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.