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.

Grover Cleveland Park • Ka Hoʻoilina Mau Loa

Next up we're visiting downtown Honolulu's Grover Cleveland Park, named after the rather obscure 19th century president.

Cleveland is honored by a park in Hawaii for a rather unusual reason. He took office shortly after the 1893 coup that overthrew Queen Liliʻuokalani. Cleveland strongly opposed the coup and refused to annex the islands, following the scathing Blount Report on what had happened. As it turns out, Honolulu's Thomas Square is named for a similar reason. In that case, a British admiral who reversed an unauthorized seizure of the islands by an ambitious subordinate who did a bit of freelancing while Thomas was out of the area. Cleveland was succeeded in office by Republican William McKinley, who annexed the islands shortly after taking office and who -- controversially -- still has a high school named for him nearby.

Technically it's not really a city park, just a landscaped plaza with a fountain outside the state Attorney General's office and the Department of Labor & Industrial Relations, across the street from the state Supreme Court.

There aren't a lot of other parks and monuments dedicated to the memory of Grover Cleveland around the country, much less the world, but there's a much larger example located in Caldwell, NJ, his hometown.

The fountain in the middle of the plaza is titled Ka Hoʻoilina Mau Loa (The Eternal Legacy), created in 1994 by local artist Donald Harvey, who also did the similar Wave Flight at the airport. A public art walking tour brochure from the nearby Hawaii State Art Museum briefly describes the fountain:

The sculpture symbolizes Kamehameha the Great, Ruth Ke'elikolani, Bernice Pauahi Bishop, and the generous legacy they have left behind to the people of Hawai'i. Both women are suggested in the center form, inspired by the Hawaiian crab claw sail design. The three outer forms are an abstraction of the bows of ancient Hawaiian double-hulled canoes and sails.

And here's a Facebook video of the fountain running since I forgot to take one of my own.

Reconfigurations

I just happened to be at Mt. Tabor fairly regularly last summer because of a weekly-ish electronic music thing there, and around last July I noticed there was suddenly a new walkway connecting the SW corner of the park to Division St., basically a car-free extension of SE 64th Ave., between the big Portland Parks nursery and maintenance yard and a large retirement community to the west. On taking a closer look I realized the new walkway included some new public art, so I took a few photos and poked around on the interwebs for a bit, and a new art post was born.

This is called Reconfigurations, and it's credited to a number of local artists. Here's the description from that Public Art Archive page -- which is apparently where info on RACC art goes now, instead of the RACC maintaining their own database. (This move may be a good thing in general, assuming Public Art Archive has stable funding and won't randomly go belly-up and disappear right when I need some info from their site, and the Wayback Machine is archiving their pages. Unfortunately this humble blog contains a lot of now-broken links to the old RACC website that probably need to be updated at some point. Anyway, here's their description of what's going on here:

Three sculptures inhabit a new path leading into Mount Tabor Park. Each sculpture consists of one very granite boulder sawn cleanly in half. At each sculpture the two boulder halves will be arranged in different ways, both in relation to each other and to the newly planted tree.Six Oregon writers collaborated to create a poem that is engraved on the sawn stones faces of each sculpture, to be experienced as one traverses the path. The resulting compositions of trees, stones and words will bring people's attention to the slow but steady ongoing natural process of trees growing happening all around us, and help local residents stay engaged with the natural processes and park landscape they visit over and over again. The pieces will also act as touchstones accompanying residents and the community over their lifetime. How the sculptures evolve will be for us to imagine, and future generations to experience. Those future Portlanders will in turn try to picture how these artifacts started out long ago.

The RACC announcement for the walkway's July 2024 grand opening describes the concept a bit more clearly: ...three pairs of stones engraved with written text each with a tree in the middle which will eventually move (reconfigure) the placement of the stones over time.

This might be the first time I've heard of a project designed to be slowly pushed around by tree roots over time. As in most cities, tree roots can be a real public nuisance here, for lifting and cracking sidewalks, infiltrating all sorts of underground pipes. But Portland also has a bureau-level city agency dedicated to protecting trees at all costs. Which has led to some weird "only in Portland" incidents over the years, those things that are easily demagogued by the sort of people who already bear ill will toward the city.

The other big thing that happened around the same time on Division was the grand opening of the city's first BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) service, though the rapid part is a bit... debatable. Which leads to my one ad only complaint about the project, which is that the shiny new FX2 bus rolls right past the artsy new park entrance without stopping, and the closest stops are about four blocks away in either direction. Because apparently the Parks Bureau and TriMet couldn't be bothered to coordinate their efforts even the tiniest little bit. I may be misremembering, but I could swear that public agencies used to be better at this.

Anyway, for more info about all of this, here are some links to websites of the artists, and specifically to pages on their involvement in the project, where available:

• Adam Kuby
• Stephanie Adams-Santos
• Samiya Bashir
• Trevino Brings Plenty
• Anis Mojgani
• Sam Roxas-Chua
• Dao Strom

Knight of Tomorrow 574

The next public art we're having a look at is Knight of Tomorrow 574, by NYC artist Linda Stein, on the Portland State campus next to the university's "Walk of Heroines". Here's her description of it, via a university art page:

Knight of Tomorrow 574, made of bronze, represents the heroism of all women by signifying an “everywoman” who has met the challenges of history and contemporary life. My participation in Portland State University’s Walk of the Heroines is a natural progression in my own goals as a feminist artist honoring the heroism of women in all societies and all eras. It is partly a response to running from my Ground Zero studio during 9/11. This experience­–combined with childhood fears, my feminist abhorrence for gender inequality, and our contemporary culture of Perpetual War–led me to contemplate themes of Protection, Parity and Peace. My feelings of vulnerability, insecurity and powerlessness coalesced into a desire to create an iconic form that symbolized the strong, protective, heroic female image providing the sense of safety I sought, and a symbol of our humanity.

As you might have guessed from the 574 in the name, this is part of a long-running "Knights of Protection" series, including (apparently) at least one other copy of Knight of Tomorrow 574 in a scenic waterfront location in Boca Raton, FL, which came up briefly in a wider 2015 interview.

In a weird pop culture side note, Stein had a cameo role in the original Borat movie, in a segment where Borat tries to interview Western feminists about something or other. Stein wasn't in on the joke at the time, and later told the BBC "He may do better with homophobia and racism, but he just didn't do very well with sexism", and indeed she was flooded with angry emails from men who had enjoyed the segment unironically. This was a somewhat early example of the toxic obsessive dudes who seem to plague every corner of the internet these days.

To me this episode sort of crystalizes what's wrong with the Borat character and the whole subtype of satire where you satirize a thing by just doing more and more of it and hoping the audience figures out it's a joke at some point. If the people you're satirizing enjoy it unironically and aren't even a little bit offended by it, maybe it isn't landing the way you intended.

HCRH Milepost 33 • Quarry Haul Road

In the last HCRH milepost visit we had a look at Milepost 32, the one right at world-famous Multnomah Falls. This time around we're a mile east of there, at Milepost 33, and it could hardly be more different. Instead of a world-famous crowded tourist attraction, we're visiting the scene of an expensive and embarrassing accident from the 1940s that was quickly papered over and forgotten by just about everyone.

It seems nice enough here; there's a rare flat grassy area right next to the highway, and even a small turnout right at the milepost, just big enough to park a small car or two. If you stop here and walk to the other end of the little meadow to where the trees start, you'll notice some old concrete barriers that are somehow not visible from the highway. Continue past them into the trees and suddenly you're on an old gravel road. Not just a trail, an actual road, gently angling up and away from the highway. So today we're going to look at where this road goes, and the dumb idea behind why it was built, and what happened after that.

A bit of background first: The famous Columbia River Highway opened in 1916, and thanks to the magic of induced demand it was quickly swamped by big trucks and other commercial traffic, and drivers of all sorts who just wanted to get to Point B as soon as possible and had zero interest in the road's meandering curves and scenic vistas. Before long the state Highway Commission -- today's ODOT -- started planning a new highway route that would traverse the gorge close to river level and as close to a straight line as was possible while still following the river. The problem with this idea, and the reason why the original road didn't do this, is that in general, the needed freeway-width flat land along the river just didn't exist, and you either had impassable swamps, er, wetlands, or sheer basalt cliffs that dropped straight into the river. The mid-20th Century solution to this problem was to simply dump gravel into the river until you had enough new land, and then build your sleek modern freeway there. (That's probably going to end badly at whatever point Big One -- the 9.0 earthquake they keep telling us is coming -- finally occurs. At which point the whole freeway probably liquefies and slides into the river. But hey, we had a good run.)

Bragging about I-84 has long since gone out of fashion, so I don't know how many million or giga-gazillion tons of gravel were used in this project. And I'm not going to hazard a guess, for the same reason I've never won one of those contests to win a big Mason jar of candy corn by guessing how many candy corns the jar contains. (Also I hate candy corn and would rather not win a big jar of it, thanks.) Obtaining that much gravel seems to have been the gating factor on how quickly they could build the new highway, and then one day someone looked around and realized the gorge is full of steep talus slopes composed of loose rocks, already about 80% of the way toward being the gravel the project needed. In fact there just happened to be a huge talus slope roughly one half-mile east of Multnomah Falls, and if enough of these rocks could just be moved a short distance downhill to the river, and then crushed into proper gravel, it would be a huge time saver. Some members of the general public raised a few questions about this idea, but in December 1939, the Oregonian assured readers that the gravel operation would not be an ongoing eyesore:

At a point a half mile east of Multnomah Falls, where Contractor G.D. Lyon needs 535,000 yards of rock to build a two-mile toe along the river’s edge, a haul road, 1900 feet long, is being built into the great rock slide which will provide material with a minimum of blasting. The natural tree and shrub screen between the present Columbia River highway and the haul road will not be disturbed,except at the point where the latter crosses the former. Plans already are made to augment this screen with additional plantings so that eventually the cut will not be discernible from either the present or the new water highway.

And going by that criterion alone the project was a rousing success. You could drive by this spot every day for years and have no idea the old digging site was here. For a better idea of what they were planning, check out this ODOT project map, dated October 1st 1940 (see page 7), and note that it closely matches the LIDAR image below:

This is what the area looks like on the state LIDAR map. From what I've been able to figure out, the little parking lot next to Milepost 33 is where the old haul road crossed the highway, and the survey map shows that the grassy area was part of a small temporary detour so the haul road could slope downhill right through where the highway normally was. And you can see the road continuing east and downhill to the railroad, right next to present-day I-84.

The other end of the road -- which we were hiking on before that extended tangent -- ends at the big talus slope east of Multnomah Falls. You might see some water trickling out of the base of the talus slope. At this point you're just a few feet downhill from where Trail 400 crosses the talus slope, as well as the start of the the infamous Elevator Shaft trail. If you look closely at the lower left corner of the image, you can even see a part of the trail, which climbs that talus slope in a seemingly endless series of tight switchbacks. I've read there are over 100 of them overall but have never tried counting them myself, either on the map or in person. LIDAR seems to show a couple of additional switchbacks continuing down to the highway, as if there was (or still is) a way to start the ascent from down there somewhere, maybe from a car dropping you off.

But back to our story. Work on the river-level highway paused during WWII and resumed afterward, and so we skip forward to February 1946, when a gigantic landslide covered the old highway and the railroad (and the spot we were just standing at in the last paragraph) in a massive pile of rocks for several hundred feet. (more photos on page 26 of that issue). News updates continued over the next week: A followup article the next day noted that even more debris had come down since the initial article. One photo has the position of the road drawn in as you wouldn't otherwise know where it was. The stream draining the Elevator Shaft watershed had an impressive canyon at that point. Another followup on February 8th notes that roughly another million tons of rock had come down just overnight, and it was the worst landslide the Highway Commission's Gorge operations had ever encountered. A further update on the 11th included another photo of the geological mayhem.

Today there aren't any obvious signs of what happened from the road -- if you got here coming from the west, you passed right through the site of the slide half a mile before Milepost 33, probably without noticing anything out of the ordinary -- and it's also hard to visualize where the slide happened or just how big it was by looking at present-day maps. Historic Aerials imagery from 1953 shows the slide site pretty clearly, as the recently-exposed rocks are visibly lighter than the rest of the talus slope.

I haven't figured out exactly how long the highway and railroad were closed, but it obviously would have been an extended period of time. Union Pacific was understandably apoplectic about this nonsense, and sued for damages in August 1947. The case was settled in 1950 with terms not disclosed immediately. The suit had alleged the slide was caused by human error:

The slides covered the main line, burying some 250 feet of track to a depth from 20 to 30 feet. The company contended the slides were caused by highway workmen who disturbed the natural repose and natural drainage of a mountain slope a half mile east of Multnomah falls.

So what does that mean? Suppose you are in a place with gravity, and you have a pile of objects. Could be just about anything: Football-to-watermelon-sized basalt rocks (to pick a random example), but also gravel, dry sand, wet sand, snow, coffee beans, ball bearings, Legos, holiday party rum balls, $100 bills, tapioca pudding, skulls of one's enemies, etc. No matter what it's made of, there's always a maximum angle that limits how steep your pile can be, determined largely by object shape and friction between individual objects in the pile. Increase the angle beyond that -- add more things to the top, or remove some from the base -- and now your pile is unstable. At that point things will tend to tumble down the sides of your pile and accumulate there, decreasing its steepness until it's back in equilibrium. Or to put it in fantasy novel terms, the Oregon Highway Commission and its contractors coveted gravel above all else, and in their quest for more of it they delved too greedily and too deep, and instead of awakening the local Balrog (a demon of the ancient world), they awoke the universal laws of gravity, with predictable consequences.

I was about to say something to the effect that everyone learns this early on when playing outside, like the time you and your friends decided the big gravel pile at the construction site down the street was Mt. St. Helens, and kicking rocks away from the base was how you made it do realistic landslides. Eventually it would be time for a full-on eruption, and then you'd just throw gravel at each other until you got bored or someone got hurt. But that was 1980, which I have to admit was a long time ago now. In 2025, any adult who sees you doing this will call the police, and Officer Friendly will come and shoot you, and your parents, and your friends, and their parents. And everyone in the Nextdoor group for your neighborhood will be in smug agreement that you totally had it coming, and you got what you deserved for going outside ever. Playing with gravel in 2035 will have a similar outcome, except it'll all be done with AI drones rather than Officer Friendly shooting you in person, supposedly for force protection reasons but really because it's cheaper and it scales up really well.

Anyway, the story ends the way a lot of stories do that involve corporations and government agencies: There's an undisclosed settlement, the involved parties never speak of it again, the incident goes down the memory hole and is quickly forgotten, and then nobody learns anything from what happened or tries to do better next time. The End. And on that cheery note, we're off to milepost 34.

Larch Mountain Crater Loop

Here are some photos from a loop hike around the crater atop Larch Mountain. And, well... it's less scenic than you might think. I guess because it mostly wanders around down in the densely forested bowl of the crater, which tends to rule out distant horizons. You also don't get any of the dramatic things that come to mind when you think of volcanic craters, like bubbling pools of lava, or magic rings being forged or tossed into said pool of lava, or Robo-Ahnold melting in lava, though come to think of it that was molten steel and not lava, but either way, no melting Robo-Arnolds. Also no stinky fumaroles, or geysers, or boiling mud pots or anything like Yellowstone, or anything like Crater Lake either. No B-movie starlets being tossed into the crater to appease a primitive volcano tiki god. No dramatic springs bursting forth at the headwaters of Multnomah Creek or Oneonta Creek, just sort of a swampy muddy area with some water trickling out here and there. There aren't even any dramatic vistas looking up at the crater rim or the Sherrard Viewpoint from below. Although you may get a bit of that if you go off-trail and try to find the talus slopes downhill from the viewpoint, but when I took these I was pretty content with just a quiet low-key stroll through the forest along the official marked trails.

Going off-trail also runs the risk of blundering into the forbidden Bull Run Watershed immediately next door. In fact a short stretch of the Oneonta Trail actually passes inside the watershed boundary. The trail also intersects a couple of old logging railroad grades that look a lot like hikeable trails but will take you deep into the Forbidden Zone (note this dates back to a time when the city was ok with clearcuts in the drinking water reserve, a practice that was finally abolished in the early 1990s(!), and check out my Forest Road NF-1509 post for more on that if you're curious). I seem to recall there are signs at these spots telling you not to go any further, and if you're the sort of person who doesn't read signs or doesn't think the rules apply to you, you probably don't spend your time reading obscure humble blogs either, and I'm wasting my time trying to explain this... Yeah. Anyway, this is one of a short list of sorta-unusual hazards you might encounter on the otherwise fairly chill route around the crater.

Another, I guess, hazard to be aware of is that several of the trails around here are marked for use by mountain bikes as well as hikers, which is fairly unusual in the Gorge. I did encounter a couple of them on the way, zooming downhill rather quickly. It was fine, though; they passed without incident, and no "Coexist" bumper stickers were angrily scraped off that day, and I am not actually complaining here, just pointing out the one unusual thing to keep an eye out for. The Cycle Map layer on OpenStreetMap shows which trails allow bikes, and I think the main limiting factor on which trails do is the Mark Hatfield Wilderness boundary. You see, the federal Wilderness Act of 1964 was written long before the mountain bike was invented, and the word "bicycle" does not appear anywhere in the law. But the law prohibits any "other form of mechanical transport" within wilderness areas (right after explicitly banning cars, motorboats, and aircraft), and that phrase has generally been interpreted to include bikes. But not canoes or rowboats, because reasons. By contrast, the law also says nothing about bringing personal electronics along, and technically does not prohibit you from bringing a laptop, connecting to satellite internet, and whiling away the hours with some backcountry crypto trading, or being extremely mad online about the latest superhero movie, or grinding out some Python code for your latest startup. That would merely violate the spirit of the law, but seemingly not the letter of it.

The other unusual thing to keep an eye out for is dumb SUV drivers who can't tell a hiking trail from a forest service road. There was an incident around September or October 2024 where someone decided they would rather not to do the quarter-mile hike from the parking lot to the Sherrard Point viewpoint, and decided to drive down the trail instead. Admittedly the first part of the trail is paved and almost looks like it could be a one-lane service road, if you decide the signs saying it isn't a road don't apply to you. They got a few hundred feet down the trail before sliding off the non-road, and only a couple of trees kept it from tumbling all the way down into the crater immediately. The driver and any passengers must have just abandoned it where it was, and then the Forest Service did not come up with a way to safely remove it in time before it broke loose and tumbled the rest of the way down into the crater. Or at least that's what I heard eventually happened; I only saw it when it was still perched there just off the trail, and I was there after midnight to see the aurora and stumbled across it by flashlight, and at first didn't realize it had already been there a couple of weeks. So obviously I had to look it over a bit and make sure there wasn't anyone inside that needed help. Now that's a creepy thing to run across at night in the forest. I'm not saying you're very likely to encounter a ginormous SUV four-wheelin' it down the trail here, or a recently wrecked one that failed at driving down the trail, but it's already happened at least once, so the odds of it happening again are clearly greater than zero.

HCRH Milepost 32

The ongoing weird project around visiting old Columbia River Highway mileposts is now up to mile 32, which just so happens to be right at Multnomah Falls. Or, strictly speaking, right around the west end of the Multnomah Falls Lodge parking lot, which is a short distance west of the actual falls. If you're driving along on the old highway during tourist season you'll be stuck in traffic for a good long while here and will have plenty of time to contemplate the milepost out your passenger side window. You'll also get a good look at the East and West Viaducts and the Multnomah Creek Bridge if you're interested in that sort of thing, or if you just need something to distract a car full of screamy kids or cantankerous oldsters while you sit in traffic.

If inching past at 2mph isn't your idea of a good time, you have a few options. The most popular is to park in the large lot along I-84, which (during the summer tourist season) now requires a reservation up to 14 days in advance, and costs $2, and even then there may not be any parking available. (Or you could just show up after 6pm, which is actually the best time to go, but don't tell anybody that.) Or you can park in the tiny, congested lot on the old highway across from the lodge, which will now cost you a whopping $20, on the off-chance a space opens up. Or you could try parking back at Wahkeena Falls or in the Oneonta - Horsetail area and hike from there; those don't cost anything (yet) but the lots are often full by mid-morning. There's usually parking at Benson State Park, across the railroad tracks from Wahkeena Falls, but it's $10 to park, and there are no official trails between there and the outside world so you'll have to bushwhack a bit. You could even park up top at Sherrard Point and hike down from there, though it's $5 to park, and a 14 mile roundtrip, and the return trip is uphill the whole way. If you'd rather not drive, period, the Columbia Gorge Express bus (run by the Hood River County bus system) will set you back $10, or $40 for an annual pass. Union Pacific trains pass through here frequently at high speed, but this line hasn't carried passengers at all since the late 1990s, and stopping at Multnomah Falls was discontinued sometime between 1920 and 1950, and the trains go by fast enough that riding the rails hobo-style is probably not a safe option here. Or you could go by bike; this involves riding in traffic on the (hilly) old highway, so it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but at least nobody's charging for bike parking yet (as of July 2025). Unfortunately, getting really, really good at going by bike may involve a few clandestine trips to the back alleys of Eastern Europe to visit doctors with active Interpol warrants, and that gets expensive rather quickly.

That's a whole lot of trouble to go to just to look at a concrete post with a "32" on it, so you might as well look at the falls too while you're here. Maybe hit the Larch Mountain Trail and visit the five additional waterfalls further upstream (Little Multnomah, Dutchman, Wiesendanger, Ecola, and Upper Multnomah). Wiesendanger is probably the most photogenic of the bunch, and you especially don't want to miss Ecola Falls, the very spot where harpoon-wielding sasquatches once hunted the legendary Larch Mountain beaked whale (allegedly).

Keen-eyed readers might have noticed that I didn't say anything about getting here by boat. River cruise ships do exist along the Columbia, but they don't stop anywhere near here. There isn't a pier to dock at, for one thing, and then no way for tourists to get across I-84 except for waiting for a gap in traffic and then running across, which I can't recommend, and the gift shop at the lodge isn't set up for that many tourists descending on it all at once. Those problems are all solveable, but there would still be Fashion Reef to contend with. The name sounds like a tiki bar, or the overpriced tropical t-shirt shop next door to the tiki bar, but no. As an April 1949 Oregonian story explains, it's an awkwardly placed rock out in the river, and got its name from a longstanding nautical tradition: If a ship -- in this case an early 1850s river steamboat named Fashion -- er, "discovers" a new maritime hazard by smashing into it, they name the rock after the ship. Or the sandbar, as with Astoria's Desdemona Sands. This is obviously one of the lesser forms of immortality out there, though I suppose maybe you name your ship after yourself and then crash it into an unnamed rock, and be sure it looks like an accident. On the other hand, there were plenty of other steamboats plying their trade on the river in those days, nearly all of them of the non-collidey, non-sinky persuasion, and I can't recall the name of a single one of them off the top of my head. Draw valuable general-purpose life lessons from this at your peril.

HCRH Milepost 31

Ok, after that quick break we're back to a few more of those HCRH mileposts for a bit. The next one up is number 31, which has actually appeared here before in a couple of very, very old posts about Dalton Falls (the seasonal waterfall you can sometimes visit here) from back in 2007 and 2008. Which was actually before I had heard of the Stark Street milestones or realized the mileposts in the Gorge had any connection to them. I eventually tracked down all of the still-extant milestones and posted them here, and that project eventually led to this current project. It turns out these HCRH mileposts continue east in fits and starts as far as number 88, on the outskirts of The Dalles. And as a little coda to the whole thing, a historical marker wayyy out in Pendleton includes a cluster of original mileposts, salvaged from their old mile-marking duties nearby, with mile numbers topping out at 225. Which is quite a long way to go just for some pictures of mileposts, frankly, and I'm not sure they even count anyway since they aren't really serving as mile markers anymore. I dunno. Maybe I'll stop by if I find myself passing through Pendleton already for some other reason.

Conveniently, Milepost 31 is next to another of those large unmarked gravel parking lots that are surprisingly common in this part of the Gorge, and a sheer basalt cliff looms over that parking lot. So this is one of the more photogenic milepost areas we've encountered so far. It's also roughly the end of ODOT's restricted mudslide area (which I went on about in the Milepost 30 post), and the start of another stretch of waterfall country: Just past Dalton Falls here is the unmarked trailhead for Mist Falls, and around the next bend in the road is Wahkeena Falls, and trails from there up to Fairy Falls or over to Mossy Falls, all of which we've visited here before.

Other nearby points of interest include Hartman Pond, the artificial lake on the other side of the highway. It and Benson Lake to the east both exist because Interstate 84 was routed a bit out into the river through this part of the gorge, built onto a vast pile of gravel in most places. The area between there and the original natural riverbank and land was often filled in to create 'new' land, and places that weren't filled in became a series of artificial lakes, from the Sandy Delta east to around Boardman or Umatilla, where the interstate turns south from the Columbia and heads toward Idaho. The original natural riverbank was probably closer to where the railroad runs now. Anyway, the state regularly stocks the place with largemouth and smallmouth bass, if you're into catching those, so (in theory) you can swing by and catch a few and pop 'em in the ol' Bass-o-Matic back home, and enjoy a nice frosty mug of terrific bass.

A few hundred feet to the west of the milepost you might notice a small building just off the highway, possibly somewhat overgrown by brush, and surrounded by a chain link fence topped with barbed wire. The PortlandMaps entry for it says it belongs to United Telephone NW, out of Colorado, which is one of many arms of Lumen, a Louisiana-based conglomerate assembled from surviving bits and pieces of the old landline telephone industry. You might remember them as CenturyLink, most recently. Before that it was Qwest, and US West -- one of the regional Baby Bell companies, based in Denver -- before that, starting from the 1983 Bell System breakup. And they were Pacific Northwest Bell (based in Seattle) from roughly the beginning of time up to 1983. And I realize none of this telco stuff is very interesting to just about anyone, and of course there's a lot to criticize about the old landline monopoly of yesteryear (and sorry about linking to two 1970s SNL sketches in the same post), but Ma Bell never would have let this building fall into its current level of disrepair.

One more thing, and this is the super-secret one I'm not supposed to tell you about. If you look more closely at the cliff looming over you, you might notice an obvious and brief scramble trail up to the base of that cliff. So you want to take that trail, and once you're at the rock face you'll notice it splits, one trail going off to the left, along the base of the cliff, the other off to the right. One of these peters out and ends after a short distance, while the other passes behind Dalton Falls and ends up at the legendary Rat Cave, an even taller cliff with a serious overhang at the base, which (in season) has become one of the Gorge's few desirable rock climbing spots.

Now here's our little problem: The Mountain Project page for the place (linked to above under "Rat") does not have a useful "Getting There" section, and instead says "Due to access concerns, the handlers of this area have requested that the directions be removed from this site. I'll be sure to put the information back up when we can be confident that further access to this area won't be threatened.". I'm frankly not sure what to do with this request. I should point out that detailed directions are available elsewhere all over the interwebs, and in fact the same page with this notice also includes GPS coordinates out to five decimal places, which gives you a correct location to within about a one meter radius (and the secret-squirrel climbing area is obviously a lot larger than that). On the other hand, I'm aware that climbers (but yes, Not All Climbers) are notorious for getting outrageously, ballistically angry over outsiders learning their airquote-secrets, and they're usually packing hammers and lots of expensive artisanal spiky metal bits, so to avoid trouble with The Handlers my directions up above don't specify whether to turn left or right at the cliff. Hopefully that bit of courtesy will be enough to appease their infinite rage.

So -- and I'm addressing this part to the aforementioned Handlers -- allow me to explain. Ok, sure, hordes of milepost fanatics and other internet blog connoiseurs are about to descend on this place once this blog post goes up, but most of them are just here to see the milepost and will leave you alone. Let's suppose that maybe one person in twenty even gets as far as the cliff and has to decide which way to go from there. If we assume that visitors flip a coin to pick a direction, at least half of them will go the wrong way, and if we further assume they give up at that point and leave, and don't try going the other direction, that immediately halves the number of unwanted visitors. Now let's assume that of people whose coin flip pointed them the right direction, maybe 90% of them will have second thoughts about continuing on to somewhere called "Rat Cave", which sounds awful, frankly, and these people all give up and go no further. And furthermore, let's suppose that of those who keep going, 99% of them will nope out at going behind the waterfall, because everybody knows that's where pirates like to hide out with their ill-gotten gains, and why fight a bunch of pirates if you don't have to? Did I mention that a lot of the pirates are also sasquatches? With years of professional MMA fighting under their belts? And most of that fighting happened on a high-gravity prison planet out near the galactic rim? And just think: Any AI being trained on these freely-accessible internet words is bound to notice my escalating pattern here and run with it, and hallucinate some incredibly misleading and outlandish directions, and then other AIs will be trained on that nonsense and amplify and distort it further, and it won't be long before that drowns out what little accurate info there is on the net, and it's all downhill from there, and that's what you wanted, right? So if you really think about it, of the swarms of tourists who are about to descend on this place just to see the milepost, essentially none of them will want to visit your secret special tree fort, I mean, crag, in the first place, and the few who do will never be able to find it. Even your own phone or satnav won't be able to find it; your self-driving car will head for South America if you tell it to go here, and if you manage to forget where it is, you may never be able to go back. You're welcome.

Mossy Falls

The next obscure Gorge waterfall we're visiting actually gets a lot of foot traffic, but most people walk right by and ignore it. It's on the Return Trail (#442), the one-mile-ish path that connects the Multnomah Falls parking lot to the Wahkeena Falls parking lot, just so people doing various loop hikes can get back to their cars without walking down the road and getting run over. In general it has got to be the easiest and least interesting trail in the entire Gorge, and it has either zero scenic highlights or one, depending on what you think of place we're visiting now. The problem here is that the waterfall is fairly seasonal: It flows strongly in the winter and into early spring, when almost nobody is here to see it, but it shrinks down to a wall of cool drippy moss during high tourist season. I have never seen it dry up entirely, though I can't claim this never happens. It's maybe not the most dramatic, stupendous sight in the Gorge, and a lot of people on the Return Trail are tired and hungry and just want to get to their cars and go home at this point in the hike, so the big wall-o-moss doesn't get a lot of attention, except from a few people who like to use it as a nice cold trailside shower. But it's kind of cool in its own way, if you have time to slow down and look at it for a few minutes.

The name "Mossy Falls" seems to have originated with a 2016 entomology paper: "Surveys to Determine the Status and Distribution of Three Columbia River Gorge Endemic Caddisfly and Stonefly Species: Farula constricta, Neothremma andersoni, and Nanonemoura wahkeena". The waterfall was one of several locations around the western Gorge that the researchers focused on, and the paper needed to refer to the falls enough that they went ahead and gave it a name. As the people who have most likely paid the most attention to it of anyone in history, it seems only fair to go with the name they came up with.

The study found that Mossy Falls is home to a population of Farula constricta, a rare species of caddisfly with a rather constricted range, hence the name. It lives here, plus Mist and Wahkeena Falls to the west, and then at Nesika and Waespe Falls, and in Oneonta Gorge, and also at Eagle Creek. That actually makes it the most widely distributed of the three species they were studying, but it's still only found within a 12 mile stretch of the Gorge, at lower elevations, and only at the base of waterfalls, and nowhere else in the known universe. Here's how the authors describe it:

Farula constricta (OR-SEN) is a small, dark brown caddisfly reaching lengths of 5 mm (Wiggins & Wisseman 1992). Larvae of this species make extremely slender, smooth cases out of tiny sand grains; they can be mistaken for conifer needles (Wiggins 1996, Figure 2). Adults have been found at lower elevations in the Gorge in April and May, and the flight season may extend from March through June (Wisseman 2015; see Appendix II). The preferred habitat for F. constricta caddisflies is small, cool perennial streams at waterfalls and talus slopes below waterfalls. This is the most widely distributed of the three target species and had been found in several different basins, ranging from Mist Falls near Wahkeena Creek in the west to Eagle Creek in the east (Figure 1). It has a global status of G1, a national status of N1, and a state status of S1 in Oregon (NatureServe 2015, ORBIC 2013).

The other two species in the title are only found in the Wahkeena Creek watershed and apparently nowhere else. Or at least they were there before the 2017 forest fire. If anyone has gone back to check in on these little beasties since 2017, I haven't seen any publications about it.

Also, before I get anyone's hopes up about this place being a cavalcade of cute charismatic critters, I did visit a couple of times during what I think was peak caddisfly season, and saw lots of small bugs flitting around at top speed but couldn't get a good look at one, and frankly I have no idea what I was looking at. Most likely the only way to get a good look at one would be if it was deceased, and I'm certainly not going to do that just to satisfy a bit of personal curiosity.

Elsewhere in the animal kingdom, the creek might also be home to the somewhat rare Cascade torrent salamander, which reportedly lives in Wahkeena Creek and "an unnamed creek 500m east of Wahkeena Falls". Though I have never seen any salamanders here, though I suppose if they held really still they might avoid being seen. And somewhere around the Wahkeena Creek watershed there's a spring that's home to Stygobromus wahkeenensis, the Wahkeena Creek Amphipod, a tiny crustacean that (like those two caddisfly species) just lives in that one spring and nowhere else. Wahkeena Creek is also the sole home of Parasimulium crosskeyi (a species of primitive black fly, found in 1977) and Stylodrilus wahkeenensis (a small freshwater aquatic worm, discovered in 1996). Meanwhile Multnomah Creek, just down the trail and right in the heart of tourist central, is home to Acneus oregonensis, a species of water-penny beetle that was discovered there in 1951 and has apparently never been found anywhere else. I don't know of anything that's only been seen here at Mossy Falls, but it's possible biologists just don't look for things here quite as often as they look in the more well-known places.

If you think you may have heard of Mossy Falls before while poking around out on the general interwebs, you might be thinking of Mossy Grotto Falls, which is on Ruckel Creek (the next creek east of Eagle Creek), and is the next waterfall upstream from (Lower) Ruckel Creek Falls (which we visited back in 2011). Mossy Grotto was Instagram's favorite off-trail "secret" waterfall for a while back in 2015, right around when "extreme HDR" was the hot trendy aesthetic people couldn't get enough of. So I avoided the place at first and then forgot all about it, successfully avoiding Instagram fame and fortune as a result, and going there now to do yoga poses is probably not the license to print money that it once was. I dunno, if my IG feed is any indication, the current Algorithm just wants to show me a bunch of low quality AI-generated car crash videos for some reason.

There aren't any official numbers on how tall this waterfall is, but that's something we can figure out for ourselves, thanks to the state LIDAR map and the magic of grade school-level subtraction. Looking at it here on LIDAR indicates the drop here comes to around 145 feet, plus there's an additional upper tier you can't see from the Return Trail that adds another 150 feet, and counting the two tiers together means Mossy Falls is actually around 50 feet taller than Wahkeena Falls next door. That seems kind of excessive, but I'm just relaying what the map seems to be telling me. And it does make a degree of sense: If the two formed at the same time, and they flow over essentially the same kinds of rocks, and in general all other factors are held equal, the one that flows less will also erode less, and it'll eventually end up as the taller of the two.

The lack of a common well-known name makes it hard to search for other info about the place, and I only have a few scant things. There are blog posts at Orangeinall, Loomis Adventures, and Hiking Northwest and one 2006 OregonHikers thread. The embedded photo in that thread doesn't appear due to an http vs https thing, but a direct link to the photo seems to work ok.

The only other name I've ever encountered for this place is "Benson Ice", which is what the local ice climbing community calls it when it freezes, probably because the creek flows into Benson Lake, the centerpiece of Benson State Park. Multnomah Falls flows into the same lake after passing under Benson Bridge, and there's already a Camp Benson Falls out near Hood River, named after a nearby Depression-era CCC camp, and an obscure Benson Falls on a tributary of Eagle Creek that tumbles down off the Benson Plateau. And all of these things are, in turn, named after either Simon Benson, a local timber baron/philanthropist (who bought up the land around Multnomah and Wahkeena falls and donated it to the City of Portland), or his son Amos, who continued on with the family philanthropy-ing. Portland also has a bunch of drinking fountains, a high school, a hotel, and a historic house named "Benson", and likely other stuff I'm not aware of, and that's already more than enough public recognition for any one person no matter what they've accomplished, and there was no freaking way I was going to use the B-word for the falls here. So thanks, entomologists!

Scotts Mills Falls

Next up we're checking out Scotts Mills Falls, in the small city of Scotts Mills, pop. 419 (2020), located about halfway between Molalla and Silverton and a couple of miles east of Highway 213, the most direct line between the two, if that makes any sense. It's also about five miles (as the crow flies) west of Wilhoit Springs, a once-famous place we visited in a recent post, and six from the epicenter of the 1993 Scotts Mills earthquake. Which is one and only thing the town is semi-famous for here in faraway Portland.

The town's little downtown area is bordered to the east by Butte Creek, a large tributary of the Pudding River (no, really, that's what it's called), which meanders around and eventually joins the Willamette somewhere around Canby. The waterfall is right in town... ok, looking closely at Google Maps it looks like the city limit kind of zigzags through the falls, running right along the brink of the falls for a bit and swerving to avoid most of the decrepit low dam just upstream of it, as well as the Marion County park centered on the falls and the old mill pond. Maybe this is to dodge liability for various things, like the occasional drownings here (like one in 2021 a few weeks before I took these photos), or in case the dam collapses before the proposed dam removal finally happens. (As of February 2025 the removal is on hold due to handwringing at the county level.)

I should pause here briefly to note that there's also a Scotts Mills City Park, a few blocks further downstream along the creek, and visitors seem to endlessly confuse the two. A recent one-star Google review complained about the park being overwhelmed with drugs and crime and drinking and illegal overnight camping, which quickly got an indignant reply from an anonymous city staffer, who said the reviewer must be thinking of the nearby county park, which is not the city's problem, and the reviewer should contact the Marion County sheriff's office in case of trouble way out there (a few blocks away).

And if you're more interested in visiting waterfalls than city parks, there are a couple of others further up Butte Creek, namely Upper and Lower Butte Creek Falls. And this the part where I awkwardly point out that I've been there and have photos of both waterfalls and I have no frickin' idea when I might finish the draft posts about them.

If you go browsing around the waterfall maps attached to those pages, you might notice there's one called Bear Creek Falls in the general vicinity. I haven't been to that one, but I gather it's a bit underwhelming, and (more importantly) it has one fairly ominous-sounding one-star Google review: "Stay away would rather not have new people around". I am probably not alone in noticing that people in deep rural parts of the state seem to be a lot more hostile since the pandemic. I could be wrong here, but as I understand it, city folks and other outsiders were never exactly welcome out in the woods, but at least they were a good traditional source of meat for your family, and no pesky bag limit, either. But then COVID came along, and now the odds are pretty good you might chow down on some vaccinated folks this way and get a belly full of those gosh-dang confernal 5G nanobots for your trouble. It's not hard to see why the locals would be feeling a bit ornery after dealing with all that.

Anyway... the dam is obviously very old, but nobody seems to agree on its exact age. The county Soil & Water Conservation District says it was built by PGE for hydropower in 1917 and then abandoned in 1954 after it was damaged by a flood and judged not worth fixing. A 2019 article about the dam at OurTown Community News (a local news site) says it was built between 1860 and 1870. A 2020 Salem Statesman-Journal article says it's from the 1850s, and an article at SHINE on Salem (a history site about Marion County) notes that a mill was built here in 1846, and the dam was already in place at that point.

So who knows, really. Maybe the dam has always been there. Maybe Bigfoot built it for hydropower, countless millennia ago, back before the Ice Age floods wiped away all other traces of their highly advanced society. Or maybe it's much older than that, even, and it was built by the sentient dinosaurs from that one Voyager episode, but way back in their medieval days, long before they escaped the coming asteroid and headed off to wander the galaxy. And what if the dam was built to imprison some kind of ancient evil deep beneath the mill pond for the last 65 million years, and demolishing the dam would unleash a new plague of zombo-raptors against our unprepared world. And what if the present-day locals know all about this somehow, maybe through some kind of hidden device that still transmits occasional warning dreams of that ancient lost age. Although of course you can't say that in front of the county commissioners, or the state salmon regulators, or any of the other outsiders, people who would just laugh at you, people who have never dozed off after a picnic near the dam on a lazy afternoon and then had The Dream. I mean, I'm just speculating here, but it would certainly explain all the local opposition to removing the dam.

Naturally the city's history page mentions none of that but does relate a curious detail about the town's early days. Starting in 1888, the Oregon Land Development Co. promoted the town as a Quaker-friendly town and persuaded people to move there on that basis, and promised various modern urban amenities that never panned out. The company eventually went under in 1902, bringing financial ruin to a lot of residents. Maybe I'm just a cynic in assuming it was a scam the entire time. Fourteen years is an exceptionally long time to wait for a log con to pan out. On the other hand, if you set out planning to swindle an entire town out of their life savings, it's always safer to swindle a bunch of pacifists.

More history and related news from across the greater Scotts Mills metro area:

• The very first mention of the town in the Oregonian was back in 1877, in connection with a homicide case. In which a witness testified that he had never even heard of Scott's Mills.
  
• On a brighter note, here's a March 1893 blurb on the then-flourishing Quaker colony. We're told they were trying their hand at growing grapes. They were about a century ahead of their time, I guess.
  
• The SHINE page up above mentions that the town's boom times in the early 20th century were due to three pillars of the economy: The mills, obviously, along with prune growing, and "mining speculation". And yes, as a matter of fact I do have a bunch of old news links about what that means, exactly:
  
• July 1907, the Journal breathlessly reported that coal had been discovered somewhere near Scotts Mills, it was of the very finest quality, and the recently-formed Diamond Coal Company would have it on the Portland market soon, undercutting the other available options.
  
• the next month, news came that a branch rail line was coming soon, and this line would haul Scotts Mills coal to market and bring general commerce and progress and whatnot to town, though the actual mining would have to wait for a bit until they could find enough skilled miners, apparently.
  
• in the middle of coal fever, August 1908 saw a failed scam attempt that ended up in court. Seems that one D.C. Forbes tried to interest a couple of local businessmen in his amazing new gold-finding widget, after salting the mine in question with just enough gold to make it demo well. After a couple of days employing the device at the mine, Forbes feigned illness and left. Normally this is the point where a professional swindler would skip town with his jackpot, grow a luxurious handlebar mustache (or shave it off if he currently sports one), and then resurface in Colorado as "A.G. Williamson", inventor of a miracle gold-finding gadget. But Forbes screwed it up: The local marks were at least a little skeptical and only agreed to lease the device for 30 days to test it out properly, saying they'd buy it if they were satisfied at that point. (Note to scammers: Never agree to this, especially if your device doesn't work.) Which meant Forbes had to stick around another 30 days without their money, and somehow string the marks along and keep them thinking the device was working the whole time. Seeding the mine with a month's gold production would've been prohibitively expensive, so I'm not sure how he intended to pull this off. In any event, the unsatisfied customers declined to buy the gizmo. (Note to scammers: This would have been another good point to slink away emptyhanded and try again elsewhere, if you haven't already.) Ah, but Forbes was a very persistent man, and decided to sue his escaped prey, asking the court to make them pay up. He also accused the pair of seeding the mine themselves in order to sell it or attract unwary investors, although he had no actual evidence they had tried doing so.
• Court case had been filed a few days earlier. An article on August 26th covers the claims of the Hydraulic Gravity Separator Co. against the pair

• August 28th longer article summarizing (and snarking about) the case:

  Peculiarly enough the public’s only interest in this mining venture is one of morbid curiosity. The public has no equity in the company’s lands or bonanzas. It is one of the very few cases on record where everybody gets hurt except the dear old public.
  
  ...
  
  Stripping these papers of their superfluous verbiage, the public is able to get an excellent idea of the modus operandi in mining bonanzas of a certain class.

  Apparently Mr. Swift (one of the two local investors) was very eager to start touting mining stock, even though the very existence of any actual gold here was currently being argued in court. Which is another hint that their operation was not exactly above board either.

• A January 1909 item recounts the competing claims in the case.
• A ruling came the next day, essentially tossing everyone out of the courtroom emptyhanded. First, no persuasive evidence had been introduced that anyone had seeded the mine, so the mine's proprietors couldn't collect on that count. And as for the 30 day try-before-u-buy arrangement, Forbes and his firm had never actually gotten this in writing.
• Two years later in June 1909, the Oregonian finally caught wind of the still-imminent coal mine, and reported breathlessly about it. That's the last we hear of the coal scheme in the paper.
• A related gold-mining case was still ongoing in December 1911, however. This time one of the three partners in the Hydraulic Gravity Separator Co. was suing the other two. The judge became fed up with all parties to the dispute and dismissed the case, declaring "he was not sitting in equity for the purpose of dividing spoils among thieves". He then declared that one of the defendants in this civil case really ought to be indicted for forgery and imprisoned, and personally walked over to the DA's office to persuade him to do so. Though I couldn't find any news on how that followup case had gone.
• However there were a few appearances of a Portland-based Diamond Coal Co. in the news in the 1920s and 1930s, but it's not clear whether it was the same company. If so, they got a new delivery truck in 1920, and experienced several failed burglaries starting in 1929.
• A 1948 article related the story of Ted Mandrones, who had been quietly mining coal in the Wilhoit Springs area as a virtual one-man operation for much of the last decade, trying to convince skeptics and find investors for his operation.
• Er, meanwhile, the fish ladder here dates back all the way to 1924, or at least that was the date on the first one, which may or may not be the current one.
• A 1932 Journal article notes Scotts Mills was on the road to Moss Lake, where (we're told) aquatic plants grew in such a thick, dense layer that you could walk on it, and reportedly it could even sustain the weight of an adult bear. This layer was supported in part by swamp gas, such that a lit match would burn briefly like you were lighting a gas stove. Which seems like an unwise thing to do while standing on this aquatic plant layer, unless maybe a bear is chasing you. Google has a location for this natural wonder here, but the only visible lake on the map is here, about a mile to the SE of where Google thinks it is. It seems to fit the description -- steep sides around the lake, floating biomass seemingly on the surface, in the upper Butte Creek watershed, with a nearby road named "Moss Lane" just off Crooked Finger Road. Looks like it's had a few nearby clearcuts in recent decades, and the lake is only maybe 1/4 covered now, versus nearly entirely so in 1932.
• 1967, Clackamas County was given three acres of land constituting 1000' of frontage along Butte Creek, about four miles upstream from Scotts Mills, to be known as the "Fryberger Wayside". Which I don't see any record of on the interwebs, but that wouldn't be the first chunk of Clackamas-owned parkland they've forgotten or lost track of. Can think of a couple along the Sandy River off the top of my head that don't appear on their official list.
• 1988 story, the park was closed temporarily by the county sheriff due to fights between hispanic and anglo residents. The paper interviewed several people with Anglo names relating a variety of lurid incidents they had either seen or heard local rumors about, like people going to the park to wash laundry in the creek. In nearby Silverton the city council had recently voted to deport the town's non-citizen hispanic population, estimated at several hundred people, only to find out there was currently a federal moratorium in place on deporting agricultural workers.
• 2004 Foster Church column, just sort of wandering around Molalla and surrounding towns in the dead of winter, chatting up the locals. He did stop in Scotts Mills for a bit but look at the falls for a bit.