining a loud, contented snore the entire time.