HCRH Milepost 24

After curving around the Vista House in the last post, the HCRH heads south a bit and then bends again, avoiding a steep, deep ravine. The creek tumbling down through that ravine turns out to be the same one that forms Palisade Falls , and shortly after we cross that creek we encounter Milepost 24, and for the next couple of miles there is -- officially -- nothing much to see or do until you get to Latourell Falls. Which is technically not true, but it's fair to say this mile of the road wasn't designed with the thought that visitors would want to stop and look around here. Here's what I've got for sights and attractions and whatnot:

• First off, it looks like the milepost has been knocked over since I took these photos, joining what seems to be a trend. A common thread among the ones this has happened to is that they're on the outside of a left-hand curve or bend in the road, so maybe they're getting sideswiped by people trying to drift their large rear wheel drive cars around corners but not being very good at it.
• Second, you might notice a few signs saying "No Trespassing" or "Area Closed" along this stretch of the road, which were posted maybe 15-20 years ago after a high-profile hiking accident, and I don't recall off the top of my head whether it was a fatal accident or just a very technical and expensive rescue operation, but either way it led the state to declare a permanent closure here. I haven't been able to find a map spelling out exactly what area is closed, but at minimum it includes the ravine leading to Palisade Falls, and the narrow ridge on the other side of it. Beyond that it's anyone's guess. That said, that was a long time ago now, possibly even before this humble blog existed, and memories fade and law enforcement priorities shift over time, and I don't know how strictly this is enforced here and now in the mid-2020s, and you may very well see people out on this ridge if you look east from the Vista House on a busy touristy day. So just to be really clear, anything you read or see here on this humble (and risk-averse) blog is strictly informational only, and I am not encouraging you try any of this stuff, and I don't want to be responsible for any consequential life choices you might make. Are we all clear on that? Good.
• After the curve I mentioned above, and just past the straight bit where the milepost is, or was, the highway hangs a right, and the wide spot on the opposite side of the road is a good place to park if you're visiting the Milepost and maybe also if you're peeking down into the ravine. I say that because of a Google Review I ran across that says it's for Palisade Falls, but the pushpin for it marks a spot somewhere down in that ravine. The reviewer called it a small waterfall and said it's only visible from a short trail off one of the turnouts along the road here, and possibly other places, and includes a photo that's clearly not of the same Palisade Falls that we visited that one time. And checking the state LIDAR map there are a few spots that look like possible waterfalls, the tallest of which (here) might be up to 100' high. So yeah, we may be looking at an Upper Palisade Falls down there. And possibly a Middle one below that, and maybe an Uppermost one above it, depending on how you want to split the hairs. At this point I need to point out that I didn't notice any trails like the one she talks about, and I don't even know which turnout is the one she stopped at or exactly where her photos were taken from, and there are a couple of other turnouts further back, at or before the first bend in the road.
• A short distance to the east is the Forbidden Trailhead, and the trail that begins there starts with a steep scramble uphill straight from the highway, and right at the top of the scramble is a big "No Trespassing" sign that continues "Danger - Steep Drop-Off!" As for what's beyond that sign, someone has posted a panoramic photo to Google Maps here, and you can see that the trail ends up on top of a narrow, exposed, treeless, and very picturesque ridge, just wide enough for the trail and a token line of grass on either side of it. There are a lot of places in the Gorge that look like this and aren't closed to all entry. The difference here, I gather, is that it's just too close to the Vista House, and if you're out on the ridge part you can be seen quite easily from there, and merely seeing you will put the idea into the heads of clueless people who have no idea what they're doing, and reckless people who don't care, and then whatever happens to them somehow becomes your fault, depending on what sort of mood the local media is in and whether the idiots' next of kin have good personal injury lawyers, and maybe you can start to see why I include all these tedious disclaimers and also why the Apple license agreement has more pages than a typical fantasy novel, with entire chapters in all caps seemingly at random, and every few pages the EULA denies once again that the product works at all for any particular purpose, and it most definitely cannot do what the manual claims it does, and insists over and over that the product has zero "merchantability", whatever that is. Whatever it is, I'm fairly sure I have even less of it than Apple does, so consider yourselves (and your heirs, assignees, and creditors) hereby duly notified thereof, etc.
• There isn't a lot that I know about the ridge or the Forbidden Trail beyond what I've told you already. It was undoubtedly given a melodramatic sorta-mythological name once, back in the days when they were handing those out, probably by the same people who wanted Crown Point to be called "Thor's Crown". Given the shape of the ridge, they could have reasonably called it something like "Odin's Razor" or "Poseidon's Diving Board", but any name it may have once had has long been forgotten, and that makes it hard to search for. Terms like "ridge east of Crown Point" or "looking east from Vista House" have scared up a few old photos of it, at least. This one from 1932 seems to clearly show the trail out onto the ridge, just short of a century ago. The trail is less obvious in some 1963 snapshots in this Oregonhikers thread but they do show the ridge looking bare and treeless, like today. An undated stereo photo from not long after the road opened in 1916 lets you check it out in 3D. And a more recent photo shows a small group of people hanging out atop the ridge, for scale.
• Continuing east from, er, Odin's Razor, it looks like there's another unnamed creek and ravine on the east side of the blade, and what looks like a 40' waterfall somewhere down in that ravine
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• and then another ridge beyond that. I don't see a trail or a No Trespassing sign on this one, and I'm not sure if you're visible from the Vista House at all if you wander out on it, and I've never seen or seen photos of people doing that.
• Another source of governmental anxiety about the public wandering around in this area comes to us from Chapter 3 of Multnomah County's 2016 Community Wildfire Protection Plan:
  
  

  September 24th, 2005 Vista House Fire was ignited .5 miles east of the Vista House , just off the Historical Columbia River Highway about 1 mile south of I-84. The exact cause of fire ignition is unknown, but since it started down a non-designated trail the most probable source is a recreationist. The fire grew to be about 10 acres in size, with Corbett RFPD providing initial attack.

  
  
  The really peculiar thing is that I can't seem to find any other references to this fire, other than this anecdote that keeps getting passed around as they update the fire plan every few years. No other references. At all. State wildfire records don't mention it, maybe because 10 acres is very small by wildfire standards. I also haven't found any local news records about it, and this was a bit over a decade past the 1991 fire that threatened the Multnomah Falls Lodge, so you'd think anything that seemed to threaten the Vista House would've been a major headline. And in aerial photos I don't see anything that looks a 10 acre wildfire burn in the area. So yeah, I really don't know what to make of this.
• After those two ravines and two ridges the road just descends gently toward the next milepost, and if there are any further points of interest along the way they're apparently so subtle and obscure that even *I* can't find them.
• Switching briefly to things that only exist on paper, Milestone 24 is also right around the point where the proposed but unbuilt County Road 788 (map) would have joined the present-day HCRH route. 788 was a 1912 proposal for a new road between Crown Point and the town of Latourell, similar to the present-day road in most respects, but different in a couple of places. First, it would have split from Larch Mt. Road several block east of where the HCRH does, skipping Crown Point entirely and heading downhill from a point near Milepost 24, though of course Milepost 24 would have been somewhere else if they'd built this version of the road. Second, at the point where the highway has the famous figure-eight loops, 788 would have headed downhill with no switchbacks at about a 10% grade (which was still a serious upgrade over the then-current road.) And third, the road would have continued downhill and through the middle of Latourell. The reader will not be surprised to learn this proposal was backed by commercial interests in Latourell (including several people named 'Latourelle'), and opposed by backers of the Thor's Heights subdivision atop Crown Point. The Crown Point side of the argument seems to have won out; not only did the eventual highway provide multiple access points to the premium view lots of Thor's Heights, it also bypassed the town of Latourell entirely, such that it's down to a handful of old houses now instead of sprawling along the highway and out to the river like it easily could have done.