Lower Archer Falls

Next up we're visiting another obscure waterfall on the Washington side of the Columbia Gorge. These photos are of Lower Archer Falls, a 50' waterfall hiding juuuust out of plain sight near SR14, roughly halfway between the little towns of Prindle and Skamania. The unmarked trailhead is literally right across SR14 from the US Forest Service's St. Cloud Day Use Area. Which is an old historic apple orchard plus a stretch of rocky, muddy, sandy semi-beach along the Columbia, but that's a whole other blog post I need to finish. So the thing you need to do is park at St. Cloud, make sure your Northwest Forest Pass is somewhere where Officer Friendly can see it, then follow the entrance road back to SR14, and wait for a gap in traffic so you can mosey across. I meant to take a photo of what you're looking for here, as it appears from across the road, but I apparently forgot to do that. Just look for an unmarked but visible trail directly across from the St. Cloud entrance road. You can see it on Street View here, if you'd like a better idea of what to look for.

If the "Lower" qualifier made you wonder about the others: Yes, there is an (Upper) Archer Falls, well upstream of here, 218' high, and part of a restricted area that's permanently closed to all public access, to hopefully protect a number of rare species including the Larch Mountain salamander. It was later realized that the salamander not only existed south of the Columbia River but was much more common there, but the closure was already in effect at that point, and there seems to be a general principle in place to never relax closure rules, period, even if the original rationale behind them turns out to be a bit overstated.

Zach Forsyth's waterfall book also lists a "Middle Archer Falls", maybe 10-20' high and a short distance (as the crow flies) upstream from the lower falls. I don't have any photos of it to show you, because first you have to get above the lower falls, which you do via an absurdly narrow stairway seemingly made of piano keys. Once you're above the lower falls the (unofficial, community-maintained) trail turns east and away from Archer Creek for a bit in order to stay on public land as it continues uphill, and you have to bushwhack back to the creek to find the waterfall. And when I put it that way it hardly sounds worthwhile, but I have this nagging suspicion that I may have to go look for it at some point, and at that point I'll try to explain why it was worth all the extra trouble and why you ought to give it a try too. So there's that to look forward to, I guess. The only other mention I've seen of the middle falls is a brief mention on a Ropewiki page, and even they have no photos of it, or details on how to get to it. A recent PacificNW Hiker video about Lower Archer includes a drone shot that rises above the top of the falls, and you can see what -- from that perspective -- just looks like an upper tier to the lower falls, but it might be Forsyth's middle falls.

Before going I looked at Skamania County GIS to double-check that this is all public land, and then check the Forest Service interactive trail map and see if this is an official trail or not. The answers are a.) yes, and b.) no.

So, a thing I like to do before looking for obscure stuff on the Washington side of the Gorge is fire up the local county GIS system (Skamania County in this case) and double-check that the place I'm interested in -- and the trail to it -- really is public property. This isn't just because I like looking at maps; much of the Washington side is kind of a crazy quilt of state, local, federal, and private land. And then in the 2000s and early 2010s there were a lot of people on the internet posting a lot of cool waterfall photos from places they weren't, strictly speaking, allowed to be, and scored serious Valuable Internet Points in the process, but that was then, and the fact that some hipsters got away with it in 2007 doesn't really hold up in court. In this case, fortunately the answer is yes, the Forest Service owns the whole area we're visiting, having bought it off the Burlington Northern railroad back in 1994.

It's also useful sometimes to pull up the Forest Service's interactive trail map, and if it's an official trail save the relevant area as a pdf in case cell reception is no bueno somewhere. Except that although this is Forest Service land, this isn't a Forest Service trail. Apparently there's a group of dedicated local volunteers that maintains trails in the Archer Mountain area, wayyy uphill from here, so this trail might be their doing. It seems to be an unofficial but longstanding Forest Service policy -- locally, at least -- that if you feel a real calling to do trail construction and maintenance in your spare time, they'll go ahead and let you have a go at it, so long as you do a reasonably professional job of it, and are never a source of bad publicity. I'm sure they can't put that in writing, but it generally seems to work here, and it seems to work for a whole network of forest trails around North Bonneville, a few miles east of here, and it seems to have worked for about a century or so with the web of trails back behind Angels Rest on the Oregon side and the trail up Wind Mountain on the Washington side.

A short distance further upstream just past the Middle(?) falls, the USFS land runs out and the creek passes through a parcel owned by someone or something called "The Lightbearers". The property records don't include an address, but I think that refers to a longstanding new-agey group out of Seattle. And if I have that wrong, it might be a similarly-named fundie group out of Tennessee, or even an evangelical landlord company, or someone else entirely. It frankly sounds like a name you'd adopt if you and a few friends took up LARPing as YA fantasy novel wizards. Or (again, just going by the name) possibly they're a cabal of especially creepy Buffy villains, similar to The Gentlemen. In any event the trail swerves east at that point to avoid the whole thing, whatever it is.

Due to the complicated land ownership situation, a lot of places that would be top destinations on the Oregon side were either private property until fairly recently (like Lower Archer was until 1994), or even now are gated off and inaccessible, like nearby Prindle Falls, which is anywhere between 250' and 435' high depending on who you ask. So over the years, whether people visited a given place or not (and whether it showed up in print anywhere) was kind of a function of whether current landowners were friendly, or alternately how emboldened (or you might say entitled) people felt in visiting without asking. I mention all this because I think it's why I had never heard of Lower Archer (or a lot of the other Washington-side falls) until a few years ago. A lot of this info traditionally got around strictly by word-of-mouth, and putting it in print for strangers to read was a great way to infuriate a landowner who had just about tolerated a few rare visitors who were in the know, and I just never happened to know anyone who knew someone, if you know what I mean.

As a data point, I dug out my stack of old Columbia Gorge hiking and waterfall guidebooks from the late 1960s thru the 1980s, and none of them say anything about waterfalls in the Archer Creek area. Or anywhere else on the Washington side, for that matter, apart from the couple of well-known ones along the Hamilton Mountain trail. And at least some of them had to have known about the others. At the very least someone would have told the Lowes about some of the more obscure places, Another curiosity is that despite all the official hikes and expeditions and whatnot setting off in search of (Upper) Archer Falls over the years, not one historical source -- not a single one -- mentions the lower falls here. You'd think someone would have mentioned it in passing at some point, but no dice.

Anyway, here's a timeline of news about the Archer Creek area. As usual, most of the links go to the Multnomah County Library's local newspaper database, and reading them for yourself requires a library card. Which you should already have anyway if you live here. But if you aren't from around here, your local public or university library miiiight have access to the same scanned papers as part of a nationwide database. The links here still won't work, but you may still be able to find the articles by searching on the topic and the given month and year.

Anyway, here goes:

• Our story begins in the summer of 1901, when a local scientific expedition climbed to the very rim of the gorge and explored the high mountaintops of Archer Mountain and Table Mountain. The party included geologists, photographers, an Oregonian reporter, and even a visiting archeologist from Chicago's Field Museum. Transportation was provided by the steamboat Regulator, which even as late as 1901 was still basically the only connection between this corner of the Washington side of the Gorge and the outside world.

  The expedition proposed to determine the truth or falsity of the "Bridge of the Gods Hypothesis". The present-day version of the idea is that debris from a massive landslide on Table Mountain, on the north side of the river, once completely dammed the river, and once that blockage finally failed, there was still a huge amount of debris in the river here for a long time afterward, so much so that for a while you could cross the river by carefully hopping rock to rock without getting your feet wet. The 1901 version was different, and was what you might call the "Maximal 'Bridge of the Gods' Hypothesis": This idea holds that, once upon a time, a natural rock arch spanned the Columbia. And not a minimal span right there in the narrowest stretch of the river, not a stone version of the present-day bridge. Oh no, they liked to think big in those days, and so imagined a truly stupendous majestic arch connecting the 3417' summit of Table Mountain to some TBD mountaintop on the Oregon side, the closest of which is fully 5 miles to the south.

  For a little context, Wikipedia (and their primary source in this case, the Natural Arch and Bridge Society, which exists) inform us the longest known natural arch in existence today is one in China that's about 400 feet long, so the maximal one here would have been around 66 times longer, had it existed. It turns out the world's longest artificial arch bridge is also in China, and the summit-to-summit bridge here would have exceeded it by a mere factor of 14.

  Frankly the only bridge that comes to mind that even approaches this is the fictional one from Tom Swift and his Repelatron Skyway (1963), in which Tom and the gang rescue a troubled foreign aid project in the friendly African nation of Ngombia, building a modern USA-style freeway across the country's vast impassable malarial swamps via the magic of antigravity. When I read this as a kid, as a hand-me-down childrens book, I wondered why anybody would still need freeways if antigravity was a thing that existed, as the book never bothered to explain that pesky detail.

• Anyway, the adventurers' initial trip report put a brave face on it, but the details tell us the expedition was a big mess. On day 1, the group ascended Archer Mountain without too much chaos, other than the expedition's one and only guide bailing out early due to a foot injury. The party spent a good part of the day ransacking the "Indian mounds" on Archer Mountain looking for artifacts, but didn't find anything of value, before continuing to the summit. Where the photographers were disappointed to find that distant Cascade peaks were obscured by forest fire smoke.
• The trip up Table Mountain the next day was what you might call... under-planned, if you were in a charitable mood. Our brave explorers set out without map or guide, and packed for the hike on the assumption there would be plenty of drinkable water to be had along the way and there was no need to bring a lot of it along. You can probably already guess where this is going. They spent most of the day wandering around lost and thirsty, then ran out of daylight, and spent the night somewhere near the summit without blankets, before eventually finding their way home the next day. Afterward, our conquering heroes told everyone who would listen that the real problem was obviously the mountain, which had turned out to be vastly taller and harder to climb than anyone had known previously. Which, of course, was an important scientific discovery in itself. A follow-up article on the climb quotes one of the explorers as estimating Table Mountain at up to 7000 feet high, roughly even with the tree line on Mount Hood, where in reality it's only about half that height. For some reason I was reminded of the classic SNL sketch where Bill Murray plays an aging, out-of-shape Hercules, making various excuses for his inability to lift a nearby boulder.
• To put this adventure in a wider context, 1901 was also right around the start of what historians call the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, the golden age of fearless leaders like Roald Amundsen, Robert Falcon Scott, and Ernest Shackleton, and in fact the latter two were in the early stages of the 1901-1904 Discovery Expedition right around the same time our local heroes were bumbling around the Gorge. So that's more or less the model our bold adventurers were aiming for, I think. Imagine, if you will, the many perils of exploring near the 45th parallel, balanced precariously halfway between the polar wastes of the Arctic and the treacherous tropical jungles along the equator...
• As far as I can tell they never mounted a followup expedition to document the surprisingly rarefied heights of Table Mountain and the mysterious unknown lands beyond, and thus passed the brief Heroic Age of Archer Creek Watershed Exploration. In fact, after the expedition there was a nearly thirty-year gap before Archer Creek or Archer Mountain appeared in the news again, at which point the area was reachable from the outside world by automobile via a very expensive road (present-day SR14) and also by a very expensive railroad line down near river level. This is the same rail line you cross on your way from your car to the trailhead here; it doesn't look very fancy because they spent most of their money on tunnels, and didn't focus so much on general aesthetics. There are a couple of points further east along the line where you might see the same long train threaded through three tunnels in a row, one after the next.
• A November 1901 article titled "How the Indians were Decimated" notes that the wave of disease that swept through the northwest and devastated tribes across the region happened largely before settlers arrived, and the worst of the diseases was apparently something modern science couldn't identify by its symptoms, and in short the whole horrific episode might be Not Our Fault, or at least there was juuust enough doubt about what happened that there was no point in anybody feeling bad over it now. He then goes on to relate various Native stories, anglicized to match readers' expectations. I mention all of this because his article touched on Archer Mountain briefly, stating confidently that the mounds or pits near the top were actually fortifications, and then estimating it would take a large army to staff and defend such a fortress. So apparently this was a common idea at one point. Mostly I figured I should note that the article has problematic contents, before anyone clicks looking for more info on the "Indian fortress" hypothesis. I think I've mentioned this somewhere else before, but my impression is that the fortress idea peaked in popularity (both in academia and with the general public) shortly after World War I, when ideas of vast trenches and fortifications were still fresh in people's minds.
• A January 1928 news item about an upcoming Mazamas hike:
  
  

  A.H. Marshall will lead the Mazamas on a hike next Sunday in the Archer Creek district. Members will leave Portland on the North Bank railroad at 7:30am and will detrain at St. Cloud. From St. Cloud the hikers will follow Cable creek past Big falls to the top of North mountain, then to the head of Archer canyon and down the canyon past Archer falls

  To explain that a bit more, Cable Creek, or Gable Creek, is the next watershed west of Archer Creek, and it has at least one big waterfall too, but nobody is really sure now whether the correct name is "Cable" or "Gable", and there is historical support for both versions. More recently, in an apparent effort to resolve this confusion, the creek was officially renamed as "Good Bear Creek" a few years ago, but unfortunately it's a weird and dumb-sounding name, and a lot of people would argue there's no such thing as a Good Bear, and wherever you stand on that particular topic, most maps haven't been updated, and I've never seen anyone using the new name.

• Notices about organized group hikes along Archer Creek or up Archer Mountain were fairly common from the 1920s and early 1930s, tapering off into the early 1960s. Most of these announcements were fairly brief and to the point, while the post-hike ones could be a bit more entertaining. The route varied a bit: Often it was straight up Archer Creek from SR14 (or the St. Cloud train station, before that) to the main falls and back down, but sometimes they changed it up and hopped over to Gable/Cable Creek for the return leg, checking out the big waterfall over there too. I gather not everyone was aware of the falls on the other creek, since a couple of the more excitable groups came away elated and telling anyone who would listen that they had discovered it. It was almost always the same guy guiding these groups for several decades, so maybe 'stumbling across' the falls on Gable Creek was part of his trail guide schtick, allowing his charges to believe they were great wilderness explorers for a while. I dunno. Anyway, here's a list of a bunch of examples, if you're interested.

  • May 1914
  ;
  • May 1920
  • October 1920
  • March 1923 - this one mentions they would be visiting three points of interest: The waterfall, obviously, a "view from top of bluffs", and "the new falls".
  • April 1923
  • May 1924 - the group claimed to have discovered an unknown 192' waterfall, and promptly named it "Marshall Falls" after the leader of the hike.
  • April 1930
  • April 1931
  • February 1932
  • August 1933
  • November 1937
  • March 1938
  • May 1942
  • March 1944
  • April 1946
  • May 1952
  • April 1956
  • November 1963
• Sometime in 1971, a group of Portland-area hippies decided to go back to the land (because 1971), bought a chunk of then-cheap land near (Upper) Archer Falls and started a commune (because 1971). This went unreported and unnoticed by the local papers at the time, because if you want to live in peace and harmony forever with all your friends, telling The Man about it is probably the last thing you want to do. So you might be wondering how those dreams turned out, and we'll get around to that in a bit. But on the general topic of late-20th Century alternate living arrangements, let me point you at a fascinating 2021 GQ article about some of the stragglers still hanging on to the old ways in Northern California; a Brooklyn Rail piece about the same general time and place; and a 2019 Messy Nessy Chic article about one group that somehow survived to the present day, morphing over time into a sort of hybrid organic farm / yoga retreat / health food store chain. But I digress.
• An April 28th 1970 letter to the editor pointing out that a recent article on the little-known waterfalls of the Washington side of the Gorge neglected to mention the upper Archer Falls, which (he explained) were accessible by a scramble up the creek starting at St. Cloud. He didn't mention the smaller waterfall on the way there, so someone making the trip just going by the info in this letter could easily have turned back at the lower falls thinking it was the main one.
• The Forest Service bought land at Archer Mountain starting in 1987 along with a bunch of other things, though county property records I referenced up above say this wasn't purchased until 1994.
• Trail construction by Friends of the Columbia River Gorge for Earth Day 1991
• The St Cloud area opened to the public in November 1994 along with the Sams-Walker area a mile or two to the east. The article dutifully lists the modest charms of the two places, but makes no mention of Lower Archer Falls.
• 1996 Steve Duin column about an ongoing court battle over High Valley Farm, the very same High Valley Farm we last saw in 1971. As with a lot of these communities, there were a few diehards left at the place, while everyone else had gone their separate ways years ago, and people didn't have much in common anymore except for the big chunk of land they all still co-owned. Some of them wanted to sell the land and split the proceeds and move on, but couldn't unless everyone else agreed, and there were objections, especially by the few remaining residents, and it ended up in court. Evidently some kind of deal was worked out in the end, because that's the same land that's now part of the strict no-entry state nature preserve, and I've seen rumors that some of the holdouts are still living up there as part of the deal, and maybe that's true, and maybe that's the real reason behind the closed area. Or maybe people (myself included) are half-remembering some of the plot points from M. Night Shyamalan's The Village (2004), which I won't explain any further because spoilers.
• A 1998 Terry Richard column asking people to name their favorite Gorge waterfall. One interviewee, a resident of Prindle on the Washington side of the gorge, piped up to explain that the Washington side has waterfalls too, they're just really obscure and hard to get to and you probably haven't heard of them.
• A 2008 Terry Richard column explaining the Gorge scenic highlights you can enjoy while speeding along I-84 and not stopping anywhere. The guide says Archer Mountain is the prominent peak along the north shore around mileposts 33-34.
• A 2011 Oregonian article told the normies about OregonHikers (still called PortlandHikers back then), right around the peak of the site's traffic and interesting content. Or just before the peak, or a year or two after, depending on who you ask, but my money's on post-peak if only because appearing in the Oregonian instantly makes anything a bit too mainstream and uncool. In any case, Archer Mountain/Creek/Falls gets a quick mention as one place the site had drawn a wave of renewed attention to.
• And in 2017, there was a small wildfire on Archer Mountain, started by embers from the Eagle Creek fire being blown across the river. Fortunately this fire didn't take off like the Oregon one did, and was controlled and extinguished fairly quickly.

University Falls

Ok, next up we're back in the Oregon Coast Range again, and this time we're visiting University Falls, a 55' waterfall off Highway 6 in the Tillamook State Forest. Like the rest of the Coast Range (and unlike the Cascades) it doesn't have any high-altitude snowmelt feeding it over the dry summer months, and I happened to visit during the worst time of the year, at least in terms of the sheer volume of water going over it.

Unlike some of the Coast Range waterfalls we've visited before (like Fern Rock and the Bridge Creek duo), this one isn't right on the main road, so you have a couple of ways to get there. A 0.3 mile hike from a trailhead accessed by one-lane gravel logging roads, or an 8.5 mile loop mostly on old historic roads, with parking right off Highway 6. I picked the short hike because it was a mid-afternoon impulse to go check it out, days were getting shorter, and I try not to be out on the trails around sundown (or sunrise for that matter) in big cat country, or driving on unfamiliar logging roads after dark.

If you're more accustomed to visiting state parks and national forests, be aware that state forests are managed a bit... differently. By law their main purpose is still to produce trees for the timber industry, and the parts that aren't currently being logged are often designated for OHVs and motorized recreation in general, plus endless target shooting. That's actually the case here -- the Rogers Camp trailhead where the 8.5 mile loop starts also doubles as an ATV/OHV staging area, for one thing -- and a lot of hike-focused sites take a cautionary tone about this, warning readers that the vehicles are loud and fast, and the people are rough and rowdy and drunk and heavily armed and belligerent 24/7, and you might even see some of those icky red hats, you know the ones. I don't have any statistics about this, and this is just my anecdotal experience here, but in practice it was fine. There are separate trails for the motorized stuff vs. people on foot, and other trails for horses and for bikes, and the only times I saw any OHV people were on the drive in and back out, and -- at least while I was there -- people seemed to be sticking to that arrangement and were busy doing their own thing and not going out of their way to antagonize people in other adjacent fandoms. I'm not saying you should go and try to make friends if you hear banjos duelling in the distance. And my experience is, I'm sure, a function of people seeing a male Caucasian face and not immediately seeing a threat --or deciding to be one -- and the less you resemble that description, the more your mileage may vary. Though driving a foreign-made non-truck probably didn't do me any favors.

• First mention is an 1895 ad for the Wilson River and Tillamook Stage, listing University Falls as one of the scenic highlights of the 10 hour (!) journey from Forest Grove to Tillamook, a 52-mile trip that takes about an hour today. The ad lists a fare of $4, which is about $150 in 2025 dollars. Which is a lot of money for a one-way trip to Tillamook, if you ask me.
• 1968 mazamas hike
• 1983 interview with Elroy & Edmund Gravelle, twin brothers who had grown up in the area and were working to preserve a piece of the old Wilson River Wagon Road, the predecessor to today's Highway 6. Today there's a trail named after them.
• 1984 hike of the historic roads and trails, sponsored by the Washington County Historical Society.

Of these limited sources, nobody has bothered to explain which university they had in mind when naming the falls. I mean, sure, it's possible to enjoy the place without knowing which university they had in mind, but it's the kind of name that sounds like it might have an interesting story attached.

Penstemon Prairie

Next up we're paying a quick visit to Metro's Penstemon Prairie Natural Area, an obscure wetland area that I visited the same day as the nearby and much better-known Chehalem Ridge Nature Park. As I mentioned in that post, the difference between a Nature Park and a Natural Area is huge: Nature Parks get their own web pages and all sorts of visitor facilities -- paved paths, signs, picnic tables, restrooms, maybe some playground equipment, even a few public art installations. Natural Areas (like the one we're visiting now) get a little sign that says "Natural Area", and sometimes not even that. In this particular case, the Chehalem Ridge Master Plan (2020) briefly mentions Penstemon Prairie along with a few surrounding nature areas, I guess to place the upcoming nature park in a broader context:

Both south and west of Fernhill Wetlands, additional bottomlands have been protected by Metro at Carpenter Creek and Penstemon Prairie. These do not offer public access and are often flooded, providing critical habitat for waterfowl and migratory birds.

A recent Tualatin Floodplain Metro doc includes a few vital statistics about the place: the natural area comes to 280 acres, was purchased in 1995, and an ongoing restoration project began in 2015.

So now we get around to the subtle details that make this a special place. The name "Penstemon Prairie" comes from the tall western penstemon (Penstemon hesperius), a rare wildflower that is exceedingly fond of Willamette Valley wetlands. In fact it likes Willamette Valley wetlands almost as much as humans like turning Willamette Valley wetlands into farms and subdivisions, and it stubbornly refuses to thrive in any other circumstances. As a result, the species had not been seen since 1935 and was thought to be extinct until it was rediscovered here in 2008. Since then, increasing the penstemon population has become a major focus of the ongoing wetland restoration work here.

In parallel there's an ongoing effort to get it listed as an endangered species: Here's the original petition, and a doc confirming that it's officially under review as of October 2022. And there's even a status page indicating where it is in the review process. And, inevitably, a lawsuit running in parallel with the formal petition process, because that seems to be an essential part of getting anything onto the list, and federal agencies won't take the proposal seriously unless there are lawyers and judges involved, and often not even then.

The chance rediscovery happened while a researcher was looking for Nelson's checker-mallow (Sidalcea nelsoniana), another rare (and unrelated) species endemic to wetlands in the Willamette Valley and parts of western WA up to about Olympia. This checker-mallow was actually listed as Threatened on the federal Endangered Species list until it was delisted in 2023, after the feds decided it had recovered sufficiently. And the presence of checker-mallows means this area may also be home to Macrorhoptus sidalceae, an obscure and highly specialized type of weevil that only noms on checkermallow seeds, if you can believe that.

The rare streaked horned lark has also been seen here, and is also the subject of a federal lawsuit arguing the bird should be considered Endangered, not just Threatened.)

I did not know any of this at the time I visited, did not know what to look for, and I'm also not that good at identifying wildflowers even when they're common ones, so I (probably) did not get any photos of any rare species when I was there, though I'm not really sure. If you're an expert in identifying Willamette Valley wetland plants and see anything interesting in these photos, feel free to leave a comment down below. I also had a question that popped into my head while reading up on the various rare species here: If you identify one of these checker-mallow plants, and you look closer and see a weevil eating checker-mallow seeds, I am not sure what you're expected to do. Do you smoosh the weevil for the sake of more checker-mallows? Or do you keep walking and leave the circle of life alone, on the theory that any insect that is this absurdly specialized is probably rather uncommon too?

Killin Wetlands

Next up we're visiting Killin Wetlands, a Metro Nature park near Banks, on the far west side of the metro area. The park comes to about 590 acres overall, but most of it is a swampy lake, and most of the non-swampy part is leased out as farmland, so public access is limited to a small area in the NW corner of the park. So you might feel a bit underwhelmed with what trails and so forth are available just going by the size of the place. The 2016 master plan for the park, essentially what's there now but with a few things punted off to future phases haven't been built yet. In particular, the plan envisons a boardwalk that juts out into the lake for a bit, which would have helped with the sort of photos I had in mind. I had brought a camera with an infrared filter along, thinking the wetlands would be sort of photogenic in an infrared sort of way on a sunny day, but alas no. Here's one photo that I thought turned out ok, at least ok enough for the 'Gram:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by brx0 (@brx0)

A 2015 Metro doc about the wetland restoration side of the effort mentions they expect restoring the place back to more or less how it was before Euro-American farmers did a number on it will take roughly the same amount of time it took to get to its current state, so something in the 150-200 year range. And yeah, one possibile future may be what I said in the IG caption, people beaming in from near and far just to vibe with the peat. But that was a few years ago, and extrapolating from current trends here in late 2025, it strikes me that another likely possibility is that in the 2220s we'll be in the early centuries of an extended second Dark Age, and we'll be back to tossing people into the nearest peat bog (i.e. here) for witchcraft, or for saying the Earth is round, or knowing numbers greater than 12 or so. On the bright side, that means the wetlands here will be a huge help to the future archeologists of the mid-4440s as they decipher what happened here, and some of the better-preserved ones will end up in museums and be given cutesy nicknames, like that guy they found frozen in the Alps, and everyone will vow not to let it happen again, and they'll really mean it, and who knows, maybe they'll even be right next time, at least for a while.

HCRH Milepost 34

So (continuing our ongoing series) here we are at milepost 34 along the Historic Columbia River Highway. This one is just a few hundred feet or so west of the Oneonta Trailhead (though getting to it is a rather inconvenient walk), so nearby points of interest include the various waterfalls on Oneonta Creek, along with Horsetail and Ponytail Falls next door, obscure Waespe Falls, the (still-closed) Oneonta Gorge, the Oneonta Tunnel and various minor HCRH bridges and railroad bridges (and I realize bridges are kind of a niche interest and it's fine if you don't care about those, although this milepost thing is not exactly a mainstream hobby either, frankly).

If you use the Forest Service's Interactive Visitor Map to plan your trips through the Gorge, you might notice a road numbered 3000-341 that starts across from the Oneonta Trailhead and winds around through some nearby wetlands before connecting to Interstate 84. I am upwards of 99.9% sure that this route does not actually exist, nor does the shorter spur road heading downstream along Horsetail Creek from the Horsetail Falls parking lot (number 3000-426). As far as I know, no such road has ever existed there, and those two road designations are actually for the Oneonta and Horsetail trailhead parking lots.

In a lot of places around the country and around the world, when you see this sort of thing you can safely assume somebody is putting fake roads on the books and embezzling the maintenance budget, and gambling all the money away as fast as they can steal it, and you would be right 100 times out of 100. That's not usually how it works around here, though. I'd love to claim that people are just more honest and upstanding here, but I think it's more that people are world-class busybodies who will gladly rat you out to The Man at the first opportunity and then be insufferably smug about how we don't do that here. So here are some alternate theories about the phantom roads:

1. The next time higher-ups give you a road decommissioning quota that you don't think you can meet, here's a tenth of a mile you can vaporize with a few mouse clicks.
2. Or (assuming the road has a dedicated budget) the extra maintenance money pays for sweeping up broken glass from all the car burglaries. Not quite enough money to hire a security guard, but it might save a few tires at least.
3. Or if not that, some other wholesome activity, like having the ranger district's one-and-only Woodsy Owl costume dry cleaned and disinfected before any of this year's summer interns have to wear it; or a nice office holiday party for once; or a gold watch for that one oldtimer who finally quote-unquote retired after 70+ years with the Forest Service.
4. Or maybe the road is real, but it's enchanted and only Bigfoot can see it. You might be wondering what possible use Bigfoot has for Forest Service roads. Recall that many of the Gorge's resident Sasquatches settled here after retiring from the National Hockey League, as a way to return to the forest (and quit bathing in Nair twice a day) but still be close to all the big city creature comforts they'd become accustomed to as highly paid athletes living among -- and kinda-sorta blending in with -- ordinary humans. So somewhere down this magic road is a parking garage full of Ferraris and Lamborghinis and whatnot, waiting for their owners to shamble down out of the hills and head into town for dinner and a movie, and it's enchanted because, duh, the Gorge is famous for car break-ins.