Shifting Assets

Some photos of Shifting Assets, a collection of both real and concrete rocks along the Springwater trail's Willamette River segment. I ran across these while tracking down the city's very obscure Riverside Park several years ago. I took a few photos but I wasn't really doing a public art project at the time, so I just filed them away.

Then last year I wrote posts about Portals and Eye River, a pair of recent public artworks located between the Hawthorne Bridge & OMSI. Both were by local artist Linda Wysong, and the (semi)-trusty RACC database mentioned she'd also created Shifting Assets. I vaguely remembered I had photos of it/them somewhere in iPhoto, and made a mental note to go dig them out. I finally got around to doing that, so here they are.

Shifting Assets has two RACC pages for some reason; both offer the same description:

This work consists of two "stopping places" along the trail. The rocks have been retrieved from the Willamette River and are glacial erratic from the Missoula Floods that occurred during the Pleistocene Age, two million years ago.

The sliced stones refer to the layers of time that are part of the area’s geology and history. The acrylic layers are metaphors for the natural environment. The cast concrete stones with layers of steel reflect the mix of natural and industrial influences in this section of the trail.

This isn't the only way to see glacial erratic rocks around here, obviously. In fact there's an Erratic Rock state park in the rural Willamette Valley that protects a very large example of the genre. I've never been there, although it's on my legendarily big todo list. I'm fairly sure there will be a blog post about it someday, at whatever point I finally get around to visiting. What I do have right now, Missoula Flood-wise, are posts about the spectacular Dry Falls and Sun Lakes area of Eastern Washington, where the floodwaters spilled over a 400 foot cliff, forming an enormous waterfall three miles wide. NE Portland's Alameda Ridge is far less spectacular, but apparently the ridge is an ancient gravel bar left over from the ice age floods. This likely precludes building a proper Batcave or Bond villain lair deep beneath the streets of Alameda, but hey.