Coffee Creek Falls

Here are a few photos of Oregon City's Coffee Creek Falls, which is conveniently located right on South End Road, literally right next to the road, a bit south and uphill from downtown Oregon City. Let's get the bad news out of the way first: There is no actual coffee here. Not even decaf. It's just plain old water like every other creek out there. The same is true of the more famous Coffee Creek down in Wilsonville, the one with the womens' prison named after it. No caffeine in that creek either. Same goes for the Coffee Creek in Douglas County, which was the site of a brief gold rush in the 1850s. Based on a bit of light googling there are probably dozens of Coffee Creeks scattered around the state, possibly because the water was a bit muddy when someone named it and it reminded them of terrible pioneer-era coffee. That or people just thought about coffee constantly, which is understandable. Still, the name kind of gets your hopes up and then dashes them, and maybe once the geographic naming authorities finish up renaming all the places currently named with racial or religious slurs, after that they can start in on renaming non-caffeinated places and things named after coffee, on the grounds of false advertising. That or figure out how to add caffeine to these creeks and lakes and whatnot, and I have no idea how that would work.

You might have guessed, correctly, by the previous paragraph that I don't have a lot of source material for this post. The usual waterfall fandom sites don't mention it for some reason. And getting to the falls doesn't require any actual hiking, so the usual hiking and outdoor websites don't mention it either. And it doesn't appear that any interesting historical events have ever happened here, at least going by local newspaper archives. So once again I had to resort to the state LIDAR map (see here) just to try to guess how tall the thing is. The part you see here is probably around 20', but LIDAR seems to indicate there's more of a drop up above this that isn't visible from street level, so that it may be closer to 50' or even 75' high depending on where you measure from. And then the creek continues dropping on the other side of the road, too, so the total drop from what looks like the top of the hill down to the Willamette River comes to around 350'. I don't have any photos of that part of the creek and I have no idea whether it ought to be included or not.

The falls do appear in a few places online, at least. There's a page about it at

OregonWaterfalls, and a Waymarking page, and a YouTube video from 2015 and even an Urban Adventure League Flickr photo. As for official governmental stuff, there's, well, a photo of the falls on a city 'natural resources' page and brief mentions of it in connection with some current and ongoing public works projects, and that's about it. Oh, and a fairly recent water quality report on OC-area creeks. Coffee Creek did relatively well in some catetories and worse in others, most notably in bacteria numbers. Just passing that along in case you were still thinking about drinking the water, on the outside chance that I'm wrong and there's caffeine here after all.

Sulawesi, SW 17th & Morrison

Back in February I finally hit "Publish" on a post about Icarus at Kittyhawk, the Lee Kelly art at the Beaverton Central MAX station. That post was stuck in Drafts for ages because I didn't know what it was called, until I finally found that crucial detail on a walking/driving tour map of Kelly art around the Portland area. I said at the time:

In fact the map includes a lamentable number of others that I wasn't aware of and have never visited. Somehow I feel like I have to add them to the ol' TODO list now, although for the life of me I'm not sure why.

...and sure enough, here's a TODO item from that map. This is Sulawesi (2008), on the West Portland Physical Therapy building at SW 17th and Morrison. I actually like this one. It's a reasonable size, and somehow it actually fits with the building it's on (the circa-1958 Annand Building) and looks like it's always been there, despite being about a half-century newer. Usually at this point I would go off on a tangent about the cool midcentury building, but I haven't found any interesting info about it by name or by address. I can tell you the building once housed an office of the Equitable Life of Iowa insurance firm starting in 1958, and they were seemingly hiring new stenographers every few months, year after year, and after that other tenants came and went over time, and I have no historical anecdotes to share about any of them, or the building, or anything really. Which at least makes this an easy post to finish, so there's that, I guess.

I'm glad I checked that walking map again before hitting 'Publish', since I had gotten the name of the art wrong. Sulawesi (the correct name) is an island in Indonesia, the 11th largest island on the planet and home to 20 million people. I almost mistakenly called the art "Surabaya", which is a city on the island of Java, elsewhere in Indonesia. The Surabaya metropolitan area is home to about 10 million people. So that would have been kind of embarrassing. Searching for more info under the correct name comes back with a result for "Sulawesi I" (1997) a similar Kelly sculpture outside a library on the Oregon State University campus. The OSU one is described as "A wall-mounted sculpture with silver leaf with looping and linear forms reminiscent of script." That could be the origin of the name here too, or it's named for resembling the weirdly-shaped island itself, which looks a lot a letter in some unknown alphabet.