Friday, September 19, 2025

Chinquapin West

Next up we're paying a visit to Metro's obscure Chinquapin West Natural Area, on a weirdly remote stretch of the Sandy River a few miles south of Troutdale. Until a few years ago this was a Nature Conservancy property, and before that it belonged to one of several old-money philanthropists who donated land to prevent it being developed (while still hanging on to their cabins along the river, in some cases). If you know where to find the unmarked trailhead (located along Gordon Creek Rd., as shown on the map above), you can follow a surprisingly well-maintained trail down into the river canyon, and eventually to the trail's one and only trail junction. Which, once again, is unmarked. Turning right eventually takes you to a sunny happy burbling stretch of river -- or at least it was sunny when I was there, your mileage will vary -- where you can don your vintage L.L. Bean gear and do a bit of gentlemanly fly fishing, which I gather was the main reason the original donors felt this stretch of the river was worth preserving.

That area is attractive enough to make the area worth a visit, even if you aren't into catching or eating fish. But the real secret treasure of this place is down the side trail that was off to the left back at the trail junction. After a short distance, a sheer cliff comes into view, covered in moss and ferns, with a small creek tumbling along below it. The trail heads toward the upstream end of this creek, and you soon find yourself in a narrow sheer-sided canyon, with the stream undercutting the cliff in a rather extreme way. At the head of this mini-canyon is a waterfall, and one like you've probably never encountered. The creek falls into a sort of cylindrical hole, slightly open on one side where it faces the canyon, so you can only see the lowest one-third or so of the waterfall. If you've been to the so-called "Pool of the Winds" at Rodney Falls on the Washington side of the Gorge, it's kind of like that but even more so. The cherry on top of all this is that if you're here at just the right time, on a late summer afternoon, the sun shines directly into the mini-canyon and the alcove holding the waterfall, catching the spray from the falls and causing fleeting mini-rainbows. I dunno, this may not be your cup of tea, and as always your mileage may vary, but I thought it was fairly magical.

A small plaque dating to the Nature Conservancy days proclaims this area to be "Duckering Glen", honoring a late donor who had loved this spot in particular. I don't know whether Metro still considers that name to be in effect, and as far as I know both the creek and the falls have remained nameless since the first Euro-American settlers showed up. And this is the point where I tell you that this spot is -- as the crow flies, at least -- less than twenty miles from downtown Portland. It astonishes me to no end that this place hasn't been loved to death by crowds and ruined, like what happened to Oneonta Gorge before the Eagle Creek fire.

One thing that might be limiting the crowds here is that Multnomah County strictly prohibits parking on the shoulder along much of Gordon Creek Rd., and you sort of have to read between the lines and suss out where you can park just going by the absence of No Parking signs. If you do this and guess wrong, Officer Friendly is only going to ticket you for it, but I'm pretty sure I've seen a tow truck from a notorious predatory towing company scoping out one of the other Sandy River trailheads on at least one occasion, so maybe don't push your luck here.

Tamanawas Falls

Next up we have some recent photos from Tamanawas Falls, a ~100 foot waterfall a short distance from OR 35, due east of Mt. Hood, right around where the drive time is the same if you take I-84 to OR35 South via Hood River, or US26 to OR35 North via Government Camp. The hike (OregonHikers | AllTrails) is a fairly easy (albeit rocky) 3.4 mile roundtrip, and the trailhead is right on OR35 (so there's no driving on any sketchy logging roads), and the falls at the end are spectacular, so it's quite a popular trail. At least for a place this far from Portland. If you prefer to hike in complete solitude, this trail is probably not the one for you, but if you like visiting with friendly dogs you'll probably have a good time.

One couple on the trail was hiking with around six dogs, at least half of which were Corgis. I was about to say something along the lines of "If they can do it, you can do it", to try to sound positive and encouraging for once, but realized it wasn't a fair comparison. A single Corgi might struggle on the trail, but put them in a group and they seem to reinforce each other, and all things are possible given enough Corgis cheering each other on. When they have to get up a steep bit of hill, they seem to tackle it one by one while the others beam positive energy at the one currently climbing, and everyone is really stoked once the whole mutual support group is past the latest obstacle. Which unfortunately means they're hopeless at anything that involves all of them working together in unison, like pulling a dogsled.

These photos were taken in fall 2024, and fall seems to be a great time to visit; the trail isn't all that high up -- the maximum elevation you'll encounter is only around 3500 feet -- so you most likely won't have to trudge through snow in September or October, but it's still high enough that autumn leaves start turning while there's still plenty of afternoon daylight available. And then on the way home you can stop for a bite to eat and wait out the blinding sunset light in your eyes on the way home. The internet largely disagrees with me, of course, and the consensus seems to be that you absolutely must go do the trail in the depths of winter, preferably by snowshoe, or dogsled, or probably by fixie snow unicycle (you probably haven't heard of it) just to be Xtreme™ and one-up everyone you know and then wonder why they never want to hang out. Which, as it turns out, is exactly why these people have so much free time to spend opining online about the one and only correct way to do various things.

Tamanawas Falls, LIDAR

I do want to add a couple of Useful Protips from this trip. First, if you're going here, or anywhere run by the Forest Service in the Northwest, and you want to know whether you need a Northwest Forest Pass to park there, their website is more authoritative on this point than the various enthusiast websites out there, no matter how good they are in other respects. In particular, the OregonHikers page for the trailhead said something about the pass only being required during prime tourist season, and it may still say that, and maybe that was true at some point. But these days Uncle Sam needs five of your dollars if want to park here, any time of the year. I get that some people ignore this, whether on principle or because they're just cheapskates. And I honestly don't know how strictly they actually enforce this -- it probably matters a lot how close you are to the nearest ranger station, for one thing -- and I also don't know what they typically do to violators -- whether it's just a federal parking ticket on your windshield, or they actually tow your car and leave you stranded out in the middle of nowhere. There have been a couple of times in the past where I decided to just chance it, and nothing bad ever happened when I did that, but I also enjoyed the hike less due to getting stressed out over it. So I pay up and then I can relax and just worry about car breakins. You might think that a big parking lot full of vehicles at $5 a pop (or $30 for the annual pass) ought to cover hiring a security guard to watch the lot, at least for summer weekends, but apparently that's not how it works.

Just to add to that, in 2025 the hot new trend in forest recreation management is to have a concessionare take over running a given site and opt out of honoring the $5 pass, or any pass other than the $30 annual one. They generally want $10 for a day pass for just that site, which really adds up if you want to visit one place in the morning and another after lunch. On the bright side, the $5 pass still exists, technically, and it still costs only $5; it's just that the number of places you can actually use one keeps dwindling. Tamanawas Falls parking was still $5 when I was there, but your mileage may vary, and if it does it probably won't vary in the downward direction.

Ok, second protip: If you rely on Google Maps for driving directions, be sure to ask for directions to Tamanawas Falls Trailhead, not Tamanawas Falls. This matters because Google interprets the latter to mean you want to drive to a point as close as possible to the waterfall itself, no matter what the road to that point is like, and getting there via the normal trailhead is not a priority. In this case Google has you leave Highway 35 a few miles south of here, and directs you onto Forest Service road NF-3520-620, a steep, narrow gravel logging road that climbs around 500' vertical feet up onto Bluegrass Ridge, ending at a point that, yes, is pretty close to the falls as the crow flies, definitely closer than the official trailhead will get you. On the other hand, the crow can soar gracefully over multi-hundred foot cliffs and you can't, or at least you can't more than once. And before you even get to that point, the main problem is that the road is also marked Unmaintained & Closed To Vehicle Traffic, so there's almost certainly a locked Forest Service gate in the way. If you can get past that somehow, legally or otherwise, there will most likely be fallen trees across the road, so bring a chainsaw. (Note that the legal way involves passing a civil service exam and joining the Forest Service, starting out at Junior Assistant Outhouse Inspector, and slowly working your way up the federal seniority ladder until the Forest Service starts trusting you with keys to things, which could take a while.) And long story short, this might be the closest road to Tamanawas Falls, but it's not likely to be the fastest. My photoset includes a couple of photos of the trailhead and parking lot, and if you park somewhere that doesn't look like that, you are in the wrong place.



Geology


Our story starts around 29,000 years ago, the last time (or one of the last times) that an eruption of Mount Hood included actual lava flowing down and away from the mountain. Cascade eruptions in recorded history, and in native oral history before that, only talk about explosive-type eruptions like that of Mt. St. Helens in 1980, but Cascade volcanoes are often surrounded by old lava flows, reminding us they can erupt other ways if they want to. (To any volcanoes reading this: Your kind and generous offer to arrange a demonstration is truly appreciated, but is not strictly necessary at this time. Thanks!)

So the lava erupted from a vent on the east side of Mt. Hood, and flowed east and downhill until it came up against Bluegrass Ridge. This is the north-south ridge that runs for several miles on the east side of Mt. Hood, completely not aligned with Mt. Hood for the simple reason that it's older (I've seen numbers putting it at ~3m years old versus no greater than 1.3m for Mt. Hood) It's also a few hundred feet too tall for anything flowing down from Mt. Hood to just flow over the top, so the other options are to flow around the obstacle if possible, or stop and pile up if not. Water finds a way back to the sea. Lava dreams of that, but flows a bit and piles up a bit and eventually solidifies in place. Some of the lava flowed north, parallel to Bluegrass Ridge, until it could flow around the ridge and continue downhill from there, and finally froze in place at some point, well short of the Pacific Ocean. The regular climate resumed after that event, and water from the mountain still needed a way around the ridge, which led to present-day Cold Spring Creek. This is not necessarily the same exact channel as the lava earlier, or any water channel that might have been here before the lava came, but same basic idea. And then the (usually) slow magic of water plus time took over, and the creek has been eroding its way downward and backwards, and Tamanawas Falls is the slowly moving point where that ongoing process is at right now.

(But don't just take my word for it. Here's a 1997 USGS report, Geologic History of Mount Hood Volcano, Oregon. A Field-Trip Guidebook, which was created for a 1996 geology conference in Portland as a fun driving tour if you're in town for an extra day or two. Pages 22-23 cover the area along OR 35 near the falls.)



History


Depending on who you believe and what the current best evidence says, it's an outside possibility there may have been people here when all that happened. Though current conventional wisdom holds that people have been here for around half that time, with the caveat that ice age floods would have buried or erased a lot of evidence. That's still around 15000 years, which is long enough that it's safe to assume the whole region was thoroughly scouted for useful waterfalls, meaning the ones that migrating fish have a decent chance of leaping over. Tamanawas Falls is clearly too tall for that; the only traditional fishing site I know of in the Hood River watershed is at Punchbowl Falls over on the West Fork of the river.

Beyond that, I have no idea whether this was a significant place for anyone before recorded history. A 1977 Forest Service planning doc for the agency's Mt. Hood Planning Unit (which seems to coincide with the whole Mt. Hood National Forest) tried to inventory all "cultural resources" in the area, and came up with precisely nothing before the pioneer era. And the only maybe-pioneer-era thing they had for Tamanawas Falls was an item for "Initialed Trees", of some unknown age. It does not say exactly where the Initialed Trees were, or even what the initials were, and there aren't any signs along the trail pointing out where one might find said Initialed Trees. Which is fine; quite honestly I don't suppose there's any way to showcase historical graffiti without some percentage of visitors thinking they have permission to add to the collection. If you need a protip about that: First I have to tell you not to carve your initials in trees, because it's bad for the trees. But if you absolutely positively must carve something in a tree, be sure to include today's date and time, and some sort of unique ID (Legal name and address, Instagram or TikTok or YouTube @name, Social Security number, or whatever). Just some sort of ID that future historians of the year 2225 can cross-reference in the archives and pull up your vital records and complete browser history, including the supposedly incognito parts, so a sign next to the tree can include an accurate biography of you. But hey, that's immortality for ya: You can maybe influence whether people of the future have heard of you, but you can't control what they think of you.

I should point out that the Forest Service did not actually consult local tribes for that 1977 study, because 1977. Which is how you get things like a 2008 incident where an ODOT road crew damaged a sacred site named Ana Kwna Nchi Nchi Patat after not realizing what it was. The site happened to be right next to US 26 and was impacted when they added a turn lane to the road. The Forest Service finally agreed to restore the site in 2023.

I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that the odds are extremely low that the very first person to see the falls was a white guy with a camera. The reason I say that is that sometime between 1895 and 1909, photographer Benjamin A. Gifford (1859–1936) took this photo of the falls, eventually publishing it in his 1909 photo book Art Work of the State of Oregon, currently on Amazon for a mere $895.00. He isn't credited with discovering the falls -- he must have already had an inkling that the falls existed before bushwhacking up Cold Spring Creek lugging a heavy large-format camera. But it also wasn't a well-known destination back then, since it apparently didn't have a name when he took the photo and it ended up being called "Giffords Falls" for a while in the early part of the 20th Century. This burst of fresh attention did not, however, result in a trail to the falls right away, and it spent much of the 20th Century as a known and named but rarely visited mystery spot deep in the forest.

The only use of the old name I've come across in local newspaper archives is an Oregon Journal article from September 1907. The article itself is fairly dry, concerning various recent and proposed improvements in Oregon canals and railroads, including the never-completed railroad loop around Mt. Hood. The article is illustrated with a variety of photos from around the state with some vague connection to the text, including one that's definitely the falls here, labeled "Gifford Falls, Base of Mt. Hood". I think they used it on the idea that the creek flows into the E. Fork of Hood River, which powers the hydro plant at Dee, OR, which powers the city of Hood River and may power the proposed railroad someday, plus the falls themselves might be a scenic destination for tourists on the proposed railroad someday. I don't see any photo credits listed for the image, so for all we know the newspaper's one and only depiction of "Gifford Falls" might be illustrated with someone else's photo.

And with that, the falls fell off the radar again until the 1960s. Sometime along this time period it picked up the name "Tamanawas", but I don't know when. Official maps of the Mt. Hood National Forest (updated every few years) showed nothing here thru the 1952 edition, while the 1963 map shows the falls, but no trail or trailhead, and it's labeled using "Tamanawaus", the old spelling. You might have been able to get a look at the falls from above at this point, as the Elk Meadows trail now passed by the general vicinity of the falls and connected to a forest road labeled "S230", which would have to be present day NF-3510-620. (not a typo: the NF-3520-620 I mentioned runs just south of here, and it looks like it was road S229 under the old numbering scheme in effect back then).

If you google the place now, you'll encounter an internet factoid claiming that the name was changed from "Giffords" to "Tamanawas" in 1971, but that's not quite what really happened; I found an Oregon Journal article about the renaming (and a few others), dated December 4th, 1971, and it briefly explains what actually happened. Listed among various decisions by the state geographic names board, the article says "Spelling of Tamanawaus Falls on Clear Creek in the Hood River drainage was changed to Tamanawas to make it phonetically in keeping with the Indian language." So the immediately previous name was basically the current one but spelled wrong.

I was kind of hoping that the old spelling would lead me to more vintage news articles, but no such luck. The only other use of that spelling in local papers was a mistaken use of the old spelling in a 1982 article, over a decade after the experts officially fixed it.

The 1972 map has the falls under the current name, spelled correctly this time, and it now shows the trail too. The trail isn't numbered, though, so it might have been new, or that corner of the map was just too cluttered to add a trail number. I thought that narrowed it down to a six year window for roughly when the trail came about, but then I found a 1964 USGS map showing the falls and trail and labeling it "Tamanawaus", and that's the oldest 1:25000 map of the area available on the USGS site. While lower resolution maps as late as 1978 don't mention it.

The trail appears in Don and Roberta Lowe's 70 Hiking Trails: Northern Oregon Cascades (1974), but it wasn't mentioned in local newspapers until 1978, in an Oregonian article on fun fall activities around Mt. Hood. It also got a mention a Roberta Lowe column in a November 1978 Oregon Journal column full of factoids about trail history. She tells us most of the trail was built by volunteers, but Forest Service experts were called in to blast a way through the big boulder field toward the end, since the agency generally doesn't let volunteers go around dynamiting stuff on federal land. You might think that would go without saying, but it was the 1970s, and you could get away with a lot in those days if you told people that you had done this before and looked like you knew what you were doing. So this "no amateur demolition work" rule might have been a new policy at the time. And she doesn't actually say when this trail construction had happened. It sounds recent, but the rest of article hops around between the first trails on Mt. Hood going in around 1908, and recent work to reopen the Mt. Defiance trail by building a path from Starvation Creek to the old trail -- which used to start at the little state park at Lindsey Creek, now bypassed by I-84. Anyway, mentions of the place seemed to pick up a bit after 1978, and it started appearing in Mazamas hike announcements afterward.

Which is not to say the area wasn't getting the usual Forest Service treatment. On aerial photos it's not hard to see the patchwork pattern that comes from decades of Forest Service timber sales. I couldn't find anything in the newspapers about timber sales near the newly minted trail, so I checked HistoricAerials, which has 1981 and 1994 imagery for the area. The 1981 photo just shows unbroken forest to the south of the falls and trail, while the 1994 edition has a patchwork of clearcuts centered on forest road 3520-620. Until quite recently the forest near the falls was threatened by the proposed Polallie-Cooper timber sale project just north of here, which the Forest Service has been trying to push through since the mid-2000s.

Speaking of clearcuts, I was a bit surprised to realize how little protection the area around the falls actually has. The creek has been proposed as a future "Wild and Scenic" waterway but doesn't currently have that status, though it flows into the East Fork of Hood River, which does. The falls are also juuust outside the Mt. Hood Wilderness boundary, as the area was proposed but excluded during Congressional horse trading in 2009. Instead the falls are part of the ~13,000 acre "Mt. Hood Additions Roadless Area". "Roadless Area" indicates -- as you might expect -- a lower level of protection than "Wilderness" does. Frankly it's more of a description than a protection measure. It doesn't actually ban logging or other development within the designated area. It doesn't even ban roads; a Forest Service explainer gamely argues that "roadless" means "less roads", not "no roads" or even "no new roads". That isn't what "roadless" usually means to the general public, though, and so they're forever putting out new proposals to clearcut a roadless area and always seem shocked and bewildered every time they're sued over it. In a similar vein, the falls are also included in the 82,385.47 acre "Mount Hood Park Division", as designated by the US Secretary of Agriculture way back on April 28th, 1926. (A 16,762.97 acre "Columbia Gorge Park Division" to the north of here was created around the same time.) The "Park Division" designation suggests it's managed for nature and recreation along the lines of a national park but run by the forest service, and a lot of contemporary news accounts from that period act like that was the case. But again, "Park Division" was more of a description than a protected area, and it seems as though the Forest Service eventually allowed these designations to fall by the wayside.


Footnote(s)

[1] The more that I look at the map, that road might be useful as part of a loop hike: After visiting the falls, take the Tamanawas Tie trail #650B up to the Elk Meadows Trail #645, follow that to where it intersects the Bluegrass Ridge Trail #647, and after a short distance bushwhack over to road 3520-620. Go downhill/south on the road, and cut over to the East Fork Trail #650 at the point where the trail and road run together for a bit, and take the #650 north back to the trailhead. There's also a point where the road and trail pass about 100' feet from each other, as the crow flies, and maybe that would work as a connector and maybe it wouldn't, I haven't actually tried this yet and don't know what it's like in the real world. But the interwebs version looks kind of interesting. Maybe I just have a bias in favor of reusing old forest roads; it's mostly that there are a truly mind-boggling number of them out there in the forest, and the Forest Service is never going to have enough money to either decommission old roads properly, or to build and maintain any more trails beyond what currently exists, so if an old road goes somewhere interesting, the pragmatic thing would be to not turn up our noses at using it. Also old forest roads are wider than the average trail, which miiight help avoid being swarmed by ticks during the height of tick season.


[2] 1995 Preliminary Geologic Map of the Mount Hood 30- By 60-Minute Quadrangle, Northern Cascade Range, Oregon has a date of around 1.8 million years, from a location on the west side of Bluegrass Ridge, if I understand their latitude-longitude format correctly. The PDF describes the contents of the map but doesn't include the map, which I haven't located yet.


[3] As for the rest of the article: It was titled "'Cleanup' of Names Protested By Board" Which is and isn't what readers of the distant year 2025 might think. The State Board on Geographic Names was upset. "Outrageous, this cleansing program of the federal agencies", said the director of the Oregon Historical Society. "A colorful part of the West could be lost if this continues", said a board member. But they weren't talking about place names containing racial slurs, or names honoring Confederate generals, or notorious soldiers from the Indian Wars, or anything like that. No, it seems that a few years earlier the Bureau of Land Management had looked at their map of Steens Mountain, in a remote part of SE Oregon, and saw the name "Whorehouse Meadow" and got a case of the vapors. It seems the name dates back to the Old West, named for the only business that has ever existed there or for miles around in any direction, and then only seasonally, and -- according to historians who study these things -- it was more of a gussied-up stagecoach than an actual house. The agency quietly changed it to "Naughty Girl Meadow", a name that invites at least as much curiosity as the original. That finally caught the notice of the state board in 1971, though I gather the original name wasn't officially restored until the early 80s.

In related news, the board concluded the name "Hells Canyon" was not offensive and should be the official name, rather than "Grand Canyon of the Snake". Also, "Moloch Beach" on the coast became "Moolach" since it was intended to be a Chinook word for "elk", not anything biblical, but someone had spelled it wrong somewhere along the way and it got stuck that way for a while. The name has since been further corrected to "Moolack", I guess to be even less Moloch-y. And in another bit of typo repair, "Bagsby Hot Springs" was officially changed to the correct "Bagby".


[4] In a situation familiar to photographers across the ages, Gifford sued the Ford Motor Company in 1916 for using one of his photos in a company publication without permission or credit. He won the case and was awarded $250 (which is about $7200 in 2024 dollars) plus attorney fees.

Gifford (but not the falls) was mentioned in 1972 article of oldtimer reminiscences. It seems the Giffords owned a raspberry patch near Salmon Creek in the 1920s, near (and now in) Vancouver, WA, where the author and her husband first met while picking berries at age 11.


[5] Two papers came back after checking JSTOR a few different ways:

Printzen, Christian, and Tor TĆønsberg. “The Lichen Genus Biatora in Northwestern North America.” The Bryologist, vol. 102, no. 4, 1999, pp. 692–713. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3244256. Accessed 9 Dec. 2024.

German and Norwegian lichen taxonomists visit the Pacific Northwest to study an inconspicuous lichen genus, announce four new species. A passage describes what they're studying and why this is good place to do it:

"the genus comprises crustose lichens with green algal photobionts, biatorine apothecia, colorless, simple to 3-septate ascospores, and bacilliform pycnospores. Biatora is widely distributed in the Northern Hemisphere, but the extra-European taxa have not received any systematic treatment. The diversity is obviously highest in temperate and boreal coniferous forest."

And you're hearing about this now because a specimen of Biatora nobilis, one of the newly-described species, was collected from a conifer tree somehere along the Tamanawas Falls trail. The type specimen was collected up on Vancouver Island, so this isn't a situation like one of those weird insects that only lives around the base of a few Gorge waterfalls and nowhere else. Common but inconspicuous, and tough to tell different species apart, and there are not a lot of taxonomists out there period much less ones specializing in lichens, and there are big swaths of the biological world where nobody has gone through and done the detailed taxonomy work. Lichens are a weird specialty because a lichen is a symbiosis between a fungus species and an algae species. I actually knew that part already, but I didn't think about how that complicates putting them in categories. At present they're classified by (and named the same as) the base fungus species in the pairing, but this is an ongoing controversy. You can get lichens that seem completely unrelated by swapping out the alga species, yet they're all counted as the same because the fungus is the same. I dunno, you may not find that very interesting. But it's a thing I just learned today and I wanted to tell you about it.

Secondly, a specimen of the stonefly Taenionema kincaidi that was collected further up Cold Spring Creek was examined in:

Stanger, Jean A., and Richard W. Baumann. A Revision of the Stonefly Genus Taenionema (Plecoptera: Taeniopterygidae). Transactions of the American Entomological Society (1890-), vol. 119, no. 3, 1993, pp. 171–229. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25078571. Accessed 9 Dec. 2024.

[6] Vintage USFS maps of the Mt. Hood area from 1921, 1936, 1939, and 1946, 1952 and 1966 don't show the falls, or the trail to the falls, or the trailhead. They generally do show the Bluegrass Ridge and Elk Meadow trails, and a lot of the campgrounds in the area existed that far back, just not anything here.

Likewise, a vintage brochure "Forest Trails and Highways of the Mount Hood Region" (1920) covers a lot of the scenic highlights of the region, including the Gorge, and doesn't say a word about Tamanawas Falls. A 1939 brochure "Trails on Slopes of Mount Hood" comes with a detailed map and doesn't show the waterfall here, while including a variety of others, all smaller than Tamanawas, and a 1961 reissue of the same guide shows even more trails but not one to the base of the falls. A state highway department publication, "Oregon scenic highway drive: Mt. Hood Loop" has an exhaustive log of sights to be found along the route and doesn't mention the falls, and it's dated 1981 (though it looks like a reprint of a much older guide.)

Singer Creek Falls

Next up we've visiting yet another waterfall in Oregon City that isn't Willamette Falls. Right next to the city's famous municipal elevator, there's an Art Deco walkway with a few flights of stairs that also connects the city's upper and lower halves, and this walkway also includes a water feature that descends the bluff in around 5 stairsteps. This "water feature" is Singer Creek Falls, another of the Northwest's many Works Progress Administration projects from the mid-1930s. The idea here was that they would start with an existing, 'natural' waterfall at this same location and improve on it, giving it clean, modern lines, and adding the ability to easily light the falls at night. This seems like a bizarre idea now, but 1937 was the year of Bonneville Dam and Timberline Lodge, and Man Improving On Nature was all the rage back then.

For more info about that project, there's a city planning page about the falls, plus a page at Living New Deal (which is a great site for general WPA fandom, btw.). Also see a post at Meandering through the Prologue, and a photo at The (Daily) Rail Photo.

Somehow I didn't notice any of this during previous visits to the elevator, and I had no idea it was here until stumbling across it on Google Maps, I guess based on previous search history. I can only speak for myself here, but it's possible that if your brain is focused on looking for midcentury public elevator stuff, maybe an unexpected Art Deco urban waterfall simply won't register, and vice versa. After visiting for the waterfall this time, I later found out that there's public art at the base of the falls, specifically a Lee Kelly sculpture titled Moontrap (2011), which I completely failed to notice at the time. I wonder if it's named after the low-budget SF movie from 1989 starring Walter Koenig and Bruce Campbell. So if I decide I need photos of it I'll need to make yet another visit to the area, and probably miss out on yet another interesting detail while I'm at it.

The usual waterfall websites have absolutely no info about this one, as traditional waterfall snobs aren't really sure what to do with a place like this. So instead we'll have to figure out the height for ourselves, going by the state LIDAR map. If we take this point as the top and this point as the bottom, the falls could be up to 70' high, though that might be a bit generous; we can at least say the cliff is around 70', and the falls may be a few feet shy of that on either end. Also shows what looks like a second path or stairway coming up diagonally from 9th to right around where the stonework ends up top. No stairs or trail are visible on Street View now, so it evidently was closed or fell out of use at some point.

A news item about the upcoming redesign project explained what was coming in detail:

Designed by City Manager J.L. Franzen, a series of waterfalls will feature the Singer Hill park project which was started last Monday under WPA. These falls, formed by diverting Singer creek into a series of five drops by means of natural stone incased in cement, probably will be lighted and will constitute one of the most beautiful spots in the country, either day or night. The WPA crew which is working under the direction of Mr. Miller, foreman, and which will be augmented Monday with additional workers, will brush out the bluff for approximately two blocks between what would be the extension of the alley between Seventh and Eighth streets to the alley between Ninth and Tenth and between the railroad and Singer Hill highway. Trails along the bluff will also be built. The new course for the water which now plunges down the hillside from the outlet at the head of the stairs at Seventh and Singer hill will be 20 feet wide. It will include four 10-foot drops and the other a 12-foot drop. Water will be picked up where it goes under the stairs, carried over the falls which will be just south of the present stream, then dumped into a pool at the foot of the falls. Stone for the falls and pools will be obtained from the city quarry on Center street.
  • November 1896: mention of the creek as one of the many Willamette tributaries flooding at the time
  • 1909 Journal : a local furniture co. harnessed the creek to power a little 75hp generator, partially powering their operations
  • May 1935: proposed as part of a park along the bluff, along with a second WPA project to upgrade everyone in town to a modern, graded gravel road, at minimum.
  • September 1935: WPA approved the sum of $1835 toward the project; mentions flood control
  • January 1937 (Journal) : the falls turned to icicles during a cold snap, were still under construction at the time
  • January 1938 (Journal) : a roundup of great new things around OC, with a photo of the falls and another of the stairs. The article explains that the city was deeply dysfunctional back in 1925, noting that city council meetings drew large public audiences, not out of people being all civic-minded and public-spirited and whatnot, but because the meetings tended to end in a free boxing match between councilmembers. Now, however, things were swimming right along under the modern council-manager form of city government. It mentions the total project cost for the falls came to around $22,500.
  • I've never come across a photo of what the original falls looked like. I'm not saying there aren't any, just that I've never seen one. But I did come across the next best thing in an October 1938 Oregon Journal column. The paper's weekly "In Old Oregon" feature reprinted someone's 1847 sketch of the Oregon City skyline, featuring the town's few scattered buildings at the time, along with the creek tumbling down the bluff. A note along with the feature offered to pay $2.50 for readers' photos from the old days suitable for publication. That's almost $60 in 2025 dollars.
  • A rather gross 1959 sewer incident: The city was busy replacing the pipe carrying Singer Creek thru downtown Oregon City from the base of the falls to the Willamette, and city workers kept bumping into old un-mapped, unrecorded sewer pipes, dumping raw sewage straight into the river.
  • The falls have been illuminated for the holidays on and off over the years, and (for example) they were brightly lit for Christmas 1964. The linked article claims the falls are 90' high overall, which is more than you get just adding up the drops.
  • The city was still busy putting parts of the creek underground in 1967, as part of a larger project to eventually pave part of John Quincy Adams St. The older part of town atop the bluff uses a street naming convention common to US cities of a certain age, where the streets parallel to the Willamette are named for US presidents ordered chronologically extending uphill away from the river, with a slightly odd twist. The order didn't look quite right, so I double-checked a list at the Library of Congress and realized Oregon City had skipped over anyone who became president on the death of his predecessor. And as a result, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, and Andrew Johnson aren't honored with streets of their own, which is probably just as well. It seems there had been a rather vociferous (yet long-forgotten) public debate around whether a Vice President actually becomes President as part of the succession thing, or merely takes over presidential job duties without scoring the upgraded job title, salary, official residence, and so forth, as the constitution was a bit ambiguous on this point. Tyler's presidency overlapped with Oregon City's brief tenure as territorial capitol, so it was a contemporary issue at the time, and locals evidently disagreed with his taking the oath of office and calling himself "President". Once established, they then had to apply the same naming convention as the city expanded away from the river. The naming convention ended with US Grant, sparing the city from having to figure out what to do about presidents with non-consecutive terms (like Grover Cleveland, and that one orange guy), and two Roosevelts, and two Bushes with very similar names, that sort of thing.
  • A 1968 article about the same project primly notes that "[p]resently the creek is not as pure as might be desired", but it was hoped that a future project would connect the neighborhood to the city sewer system instead of feeding directly into the creek.
  • The city didn't light the falls for the holidays at first in 1970, but a small child wrote a sad letter asking the city to please turn them back on, and they did.
  • September 1970, a Journal photo of a city maintenance crew hosing debris out of the falls in preparation for fall
  • 1985 experiment stocking the creek with coho salmon. I think the idea was that the falls look a bit like a fish ladder, and maybe a few salmon out there were athletic and ambitious enough to pull it off, eventually leading to a new subspecies of supersalmon that would hopefully also be delicious.
  • ...but it later turned out that it wasn't an experiment at all, but an attempt to put the baby salmon in a sort of protective custody, after an unexplained (but suspicious) mass fish kill at a Clackamas Community College facility.
  • The current lighting dates to 2012, funded by a $17k Rotary Club grant. The city posted a video of the illuminated falls shortly after they went live. Watching it, I found myself thinking the phrase "vintage YouTube video" about something that was posted 11 years ago.
  • another 2012 article relates one of the city's many ghost stories. Ghost is a small redheaded child who died in a 1913 typhoid epidemic, seen around town as an ungentle reminder that drinking untreated water straight from local streams is not safe. At this point the ghost is probably trying to head off to wherever ghosts go when their work here is done, only to be blocked by a local measles epidemic ghost who says "I used to think I was done here too", and they both swear up a storm at the local antivaxxers.
  • April 2021 article mentioning the falls; I had never heard of them before despite being right next to the elevator

Thursday, September 11, 2025

Chehalem Ridge Nature Park

Here are some photos from a wander around Metro's shiny new Chehalem Ridge Nature Park, in the Chehalem Mountains, the hilly area between the Tualatin and Yamhill Valleys. I probably ought to say up front that although it's generally nice and seems to have a well-designed trail system, outside of a few key viewpoints most of the park does not have those gazillion-dollar views that the name tends to conjure up. And I say that up front because my photos of the place might lead you to believe otherwise, because I liked the scenic viewpoint parts and took lots of photos there.

I gather Metro had wanted to add a regional park somewhere in the Chehalem Mountains area for a very long time, and eventually they came across this former tree farm, and bought it and slowly rehabbed it into a place people might enjoy visiting. It may not have been the absolutely most desirable land in the area, but it had enough acreage, and seemed to have good bones, and it came on the market right when Metro had a pile of cash to spend, so here we are.

The most desirable land was probably not affordable anyway, even for regional governments flush with greenspace bond money. Like areas with views (like along Mountain Top Rd. and Bald Peak Rd, where south-facing McMansions perch above the Yamhill Valley) or quality vineyard land maybe 3+ levels of nested AVAs deep. (For example, the nearby Ribbon Ridge AVA which is inside the larger Chehalem Mountains one, which in turn is one part of the overall Willamette Valley AVA, and in general anything with a designation more specific than "Willamette Valley" is going to cost more, sometimes a lot more.) Note that all of this happened despite local vigilance bordering on paranoia about development proposals -- see, for example, this forum thread from 2010 about a proposed McMansion / hobby farm subdivision somewhere in the Yamhill Valley that was seen as yet another harbinger of Napa-style development doom.

There's an old joke-that-isn't-a-joke among winemakers that the best way to make a small fortune in the wine business is to start with a large fortune. In that spirit, the surest way to afford the very best Chehalem Mountain land is to travel back in time to the 1970s and get a job at Intel in Hillsboro. Claw your way up the corporate ladder from there, and do everything you possibly can to avoid working on anything that isn't an x86 processor. When Intel stock hits $40 in August 2000, cash out your massive pile of stock and stock options, and spend your newfound dot-com gazillions on land before it gets insanely expensive, and somehow outwit all the other time travelers who also read this very blog post and are trying to do the same thing, as well as the others working at cross purposes, like me going back to the same exact spot circa 1800 to hand out vaccines and warn everybody about Lewis and Clark.

Anyway, the Chehalem Ridge Master Plan explains what Metro had in mind when designing the park. One thing I liked here is that the plan added trails to most of the park, which seems like a no-brainer but is not what they did at other recent nature parks, like Newell Creek or Canemah Bluff, where the areas open to visitors are sort of crammed into one corner of the property, making those parks feel weirdly cramped and a bit underwhelming. I am not sure why they do this, since the acquired land is typically not pristine old growth forest full of fragile ecosystems that need to be left untouched. Maybe it's that they can only spend greenspace money on land, and other capital expenditures (and operating costs) come out of the general fund, where they will forever be prioritized a few steps below cute zoo animals.

One grumble I do have about this park, in common with the other places I mentioned, is a feeling that things are a bit... over-curated? I'm still trying to put my finger on it, it's not quite helicopter parenting, exactly, but you'll come across things like trails that are signed as one-way for safety, and lots of railings to be extra sure you stay on the trail. Other trails have themes and plenty of signage, like someone was worried visitors won't get anything out of the experience without it being spoon-fed to them. There's one spot here where a trail is a few steps away from a gravel service road, but they aren't connected, and they even added railings between them, I guess to prevent people from switching themed experiences halfway through. I dunno. I am probably making it sound really bad, but I am not actually mad about what they're doing, exactly; I sort of assume this was all imagineered into being by young idealistic twenty-something staffers, people who landed their dream jobs and are ecstatic about designing new parks and really, really want you to love these places just like they do, and they may go a little overboard about it sometimes.

And if you do find yourself humming It's A Small World involuntarily while visiting a Metro Nature Park, let me suggest visiting one of their Natural Areas instead. These are the other kind of Metro greenspace, and are in many ways the complete opposite of what I just described. You won't find a guidebook or even a simple list of these places anywhere on the Metro website, or -- remarkably -- anywhere else on the internet, although I might create one at some point. For now, your best bet is probably to fire up MetroMap, their GIS system, enable the "Parks and Natural Areas" layer (which is off by default), and then look around for unfamiliar green-shaded areas that don't show up on Google Maps. If you visit one, don't expect any handholding. At all. If you're lucky, there will be a cute little Natural Area sign about the size of a picture postcard welcoming you, or at least confirming you're at the right place. Note that this sign, if there is one, won't always be right at the entrance, however, which can make things a bit interesting when you first arrive. You see, Metro also has this fun policy of leaving any existing signs in place, so if (for example) the previous owner was some sort of crazy-eyed militia nut, you will just have to trust GIS and ignore the previous owner's fake security cameras and hand-painted "Trespassers Will Be Violated" signs and keep going til you see the "Ok, ok, fiiine, you win, welcome to the Natural Area" sign, posted just around the first corner so it can't be seen from the road. Which is pretty hilarious, actually. Though (and I shouldn't have to say this, but I will) it really helps to be absolutely positively sure you're in the right place and haven't mistakenly blundered onto the private property next door, which is still owned by a different crazy-eyed militia nut. Anyway, assuming you pass that initial test, the rest of the Natural Area is pretty much whatever was there before Metro bought it, minus any buildings that could otherwise harbor squatters. Some of the Natural Areas are flat-out amazing, others not so much, your mileage may vary and it's not their problem, there's no implied warranty of merchantability for any particular purpose, etcetera, etcetera. I'm a big Natural Area fan, in case you hadn't noticed. But we'll get around to exploring these places in other posts.

If you look at a Chehalem Ridge trail map, or the doc explaining the trail names, you might notice a very odd detail that they don't explain clearly. The name doc explains that the trail names are a diverse mix: Some are in English, a couple are Spanish, and several are in the local Kalapuya dialect. Which seems like a reasonable and unsurprising thing to do. And then you get to the Mampaɬ Trail and encounter an entirely new letter of the alphabet that you've never seen before. The doc says it's pronounced "muhm-pahl", sort of the way you would with a regular non-curlicued 'L', but doesn't explain the letter any further. (We're also told it's the Tualatin Kalapuya word for 'lakeview', in honor of a nearby former lake that was converted to farmland in the early 20th century). It actually worked really well to just search Google for that single character, which leads directly to the Wikipedia article on "voiceless dental and alveolar lateral fricatives". Evidently this squiggly character is a "voiceless alveolar lateral fricative", and represents a sound that simply doesn't exist in English. And you're seeing it because the present-day convention (at least with Pacific Northwest indigenous languages) is to use International Phonetic Alphabet characters whenever the regular Latin alphabet isn't up to the job, which turns out to be rather often. Another recent example is NE Portland's Kʰunamokwst Park, which is pronounced something like "KAHN-ah-mockst" and is a Chinook wawa word meaning "together".

Of course these pronunciations are meant as "close-enough" approximations for English speakers. If you're wondering how to really pronounce the 'ɬ' -- which would be an essential skill when travelling back to 1800 to warn people, for example -- it turns out that the same sound is also the correct way to pronounce the double-L sound in Welsh, and so there are a few instructional videos on YouTube explaining (in English) how to make this sound. Which I've attempted a few times, and am doing quite poorly at so far. Meanwhile over on Wikipedia we're also told that it's the "Lh" sound in Sindarin (e.g. the River Lhƻn), and "Hl" in Quenya, both Elvish languages from LOTR and the Silmarillion.

Saturday, September 06, 2025

phx ✈️ pdx, september 2025

Next up is the latest set of aerial photos (so far, at least), from another flight from Phoenix back to Portland a few days ago. It was cloudier than the previous installment, so no Vegas photos this time but instead featuring lots of big puffy thunderheads at sunset. It was rather nice, although I did get the "City in the Clouds" theme (from Empire Strikes Back) stuck in my head for a bit.

pdx ✈️ phx, august 2025 (II)

Next up, some photos from a second early-afternoon flight from Portland down to Phoenix. This photoset is smaller than the first one, mostly because I fell asleep for a bit, and everything was just kind of beige and hazy and uninspiring all the way down.

One of the photos right after takeoff is looking across the agricultural part of Sauvie Island, and I think you can see Bell View Point toward the top of the photo. It's a bit of river bank directly across from Kelly Point Park, making it the official mouth of the Willamette River as it joins the Columbia. It's another of those Metro properties that used to be a Multnomah County park until the 1990s, and the reason you haven't seen a blog post about it is that the only way to get to it is by a narrow gravel road marked by large "Private" and "No Trespassing" signs. So I don't think the place has been (legally) accessible by land for several decades on end. Maybe you can get there by kayak or small boat, which might involve cutting across the main shipping channel of the Willamette River without being run over by a ship full of outbound wheat or inbound cars. That hardly seems worth doing, just to visit what seems to be an otherwise-generic bit of riverbank, especially since I don't own a kayak, and the only person I knew who owned a boat ended up selling it for the usual financial reasons, despite all the glamor and attention and whatnot that comes with being that one friend who owns a boat.

phx ✈️ pdx, august 2025

Next set of aerial photos was taken flying from Phoenix back to Portland, leaving around 6pm and getting home late. So there are some photos taken around sunset, and a few taken while flying over Las Vegas. You can instantly tell it's Las Vegas and not some other random city in the desert because The Sphere is easily visible from 40,000 feet or so in the air. Thing is, if you get any semi-decent photos of it and show them to an elderly relative who hasn't heard of The Sphere, they'll ask you what it is and what it's for, and follow up with "But why, though?", and probably your best bet is to just read off what Wikipedia says about it and agree that it doesn't make any sense to you either.

All of that said, the 319 megapixel, 120fps Big Sky camera that was designed to film content for the Sphere looks rather interesting and if they gave me one I would be willing to give it a spin. I'm usually not that interested in fixed-lens video hardware, but I would be willing to make an exception in this particular case.

pdx ✈️ phx, august 2025 (I)

Welp, here's the first in a series of at least four posts tagged 'flying', thanks to a bit of ongoing family medical drama down in Arizona. This isn't the sort of blog where I go into lots of personal details, but as a piece of general advice for everyone, but especially those of the elderly persuasion: If you've been prescribed something for a chronic condition (say, blood thinners, to pick a random example), and it's a bit expensive, and you run into a temporary financial dry spot for a few months, but you have people (say, your successful middle-aged adult children, to pick another random example) who would be more than happy to help you out if only they knew, the correct course of action is not to skip filling that prescription for a while and not tell us, I mean, anybody, and just sort of cross your fingers that it'll probably work out ok in the end. This is not doing anybody any favors, to put it mildly. And after all that, saying how weird it is that your kids are starting to have grey hair, right after causing more of it.

Anyway, this set of aerial photos includes some semi-snowy Cascades, then lots of empty desert, then the rocky hills around Phoenix on a hazy smoggy 115ĀŗF afternoon, which vaguely of remind me of the photos returned by Soviet Venus probes back in the 1980s. Except with endless subdivisions stretching off to the horizon, many of them built around artificial lakes (which you can't swim in, or fish in, or go boating on), I guess just to own the libs or something. I can't explain that or much of anything else about Phoenix, really, including a.) why it exists in the first place, and b.) why nearly 5 million people live there. Ok, people keep telling me it's only incredibly hot for three months of the year and is nice otherwise. But I've only ever experienced it at summer temperatures and have come to suspect it's actually like this year-round and the idea that it's vaguely tolerable sometime in the winter was dreamed up by a few creative real estate speculators preying on people who buy propery sight unseen, and it sort of snowballed from there, so to speak.

Friday, August 15, 2025

Little Zigzag Falls

Here are a few photos of Mt. Hood's Little Zigzag Falls, a short distance off Highway 26 on the way to Government Camp. You follow Highway 26 eastbound toward Government Camp, but hang a left here onto a road that's signed as both "Kiwanis Camp Road" and "Road 39". Then you stay on that road for 2.2 miles, past the Kiwanis camp to the trailhead. The road crosses a bridge and looks like it's going to continue past here, but it really doesn't, and it hasn't in decades, and we'll get to why in a bit. From here, a short, easy, and surprisingly flat hike (trail #795C) takes you to the falls, strolling along next to the burbling Little Zigzag River the whole way. It's not the highest waterfall you'll ever see, or the most challenging trail you'll ever tackle, but it's great. At least I thought it was great. Maybe it was the perfect weather, or the season, or the late afternoon light, or the stars and planets lining up in exactly the right way, or who knows. I didn't take any selfies on the way and mercifully have no evidence of this, but it's possible that I had a goofy grin on my face the whole time, thus looking like a complete idiot, and belated apologies if you had to witness that.

The history bit I mentioned is that this old bumpy road is a piece of the original 1925 Mt. Hood Loop Highway, the predecessor of the modern Highway 26 you took to get here, and back in those days Little Zigzag Falls was one of the new highway's big scenic attractions. The old road was modeled on the recent Columbia River Highway and did not assume you were in any great hurry to get where you were going -- or that your car was capable of tackling steep slopes even if you were in a hurry -- so it wandered around the landscape connecting various scenic and historical highlights. After the bridge here, the old highway doubled back and headed uphill to Laurel Hill, where it's abruptly cut in two by the present-day road, and you can't really see where or how the old route passed through because of how thoroughly ODOT reshaped the land with dynamite. To get to the other side, you have a few options. First, if you have superpowers you can jump across or teleport or punch cars out of the way or whatever. Second, if you're a good sprinter and also an idiot, you could try that and see how it goes. Otherwise, the third option is to backtrack to 26, get on heading east, and then pull off at the tiny parking area for the Laurel Hill historical marker. From there, a short trail takes you uphill to the next fragment of 1925 highway and you can resume exploring for a bit. The main attraction along this stretch is a slope of bare rock where the old highway crosses its predecessor, the 1840s Barlow Road. That road was an especially treacherous stretch of the Oregon Trail, and its operators charged, or tried to charge, ruinous tolls for the privilege of using it. The crossing is right at a point where covered wagons were slowly eased down a near-vertical slope with ropes and pulleys. This might have been yet another way of dying in the old Oregon Trail video game, but I'm not sure I ever got to this point in the game. Usually I chose the water route to end the game instead, and generally ended up drowning at The Dalles, or at Cascade Locks if I was having an especially lucky game. Anyway, past the the Barlow Road bit the old abandoned highway continues uphill in a gentle S curve for a while, before it's cut by Highway 26 again. Somewhere along that segment you can find Yocum Falls, another former highlight of the old road, which is now so obscure there isn't even a trail to it anymore.

Which brings us to the historical timeline part of this post, which (as usual) is a bunch of items from the local library's newspaper database. You'll need a Multnomah County library card if you want the links below to work, but (as usual) I tried to summarize the items so everybody else gets a bit of history too.

  • A June 1913 account in the Oregon Journal of trying and failing to drive to Government Camp because of excessive snow on the road, at a time when it was 85 degrees back in Portland. The article notes that the normally placid Little Zigzag was close bursting its banks due to melting floodwaters. An adjacent, unrelated article noted that the upcoming Rose Festival would feature a motorcycle parade for the very first time that year.
  • Around this time, Portland businessman Henry Wemme bought the old, privately-owned Barlow Road from its previous owners and donated it to the state for free public use. I gather the old road was more of a disused series of wagon ruts than a proper road at this point, and the 1925 road was not really built on top of it, for the most part, so buying it out was probably more to get its owners out of the way early on, before they could really gouge the state for a larger payoff. You might know the name "Wemme" for the sorta-town further west on 26, between Brightwood and Welches, part of the long stretch of highway sprawl that occasionally tries to rebrand as "Mt. Hood Village". Wemme was also the first person in Oregon to own an automobile, a steam-powered 1899 Stanley Locomobile. Wemme died in 1914, and his will left nearly $500k to found "a maternity home or laying-in hospital for unfortunate and wayward girls in the city of Portland, Multnomah County and State of Oregon.", which eventually became the Salvation Army's White Shield Center. This was located in an oddly remote corner of Portland's Forest Park, and was only connected to the outside world by the peculiar Alexandra Avenue Bridge, which is how I know about all this.

    The news article mentions that local businessman George W. Joseph was also involved in the Barlow Road deal; Joseph is best known today as the namesake (and donor) of a state park in the Gorge containing Upper Latourell Falls. As the story goes, Joseph actually had a house or cabin on that property at one point, and an early version of today's Latourell Falls trail started out as part of his daily commute, from home to the Latourell train station.
  • Oregon Journal December 1920 article about surveyors doing their thing in this part of the forest primeval. Most is about the team looking for good homesites for summer cabins, which would somehow play into the routing of the upcoming Mt. Hood Loop Highway. There's a mention of the river & falls as an attraction along the way to Government Camp, which was bound to help move a lot of real estate. This survey work probably led to a lot of the now-famous and very expensive Steiner Cabins that were built around the wider Mt. Hood region.
  • Oregonian bit on the same survey. Mentions what miiiight be today's Pioneer Bridle Trail, which began as an alternative to the block and tackle nonsense down Laurel Hill. This route was built along a ridgeline for better visibility in case of Indian attack, and was later abandoned after that risk diminished due to war and disease.
  • December 1928: Exploring the road to Mt. Hood and winter sports via 1928 Oakland Sedan, with an extended stop at Laurel Hill to visit this half-forgotten historic place while they were in the area. The article asserts that "Zigzag" refers to the switchbacks the Barlow Road was eventually retrofitted with, after the first few years of winches and pulleys and price-gouging fees to use them. And that sounds plausible, I guess. The "Little" part is because this is a tributary of the somewhat larger Zigzag River nearby, which flows into the Sandy River a few miles west of here, and the Sandy joins the Columbia at Troutdale, and so forth. I haven't visited any of these, but the NW Waterfall Survey says the [Big] Zigzag River is home to at least three waterfalls: [Upper] Zigzag Falls, way up above the treeline and the PCT on Mt. Hood, and a Middle and Lower falls downstream from there, and my usual LIDAR-based guessing technique says they're about 125', 110', and 60' high, respectively.
  • July 1929 public notice about an upcoming Mazamas work party to build a connector between the Little Zigzag Trail and the Hidden Lake Trail. The latter starts just down the road, goes to Hidden Lake, and continues uphill from there, eventually connecting to the Pacific Crest Trail as it circumnavigates Mt. Hood. For variety, the other trail off the same road (the Paradise Park Trail) also connects to the PCT and even continues uphill from there for a while. The official Forest Service page for the present-day Hidden Lake Trail admits the lake is really more of a pond, but "is still a pleasant destination". Meanwhile the Forest Service Interactive Visitor Map does not show a connector trail like the article describes, so either they never finished it, or it was abandoned at some point later on.
  • September 1950, Little Zigzag Canyon was mentioned briefly in an article about the multiday loop hike around Mt. Hood, via the Timberline and Skyline Trails. The Skyline Trail was the immediate predecessor to today's Pacific Crest Trail, and the PCT/Timberline loop is still a very popular hike, following more or less the same route.
  • A section of highway through here, either the old one or the new one, I'm not sure which, was officially dubbed the "E. Henry Wemme Forest Corridor" in 1955. I have never seen that name used to describe this area, and have never seen it on any maps or road signs, so maybe everyone just sort of forgot.
  • Typical mentions of the river and its canyon over the years involve lost climbers and hikers; this and the 'big' Zigzag River in the next canyon clockwise from here seem to be where a lot of lost people have ended up, either by hiking straight downhill and hoping to bump into civilization, or, well, just tumbling into one of those river canyons along the way. A June 1981 article on the subject interviews several exasperated forest rangers and search-and-rescue experts, who rattle off long lists of dumb ways people have gotten hurt on the mountain over the years. Like not knowing how to use their climbing tools, or not trusting what their compass is trying to tell them. The article relates this to 1981 pop culture by comparing the large area west/clockwise from Timberline Lodge the "Mt. Hood triangle", by analogy with the Bermuda Triangle.
  • One oddball search result was from August 1987, and the term "little zigzag" described the typical antenna shape of that amazing new modern marvel, the cellular telephone. The phones had launched three years earlier and there were now an estimated 884,000 cellular phone subscribers nationwide, including around 100,000 in just the LA metro area alone. A spokesman for the local cell company hastened to add that the devices were not just for rich and famous celebrities anymore, and they were now becoming popular among busy executives and even "unglamorous" small business owners. Which is not really relevant to our main subject, but it was kind of cute, and most of the photos in this post were taken with a distant descendant of 1987's chonky car phones.