Barlow Monument, Government Camp

Next up we're visiting the little mountain town of Government Camp, OR, about 56 miles SE of Portland on US 26, and due south of Mount Hood. We aren't here to ski, or snowshoe, or attend any chic apres-ski disco parties (which as far as I know don't exist here anyway), or even sit around eating fondue and making fun of people trying to drive in the snow. We also aren't here for any extreme summer sports. We aren't even here for the hiking this time, though that's usually a good guess. No, this time it's something nerdy, unfashionable, and very small.

We're checking out a little landscaped triangle at the corner of E. Olive St., Little Trail, and Government Camp Loop (the main street through town, and the original route of US26 through here). We're looking at the one bit with a few rose bushes around a large boulder the size of a small boulder bearing a pair of old brass plaques. One is a monument to Samuel Kimbrough Barlow, namesake of the Barlow Road. The Barlow Road was the notorious local toll-road segment of the Oregon Trail, where you paid a premium to avoid drowning in the rapids at Cascade Locks, only for your rugged pioneer family to die of dysentery on their way through the mountains.

The second plaque honors his wife, Susannah Lee Barlow, a recognized Daughter of the American Revolution. The monument location was apparently at a point where the new Mt. Hood Highway (circa 1925) intersected Barlow's old road. And more importantly, it was a point where the new highway angled out of the Government Camp street grid and cut through some platted lots, and that left a 25 square foot scrap of land here, outside the highway right-of-way but far too small to do much of anything with except put up a historical marker.

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Origins

The monument was proposed in June 1921 and dedicated in July 1925, in conjunction with the official grand opening of the shiny new Mt. Hood Loop Highway. A followup item in August 1925 noted that the attendees included one F.A. Gaines, presently of Jackson, MS, who had last traveled the Barlow Road as a small child in 1845.

(Elderly pioneers retracing their steps was a popular activity around this time, most famously by Ezra Meeker, who arrived by oxcart in 1852 and then retraced his steps a few times to publicize various causes: By oxcart again in 1906, for historic preservation of the old Oregon Trail; by automobile in 1916, to promote good roads; and by airplane in 1925 because he just sort of wanted to.)

Ordinarily a boulder with a couple of brass history plaques on it would be a minor local curiosity, at best. Plaques on boulders do give off an air of permanence, but they're not a great way to teach history, and getting people to actually read your monumental boulder is a whole other issue. The reason we're talking about it today is that someone had the notion of donating the marker to the state and making it an exceptionally tiny state park. The state initially declined the gift in October 1925, on the grounds that 25 square feet was too small to beautify properly. But they eventually warmed up to the idea; state parks were a sort of side hobby of the state highway department back in those days, so adopting a monument to an early builder of roads (and largely-unsuccessful collector of tolls on said roads) was hard to resist, and so the place was duly surveyed and added to the system. A prime example of this historical retcon is a 1946 historical note that calls Barlow a "pioneer roadbuilder", adopting him as a forefather of the present-day state highway department.

Per the story related there, Barlow claimed he figured out where to put the road by looking for a dip on the horizon, a place where the hills weren't quite as tall. As if he was imitating fellow Kentuckian Daniel Boone finding the Cumberland Gap. Although Appalachian geology is completely different than ours, and a key part of the Cumberland Gap turned out to be a gigantic meteor crater, and we don't have one of those here, as far as anybody knows. Or at least we don't have one yet. What probably actually happened here is the same as what happened in thousands of other places: White guy stumbles across a path used by local tribes for thousands of years. Names it after himself and tells everyone he discovered it, and they agree to believe him, and history is written down accordingly.

On coming across this route, Barlow also saw dollar signs, and somehow enlisted much of his wagon train to help out with a few months of unplanned physical labor building a rudimentary road here, thiiis close to the end of their long journey, and we may never know exactly how voluntary this volunteer work actually was. The Barlows finally arrived in Oregon City on Christmas Day, which is very late in the year to be rolling through the snowy mountains in a covered wagon. The history note doesn't say this, but it sounds to me like they may have narrowly avoided a Donner Party scenario. Barlow quickly talked the Provisional Government into letting him set up a tollbooth. The historical note doesn't explore whether the other wagon train members saw a cent of the proceeds after all the trail work they did, and in any case the Barlow Road tolls were easily evaded by the simple measure of detouring your wagon around the spot where the toll gate was located.

Once the little park was established, it duly appeared on official state highway maps like any other state park would, like map number 5C-10-18 titled "Property Acquired for Right-of-Way in Townsite of Pompeii", dated November 1927, which shows it as a tiny flyspeck, but it does label it and tells you to consult map 1R-1-795 for a closer look. To be honest I'm mostly linking to those because old hand-drawn, hand-lettered ODOT maps just look cool. Also, regarding the "Pompeii" bit: That's what the town's founder wanted to call the place, but the name was unpopular and didn't stick. Maybe locals worried the fate of the original Pompeii might scare away potential homebuyers. Or maybe they were aware of the original Pompeii's pre-volcano reputation as an epicenter of Roman debauchery, even by the empire's usual standards, and figured that might attract the wrong element. Still, if you were thinking of moving to Government Camp and starting a pizza place or a gelato shop or maybe a retro-themed Southern Italian restaurant, but you're stuck on what to call the place, working "Pompeii" into the name seems appropriate.

A few period photos of the monument in its early days can be found online, like a 1920s photo of the new monument at the Hood River History Museum, and another via the Southern Oregon Historical Society in Medford. The local history museum in Government Camp is right across the street from the little monument so they may know something about it too, but their website doesn't mention it and you'd probably have to ask someone in person.

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World Champion!

The monument and its tiny park had been around for about a decade when it occurred to a few people that it really was exceedingly small and as such it might even be a record-holder of some sort. In April 1936, the Oregon Journal editorial page just wanted to point out that some unnamed statewide public figure out there was going around claiming that Salem's miniscule Waldo Park was the world's smallest park, at 10 feet by 15 feet, and the paper let it be known this was not actually true, and the Salem park was a whopping six times the size of the true champion up in Government Camp. (It's actually 9.6 times as big, per Marion County property records, which give an official size of 240 square feet). And if this whole "world's smallest park" business sounds awfully familiar -- even though you've never heard of the Barlow Monument before -- just hang on; we're getting to that.

As a side note, Waldo Park is home to a single giant sequoia tree that was planted back in 1872. Assuming the tree stays healthy and continues growing at an ordinary sequoia growth rate, and lives to equal the General Grant Tree in Kings Canyon National Park maybe 1500 years from now, it will have grown larger than the present-day park. But we'll let the worrywarts of the year 3535 AD or thereabouts figure out that one.

June 1936: The Journal reprinted a similar Bend Bulletin editorial, which pinned the inaccurate claim on former State Forester Lynn F. Cronemiller (boo! hiss!). The article asked readers if they knew of other contenders around the world, but I didn't see any follow-up articles naming any, so it's possible nobody else on earth saw this as a thing worth doing.

Brief mentions of the park appeared in May 1937 and June 1938 articles on some of the gems of the state park system. Actually now that I look at the two, the 1938 piece looks like a cut-down version of the previous year's story. The 25-square-foot factoid survived the chopping block, though, and appears in both.

A few events were held at, or rather near the monument 1940-41 as the centennial of the old road approached. For example, a June 1940 dedication of a plaque on a flagpole that had been installed here the year before, with a program of general patriotic remarks and music accompaniment. A photo of the event appeared a few days later on the Journal's photo page, featuring dignitaries from the Sons and Daughters of Oregon Pioneers and the local American Legion post. Directly below this are a couple of photos of the new Oregon Humane Society shelter on Columbia Boulevard, including a cat enclosure with what looks like a really nice climbing structure, even by today's standards. The other photo shows a row of individual enclosures for dogs, each with its own indoor and outdoor section, and mentions one adoptable dog named "Shorty" who was said to be a police dog - dachshund mix. But because 1940 was a dark and primitive time, long before the Internet, the paper did not think to show us a close-up photo of this peculiar-sounding creature.

In May 1941 there was a sort of memorial service and wreath laying at the Pioneer Woman's Grave monument further east along US 26. The writer of the small blurb seemingly got it confused with the monument in Government Camp, calling it the Barlow Monument and claiming she had been a member of the original Barlow party in 1845. I can't find any other sources claiming that, and it probably isn't true. An old USFS sign near the gravesite claimed she died in 1845, but a later DAR plaque at the site (seen in this WyEast Blog post) just gives a date range of "184?", and a later Forest Service sign (also shown in that post) hedges its bets even further and just says "18-?", and all we really know is that it dates to sometime before 1924 when the site was rediscovered by Mt. Hood Highway construction workers. But I digress.

There were undoubtedly additional Oregon Trail Centennial festivities being planned for the next few years, but then World War II came along and distracted everyone, and we don't hear about the Barlow Monument again until July 1950, when the Oregonian finally took notice of it for the first time. The usual 25-square-foot statistic appeared in a July 1950 tribute to Samuel H. Boardman, who had retired the previous week after 21 years as state park superintendent. This article was also the last time I saw it mentioned in print as the smallest state park, which might not be a complete coincidence; I've seen enough organizational politics to know what happens to a little pet project after their champion inside the org departs for whatever reason. And the state had already been deemphasizing it in recent years; it was left off of the 1950 official map of the park system, and not included in the 1946 state park guidebook, and somewhere around that time is when US 26 was rerouted to not run right through downtown Government Camp (such as it is) and straightened into its present-day not-quite-a-freeway form, which reduced the odds of visitors randomly stumbling across the tiny park on their way to somewhere else.

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A New Challenger Approaches

Going by all of that, it seem the Barlow Monument's star had already waned quite a bit by February 1954, when an Oregon Journal article covered the quote-unquote "official dedication" of Portland's now-famous Mill Ends Park, though the tongue-in-cheek article insisted the park had already been known by that name for "lo, these many years". Apparently there had been some sort of name contest anyway, and Mill Ends narrowly beat out "Portland Envoy Park", named after the variety of rose planted there. I can't seem to find any info on the net about that particular rose variety, and so Google's dumbass search AI insists it does not exist, and scoffs at you for even asking such a ridiculous question.

So yes, the same newspaper that dreamed up Mill Ends Park was previously involved in promoting the Barlow Monument as possibly the world's smallest, and that has got to be how they arrived at the idea.

From that point forward, Mill Ends Park featured regularly in Dick Fagan's regular column. A May 1955 column indignantly notes that some national magazine had once again proclaimed Waldo Park as the very smallest, and points out that it was a whopping 200 times the size of Mill Ends Park. The present-day Mill Ends Park comes to just 452 square inches, or about 3.14 square feet, so it's also roughly 1/8 the size of the previous maybe-champion up in Government Camp.

A 1955 ODOT map of Highway 26 thru the Government Camp area still shows the mini-taxlot but doesn't bother labeling it like earlier maps had done.

The old Barlow Monument got one more brief mention in an October 1965 tour route article, which just says "Just before entering town you’ll pass the BARLOW MONUMENT, which honors the founder of the trail your route now more or less follows." and doesn't say anything about it being a tiny state park.

So what happened? I think the public sort of lost any interest it ever had in seeking out boulders with brass plaques on them. Which, frankly, was never a great way to teach history, let's be honest here. And the "world's smallest" claim is less compelling if you have to include the "smallest *state* park" asterisks. So as far as I can tell, I think everyone just sort of forgot about the place and it slipped away like spare change falling under the sofa cushions.

For whatever it's worth, there's also a smallest unit of the National Park System: Thaddeus Kosciuszko National Memorial (0.02 acres / 871.2 square feet) is a historic house in Philadelphia where the Revolutionary War hero lived for a few months in 1797 after leading a failed uprising against the partition of his native Poland. The site was added to the National Park system in 1972, partly as a leadup to the 1976 Bicentennial and partly to troll the Soviets, who had once again swiped territory from Poland at the end of WWII.

Other interesting semi-random search results (all of them larger than either Mill Ends or the Barlow Monument) include Septuagesimo UNO, the smallest park in New York City; Park No. 474, the smallest in Chicago; and Prince's Park in Burntwood, Staffordshire, the smallest in the UK. Morton Park in Vancouver BC just might be the smallest park full of creepy laughing statues, and let me suggest that we not challenge them for that particular title.

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Today

The present-day park, or ex-park, has a couple of rose bushes around the monument itself, and it looks like someone comes by regularly to fuss over them, but so far I haven't figured out who's responsible for the place these days. A current Clackamas County survey map indicates it's not an official tax lot anymore (if it ever was one), so we can't go by ownership records. Ownership of the adjacent streets is mixed: ODOT still owns Government Camp Loop (the main drag thru Government Camp, and part of the old Mt. Hood Highway) as a "frontage road" for US 26, while side streets belong to the county since there's no such thing as a City of Government Camp. The county has tried to tempt the locals into at least becoming a "village" or a "hamlet", two different flavors of lightweight local sorta-government, but so far they haven't taken the bait for that either.

(Note that "Oregon Trail Hut" next door to the monument is not part of the park, and I don't know who (if anyone) takes care of it, either. It's also not old; it was built by high school students in 1992, which I maintain was not that long ago, at least not in geological terms.)

Anyway, just going by inertia we should probably assume the state still owns it. And I haven't seen any records saying the old state park was ever officially abolished; they just sort of stopped talking about the place after a while. And if it still existed on paper, somewhere in an old file cabinet, ORS 390.111 might apply. That's the 1989 law splitting the department off from ODOT. The law says the new department "has complete jurisdiction and authority over all state parks, waysides and scenic, historic or state recreation areas, recreational grounds or places acquired by the state for scenic, historic, natural, cultural or recreational purposes except as otherwise provided by law". (This transfer did not include things like highway rest areas and roadside historical markers, which are managed by yet another state agency, the Oregon Travel Information Council. Their map of historical markers doesn't include this so they don't seem to have claimed it.)

So, long story short, it's possible this little spot is still technically a state park, albeit one that nobody at any state agency is really aware of anymore. And if it is, it just might still be the very smallest state park. As one data point, here's someone's 2011 blog post I came across that tried to identify the smallest state park in each state, and all of the ones listed are quite a bit larger than 25 square feet.

Another complication to all this is that Mill Ends Park, like the Barlow Monument, is just part of road right-of-way, and Naito Parkway / Front Avenue is technically the route of OR 99W -- a state highway -- through downtown Portland, though it's only state maintained south of Market St., a few blocks south of Mill Ends, but that was not always the case, and I guess what I'm getting at here is that we're within spitting distance of being able to claim Mill Ends may have technically been a state park for a while, though the state may have been completely unaware of this fact, or near-fact, or whatever.

And for the pedants out there who insist it can't be a park unless it includes at least one taxlot (you know who you are) -- which Mill Ends doesn't, and the Barlow Monument may have done once but doesn't now -- the smallest one might be the Vernon Ross Veterans Memorial, located on NE Sandy in Portland's Hollywood District, and the traditional centerpiece of Portland Veterans Day commemorations. At 48 square feet it's almost twice the size of the Barlow Monument, but five of them would fit inside Waldo Park. The flagpole is nowhere near as tall as the tree in Waldo Park, so a "max width to max height ratio" category might be a closer contest, though at that point we're just inventing goofy categories so Salem can finally win at something for once.

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OK, Now What?

So it's possible we had a series of local champions, each smaller than the previous one: Waldo Park, then the Barlow Monument, and then Mill Ends (452 in^2), and in 2022 the city of Talent, OR unveiled a park 78 square inches smaller (374 in^2), and a town in Japan unveiled a slightly smaller one (372 in^2) at the end of 2024.

An arms race of incrementally shrinking smallest parks sounds really tedious, and ultimately the way to get the crown back for good will involve enlisting Intel to fabricate the tiniest sub-microscopic circle they can manage with their swanky new deep ultraviolet lithography machines; mount it somewhere outside in something theft-proof, maybe by attaching it to a large boulder, and proclaim that as the new smallest park.

Even that might not be enough, though; back in 1989, material scientists at IBM managed to create a company logo with 35 individual xenon atoms. A square of four xenon atoms would be smaller than that, though I bet a molecule with bonds between the atoms would be a lot smaller than that. And for that matter you could take a single atom and say that just the nucleus is your city park, and use hydrogen instead of xenon for the smallest nucleus so that your park is just a single proton. And that might be the end of the line, since I remember reading that all protons are believed to be the exactly same size, and you can't exactly pull individual quarks out of your proton and do anything with them, because quantum chromodynamics, and even if you could, they're probably all the same exact size too. And if it's all ultimately going to end in a tie anyway, we might as well shrink Mill Ends (and the one down in Talent) to match the one in Japan, but not go any smaller than that, and call it a three-way tie and stop there.

Hood River Loops

Next up we're taking a look at the Hood River Loops, a fun section of the old Columbia River Highway on the eastern edge of Hood River, beginning at the intersection with OR 35. Like the Crown Point Loops^[1] (which we visited in the HCRH Milepost 25 post a while back), this is a spot where the old highway climbed a hill by way of multiple switchbacks, in order to limit the slope to something the average car of 1916 could handle.

To give you some idea what that means, the best-selling car that year -- and for most years between 1908 and 1927 -- was the Ford Model T, which came with a 4 cylinder engine producing 20 horsepower and had a top speed of around 42 mph. For context, 20 horsepower is about the same as a present-day riding lawnmower (which is much lighter than a Model T), or about four professional-grade leafblowers. The fastest and most powerful car on the US market in 1916 seems to have been the Packard Twin Six, which had a 464 cubic inch V12(!) engine, but even that only put out a measly 88 horsepower, although that was partly due to the crappy low octane gas of the era.

As with the other multi-switchback sections on the highway, it quickly became apparent that allowing any sort of development at this spot would be a bad idea, potentially turning these ordinary hairpin corners into blind hairpin corners, maybe with a few zero-visibility driveways here and there to make it extra spicy. To prevent this, and probably to preserve views from the top, the state bought the land around the loops in June 1922 and declared the place to be a new state park^[2]. You can see this on vintage Highway Commission survey maps from around that time, which I have to link to just because they look cool: The one for the park itself (drawing no. 1R-1-695) is titled "Hood River Loops acquired to protect slopes". Map 3B-15-8 zooms out and covers the whole stretch of the old pre-Interstate-84 route between Hood River and Mosier, and map 1R-1-1167 covers more of the Highway 35 part of the intersection.

The obscure little park got a brief mention in State Parks of the Columbia Gorge (1946, p.45-46), a Highway Commission publication about the various and sundry state-owned or managed places between Troutdale and The Dalles. It travels up the Gorge, west to east, and for each state park there's a description by W.A. Langille, state park historian, followed by recommendations by Samuel H. Boardman, longtime state park superintendent. Langille's blurb about the Hood River Loops is on page 45:

The Hood River Loops Development Area, is made up of small wayside units situated at the junction of the Columbia River Highway and the Mount Hood Highway, and bordering the loops of the rising main highway, just east of Hood River. The junction tract is described as being Lots 1, 2, and 3, Block 1, of Reynolds addition to Hood River, containing 2.77 ecres, a gift to the State of Oregon by the county of Hood River, the deed date February 4, 1931. The tracts bordering the loops, aggregating 4.20 acres were purchased in three parcels, described as being in Section 31, Township 3 North of Range ll gast, W.M., Hood River County, Oregon. The deed dates being May 22, June 13 and September 12, 1922.

The lots at the junction of the highways were acquired for extra right of way and the loop tracts were obtained to prevent encroachments upon the banks of the ascending loops, where there were usable gravel deposits. No park improvements of any kind have been made up to this time.

On the next page, Boardman's one and only recommendation was "They should be left in their natural state." And sure enough, a pre-1937 vintage aerial photo at the Hood River History Museum, and HistoricAerials photos from 1947 and 1973 all show the place looking essentially the same as it does now.

In fact this is still the plan today. ODOT's current master plan for the old highway briefly mentions the Loops on page 44, saying "This section begins with the Hood River Loops, twisting and turning swiftly up the hillside", with a small aerial photo showing what they mean by that, but (just like 1946) they don't have any specific plans for the Loops beyond maintaining the area as-is. But at least nobody's going to build a fugly McMansion right here.

To understand why the state did all this, it may help to remember that Oregon state parks began as a sort of side project of the state highway agency (in its various guises over the years) and continued on this way all the way through 1989, when they were finally split off as a separate department in their own right. So for most of the agency's existence it must've seemed like the most natural thing in the world to set aside bits of land like this for passive enjoyment from a moving vehicle^[3], and the loops would probably be classified that way if they had remained in the state park system. But in 1953-54 this stretch of highway was bypassed by the shiny new Interstate freeway along the river. Unlike the famous stretch of the old road through the main waterfall corridor, this stretch of road was handed off to Hood River County, and was eventually gated off a mile or so further east of here after the closure of the Mosier Twin Tunnels. And, per state park policy at the time, since the place was no longer on a state highway, anything along the road was not a statewide concern anymore and the park was promptly handed off the the county along with the road. But things changed again with the 1980s revival of interest in the old highway, and at some point the state took it back and the land currently belongs to ODOT again.^[4]

At this point I should note that while "passive enjoyment from a moving vehicle" may be the only intended use of the place, there are a couple of others. The main one, of course, is to drive or bike or I guess unicycle or street luge the tight corners here. Maybe even exceeding the posted speed limit at times. And then possibly turning around and doing it again a few more times, because practice makes perfect and all that. And at this point Legal wants me to point out that I am not at liberty to say exactly how I know all this, and you should absolutely positively not try this at home, not even if you're a professional driver on a closed course, and not even if you're driving a Model T -- which is nice and slow but makes up for that by being unsafe in countless other ways.

The other main thing you can do here is stop somewhere safe along the road and take photos, maybe film your friend descending the hill on inline skates, or drifting the loops really fast in a vintage Group B rally car they're restoring, something along those lines. Unlike the loops at Crown Point, there is at least a bit of a view from the top and from one curve to the next, and it seems like this would be a fairly compelling place to film a car commercial. They're always filming car commercials around Crown Point and at Rowena, and I suspect the whole Hood River Valley has been exhaustively scouted for potential filming locations, so it just stands to reason a few have been filmed here. But I haven't actually come across any yet, and in fact YouTube can't find anything at all under "Hood River Loops".

A third thing you could maybe do here is poke around and be a big history dweeb^[5]. Though if you're interested in the old Columbia River Highway, I have to tell you that (other than the loops) not that much has survived intact from a century ago around here.

For one thing, just before the first curve (if you're going uphill) is a point where HCRH Milepost 67 ought to be, but isn't. ODOT's milepost map includes it, indicating there must have been one here within the last few years, but I looked around and didn't see one, and turned around and drove by again to be sure, and repeated the process once or twice and still couldn't find it, so (like a couple of other mileposts we met early on in that project) I suspect some clumsy driver sideswiped it within the last few years while trying to look cool here, and it's gone until ODOT gets around to making a new one.

On the other hand, there is an extant HCRH Milepost 68 just a mile up the road, shortly before the gate closing the road to car traffic. But that's the subject of a whole other upcoming post.

More importantly, just on the other side of the intersection with OR 35, the old highway crosses the Hood River, and you might think there would be a cool old historic bridge there, and in fact there used to be one, a triple-arch bridge built in 1918 in the usual Gorge bridge style. But it was demolished in 1982, replaced by a taller and wider and more practical, and safer, but utterly forgettable and utilitarian, concrete structure. I had made a mental note to take a couple of photos of it for the sake of completeness, and then forgot so completely that I only remembered months later, and I would bet money that I forget again the next time I'm in the area, or maybe stop to take photos and get bored and leave before actually taking any.

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Footnote(s)

1.

The loops here are mentioned in the caption of an Oregon State Archives photo of the Rowena Loops. Per ODOT's resident historian, Samuel Lancaster personally designed the Crown Point Loops near the Vista House, and after that other state highway engineers applied Lancaster's design principles to similar loops built at Rowena, here at Hood River, and the long-lost ones at Clatsop Crest on the Lower Columbia Highway.

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2.

On the map "Hood River Loops acquired to protect slopes.", dated 06/01/1922, the park is labeled as a "Roadside Development Area. Which was part of an old State Park classification scheme, per ODOT's 1940-1942 Biennial report (pages 114-115):

In order to avoid duplication of personnel and equipment, the Maintenance Department, beginning with the year 1941, assumed the maintenance of the roads and parking areas leading to and within State Highway parks. State parks were classified under three headings — Official State Parks, Minor Parks, and Roadside Development Areas. The Maintenance Department was charged with the betterment and maintenance of park roads and parking areas in all three of the classifications and with all betterment and maintenance of buildings and grounds in the minor parks and roadside developments. Betterment and maintenance of buildings and grounds in official state parks is a function of the Parks Department. There are 73 official parks, 44 minor parks and 33 roadside development areas.

Per the report for 1942-1944 at that point there were 76 areas designated as official state parks, 48 as minor state parks and 32 as roadside development areas, a total of 151 areas aggregating 46,868 acres. The report noted that park visitorship was down because of World War II. Some parks were closed entirely due to the war, like Bradley SP on the Columbia, I guess it must have provided too good of a view of what was going on along the river, as an endless stream of newly built ships headed downriver and out to sea from Portland shipyards -- Liberty Ships, and later Casablanca-class aircraft carriers. Additionally, there would have been a large volume of cargo ships headed to Vladivostok and other Soviet ports with cargo bound for the eastern front via the Trans-Siberian Railway. But I digress.

The 1948-50 report stopped breaking out the parks by the 1941 classification, and listed 181 units of all types totaling over 69,000 acres, plus a new system of 20 "roadside picnic areas", the origin of the current highway rest area system

Despite having "Development" right there in the name, RDAs tended to be small and generally had nothing in the way of park facilities, so I think the name was supposed to mean something like "Reserved for Future Development". From what I can tell, the state seems to have lost track of several of these over the years, so when they finally split state parks off from ODOT in the 1990s, by law anything related to state parks was supposed to transfer over to the new department, but places that had sort of fallen down the back of the sofa over time weren't on that list and ODOT still owns them.

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3.

Under today's weird overly-clinical naming scheme, a place like the Loops that you're supposed to admire from a moving car is a "State Scenic Corridor", like the H.B. Van Duzer corridor along OR18 on the way to Lincoln City. If you're supposed to admire it from a moving boat, it's a "State Scenic Waterway", like a big stretch of the Deschutes River. And if you can stop and take photos and admire the view from one place it's a "State Scenic Viewpoint", like Portland Womens Forum, and

If there's more to do than just admire the view, it's either a "State Recreation Site" (like Fishing Rock and many of the other small parks on the coast) or a "State Recreation Area" mostly depending on the size of the place. Some river parks are classified as State Recreation Areas rather than Scenic Waterways, and from what I can tell the difference is in what the river is like. If you can float downstream lazily admiring the scenery, it's a Scenic Waterway, and if you're hanging on for dear life barrelling over a never-ending series of rapids, it's a Recreation Area, and the dividing line is somewhere in between.

There are a few officially called "State Park", like the flagship one at Silver Falls. These are usually larger and have actual people staffing the place, at least during tourist season, and some of them (but not all) offer overnight camping. A "State Natural Area" or "State Natural Site" is sort of the opposite of that: No amenities, no developed visitor facilities, often no State Park sign welcoming you to the place. McLoughlin SNA in the Gorge is one of these. A "State Heritage Area" is a bit like a state park, but with history. If you like to watch people cosplaying as old timey pioneers, demonstrating old timey pioneer handicrafts, this is your best bet to experience that. Champoeg Park is probably the best-known of these. A "State Heritage Site" is smaller but still historical, albeit cosplay-free, like the Willamette Stone SHS in Portland's West Hills.

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4.

Later notes added to the 1922 map say most of the area was transferred to Hood River County in 1956, and another bit was sold in 1984. But apparently the state wanted the land back at some point after that, and owns it all again, per Hood River County GIS. Their page about the property now says it's taxlot number 03N11E31B01500, and its current size is 4.11 "Map Acres", or 7.56 "Assessor Acres". I'm not sure what the difference is, but one possibility is that the latter number includes the street right of way while the first number doesn't.

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5.

And this footnote is where I relate a historical anecdote I ran across that didn't really fit anywhere else. 1903 Hood River County land survey trying to resolve a boundary dispute between Mr. Frank Button and the Mt. Hood Lumber Company. The land in question fronted on both the Hood and Columbia Rivers, both of which had meandered enough over time that no earlier survey markers could be found in those areas. After a bit of this the surveyor (one John Leland Hudson, if I'm reading the signature correctly) throws up his hands on page 4 and says he can't proceed until he can obtain certified copies of the original General Land Office survey and all the field notes that went along with it.

The survey resumed a month later, with the necessary documents in hand, but any hope that this would clear things up were quickly dashed. Again the survey crew kept encountering survey markers that could not be found, as a lot of them had been placed relative to trees that were no longer there. Other markers turned up in the wrong place, due in part to egregious errors by a previous (and now retired) County Surveyor, which often did not align with the original egregious errors made by the US General Land Office surveyor. Hudson directed much of his ire at the latter:

I found no two courses, (where all are supposed N. and S.), parallel in the whole claim, S., E., and W. bdys. Nor did I find more than one measurement as given in the field notes. The U.S. Deputy Sur. must have been either drunk, crazy, or a fool. A worse piece of surveying, I never before saw, done by a U.S. Deputy Surveyor.

Ouch! Hudson then explains how he corrected several errors of basic arithmetic in the previous surveys, and determined the correct boundary accordingly, and wraps up with another dig at the original surveyor:

This U.S. Deputy Surveyor, Mr. L.F. Cartee, must have been a “Jim Dandy”. Dr. Adams says his name was Cartee, but the Notes make it Carter.

And now having established the line of division between the said Frank H. Button and the said Mt. Hood Lumber Company, in manner as aforesaid, and to the best of my ability, I quit the survey and job, and am d——d glad to say good-bye.

Not quite as dramatic an exit as popping the emergency escape slide, but pretty dramatic for a land survey narrative, as these things are usually dry as dust. And there are hints that this was just the tip of the iceberg: Mr. Button, one of the parties to the dispute, was also somehow made part of the survey crew when it resumed. That work partly relied on the recollections of that error-prone retired county surveyor, who seems to have been some sort of local power broker that people deferred to. So it's possible Hudson may have found himself at odds with the local good ol' boy network just by trying to do his job by the book. I may also be reading way too much into this stuff.

A later coda: ODOT map 1R-2-498, titled "Acquired from F.H. Button Est. for Stock Pile Site", September 1937. But they may have gotten a bit ahead of themselves; a cursive note in pencil says simply "Would not sell. Jan 1938"

pdx ✈️ hnl, march 2026

Here's another slideshow from a window seat, since these seem to be popular. This time around I had an R72 infrared filter handy and took a bunch of photos that way as I was quite taken with the results. The effect is about the closest thing you can get to a photo from space without actually going to space (which is still way too expensive). If you'd rather look at some actual space photos, NASA has a whole Flickr photoset of Artemis II images for your perusal, and of course the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers are still driving around on Mars. Those links go to their Raw Images pages, where new photos are autoposted as they come in.

There are also a few airquote-normal photos here, and the whole set is in chronological order except for the very first one, so the first few after that show a misty, foggy, damp early morning here in the Northwest, but it doesn't stay that way for long.

Fishing Rock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stainless Dreaming

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

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

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

Sandy Milepost 14

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

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

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

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

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

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

Milepost 43, Cascade Locks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HCRH Milepost 36

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

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

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

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