Horsetail Creek Railroad Bridge

Next up we've got a few photos of the train bridge at Horsetail Creek, just down the tracks from the Oneonta Creek one we looked at in the last poist, and just downstream from the HCRH Horsetail Creek Bridge, which we visited back in 2018. Federal railroad GIS says this one is like the others we've looked at today in that it carries a single set of tracks and is not a drawbridge or any other kind of moving bridge. Like its neighbor to the west, the ridge type is listed as "Regular Steel Beams/Girder + Misc. Steel bridges", and it has a UniqueID of "W811_OR24818", for whatever that's worth. This one does look different than the Oneonta one and I don't think it's of the exact same design, like it's being held up by multiple smaller steel beams rather than one large girder. Like the others I have no information on how old this bridge might be, and I don't think I could even guess a correct range of a few decades. Regardless of that, the sorta-handrail on this bridge looks like a later addition and may coincide with the advent of modern personal injury law.

I have two mildly interesting and not particularly old items to pass along this time around:

• A 2012 Horsetail Creek floodplain restoration design doc. This project re-engineered the large low-lying area between the old highway and Interstate 84 to make it more friendly to baby salmon, implementing various things from the standard baby salmon playbook, like plenty of woody debris in the water. Regarding that, let me point you at this post from about a year ago -- it's technically about some new-ish salmon-themed art in the South Waterfront area, but while putting the post together I came across various sources indicating we don't actually understand the various needs of baby salmon anywhere near as well as we think we do. Also I think that post is one of my better recent ones, and is probably more entertaining than the one you're reading now. And if you're wondering why I'm mentioning all this stuff, the link to the 2012 plan came up in search results because the bridge here and the one on Oneonta Creek mark part of the boundary of the study area.
• A 2009 Multnomah County planning approval doc for placing power lines underground, explaining how the proposed work complies with all sorts of regulations. A window into what it takes to get anything done when your proposed project is going to take place within both Multnomah County and the federal National Scenic Area. Behold and despair as a maze of agencies endlessly consult and re-consult with each other and struggle to get anything done, even though nobody actually objects to the proposal.

Oneonta Creek Railroad Bridge

So next we've got some photos of the train bridge at Oneonta Creek, continuing east on this little speedrun. We visited the ones at Bridal Veil and Wahkeena Creek in the previous two posts, and saw the one at Multnomah Falls back in 2018, so I guess this one is the logical next step. Federal railroad GIS says this one has a unique ID of "W925_OR24624", if that means anything to you, and lists the bridge design type as "Regular Steel Beams/Girder + Misc. Steel bridges", which I don't think is exactly a technical engineering term. You can see that this one is supported by a steel beam or girder underneath the bridge instead of two on the sides, and you can also see that it has substantially more clearance above the creek than the Bridal Veil one does, so the designers didn't have the same design constraints as the Bridal Veil bridge.

This one also sits just downstream of the two HCRH road bridges, which brings us to the one and only mildly unusual detail I have about this one. Before civil engineers got their hands on it, the Columbia River once ran fairly close to the bluffs at Oneonta Creek, close enough that at one spot just east of the creek the railroad took up all the usable space between the river and the cliff. A few decades later, when the Columbia River Highway got here, the railroad wouldn't budge and highway engineers ended up having to dig the Oneonta Tunnel to continue the road east from there. Eventually the state decided to build a river-level road to replace the winding and twisting old highway, which involved quarrying vast quantities of gravel and filling in some areas along the river where there was no existing flat land available. Once that had happened through here -- on the taxpayer dime -- the railroad was suddenly much more amenable to moving, and in 1948 a sort of switcheroo was arranged: New, rerouted tracks were built, and then the existing bridge was somehow moved sideways to the current bridge location, and train traffic was shifted over to there. Then a new stretch of road was built where the train used to run, complete with a shiny new modern bridge. And when that was finished, they shifted traffic to the new road around the cliff, blocked off the Oneonta Tunnel, and used the original 1914 highway bridge for parking.

That last detail actually resolved another problem with the original alignment, which was that there was nowhere to park if you wanted to stop and wade up Oneonta Gorge. As a 1946 doc explains, the state ended up leasing a bit of railroad land for a parking lot and grandly declared that little area to be a new state park, which then quietly fell off the rolls after the realignment.

The switcheroo details come from February 2000 nomination designating parts of the highway of as a "National Historic Landmark", which I gather is similar to the National Register of Historic Places but with stricter rules on how intact a thing has to be, such that the whole road qualified for the National Register, but only certain parts were good enough to be a Landmark. The doc went on to explain that the 1948 road bridge here was a "non-contributing structure", but its presence was not enough to derail the whole nomination since the original bridge was bypassed and left in place instead of being removed. So that's nice, I guess.

Wahkeena Creek Railroad Bridge

So next up we're looking at the little railroad bridge over Wahkeena Creek, which is the next train bridge east of the one at Bridal Veil that we just looked at. This one sits on top of a girder (either steel or concrete, I'm not sure which) instead of having two of them on the sides, and in general it looks like it might be a recent replacement of an older bridge, but I don't know that either because federal railroad GIS doesn't have that info. What I can tell you is that it has a unique ID of "W1012_OR24759", and a design type of "Unknown". If you had high hopes that this bridge was made with advanced alien technology or something you're likely to be disappointed. I think it just means the data entry intern didn't have that info or couldn't be bothered typing it in.

The one semi-interesting thing about this one is that the rail line also serves as a physical divider between the Wahkeena Falls area (the side I took these photos on), which is a Forest Service day use site, with free parking, and Benson State Park on the far side of the tracks, which has been a pay-to-park fee site as long as I can remember, long before anywhere else nearby was. This is possible because Benson is set up as sort of a walled garden, with no official trails (or, ideally, a railroad-approved skybridge over the tracks) between it and either Wahkeena Falls or Multnomah Falls next door. Otherwise people of the cheapskate persuasion could just park at Wahkeena Falls and haul an inflatable raft over to Benson Lake without paying the state a penny. And now it works both ways: During peak tourist season, the demand for parking at Multnomah Falls far exceeds the available supply, and if visitors could easily use Benson as overflow parking it would probably mess up the whole timed entry ticket scheme they've been using to try to manage crowds over there. And that demand would probably swamp the smaller numbers of people who just want to fish the lake or grill some burgers or whatever else there is to do at Benson itself. And I'm sure these are all very good and responsible reasons for things being how they are, and why they have to stay that way forever, but when you're standing on one side and you can easily see the park on the other side, and there are signs saying you are strictly forbidden from going over there, the whole arrangement just seems incredibly dumb.

Bridal Veil Railroad Bridge

This may surprise some of you, but not every weird project I have a go at turns out to be a winner. Some years ago, I did a series on old historic Columbia River Highway bridges, which was fun because they were all a little different, and the engineers who designed them had gone the extra mile to show off what was possible with modern concrete technology, where "modern" meant roughly 1914-1920. So I eventually ran out of those, or more to the point, I hit the long tail part where the remaining items on the list are either small and not very interesting, or far away and hard to visit, or often both. It occurred to me at some point that instead of driving for hours on end, further and further east out into the desert wastes, there was a whole second set of old bridges through the Gorge, used by the Union Pacific railroad that often ran right next to the old highway, and by and large they're at least as old as the highway ones, and it ought to be fairly straightforward to go see a bunch of them and then share some fair-to-middlin' photos and whatever fun trivia I can dig up. That formula usually works out ok; the problem this time around is that there seems to be precisely one interesting train bridge on the Oregon side of the Gorge, the Tanner Creek Viaduct, the big sorta-Roman-aqueduct structure next to Bonneville Dam, and we already visited it way back in 2014. The others fall into two basic categories: Rivers and larger creeks get a steel through truss bridge, like the one on the Sandy River (visited way back in 2009), and anything smaller gets a simple steel beam or girder design, like the one at Multnomah Falls, but without the vintage sign giving mileages by train to various semi-distant cities.

The bridge you see in the photos above is one of the latter category. This is the old railroad bridge at Bridal Veil, downstream of the falls and the trail and next to the site of the old Bridal Veil Lumber sawmill. What little info I know about it comes from a terse database entry in the Federal Railroad Administration's "Railroad Bridges" ArcGIS layer, which informs us this is a "Steel Through Plate Girder" bridge, it crosses over water, is "fixed - non-moveable" (as in not a drawbridge or something), carries one set of tracks, length is not specified, and has a UniqueID code of "W712_OR24695", whatever that means. And that may be all the info Uncle Sam knows about it. I think the db essentially has whatever info the railroad feels like sharing voluntarily, so no details about stuff like the last time a bridge built sometime around 1907 was inspected for rust and structural soundness and whatnot. And I'll just point you at the Steel Bridge and Portsmouth Cut posts if you want to know how things go when your city depends on railroad-owned critical infrastructure and they don't have to tell you anything if they don't want to. The state government knows how little leverage it has, which explains things like a state Fish & Wildlife map of Fish Passage Barriers, which flags every last tiny creek, stream, and seasonal rivulet as a potential fish barrier where it passes under I-84 or the old highway, but not where it passes under the railroad, like they know they can't do anything about that particular barrier and would rather not poke the bear if they can avoid it.

I did find a railfan page that briefly explains what a "Steel Through Plate Girder" bridge is and how it works. See those railings along the length of the bridge? They aren't a safety feature for derailments, and they aren't a pedestrian feature from the old days when passenger trains stopped here. No, those heavy duty "railings" are actually the main load-bearing structure of the bridge: Each girder has a post on each end that attaches it to the concrete bridge piers, and then the bridge deck is attached to the beams, and then the bridge deck is a relatively thin layer attached to the bases of the two girders. The page notes the main reason you might use this design is if you don't have a lot of clearance between track level and whatever it is your bridge needs to cross, which is certainly the case here. Listed along with that are several limitations: "Easy to damage", "Difficult to replace", and "Limited to one track between girders (two possible with depth increase)".

Those design concerns may also explain why I don't think I've ever seen a regular motor vehicle bridge of this design. For one thing, a road bridge is bound to have the occasional vehicle banging into the railing for any number of reasons, and it sounds like this could be rather consequential, both for the bridge and the driver, since these support girders probably don't have the same degree of give on impact that a regular highway guardrail would. And with a road bridge you can usually get around any clearance issues by just building the bridge higher up and putting a ramp at either end, which you can't really do with trains.

Anyway, those bridge design concerns probably explain why the line is single track over the bridge, but is double track for about a mile immediately east of the bridge, ending somewhere around Old Boneyard Road. This was probably done to accomodate freight trains that used to stop at the lumber mill that used to exist here, and the railroad still keeps Bridal Veil on the books as an official train station. This is per federal GIS data, again, which says the station's unique station ID is "UP06258853437", though before anyone gets excited about this, note there is no actual freight or passenger infrastructure in place. Maybe they do this on the off chance the Columbia Gorge timber industry stages a big comeback, or there's a huge boom in the mailing of wedding invitations from the tiny Bridal Veil post office here, or the Oregon side of the Gorge gets passenger rail service again, or who knows.

Baker Creek Falls

Next up we're taking a peek at Baker Creek Falls, a small waterfall in rural Washington County, in the hilly area west of Sherwood. This is part of Metro's Baker Creek Canyon Natural Area, an obscure greeenspace area the agency purchased in 2011 or so. These late summer photos don't really do it justice; a Waymarking page for the falls has a photo of it when it was running at a much higher volume. I meant to go back on an early spring day and get better photos of it but getting there is a bit of a long drive to the far end of the metro area and then a few miles past there, almost into Yamhill County.

This a Metro Natural Area, as opposed to a Nature Park, so there are zero visitor facilities beyond the cute little Natural Area sign (if you can find it) and the agency does absolutely nothing to get the word out about it to potential visitors. Some Natural Areas like this may never get more development than they have now. Others will be upgraded to Nature Parks someday, but not during your lifetime or mine. The thing to understand here is that Metro takes a very long-term view of things, surprising for a government agency in this country. They prioritize buying land above building amenities, on the theory that nobody is making new undeveloped land; what's there now is as much as there will ever be, and it's not going to be any more affordable in the future than it is now.

The good news is that the falls are right next to a road and easy to get to, so you're not going to need much in the way of facilities. Have your favorite driving directions app guide you to the intersection of SW Kruger Rd. and Dutson Dr., which is right at a sorta-hairpin corner on Kruger. This is also where Baker Creek passes under the street. Just west of there, immediately past the bend, there's a flat stretch of shoulder on the westbound side of the road, on the inside of the turn, with enough space for maybe 2-3 regular-size vehicles, or quite a few bikes, or between 0.5 and 2 luxury SUVs. I mention that last bit because this area is a short distance from the vineyards of Yamhill County, and seems to be rapidly filling up with McMansions and hobby farms. So you can kind of sense the urgency of Metro's land-buying efforts here. On the positive side, on the way here you'll see lots of cute llamas and alpacas randomly hanging out watching the world go by, so you can look at them and just ignore the ghastly 6000 square foot Tuscan-Victorian chateaus and whatnot where their people live.

So assuming there's room to park, park there and look for a really obvious unofficial trail heading downhill to the creek. Follow it toward the creek, then look upstream for the waterfall. At this point you can decide for yourself whether it was worth the effort to get here, which is obviously going to depend on the season and how far you had to drive to get to this point. If you're just coming from Sherwood or maybe Tualatin, it probably counts as a cool local attraction, kind of like Cedar Hills Falls in Beaverton. If you're coming from downtown Portland, like I was, it's a lot of trouble to get to for how small it is. I thought it was still worth visiting, but I also recognize that doing things "for the sake of completeness" motivates me a lot more than it does most people, plus even if it had gone completely dry when I visited I'd still get a blog post out of it.

I don't have any news stories to share about the falls, or the creek, or the rest of the general area, but I did come up with a short list of Metro documents and press releases that refer to it, so here we go:

• 2009 press release about salmon returning to the area.
• A 2011 portfolio doc said public access is incompatible with water quality
• 2016-2018 Parks & Nature System Plan softens that policy a bit, and merely says public access is not a high priority because they're busy with water quality work.
• 2019-2022 plan refinement doc
• 2021 news items about restoration work
• News release about a 2022 expansion of Metro holdings in the area

Beaver Creek Canyon, Troutdale OR

Next up we're doing the hike around Troutdale's Beaver Creek Canyon. This particular Beaver Creek is a large tributary of the Sandy River that begins somewhere south of Oxbow Park and flows north, roughly parallel to the Sandy River, eventually joining the river at Depot Park in downtown Troutdale. On its way there it flows thru a surprisingly deep and narrow canyon for a couple of miles. Surprising as in one stretch seems to be over 150' deep, so not on the same scale as the Columbia Gorge to the east of here, or the Sandy River Gorge south of here, but it's big enough to make you forget you're still technically in suburbia. Which you can do here because it's a Troutdale city park, and there's a trail through it, or at least part of it.

If you look at a map of the area, like the one above, you'd think this would be a straightforward hike: You'd park at Glenn Otto Park, which borders Beaver Creek for a bit, and the trail would head south from there. But right at the mouth of the canyon are several private landowners, served by a private road with a big "No Trespassing" sign posted. As far as I could tell there isn't an interesting or dramatic backstory to this situation, or if there is the story never made it into a newspaper with searchable archives. Whatever the exact details are, the 50,000 foot version is probably just landowners not wanting to sell, and/or the city not having the money to buy. In any case, the "actual" route is a bit longer but possibly more interesting than the direct route would have been.

So the route we're taking goes a lot like this: Starting at Glenn Otto, cross Beaver Creek on the pedestrian bridge and stroll along the sidewalk heading for downtown Troutdale. After a few blocks you'll see signs for the Harlow House Museum, a house belonging to the city's colorful founder. Behind the house, there's a small landscaped garden, and behind the garden you'll find a trailhead marked something like "Harlow Canyon". Because this initial stretch follows an entirely different creek with its own watershed. The trail heads uphill briefly, crosses the tiny canyon's tiny creek right where it makes a cute little mini-waterfall, and then ends at a trail junction. One option seems to dump you out onto a suburban city street, while the trail on the left continues in a narrow corridor right along the edge of the bluff, a near-sheer drop on one side, and a bunch of backyard fences on the other. There isn't a city parks page for this bit of trail, but it appears to be called the "Strawberry Meadows Greenway", named for the subdivision here. Which in turn (following the usual practice with subdivisions) was named for the strawberry farms that once dominated the area. This part is a fairly popular community walking trail, so you might get waylaid by chatty retirees unless you look like you need to be somewhere on a tight schedule. Eventually this trail ends too, I think right at the subdivision boundary, dumping you out on a regular suburban street, SE Beaver Creek Lane. Luckily this is the kind of suburb that has sidewalks, because that's the next phase of the hike. You're looking for either of two entrances to Beaver Creek Canyon, which start as nondescript paths between houses. There aren't any big signs announcing where they go, either. The first one is across the street from the intersection with Chapman Ave. The second one is across from tiny Weedin Park. Pick either one, and before you know it the concrete path becomes several flights of stairs down into the canyon.

Either entrance puts you on the same sloping trail down into the canyon, which brings you to the park's main trail junction. From here you can turn right and follow the creek south/upstream, or follow the trail as it turns left and follows the creek north/downstream. The exact distance you can go in either direction varies a lot over time, shrinking when a winter flood or landslide rolls through, and expanding when the city finds grant money or volunteers to repair flood and landslide damage, or even (once in a blue moon) to expand the trail network. There will be anywhere between zero and two footbridges over the creek; if the current number is one or more, you may have access to a parallel trail on the east bank of the creek, and -- if it's a good trail year -- that trail might connect to another entrance here. If there's currently a bridge in existence at both bridge sites (which is rarely true), you can do this part of the park as a loop. The southbound trail may also connect to trails in Kiku Park, depending on current landslide/repair conditions, which would be a third way in from the west side. I didn't check on this when I was there and it may have changed since then, and could change again between when I'm writing this and when you're reading it.

Even further south, there's yet another westside entrance here, which apparently goes to a small loop trail disconnected from the rest of the trail network. I didn't visit this area and have no photos of it. It's separated from the rest of the park by the deepest and narrowest stretch of the canyon, so I don't know whether connections to the rest of the park once existed and don't anymore, or whether they never got funding in the first place, or whether it's even physically possible to build a trail through that part. Upstream from there, Beaver Creek passes through a jumble of public land and farmland without trails, and the canyon starts somewhere in that area. Continuing upstream, Beaver Creek flows through a city park that's called either "Bellingham Greenway", "Mountain Vista Greenway", or "CEF Open Space" depending on whose map you're looking at, with an entrance here and another somewhere around here. And on the south side of SW Stark St. is the Mt. Hood Community College campus, which has a ~65 acre Metro wetland area running along either side of the creek, and a small trail system we'll meet in another post. South of the college, the creek runs more or less along the edge of suburbia (as of 2024) for a bit, incuding a few disconnected units of Gresham's Beaver Creek Management Area here, here, and here, the last two possibly with trails connecting them. Then it's just farmland all the way south to where the creek begins, a bit west of Oxbow Park.

The park is like this because of the Great Troutdale Land Rush of the late 1970s. Subdivisions sprouted like invasive weeds all across east Multnomah County generally, and Troutdale in particular. I think it was largely because it's where the large blocks of cheap land and motivated sellers were. The local strawberry industry had been rapidly outcompeted by larger, cheaper, and completely flavorless, styrofoam-like strawberries from California, mostly because their strawberry varieties can survive long bumpy journeys in an 18-wheeler while ours don't, and theirs hold up under being dipped in molten chocolate and then sitting on grocery shelves for weeks. And our strawberries... don't. Long story short, it was a great time to sell around here, and most of the land on either side of Beaver Creek became housing over a few short years, right up to Oregon's mega-recession of the early 1980s. It probably helped too that house hunting is largely a spring and summer phenomenon and prospective buyers wouldn't get to experience what Troutdale winters can be like until it's too late. In any case, the city responded to this wave by being surprisingly forward-looking by Portland suburb standards, and not immediately bowing down to whatever developers wanted. A 1977 Oregonian article, "Wilderness survives amidst housing" explains that the city generally required developers to hand over some land for city parks as part of getting your subdivision approved, and in this part of town that included any land in the canyon. You couldn't build there anyway, for flood control reasons. The city also required that private property along the canyon rim had to be in natural vegetation, to limit the visual impact of subdivisions up above. Which probably also reduced the risk of distracted gardeners taking a big tumble while weeding.

Somehow this actually worked, and the parts of the canyon that are protected now are protected because of adjacent subdivisions. This is not how things usually turn out, to put it mildly. But thanks to the county surveyor's office putting records online we can look at the subdivision plats for Sandee Palisades phases I (1/77), II (2/78), III (12/78), and IV (12/90) on the east side of the creek, and the ones for Corbeth (6/77), Rainbow Ridge (5/76), Kiku Heights (2/77), Beaver Creek Estates (2/78) Weedin Addition (7/77), Mountain Vista (1992), Bellingham Park (5/97) and Strawberry Meadows (4/95) on the west side, each one showing the concessions developers made in exchange for the privilege of building here. Not just donating land that was probably unbuildable anyway, but providing access points into the park.

The 70s were a time of grand plans, and there was indeed a grand plan for Beaver Creek. The hot new idea back then was the "40 Mile Loop", a future regional hike-n-bike trail network encircling the Portland metro area. Eventually someone remembered the "circumference equals Pi times two times radius" formula from high school and realized that encircling the metro area would involve quite a lot more than 40 miles of trails, and a few years ago they rebranded the concept as "The Intertwine". In any case, no version of this loop has never been anywhere near completion, but I would guess that it has a cameo in every last urban planning document produced in the Portland area since the Tom McCall era. I think the idea is to not do anything to preclude a future bit of Intertwine in your project area even though you aren't actively working on it just now. So the working idea has been that Troutdale's part of the loop follows Beaver Creek into town from the south, drops into the canyon at some point, and continues to the Sandy River and then along the Columbia on what eventually becomes the Marine Drive Trail, taking you back toward Portland. Or you could hang a right at Glenn Otto Park, cross the bridge, and follow either the HCRH Trail (i.e. bike in traffic until Elowah Falls) or get on Trail 400 at Lewis & Clark State Park (as soon as they get around to building that initial 5-10 mile stretch of trail) and follow it east to Cascade Locks where it intersects the Pacific Crest Trail, and simply walk to Canada or Mexico from there, as one does.

Which brings us to the usual timeline section of this post, which is basically a list of old news stories and other items I couldn't work into this post any other way. Nothing really earthshaking to share here, but you can see the decades-long pattern of the city scratching its head trying to figure out what to do about the place and how to pay for it.

• 1978, meeting notice that Sandee Palisades III was in the city planning approval phase
• 1982 article about the growing Troutdale park system. Mentions summer maintenance jobs were paid for with CETA grants. (CETA was the "Comprehensive Employment and Training Act of 1973", a late, lamented federal program that would pay for just about anything if you had a good grant writer.)
• A similar 1983 article mentions the park briefly, director said the trails were too steep for bikes
• Another article from around the same time noted the trail was now part of city's comprehensive plan, mentions that planned 40 Mile Loop route at the time was through the canyon.
• Report on a mid-1990s project clearing invasive plants. Which sort of morphed into a restoration effort after the 1995-96 floods. A consultant told the city to move trails away from the creek and get rid of a bridge for causing erosion.
• another project nearby in 1997, maybe in connection with the Strawberry Meadows subdivision going in.
• 2004 city council minutes, discussion of parks master plan, with a member of the public blowing a gasket over another such proposed development deal, as it would be in exchange for low income housing this time. Thinks connecting the north & south chunks of park would cause crime, and if a park happens it should be a human exclusion area
• Parks Master Plan, adopted 2006. The plan of record is to extend the existing trail along the creek in both directions, bypassing the current harlow creek / strawberry route. You could hike from Glenn Otto to MHCC. Discusses maybe obtaining easements for the gap to Glenn Otto vs buying, maybe owners aren't interested in selling or city can't afford
• 2014 study connecting trail south to springwater corridor
• 2020 OregonHikers thread about the park

HCRH Milepost 35

Continuing east, the next HCRH milepost on this weird little project is number 35, which -- conveniently -- is located right at the day use area portion of Ainsworth State Park, which we (as in, this humble blog here and its vast and rapidly growing global audience) last visited wayyy back in 2007. This milepost is unfortunately a bit worse for wear right now, or at least it was when I took the photos, and this one might just be reinforced concrete spalling, and not being sideswiped by some bro in a Hellcat trying to drift through here.

The park itself has an easy half-mile loop nature trail for the whole family, and Trail 400 passes through here too. Via the 400, to the west it's about half a mile to the Horsetail Falls trail and maybe onward to points west. To the east it's about a mile to the little-known, little-used Dodson Trailhead near Exit 35, and from there it isn't far to the rather un-picturesque setting of milepost 36. Not really a highlight of the Gorge, but if you're looking for unusual hike ideas, this is definitely one of them. If nothing else, it's a good trail to keep in mind if outdoor social distancing ever comes back.

If you aren't up for any hiking at all, it's probably a good spot to just hang out and watch the trains go by, if you're into that sort of thing.

For the higher difficulty levels, this is also where you would start if you're doing the legendary slash infamous Mystery Trail, or becoming one of the few people to ever climb St. Peter's Dome, or taking on the Ainsworth Left ice climbing route.

The park also has an overnight camping section, which might be the closest public camping site to Portland, with the sole exception of Oxbow Park. It wasn't always like this; until the late 1970s or early 1980s, there were plenty of others: Lewis & Clark State Park on the Sandy River at Troutdale; Dabney SP a bit further upriver, and Dodge Park even further south and east. Also Rooster Rock; the summit of Larch Mountain; and possibly Wahkeena Falls, though I'm less sure about that one. The powers that be decided this was attracting the wrong sort of person: Young, drunk, and disorderly partiers for one thing, but also people with nowhere else to go, and even people who were in town for the summer doing seasonal farm work, back when East Multnomah County was still largely rural. So now it costs enough to keep the poors out, and time limits ensure it's not a good option for seasonal workers, who instead get to live in whatever lightly-regulated housing a farmer feels like providing, out of sight and mind, and away from polite society.

Another nearby turnout has a roadside drinking fountain, fed by an underground spring. The Ainsworth page at Recreating the Columbia River Highway seems to indicate this is actually a bit older than the park itself, since the park was created in 1933 and the fountain was part of a statewide Highway Commission project in the 1920s. I think the "Sunset Springs" one on US 26 heading to the Coast is another survivor of this project, as was the recently-discontinued one on the HCRH across from Dabney State Park. Unlike those two, this one doesn't seem to have legions of devotees who come regularly to fill their VW Buses with multiple carboys of pure spring water. I'm not sure why not, though all the fancy stonework around might make it difficult to convince yourself you've come across a fountain "that was not made / by the hand of man", as the song goes.

The area is a bit thin on nearby historical events, but here's what I've got this time around:

• For people planning their summer vacations, in June 1953 the Oregonian printed a list of state parks with a brief blurb about each. 46 acres, 37 miles east of Portland. U.S. 30, at the foot of St. Peter’s Dome. Ice-cold spring, footpaths, parking and picnic areas.
• With later additions the park now comes to 171.97 acres. At least that's the number I come up with by adding up everything labeled "Ainsworth State Park" in the State Land Inventory System. That total includes a separate chunk of 25.08 acres along the river, directly north of I-84 Exit 35 and the railroad, which doesn't seem to be accessible, except maybe by boat. ODOT's Right-of-Way map and blueprint for the park shows the original park and the 1963 expansion
• A month later (July 1953), an article about a land acquisition near Oneonta Creek mentioned a plan to somehow run a road up Oneonta Creek to Triple Falls, then cut over to Horsetail Creek to visit Ponytail Falls, rejoining the old highway somewhere near Ainsworth. I may have mentioned this proposal before; I keep coming across it when searching for other things, and it's just such a strange and alarming idea. I feel like I need to point out the bullets that were dodged when I run across them, I guess as a reminder that when a particular place or thing survives, that survival was often not automatic or guaranteed, and as inhabitants of the modern 21st century we are every bit as susceptible to harebrained schemes as our counterparts 50 or 100 years ago, and possibly even more so.
• The state started talking about expanding the park in 1963, with the land to be used as a campground, and the expansion eventually opened in 1968.
• October 1972 dueling pair of letters to the editor about the new campground. The first complains that the camping portion of the park was not natural enough and reminded them of a supermarket parking lot. The second letter, in response, claims to like it that way, insisting it's the nicest and cleanest state park around. I have never actually been to that part and have no personal opinion on the subject. Or, as real professional journalists like to say about everything, Both Sides Do It.
• April 1985 interview with the Portland regional administrator for Oregon State Parks about his big plans for Trail 400, which was (and still kinda-sorta is) supposed to cover the whole distance between Troutdale and Hood River. The segment between Ainsworth and Elowah Falls / Yeon State Park had recently opened, and the next steps he had in mind were 1.) a route around Tooth Rock, between Tanner Creek and Eagle Creek, which was probably going to be expensive. 2.) A four-mile trail between Bridal Veil Falls and Latourell Falls, passing above Shepperds Dell and giving new views of the falls there. This was gated on some key land acquisitions and of course funding. 3.) A trail segment between Portland Womens Forum and Crown Point, which also needed some land acquisitions or easements. Something akin to item 1 happened in the late 1990s as the first segment of the bike-oriented HCRH State Trail. That project made its way around Tooth Rock via a segment of the old highway, rather than dynamiting a new ledge into the rock for the trail to use, while the Trail 400 that was eventually built makes its way from Tanner to Eagle Creek via a different route, with switchbacks on either end to gain/lose altitude, and then a roughly east-west route through the maze of existing Forest Service and BPA access roads in the area between the two creeks.