Following up on the recent Punchbowl Falls post, next we're having a peek at Dead Point Falls, another waterfall a few hundred feet downriver from there, which you might as well have a look at if you're in the area already. This one is on a side creek, not the main stem, so it has a significantly lower volume but makes up for that by being a lot taller. It would probably attract a few more visitors in its own right if it had a better name; I don't have any suggestions right at hand, but anything without "Dead" in the name would be an improvement.
The Hood River History Museum has a page with a vintage stereo photo of the falls, and a comment there explains the name:
...As usual Lewis McArthur has an answer in "Oregon Geographic Names." We have Green Point Creek and Dead Point Creek, one of which "rises on a point covered with green timber" and the other on a point with dead timber (I’ll let you figure out which is which). Dead Point Falls is on Dead Point Creek.
If you're curious about those two hills, Green Point Mountain has a Peakbagger page here. Dead Point doesn't seem to have a page there, but it does have an onXmaps page about the road to the top, with photos of lots of trees, largely non-deceased.
Apparently the dead timber was due to a forest fire that had burned through here a few years prior, and you'd think people would know better than to give a place a permanent name based on temporary circumstances like that, but that seems to be what happened here. For several decades in the early 20th Century there was a widespread belief that Northwest forests simply could not grow back after fires or clearcuts, and if the trees on a certain hill ever burnt to charcoal it would just stay that way forever, and you might as well name the hill accordingly. That turned out to be wrong, although -- to be fair -- it could take over a century for a forest to really grow back the way it was, and there were very few written records going back even half that long at that point. Of course they could have also asked elderly native people if the forest eventually grows back after a fire, and surely someone would've had a childhood anecdote or two on the subject, but pioneer-era people apparently just weren't curious about that sort of thing.
