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.