HCRH Milepost 23

Next up we're at HCRH Milepost 23, at the intersection of the old highway with Larch Mountain Road. At this point the highway veers off to the left and vaguely downhill, heading to the Vista House, while Larch Mountain Road veers off to the right and starts climbing right off the bat. At one point not so long ago I might have gone off on a tangent here about whether this spot is where the "real" Gorge starts, but I'm going to pass this time -- it's one of those arguments where you spend the first hour defining what "real" means, and you can define it to mean anything and get whatever result you want, and that can be fun if you're debating with friends over beers and nobody's taking it too seriously. And I'll have you know that I come off as a reasonably normal and well-adjusted human being in person, and friends and even coworkers have never witnessed me chasing internet rabbit holes all the way down. But I digress, so let's skip ahead to the attractions and points of interest and places of note.

Nearby Attractions, and Points of Interest,
and Places and Things of Note, roughly ordered West to East:

• Before you get to Milepost, you obviously have to stop at Portland Womens Forum, the little state park where you stop for 30 seconds and take a quick photo of the Vista House. I don't think this practice is even for good luck or anything; you just sort of have to do it anyway in the name of tradition, no matter how many photos you already have of the Vista House from the exact same location. The light and the weather conditions do vary a bit, and I guess if you keep at it you'll end up collecting the whole set of those conditions eventually, so there's that. And right behind the famous viewpoint is a gated gravel road. There are no signs telling you what it's for or where it goes, but this is the old wagon road down to the railroad tracks and almost to Rooster Rock (except for I-84 in the way), and more importantly it's part of the secret path to Palisade Falls.
• Immediately east of the viewpoint is a stretch of road known as the Galaxy Note 20 Memorial Highway, due to an unfortunate yet spectacular incident back in December 2023, as I explained on the 'gram here.
• Out-of-town visitors: At some point on this journey you might decide you love the look of columnar basalt (which you'll see at a couple of future stops on this lil' tour) and want it to be part of your domestic environment. But -- record scratch -- you hate the cold, wet weather here (which is understandable, quite honestly), and have zero interest in moving here permanently. Never fear, there are other ways to live your dream. One of these would be to turn right at Knieriem Rd. and go hit up the Howard Canyon Quarry, a couple of miles south and outside of the official protected scenic area. They specialize in ornamental basalt columns and will happily sell you literal tons of the stuff. You could just set the columns up around the house, or out in the yard somewhere, maybe as part of a nice realistic water feature. For the rich Texans out there, you can tell your friends and neighbors that you shot a real Northwest waterfall while you were here and had it taxidermied up real nice.
  
  However: If you want to make the really big bucks, have your basalt shipped to Florida instead -- any old vacant lot in Florida will do -- and charge admission and tell everyone it's the ruins of a temple from Atlantis, 100% built by the ancient aliens from TV. Most people -- or at any rate enough people -- will believe you and automatically buy whatever snake oil you feel like selling, because Florida, and soon you'll have an army of true believers at your command... right up until the first moment they get bored, and then you've lost them. So the secret is just to keep the escalating PR spectacles coming as long as you can, and then flip the place to some ambitious sucker investor just before you run out of ideas. Couple of free starter ideas to get you going: 1. Lady Esmerelda, the Fortune-Telling Alligator, specializing in horoscopes and lottery numbers, and really generic advice for the lovelorn. 2. Fake a UFO sighting with some cheap weather balloons. These days if you stage it well enough the Air Force will freak out and shoot it down right over your Jacksonville Temple of Atlantis, and hordes of tourists will descend on your tourist trap, but somehow you were ready for this onslaught with a whole warehouse full of "And all I got was this lousy T-shirt" T-shirts. Those two ideas should be enough to get you started, and you can thank me later.
• Just shy of the milepost and off to your right, you might notice an open-sided steel cube, a couple of feet on each side, balanced on one corner atop a black-painted metal post. Some of the cube's edges are painted red, others white, and a couple of them are blue with white stars. If you look closely, there's a small wooden cross lying inside the cube. Older street view images show it standing up vertically from the 'base' corner, inside the cube, so it must have fallen over fairly recently. I am a bit frustrated to report I cannot find any info at all about this thing -- specificially who created it and why. Frustrating because I could swear I once read a story about it in some local media outlet, maybe Willamette Week or the Tribune, but neither has searchable archives online and I only vaguely remember the story, or I only think I remember it and I have this completely wrong. Two competing maybe-memories are saying the backstory is either a.) it was added just before the Scenic Area Act went into effect in 1986 and was grandfathered in, or b.) it was added not long after the law took effect, but so far the feds have shied away from enforcing the usual rules and regulations because of that little wood cross in the cube, since the Supreme Court would jump at any opportunity to strike down the whole law over someone's little wood cross and generally privilege religious stuff over all other things. I still have no idea what the cube stands for though, since cubes don't really appear in mainstream Christian iconography, or in traditional USA patriotic imagery for that matter. I dunno, maybe someone caught wind of the Pythagoreans and their weird obsession with the dodecahedron, and figured they ought to claim at least one regular polyhedron for Jesus before somebody else claims them all for their made-up false religion. And I admit that isn't a very good theory even by my usual standards.
• You might notice that the photos above show another small cross and sort of diorama next to the milepost. This is not a roadside attraction or a scenic highlight or even a historical marker, exactly. I thought I should explain briefly, though, for any visitors from overseas who might encounter it or another like it and don't know what it is. This is a little roadside memorial, and these usually honor a person or people who died in a car accident at this spot. They aren't official in any way, and are built and maintained by friends or relatives, pretty much for as long as people continue taking care of it. I haven't checked yet, but there are probably strict but largely unenforced laws on the books in Oregon limiting the size and duration and so forth of roadside memorials, because it's hard to imagine the state legislature passing up a chance to invent a new misdemeanor. I recall first seeing roadside memorials in Georgia and South Carolina in the mid-1990s and first seeing them in the Northwest in the early 2000s.
• Since the milepost marks the turnoff for Larch Mountain Road, Milepost 23 is the closest milepost for everything up that direction, starting with the famous
• View Point Inn, as seen in the first Twilight movie, specifically the prom scene. Also from the olden days of the old highway, but mostly the sparkly vampire movie, let's be honest here. For a little reality check, the place's Yelp reviews from before the fire were all over the map. We're told the current new owners (as of January 2025) have big plans and are going to fix up and reopen the place, for real this time. So we'll see how that turns out.
• If you were to turn left at the once and fugure sparkly vampire hotel and continue along Columbia Avenue, you'll see that there's a small residential neighborhood back there, and the road extends north to the Vista House, though that end is gated off to deter tourists. This area was actually platted out as a subdivision called "Thor's Heights" way back in 1913, and then scaled back in 1917 after (I assume) prospective homebuyers came to realize what the weather was like here most of the year.
• Continuing on the Larch Mountain side trip, there are a lot of closed roads up there -- mostly old logging roads -- that can kind of double as trails, at least if you aren't too picky about where you're going. I spent a lot of time exploring this area during peak Covid as a way to get out and get some steps in my legs without encountering any other human beings whatsoever. And I realize this list might be ruining a bunch of prime secret spots just before the H5N1 bird flu mutates and sweeps the world and causes another lockdown wave, and that wouldn't be a great outcome, but hey, there's always the coast range to explore. So in that spirit, here are a few explorable Forest Service roads, and some BLM and even Multnomah County roads too since we're in the area anyway.
• Also the trails at Donohue Creek, Buck Creek, and Pepper Mountain -- though to be honest two of those three are also old logging roads.
• And then there's the famous (but still not famous enough) Sherrard Viewpoint at the uppermost tippy-top of Multnomah County's hometown favorite shield volcano. Which turns out to be an excellent place to view the Aurora Boralis, on the rare occasions it deigns to visit us.
• Backtracking all the way back to the intersection and then hanging a left at the milepost, there are a couple of turnouts along this narrow cliffside stretch of the old highway. First up is a spot with a couple of large, raised concrete disks, which turn out to be the tops of old water tanks, formerly the water supply to the Vista House. I don't know how deep they go or if they're currently used for anything. If not, I have an idea. The dumb idea I already regret proposing is to remove the concrete tops of these tanks, and turn them into large public hot tubs with a nice view. Probably need some kind of shuttle bus since there's nowhere to park here, and things like better guardrails to arrange, but honestly I'd like to stay focused on the big picture for once and let the detail folks figure that stuff out. It would be amazing on a chilly drizzly afternoon toward the tail end of fall foliage season, and I can already tell that keeping drains clear of fallen leaves that time of year is going to be a mess, just as an example.
• The other turnout you'll see is the Bird's Nest overlook, a small viewpoint with the usual Gorge-style stone railing plus some actual seating, if you feel like lingering around to watch the sunset. The surprising thing is that this was just a gravelly wide spot in the road until 1995, when ODOT designed and built it in the style of the old highway.
• And just like that, ta-daaa, we're at the Vista House, which hopefully requires no introduction because this post is quite long enough already. It has always seemed like there ought to be more to the place than there is; in a recent Instagram post I suggested it ought to have a secret level below the lowest one we know about, ideally home to a fabulous Art Deco speakeasy and jazz club that the authorities never got around to busting, which remains secret to the present day because it's tradition at this point, and also because letting tourists in would ruin it. Anyway, poking around looking for secret doors is probably a waste of time, but be sure to have a stroll along the sidewalk as it circles around the Vista House, and then check out my Crown Point viaduct post to see what's under that sidewalk (spoiler: not solid rock). Or you could look at the post first, but where's the fun in that?