Tilikum Light

In the recent Sonic Dish post here, I mentioned that it was a sort of companion piece to Tilikum Light, the nightly lightshow on the Tilikum Crossing bridge. Which is what this post is about. TriMet's Orange Line Art Guide describes it this way:

"Tilikum Light: An Illuminating Conversation between a River and a Bridge", by Douglas Hollis and the late Anna Valentina Murch,takes real time data from the Willamette River and translates it into colorful lighting on the cables and piers of Tilikum Crossing. Below the bridge deck, curved abutment walls are activated by localized sound and the same programmed light as above.

Because TriMet is really a bunch of engineers and not artists at heart, the agency did a rather detailed blog post explaining how it all works, and crediting digital artist Morgan Barnard for this part of the project. To summarize what's going on briefly, there are a number of USGS and NOAA sensors in the river just downstream at the Morrison Bridge, and the current values drive various aspects of the lights' behavior. So here are some links to the raw sensor data, along with what part of the show each of them kinda-sorta controls:

• The river temperature drives the light color. Warmer river, warmer lights, and so forth. The average temperature while I'm writing this is in the low 50s (Fahrenheit obvs), which I assume leads to mostly blues and greens. Which is not as cold as the Sandy usually is, but anything under 60F feels cold and is rapid hypothermia territory for humans, and anything under 70F will feel chilly. Temperature ranges are different for salmon, unsurprisingly: Mid-50s to mid-60s is ideal; high 60s are stressful, and temperatures in the 70s quickly become fatal.
• The lights form a pattern that appears to move across the bridge, and this is controlled by the tides. Again, as measured at the Morrison Bridge. Yes, we do get tides here, believe it or not, even though we're around 100 river miles inland; the graph at that link shows the river level rises and falls by about 3 feet over a tide cycle. It just happens slowly enough that you don't really notice it, or at least I've never noticed it. But now you can just look at the bridge and get a rough idea of what's going on: When the tide is coming in, the lights move toward the center of the bridge. When it's going out, the light pattern moves toward the ends of the bridge. And the higher (or lower) the tide is, the faster the pattern seems to move. So keep an eye out for upcoming "king tide" events if you want to make a good video of the bridge lights.
• The river velocity drives how fast the colors cycle. Like the other measurements, this fluctuates with the tides and right now is hitting a maximum of around 1 foot per second, or 0.68 mph. Meanwhile the Columbia (as measured somewhere near the Interstate Bridge, just upriver of where the Willamette merges in) is moving about three times as fast, with a total water volume over eight times as high. The most interesting bit on the Willamette graph is that at high tide the velocity sometimes drops briefly below zero, slightly into negative territory, so if you happen to be fishing or kayaking when that happens you might notice yourself being carried slightly upriver for a bit.
• The river level controls how "contrasty" the lights are, meaning the lower the river is, the more uniform the colors are. The post doesn't say anything about the bridge having a "flood warning" mode -- maybe having it flash red if the river level is over a critical point or is predicted to. That seems like a bit of an oversight seeing as a lot of people here still remember the 1996 floods. But I suppose if the bridge lights are the only operational source of flood info, there are probably much larger problems going on for the city to deal with.

One interesting detail is that TriMet is contractually obligated to always run the bridge lights as described above, meaning the agency can't switch it to a solid color for the current disease awareness month, or the colors of a national flag to show support after some misfortune has befallen the place, or whatever fancy happens to strike Multnomah County commissioners at the moment. This seems increasingly wise after the county mishandled its response to the Israel vs. Gaza war, first going with blue-and-white lights for solidarity with Israel, and then hurriedly switching to all-white for world peace after a public outcry, a response that satisfied precisely nobody. I imagine the black stripe on the Palestinian flag made for some awkward conversations around the county bridge division as it dawned on them that they couldn't light the bridge in Palestinian colors even if they wanted to.

I am not a lawyer, and I am especially not an art lawyer, and maybe contracts like what TriMet made with the artists are completely routine. But Murch may have had a specific reason to get something in writing about the work going up and staying up. Namely, she had previously designed a lighting scheme for the city's aerial tram tower, with solid colors that (in theory) rotate monthly. I would kind of like to go get some photos of it at night over a few months to give some idea of what it's like, and I've tried to do this a couple of times. But every time I've checked on it, it's always just dark, and come to think of it I'm not sure I've actually seen it in operation for quite some time now. Maybe that's just bad luck on my part, and I just happen to look at times when it's not operating, by pure coincidence. Or maybe it keeps really unusual hours and only comes on after zero-dark-thirty, or it's only lit for half an hour at dusk every other Thursday. Or perhaps someone has to turn it on by hand every night and they don't always remember or can't be bothered. Or it's just out of order a lot, waiting on mildly obsolete spare parts to be shipped from an obscure supplier in some obscure Balkan country. Or who knows, maybe aliens are real, and in their culture the shape of the tram tower, when lit at night in certain colors, is considered unspeakably obscene, and they're all much too embarrassed about it to explain why in any detail, but there's no way they're going to share their advanced technology with us if we keep shoving that... that... thing... in their faces.

Anyway, TriMet does seem to be allowed to turn off the bridge lightshow late in the evening, so I've noticed, and it's been out of order due to Software Reasons at least once, with TriMet blandly calling it a "network issue". Which could be anything, even somebody at TriMet HQ opening a sketchy email attachment. And we won't know because the bridge lights don't have sufficient resolution to display a ransomware message, as funny as that would be.

Sonic Dish

[Quick program note here, it occurred to me that a steady diet of nothing but HCRH Milepost posts might be getting a little, I dunno, monotonous? And maybe I ought take do a quick break from that and finish a few Draft posts that look ready to go seek their fortune on the wild interwebs. So maybe we'll do some public art posts first, then maybe a waterfall hike or two before we pick back up with the milepost nerditude.]

Next up we're having a peek at Sonic Dish, the parabolic disco-tastic shiny thing under the Tilikum Crossing Bridge, by artists Anna Valentina Murch and Doug Hollis. It's sort of embedded into the bridge, and TriMet's Orange Line public art guide describes it as "Concave discs in bridge abutment walls amplify sound and reflect the same light program as on the bridge above.". The light program mentioned there is Tilikum Light, the ever-changing colors of the bridge at night, as pre-programmed by the same artists as Sonic Dish. The art guide describes Tilikum Light as "Programmable lighting on cable stays and piers changes color and motion depending on the natural conditions of the Willamette River." I haven't checked under the bridge at night to see whether the sonic dish reflects the bridge lights in an interesting way, but I kind of doubt it does much of that, seeing as the illuminated part is directly above the dish but with the whole deck of the bridge in the way. Pretty sure you'd need lights under the bridge aimed at the dish for that to happen. I dunno, maybe it was originally supposed to have lights but lost them to budget cuts and someone forgot to update the blurb. I know that happens in the software business all the time, but maybe artists are more meticulous about documentation than we are. Honestly that wouldn't really surprise me.

I did an ad-hoc test on a sunny summer day, in the late afternoon so it was receiving direct sunlight, and it did seem to concentrate light and heat in an area in front of the dish, but not all focused to a single point, as evidenced by my not catching on fire during the experiment. The dish is made of a bunch of little flat metallic tiles with a sort of semi-matte finish, and I'm not sure how to determine whether they're in even a very rough parabola shape, so this may be the best it's capable of. I mean, if there were any possible conditions under which it could be Portland's answer to the Vdara Death Ray -- rudely igniting passing cyclists and geese, and detonating unwary speedboats out on the river -- I think we would have heard about it by now. Still, when it comes to the micro-genre of under-bridge acoustic art, I think this comes out ahead of Echo Gate under the Morrison Bridge, which sort of references the fact that it's quite noisy under there, but doesn't really try to do anything with all that noise.

The brand-spanking-new bridge featured in a 2015 Pedalpalooza group bike ride event, a 'Grease' sing-along bike ride. Which is one of those inexplicable things that made perfect sense back in the innocent pre-pandemic, pre-Trump days of Peak Portlandia, back when living here was nothing but golden carefree days of swimming and frolicing in the sparkly pure Willamette River for hours, followed by free shows by incredibly obscure local bands that nobody on Earth has ever heard of, and then $1 tacos from the hot new 24/7 Greenlandic-Zimbabwean fusion cart, paired with PBR tallboys for 10 cents each. Of course the art had already been vandalized at least once before the bridge even opened, but the general consensus at the time was that being annoyed by graffitti was the mark of an unsophisticated normie, and eventually the, ah, guerrilla street artists behind it would most likely graduate to making whimsical whatzits for the next MAX line, or at least to making semi-edgy art gallery stuff for the First Thursday circuit.

Back in 2011 TriMet canceled another sonic art proposal, which would've played a Simon and Garfunkel song when cyclists rode over the bridge, thanks to finely tuned grooves that would have been imprinted on the path. You wouldn't think this would be expensive, and the article doesn't explain why it would have been so expensive, but from what little I know of the music industry I'm guessing the studio lawyers saw a high-profile licensing deal and got so greedy they tanked the whole proposal (and naturally Paul and Art would not have seen a penny of any money that changed hands). Maybe a bit more flexibility on which song and whose song to use would have helped make this happen. I have to imagine a lot of local musicians would've loved to have their song imprinted on the new bridge, or even write something new just for the bridge, exploring what it's really capable of as a musical instrument. And if that was just too indie for TriMet management, I actually had the perfect idea in mind, if only the agency's transit art folks had thought to call me for advice. The key thing is to tell the pointy-haired bosses you just finagled a great music deal for the bridge, but absolutely do not let anyone try it out before the bridge opens and all the local dignitaries have a big awkward ceremonial bike ride over it, and only then do they realize they just funded the world's most elaborate cover of a randomly selected 1980s pop song from the UK. You can go ahead and click that perfectly innocent link right there in the previous sentence. It's fine, probably.

HCRH Milepost 30

A mile east of the Angels Rest trailhead, we find ourselves at HCRH Milepost 30, um, because number 29 was right there next to the trailhead parking lot. Ok, I was trying to change up the intro a little this time, maybe make it sound more like a bona-fide tourist destination this time around. This stretch of the road doesn't really have any major points of interest, honestly. But I haven't let that stop me before, and there are a few things in the area that can be interesting if you really set your mind to it, so let's have the usual look around:

• A short distance before the milepost, Dalton Creek passes under the highway in a pipe. No swanky bridge or anything. You probably won't notice it. But it's the creek you might have seen in your big Milepost 29 adventure (if you had one) if you did the Angels Rest Trail and caught a glimpse of Foxglove Falls, where the very same Dalton Creek plunges down through a ravine east of the main viewpoint. You can't see Foxglove Falls from down here, but if you were up there earler and saw the falls and wondered where the creek goes after that, now you know.
• Dalton Creek continues downhill on the other side of the highway, and if you're inclined to keep following it that direction you can backtrack from the milepost a bit and look for a single-lane gravel Forest Service road angling off to the north and downhill. This little road has the rather ominous name of "Old Boneyard Road". I went there just because of the name, and found that (as usual) there's nothing spooky or interesting down there. (Spoiler: Mostly just a mud bog next to the railroad.) On the other hand I think I got a pretty good Halloween blog post out of it anyway, so there's that. Immediately west of there is an old ODOT rock quarry, and beyond that it's the east end of the Bridal Veil / Coopey Falls metro area, where the locals are uniformly sick and tired of your tourist bullshit and everyone else's too and have put up signs a few to that effect. Also a bunch of nuns live at the nearby convent, and past all of that you're back at Milepost 29, which we've covered already.
• The bend in the road immediately past the milepost is the closest the old highway gets to Dalton Point, where Dalton Creek finally joins the Columbia, after a trip under I-84 through another pipe. However it's still way over on the far side of the freeway and the railroad and you can't get there directly from here, and come to think of it I'm not sure you could ever get there directly from here before the freeway went in. Instead, you'll have to backtrack a mile to Bridal Veil; get on I-84 westbound (since there isn't an eastbound ramp at Bridal Veil, because reasons); get off at Rooster Rock; quickly hang a U turn before the pay station; go over the overpass instead and get on I-84 eastbound from there; continue to the Multnomah Falls exit, turn around there, and get back on I-84 westbound, and be sure to take the Dalton Point exit when you see it, because you'll have to do most of that loop again if you miss it the first time. Note that if the Multnomah lot is full and the gate's closed, you'll have to drive another four miles to the Ainsworth exit to get turned around, then another four back from there, and you risk seeing Milepost 36 out of order if you do that, with untold consequences. (Untold because I can't think of any, but still.)
• While you're over there zipping back and forth on I-84 to eventually get to Dalton Point, you might notice a rock formation right about here that looks a fair bit like the one from The Lion King, the spot where sweet baby Simba gets dangled over a cliff for the cheering crowds to the musical stylings of Elton John. Or, if there was a real rock somewhere that the movie rock was a cartoon version of, the rock here would probably look a lot like that other real rock, if that makes any sense. A few months ago this was a real place, approved and listed on Google Maps and everything. But at some point since then they decided to delete the map entry. I could swear there were other internet pages pointing at the map entry but now I can't seem to find any of those either. So I dunno, maybe Disney caught wind of this and sent their top lawyers after Google and whoever added the map entry. Maybe they're working on a Lion King rock attraction for various Disney theme parks, a spot where visitors can dangle their babies and pets over the brink of a high cliff, and then buy an oversized photo print of them doing that, and disney sees the rock here as a potential competitor. Maybe I'm just imagining all this; if the company had really been involved in the map entry vanishing, I imagine they would have insisted on demolishing the rock too, to be absolutely sure the same idea never occurs to anyone else ever again, thus threatening their many valuable copyrights, trademarks, patents, and trade secrets.
• Continuing east from the milepost we soon run across the mangled steel gate for Backstrand Road, another old forest service road, previously someone's long driveway, and a road that takes you almost but not quite all the way to the former Camp Helfrich, a long-abandoned YMCA summer camp that operated back in the 1950s and 60s, about which I can find basically nothing online. No photos, no boomers on Facebook waxing nostalgic about the distant summers of their youth, zilch, nada. Try as I might, I couldn't find a way into the site of the camp itself through the dense underbrush. So I just sort of assume there's nothing left to see there, and there was never anything spooky or weird about the place. The other possibility, of course, is that there's no available info because the local summer camp slasher was unusually efficient, and chainsawed everyone who ever set foot there or even knew it existed. It's not the most likely explanation, I grant you that, but I saw enough movies on this general theme back in the 1980s that I don't feel like we can rule it out entirely.
• And further east is a big 70 acre chunk of land owned by ODOT and currently marked as a No Trespassing area. When you see a news alert about the old highway being closed again by a massive mudslide, the odds are pretty good that it happened somewhere around here, second only to the Warrendale-Dodson area, which we get to visit around milepost 36. The last big road closure here happened in back in December 2020, when little Mosquito Springs Creek (which I gather is ODOT's pet name for the creek that made the whole mess) dumped tons of mud and rocks on the road and closed it until late spring, and it seems like ever since then they've been back there every summer with earth moving equipment tearing things up and hauling dirt away and working on some kind of landslide mitigation structures to hopefully persuade the next winter's mud to behave itself for a change. That's my understanding, anyway. I haven't seen much in the way of public outreach on this project and I don't know what exactly they're trying to do up there. Maybe there was a press release that I missed, or maybe they aren't sure it's going to hold and don't want to tempt fate by claiming to have fixed it for real this time, I don't know.
• If you drive by this area on I-84 in the wet season, maybe while trying to get to Dalton Point like I described above, and look at the upper cliffs through here (protip: have someone else drive while you do this) you'll see a number of very tall and thin seasonal waterfalls up there. None of them have common names, there aren't any trails that would take you to see them up close, they all dry up in the summer tourist season, and in the wet season they're a big contributor to the aforementioned mudslide problem. The closest thing to a catalog of what's up there is a Wyeast Blog post from 2020, written in the short window of time between the Eagle Creek Fire and the pandemic. The fire led to a state aerial survey of the burned area, and in areas like this the underlying geology was suddenly a lot more visible than before the fire. The author counted around seven waterfalls just along this stretch of the road, and his post includes the state aerial photos for most of them. He even had a go at naming some of them, though I'm not sure which one corresponds to the one on Mosquito Springs Creek, probably either "Chalice Falls", or "Lower Lucifer Falls". In any case, that post is probably the closest look that you or I will ever get of them, unless maybe you have a friend who owns a helicopter, like in Magnum P.I., in which case you're probably too busy solving mysteries and so forth. And if I just accidentally convinced you to rush out and buy a helicopter: I have always heard that helicopters are a lot like boats, in that it's much better to have a friend with a helicopter than to own one yourself.
• It's not that I'm against the idea of naming those waterfalls; it's just that if you don't want tourists wandering around looking for them and taking photos for the 'Gram and getting in the way and needing to be rescued all the time, it might be good to pick some names that sound a bit more, I dunno, offputting. "Mosquito Springs" is a really good start. If it was up to me, I'd be inclined to name the whole closed area something like "Quicksand Acres", ok, "Hot Boiling Quicksand Acres". As for waterfalls, there's already a "Mosquito Falls" somewhere high up in the Cascades west of the Three Sisters, so that's probably out. But I have consulted the internet and am like 85% sure that "Ticks the Size of Rats Falls" is not taken yet, so that's a viable option. As for the others, hmm... Lampreys are nightmare fuel but a lot of them are listed as endangered these days, so naming something "Sucked Dry by Lampreys Falls" is probably a nonstarter. So maybe change it up a bit and name one after public speaking, and another for that recurring dream where you randomly forget to make a house payment and then the Mafia comes after you.
• On the question of wandering into an active construction site for a little sightseeing, and why I'm suddenly offering semi-helpful advice to The Man about scaring away the looky-loos, I am reminded of a short safety film (which I don't recall the title of) that was shown to my, I think, second or third grade class back in the late 1970s, concerning a small baby bird, a duckling I think, who is very curious about the world and soon gets separated from his mother and his conformist siblings. He wanders around the big, loud world of people for a while, looking for her and having misadventures, just long enough for the audience to get attached to him. Eventually he wanders into a construction zone, or possibly a garbage dump, and runs around increasingly scared and bewildered, still calling for mom, but after a while the camera loses track of him, and it is strongly implied that he was just run over and killed by a bulldozer and nobody cared or even noticed. The End. I swear I am not making this up. I don't remember any classmates crying; I think the class was mostly just stunned we didn't get the happy ending we were sort of led to believe was coming. If you ever wanted to know why we of Generation X are, you know... like this, consider this as one exhibit of many. In retrospect I'm not sure this was so much a safety film as general prep for what everyday life as a grownup is like. But no matter, it was pretty effective as a safety film, and I am telling you right now to avoid getting run over by bulldozers whenever possible, because your mom will (I assume) be sad about it, and please retweet to help spread bulldozer awareness. Actually wait, I don't recall if the movie ever showed mama duck noticing his absence, much less looking for him. Come to think of it, it was always just him searching for her. So maybe this was more of a latchkey duckling scenario, I don't know. Anyway, bulldozers: Considered Harmful. And doubly so if the Camp Helfrich slasher is driving one. Except that nobody survived to describe what he looks like, and really he could be just about anybody, and you wouldn't know.

HCRH Milepost 29

Ok, next up we're visiting HCRH Milepost 29, which is one of the easier ones to visit since it's right by the Angels Rest Trail parking lot. The red pushpin is not exactly where the milepost is; I think Maps realizes the trailhead is a thing lots of people are interested in and it really, really wants to direct you there instead. I imagine Google does this just in case the trailhead is some sort of business and therefore a potential advertiser.

• Obviously the Angels Rest Trail is the main point of interest right here. Or at least that's why everyone else is here. And a few of them may look at you funny while you're taking photos of the milepost, at least until mileposting goes mainstream and sells out to the man, and every social media influencer has to swing by and do a video or take a selfie here.
• On the way up the trail, you'll soon encounter Coopey Falls and Upper Coopey Falls in close succession, and when you get to the top of Angels Rest you might be able to see Foxglove Falls if it's flowing.

• An unnumbered county road -- another of those "local access" roads we keep running into -- branches off near the Angels Rest parking lot and heads into the old mill site, next to power lines. Back when the mill was operating, this was part of the company town and there were houses along this little road. It just so happened that the mill went on the market around 1990, right when there was zero chance that anything connected to the timber industry would attract historic preservation dollars. In retrospect, though, I can't help thinking they could have been turned into vacation rental cabins, or maybe seasonal housing for Scenic Area staff or state park employees, maybe reserve one for an Artist in Residence program, who knows.

  Since that didn't happen, and there's nothing much down the road anymore, it could be turned into a trail pretty easily It slopes gently down into the mill site and ends up close to the base of Bridal Veil Falls. Seems ideal for bikes but I'm not sure where it would go from there, if the idea was to, say, climb back up to the highway west of the falls.

• You'll probably notice there are still a number of houses east of the old mill site that weren't demolished after the mill closed. These buildings were never part of the company town, and for a while this area was known as the adjacent town of Coopey Falls, back when there was a need to tell the company town and the normal town apart. This distinction was very, very important back in June 1935, as there was an ugly labor dispute going on nearby at the Bridal Veil sawmill. Activists from the Sawmill and Timber Workers Union, local No. 2532, had rented some property at Coopey Falls as a base of operations while trying to unionize the Bridal Veil sawmill. Portland was still a conservative city in a conservative county in a conservative state back in those days, and the local DA and county sheriff were determined to break up what they said was an illegal strike, which meant any strike of any kind at all, and sheriff's deputies and state police were sent in to administer beatdowns and evict the union from the Coopey Falls property by any means necessary. They even set up a police roadblock near Troutdale, turning back anyone who looked like they might be a union member or interested in becoming one. The following month, Congress passed the pro-labor Wagner Act (aka the National Labor Relations Act of 1935), the start of the one brief decade or so when federal labor laws weren't overwhelmingly tilted in favor of big business, ending with the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act.
• Next we've got several items that involve a trip up Palmer Mill Road, an old narrow gravel road that heads uphill next to Bridal Veil Creek. The start of the road doubles as an overflow parking lot for Angels Rest, and another couple of hundred feet up the road a small creek passes under the road in a culvert. This is tiny Mead Creek, home to a really obscure waterfall that we visited a while back.
• After that, a faint roadbed forks off to the right and continues along sort of parallel to and between the old highway and Palmer Mill Rd. This is another piece of County Road 634, which we last encountered in the form of a gated road between Latourell and the Bridal Veil Falls area. The county doesn't seem to think this one even rises to being a "local access road", and I think they just classify it as a random bit of unused county-owned right of way. Which is probably just as well, since this track eventually ends at a 50' sheer cliff right above the HCRH. I don't know exactly what happened here, and have never seen any pre-HCRH photos of this spot that might clear that up, but if I had to guess I'd say there was a surprisingly large amount of dynamite involved. I mean, I guess the road could have ended here and you'd pay someone to winch your covered wagon down a vertical cliff like at Laurel Hill on Mt. Hood. But Oregon Trail (the game) was pretty clear that the sketchy winch stuff was only a hazard on the Barlow Road route, south of Mt. Hood, and the river route is where you usually drown in rapids juuusst short of the end of the trail. Although a late bout of dysentery can still take you down whichever route you pick.
• You might have also noticed what looks like another overgrown gravel road off to the left. It branched off just west of Mead Creek and runs parallel to Palmer Mill while continuing to climb the hill, whatever this hill is called. It looks kind of interesting but as of right now I have never followed it and know nothing about it, beyond the fact that it seems to peter out in the forest after a mile or two and it might connect to the wider trail network up there.
• Continuing up Palmer Mill Road there are completely unofficial spots where you can scramble down to Middle and Upper Bridal Veil Falls. I have actually never been to either of them. I see photos and I always think I'd like to see them in person at some point, then I go to YouTube and see videos of people scrambling down into the canyon in a sort of semi-controlled plummet, and that reminds me why I haven't been there. There's a proposal floating around out on the interwebs to put in a proper trail connecting both waterfalls to the state park and the famous lower falls. Long story short, I would like that trail to exist. And not as a memorial trail named after me due to my having The Accident here.
• Eventually you'll come across concrete barriers on the road, which is as far uphill as you can go on Palmer Mill in a vehicle. Not that I would recommend driving on Palmer Mill in the first place; I've done it before, but it's not really my idea of a good time. You can keep going by bike for another mile or two, but then there's a stretch a bit further along where the Forest Service decommissoned the road entirely, and dumped old logs all over it, after the Eagle Creek Fire. Because of something to do with erosion and stream health, if I remember right, and if you manage to get past the impassable part another gated stretch of road will take you the rest of the way to Larch Mountain Road. And on the other side of Larch Mountain Road, Palmer Mill becomes forest road NF-20 and takes you to the forbidden Bull Run watershed.
• As for trails that do exist, there's a veritable labyrinth of unofficial trails and old logging roads connecting Angels Rest and Palmer Mill Road. That link goes to OpenStreetMap, which I gather is the closest thing there is to a canonical map of the area, maintained by some of the same people who maintain the trail network. I admit I haven't spent a lot of time poking around up there and don't have a photoset to share. I gather the scenic highlights are mostly vintage abandoned cars, most with varying degrees of target practice damage. Not something I usually seek out, but I suppose they at least give future archeologists an accurate picture of what the 20th and 21st centuries were like, unless they're scavenged for meth money first. Rumor has it there's event an abandoned vintage JetSki somewhere up there, and the archeologists of the distant year 3025 may find that a bit more confusing. It would be fun to leave a stone tablet up there noting the JetSki came from Noah's Ark and was used to scout for dry land during the big flood (and also for harpooning sea dragons), but it broke down and had to be abandoned nearby, and ended up here when the waters receded.
• Speaking of archeologists of the distant year 3025, just downhill from the Angels Rest parking lot is Bridal Veil's town cemetery. I have a theory, or more of a suspicion really, that at some point centuries from now archeologists will take an interest in digging up cemeteries of old logging towns out of morbid curiosity about all the various gory ways a person could die in the timber industry of a thousand years ago, way back when the earth still had trees and oxygen.

HCRH Milepost 28

Ok, the next stop on our eastbound tour of HCRH Mileposts is number 28, as seen above. For anyone just joining this little adventure, this milepost marks 28 miles eastbound from downtown Portland, as measured from the corner of SW Washingon & Broadway, across the river on the old Stark St. Ferry, then across the eastside on Stark to the Sandy River, and then along the original Columbia River Highway route to here. And it's taking us a while because we're stopping every mile to look at another one of these things, and (since the mile markers themselves aren't that compelling to visit) I usually rattle off some trivia about what else is nearby.

So 28 miles puts us just west of the Bridal Veil area, and it's another case where I ended up just snapping a couple of photos while rolling by, since there's nowhere to park right next to it, and parking further away and then walking along the shoulder doesn't seem overly safe. I mean, taking photos while rolling past at 5mph isn't 100% safe either, nor do you get a lot of quality photos that way, but it seemed a bit better than the other options at the time. The milepost itself was intact last time I checked, so -- as usual -- let's take a quick peek at what's in the surrounding area:

Roughly across the street and downhill from the milepost is a large house that looks for all the world like a plantation house from the deep South. This is not a common architectural style in the Northwest, and the reason it looks that way is because it was originally built to be a fried chicken restaurant. No, seriously. That was the big national food trend around the time the old highway opened, and it was kind of a special occcasion dish and not something most people made at home a lot, so several chicken dinner places opened along the old highway, enough that you needed a sort of theme to stand out from the crowd. The Chanticleer Inn (located where Portland Womens Forum State Park is now) obviously had the view as a big selling point, while Forest Hall here went for genteel Southernness. Patrons were asked to call ahead and make reservations, and the restaurant bragged (in a genteel sort of way) that they had an actual black chef who had moved here from Kentucky, and dinner at Forest Hall was the real deal. (Now imagine if the road had opened a century later, in 2016: The road would be lined with cutesy little cafes selling twee artisanal cupcakes, and very few of them would have survived the pandemic.)

Later on, in the 1940s, the restaurant changed hands and was called the Maxwell House for a while, named for the owners and not the long-gone grand hotel in Nashville, TN or the national ground coffee brand named after the hotel, though the name sort of referenced them in a way you couldn't get away with now, in the modern era of advanced global trademark policing. I don't know if the owners meant to reference this, but the Nashville hotel was also famous for hosting the first national meeting of the Ku Klux Klan in 1867, and long story short there was no limit to how problematic a simple chicken dinner could be in those days^[1]. You still see still occasional news reports of white racists trying to harrass black people with sneering references to fried chicken or watermelon, which is just about the least effective racial insult I can imagine. The harrassers always think they're being so bigly and threatening, but outside their little cultural bubble they just come off as jealous they weren't invited to the cookout, and have to go home to another plate of microwave hot pockets or a big glop of mayonnaise casserole.

Anyway, the most important thing to know about all this is that the building is now a private residence, and has been for years, so don't go knocking on doors and poking around as if it not being a restaurant is negotiable somehow.^[2]

Also nearby (and frankly the one big attraction of this mile of the road) is Bridal Veil Falls State Park, which is home to the namesake waterfall, and the overlook trail, and the "Pillars of Hercules"^[3]. The latter is a group of eroded basalt columns that you can see from the overlook, and (unofficially) from below too, while avoiding speeding trains that pass very close to the otherwise climbable rocks. I gather that rock climbers do this all the time, though that's not much of a data point as to whether it's a good idea or not.

There are another couple of large waterfalls further upstream on Bridal Veil Creek, but we'll get to those in the next post, since visiting them currently involves a trip up Palmer Mill Road, which begins near the next milepost up the road.

There's a historic HCRH bridge (albeit one of the lesser ones), a Union Pacific railroad bridge (just as utilitarian as all the others), and the few surviving remnants of the of the old sawmill that was here from the early 1880s to the early 1990s.

On the private sector side, Bridal Veil Lakes (a wedding venue) is somewhere up Henderson Road, while Bridal Veil Lodge (a bed-and-breakfast) is right across the street from the Bridal Veil state park's parking lot. And I guess that's about it for this edition, except for all the footnotes.

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footnote(s)

1. Years ago I lived in a small-ish town where I shared a first and last name with one of the few local dentists. He didn't list a 24-hour contact number for his office, so every now and then people would find me in the white pages and call at all hours thinking they were calling their dentist at home. I would try to explain they had a wrong number and I was not a dentist, much less their dentist, nor I did not have their dentist's private home number handy. That was usually the end of the conversation, but I remember a few trying to haggle, like they thought I could be persuaded to drive to a stranger's house at 3am with a pair of pliers and maybe a small hammer, and, obviously, no novocaine, to yoink their bad tooth. My point is, I don't know the current residents of the house, but you should assume they're about as likely to fry you a chicken dinner as I am to have a go at your bum tricuspid.
2. Further along the local spectrum of problematic-ness was the "[racial slur] Chicken Inn", a notorious restaurant chain that doubled and quintupled down on crude racial caricatures as their entire theme. And yes, there was a Portland location (and a Seattle one), and yes, they were hugely popular for decades, right up until sometime in the mid-1950s when society hit one of those cultural tipping points and the really overt racist stuff just wasn't respectable anymore. Kind of like the moment around 2020 when Confederate statues and monuments finally stopped being respectable, although the new orange president is doing everything he possibly can to roll that back. Not long after the Portland location closed, the building was stripped of its... decor (which hopefully nobody kept as a memento), and Clyde's Prime Rib moved in, and has been there ever since, since prime rib plus live jazz never really goes out of style, or at least it hasn't in 70 years. At whatever point the city eventually hits the 90% vegan + EDM-only threshold they might need to re-imagine the place a bit.
3. The original Pillars of Hercules are, of course, the giant rocks standing on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar in Greek mythology, and marking the edge of the known world. The northern rock being the Rock of Gibraltar, and the southern one is... well, nobody seems to agree on that part, and maybe the Greeks just sort of assumed there was another Gibraltar on the other side and didn't bother checking, because if the mighty Hercules could create one pillar with his bare hands (and the myths differ on whether he created them or was just here performing mighty deeds in the neighborhood once upon a time) he could certainly create a second one, and as a proper civilized Greek he would feel obligated to make a matching pair for the sake of classical symmetry. I had this idea that the two pillars were supposed to be enchanted and would occasionally rush out and smash together, crushing any ships that happened to be between them. But no, I was thinking of the Clashing Rocks, or Symplegades, a completely different pair of rocks that were tasked with guarding the Bosporus, the strait that serves as a gateway to the Black Sea, and is now the center of present-day Istanbul. Also, the rocks were a danger to Jason and the Argonauts, and not Odysseus and his crew, who never went anywhere near the Bosporus. I mention all this because the local Pillars were so named because the original 1870s railroad tracks once passed through a narrow gap between two of the pillars until the tracks were moved in the 1890s or so, and I was about to make a dumb joke that the tracks were moved because the pillars got ornery and kept crushing trains as they passed through, and then a few years later a random commenter would notice and point out my mistake and laugh and tell the others, and the crowd of sneering Classicists would quickly get out of hand, and it would all be very embarrassing. So, sorry about the tangent, but I had my myths crossed for a bit, and it could happen to you too, so I figured a quick PSA was in order.