Chehalem Ridge Nature Park

Here are some photos from a wander around Metro's shiny new Chehalem Ridge Nature Park, in the Chehalem Mountains, the hilly area between the Tualatin and Yamhill Valleys. I probably ought to say up front that although it's generally nice and seems to have a well-designed trail system, outside of a few key viewpoints most of the park does not have those gazillion-dollar views that the name tends to conjure up. And I say that up front because my photos of the place might lead you to believe otherwise, because I liked the scenic viewpoint parts and took lots of photos there.

I gather Metro had wanted to add a regional park somewhere in the Chehalem Mountains area for a very long time, and eventually they came across this former tree farm, and bought it and slowly rehabbed it into a place people might enjoy visiting. It may not have been the absolutely most desirable land in the area, but it had enough acreage, and seemed to have good bones, and it came on the market right when Metro had a pile of cash to spend, so here we are.

The most desirable land was probably not affordable anyway, even for regional governments flush with greenspace bond money. Like areas with views (like along Mountain Top Rd. and Bald Peak Rd, where south-facing McMansions perch above the Yamhill Valley) or quality vineyard land maybe 3+ levels of nested AVAs deep. (For example, the nearby Ribbon Ridge AVA which is inside the larger Chehalem Mountains one, which in turn is one part of the overall Willamette Valley AVA, and in general anything with a designation more specific than "Willamette Valley" is going to cost more, sometimes a lot more.) Note that all of this happened despite local vigilance bordering on paranoia about development proposals -- see, for example, this forum thread from 2010 about a proposed McMansion / hobby farm subdivision somewhere in the Yamhill Valley that was seen as yet another harbinger of Napa-style development doom.

There's an old joke-that-isn't-a-joke among winemakers that the best way to make a small fortune in the wine business is to start with a large fortune. In that spirit, the surest way to afford the very best Chehalem Mountain land is to travel back in time to the 1970s and get a job at Intel in Hillsboro. Claw your way up the corporate ladder from there, and do everything you possibly can to avoid working on anything that isn't an x86 processor. When Intel stock hits $40 in August 2000, cash out your massive pile of stock and stock options, and spend your newfound dot-com gazillions on land before it gets insanely expensive, and somehow outwit all the other time travelers who also read this very blog post and are trying to do the same thing, as well as the others working at cross purposes, like me going back to the same exact spot circa 1800 to hand out vaccines and warn everybody about Lewis and Clark.

Anyway, the Chehalem Ridge Master Plan explains what Metro had in mind when designing the park. One thing I liked here is that the plan added trails to most of the park, which seems like a no-brainer but is not what they did at other recent nature parks, like Newell Creek or Canemah Bluff, where the areas open to visitors are sort of crammed into one corner of the property, making those parks feel weirdly cramped and a bit underwhelming. I am not sure why they do this, since the acquired land is typically not pristine old growth forest full of fragile ecosystems that need to be left untouched. Maybe it's that they can only spend greenspace money on land, and other capital expenditures (and operating costs) come out of the general fund, where they will forever be prioritized a few steps below cute zoo animals.

One grumble I do have about this park, in common with the other places I mentioned, is a feeling that things are a bit... over-curated? I'm still trying to put my finger on it, it's not quite helicopter parenting, exactly, but you'll come across things like trails that are signed as one-way for safety, and lots of railings to be extra sure you stay on the trail. Other trails have themes and plenty of signage, like someone was worried visitors won't get anything out of the experience without it being spoon-fed to them. There's one spot here where a trail is a few steps away from a gravel service road, but they aren't connected, and they even added railings between them, I guess to prevent people from switching themed experiences halfway through. I dunno. I am probably making it sound really bad, but I am not actually mad about what they're doing, exactly; I sort of assume this was all imagineered into being by young idealistic twenty-something staffers, people who landed their dream jobs and are ecstatic about designing new parks and really, really want you to love these places just like they do, and they may go a little overboard about it sometimes.

And if you do find yourself humming It's A Small World involuntarily while visiting a Metro Nature Park, let me suggest visiting one of their Natural Areas instead. These are the other kind of Metro greenspace, and are in many ways the complete opposite of what I just described. You won't find a guidebook or even a simple list of these places anywhere on the Metro website, or -- remarkably -- anywhere else on the internet, although I might create one at some point. For now, your best bet is probably to fire up MetroMap, their GIS system, enable the "Parks and Natural Areas" layer (which is off by default), and then look around for unfamiliar green-shaded areas that don't show up on Google Maps. If you visit one, don't expect any handholding. At all. If you're lucky, there will be a cute little Natural Area sign about the size of a picture postcard welcoming you, or at least confirming you're at the right place. Note that this sign, if there is one, won't always be right at the entrance, however, which can make things a bit interesting when you first arrive. You see, Metro also has this fun policy of leaving any existing signs in place, so if (for example) the previous owner was some sort of crazy-eyed militia nut, you will just have to trust GIS and ignore the previous owner's fake security cameras and hand-painted "Trespassers Will Be Violated" signs and keep going til you see the "Ok, ok, fiiine, you win, welcome to the Natural Area" sign, posted just around the first corner so it can't be seen from the road. Which is pretty hilarious, actually. Though (and I shouldn't have to say this, but I will) it really helps to be absolutely positively sure you're in the right place and haven't mistakenly blundered onto the private property next door, which is still owned by a different crazy-eyed militia nut. Anyway, assuming you pass that initial test, the rest of the Natural Area is pretty much whatever was there before Metro bought it, minus any buildings that could otherwise harbor squatters. Some of the Natural Areas are flat-out amazing, others not so much, your mileage may vary and it's not their problem, there's no implied warranty of merchantability for any particular purpose, etcetera, etcetera. I'm a big Natural Area fan, in case you hadn't noticed. But we'll get around to exploring these places in other posts.

If you look at a Chehalem Ridge trail map, or the doc explaining the trail names, you might notice a very odd detail that they don't explain clearly. The name doc explains that the trail names are a diverse mix: Some are in English, a couple are Spanish, and several are in the local Kalapuya dialect. Which seems like a reasonable and unsurprising thing to do. And then you get to the Mampaɬ Trail and encounter an entirely new letter of the alphabet that you've never seen before. The doc says it's pronounced "muhm-pahl", sort of the way you would with a regular non-curlicued 'L', but doesn't explain the letter any further. (We're also told it's the Tualatin Kalapuya word for 'lakeview', in honor of a nearby former lake that was converted to farmland in the early 20th century). It actually worked really well to just search Google for that single character, which leads directly to the Wikipedia article on "voiceless dental and alveolar lateral fricatives". Evidently this squiggly character is a "voiceless alveolar lateral fricative", and represents a sound that simply doesn't exist in English. And you're seeing it because the present-day convention (at least with Pacific Northwest indigenous languages) is to use International Phonetic Alphabet characters whenever the regular Latin alphabet isn't up to the job, which turns out to be rather often. Another recent example is NE Portland's Kʰunamokwst Park, which is pronounced something like "KAHN-ah-mockst" and is a Chinook wawa word meaning "together".

Of course these pronunciations are meant as "close-enough" approximations for English speakers. If you're wondering how to really pronounce the 'ɬ' -- which would be an essential skill when travelling back to 1800 to warn people, for example -- it turns out that the same sound is also the correct way to pronounce the double-L sound in Welsh, and so there are a few instructional videos on YouTube explaining (in English) how to make this sound. Which I've attempted a few times, and am doing quite poorly at so far. Meanwhile over on Wikipedia we're also told that it's the "Lh" sound in Sindarin (e.g. the River Lhûn), and "Hl" in Quenya, both Elvish languages from LOTR and the Silmarillion.

phx ✈️ pdx, september 2025

Next up is the latest set of aerial photos (so far, at least), from another flight from Phoenix back to Portland a few days ago. It was cloudier than the previous installment, so no Vegas photos this time but instead featuring lots of big puffy thunderheads at sunset. It was rather nice, although I did get the "City in the Clouds" theme (from Empire Strikes Back) stuck in my head for a bit.

pdx ✈️ phx, august 2025 (II)

Next up, some photos from a second early-afternoon flight from Portland down to Phoenix. This photoset is smaller than the first one, mostly because I fell asleep for a bit, and everything was just kind of beige and hazy and uninspiring all the way down.

One of the photos right after takeoff is looking across the agricultural part of Sauvie Island, and I think you can see Bell View Point toward the top of the photo. It's a bit of river bank directly across from Kelly Point Park, making it the official mouth of the Willamette River as it joins the Columbia. It's another of those Metro properties that used to be a Multnomah County park until the 1990s, and the reason you haven't seen a blog post about it is that the only way to get to it is by a narrow gravel road marked by large "Private" and "No Trespassing" signs. So I don't think the place has been (legally) accessible by land for several decades on end. Maybe you can get there by kayak or small boat, which might involve cutting across the main shipping channel of the Willamette River without being run over by a ship full of outbound wheat or inbound cars. That hardly seems worth doing, just to visit what seems to be an otherwise-generic bit of riverbank, especially since I don't own a kayak, and the only person I knew who owned a boat ended up selling it for the usual financial reasons, despite all the glamor and attention and whatnot that comes with being that one friend who owns a boat.

phx ✈️ pdx, august 2025

Next set of aerial photos was taken flying from Phoenix back to Portland, leaving around 6pm and getting home late. So there are some photos taken around sunset, and a few taken while flying over Las Vegas. You can instantly tell it's Las Vegas and not some other random city in the desert because The Sphere is easily visible from 40,000 feet or so in the air. Thing is, if you get any semi-decent photos of it and show them to an elderly relative who hasn't heard of The Sphere, they'll ask you what it is and what it's for, and follow up with "But why, though?", and probably your best bet is to just read off what Wikipedia says about it and agree that it doesn't make any sense to you either.

All of that said, the 319 megapixel, 120fps Big Sky camera that was designed to film content for the Sphere looks rather interesting and if they gave me one I would be willing to give it a spin. I'm usually not that interested in fixed-lens video hardware, but I would be willing to make an exception in this particular case.

pdx ✈️ phx, august 2025 (I)

Welp, here's the first in a series of at least four posts tagged 'flying', thanks to a bit of ongoing family medical drama down in Arizona. This isn't the sort of blog where I go into lots of personal details, but as a piece of general advice for everyone, but especially those of the elderly persuasion: If you've been prescribed something for a chronic condition (say, blood thinners, to pick a random example), and it's a bit expensive, and you run into a temporary financial dry spot for a few months, but you have people (say, your successful middle-aged adult children, to pick another random example) who would be more than happy to help you out if only they knew, the correct course of action is not to skip filling that prescription for a while and not tell us, I mean, anybody, and just sort of cross your fingers that it'll probably work out ok in the end. This is not doing anybody any favors, to put it mildly. And after all that, saying how weird it is that your kids are starting to have grey hair, right after causing more of it.

Anyway, this set of aerial photos includes some semi-snowy Cascades, then lots of empty desert, then the rocky hills around Phoenix on a hazy smoggy 115ºF afternoon, which vaguely of remind me of the photos returned by Soviet Venus probes back in the 1980s. Except with endless subdivisions stretching off to the horizon, many of them built around artificial lakes (which you can't swim in, or fish in, or go boating on), I guess just to own the libs or something. I can't explain that or much of anything else about Phoenix, really, including a.) why it exists in the first place, and b.) why nearly 5 million people live there. Ok, people keep telling me it's only incredibly hot for three months of the year and is nice otherwise. But I've only ever experienced it at summer temperatures and have come to suspect it's actually like this year-round and the idea that it's vaguely tolerable sometime in the winter was dreamed up by a few creative real estate speculators preying on people who buy propery sight unseen, and it sort of snowballed from there, so to speak.

Little Zigzag Falls

Here are a few photos of Mt. Hood's Little Zigzag Falls, a short distance off Highway 26 on the way to Government Camp. You follow Highway 26 eastbound toward Government Camp, but hang a left here onto a road that's signed as both "Kiwanis Camp Road" and "Road 39". Then you stay on that road for 2.2 miles, past the Kiwanis camp to the trailhead. The road crosses a bridge and looks like it's going to continue past here, but it really doesn't, and it hasn't in decades, and we'll get to why in a bit. From here, a short, easy, and surprisingly flat hike (trail #795C) takes you to the falls, strolling along next to the burbling Little Zigzag River the whole way. It's not the highest waterfall you'll ever see, or the most challenging trail you'll ever tackle, but it's great. At least I thought it was great. Maybe it was the perfect weather, or the season, or the late afternoon light, or the stars and planets lining up in exactly the right way, or who knows. I didn't take any selfies on the way and mercifully have no evidence of this, but it's possible that I had a goofy grin on my face the whole time, thus looking like a complete idiot, and belated apologies if you had to witness that.

The history bit I mentioned is that this old bumpy road is a piece of the original 1925 Mt. Hood Loop Highway, the predecessor of the modern Highway 26 you took to get here, and back in those days Little Zigzag Falls was one of the new highway's big scenic attractions. The old road was modeled on the recent Columbia River Highway and did not assume you were in any great hurry to get where you were going -- or that your car was capable of tackling steep slopes even if you were in a hurry -- so it wandered around the landscape connecting various scenic and historical highlights. After the bridge here, the old highway doubled back and headed uphill to Laurel Hill, where it's abruptly cut in two by the present-day road, and you can't really see where or how the old route passed through because of how thoroughly ODOT reshaped the land with dynamite. To get to the other side, you have a few options. First, if you have superpowers you can jump across or teleport or punch cars out of the way or whatever. Second, if you're a good sprinter and also an idiot, you could try that and see how it goes. Otherwise, the third option is to backtrack to 26, get on heading east, and then pull off at the tiny parking area for the Laurel Hill historical marker. From there, a short trail takes you uphill to the next fragment of 1925 highway and you can resume exploring for a bit. The main attraction along this stretch is a slope of bare rock where the old highway crosses its predecessor, the 1840s Barlow Road. That road was an especially treacherous stretch of the Oregon Trail, and its operators charged, or tried to charge, ruinous tolls for the privilege of using it. The crossing is right at a point where covered wagons were slowly eased down a near-vertical slope with ropes and pulleys. This might have been yet another way of dying in the old Oregon Trail video game, but I'm not sure I ever got to this point in the game. Usually I chose the water route to end the game instead, and generally ended up drowning at The Dalles, or at Cascade Locks if I was having an especially lucky game. Anyway, past the the Barlow Road bit the old abandoned highway continues uphill in a gentle S curve for a while, before it's cut by Highway 26 again. Somewhere along that segment you can find Yocum Falls, another former highlight of the old road, which is now so obscure there isn't even a trail to it anymore.

Which brings us to the historical timeline part of this post, which (as usual) is a bunch of items from the local library's newspaper database. You'll need a Multnomah County library card if you want the links below to work, but (as usual) I tried to summarize the items so everybody else gets a bit of history too.

• A June 1913 account in the Oregon Journal of trying and failing to drive to Government Camp because of excessive snow on the road, at a time when it was 85 degrees back in Portland. The article notes that the normally placid Little Zigzag was close bursting its banks due to melting floodwaters. An adjacent, unrelated article noted that the upcoming Rose Festival would feature a motorcycle parade for the very first time that year.
• Around this time, Portland businessman Henry Wemme bought the old, privately-owned Barlow Road from its previous owners and donated it to the state for free public use. I gather the old road was more of a disused series of wagon ruts than a proper road at this point, and the 1925 road was not really built on top of it, for the most part, so buying it out was probably more to get its owners out of the way early on, before they could really gouge the state for a larger payoff. You might know the name "Wemme" for the sorta-town further west on 26, between Brightwood and Welches, part of the long stretch of highway sprawl that occasionally tries to rebrand as "Mt. Hood Village". Wemme was also the first person in Oregon to own an automobile, a steam-powered 1899 Stanley Locomobile. Wemme died in 1914, and his will left nearly $500k to found "a maternity home or laying-in hospital for unfortunate and wayward girls in the city of Portland, Multnomah County and State of Oregon.", which eventually became the Salvation Army's White Shield Center. This was located in an oddly remote corner of Portland's Forest Park, and was only connected to the outside world by the peculiar Alexandra Avenue Bridge, which is how I know about all this.
  
  The news article mentions that local businessman George W. Joseph was also involved in the Barlow Road deal; Joseph is best known today as the namesake (and donor) of a state park in the Gorge containing Upper Latourell Falls. As the story goes, Joseph actually had a house or cabin on that property at one point, and an early version of today's Latourell Falls trail started out as part of his daily commute, from home to the Latourell train station.
• Oregon Journal December 1920 article about surveyors doing their thing in this part of the forest primeval. Most is about the team looking for good homesites for summer cabins, which would somehow play into the routing of the upcoming Mt. Hood Loop Highway. There's a mention of the river & falls as an attraction along the way to Government Camp, which was bound to help move a lot of real estate. This survey work probably led to a lot of the now-famous and very expensive Steiner Cabins that were built around the wider Mt. Hood region.
• Oregonian bit on the same survey. Mentions what miiiight be today's Pioneer Bridle Trail, which began as an alternative to the block and tackle nonsense down Laurel Hill. This route was built along a ridgeline for better visibility in case of Indian attack, and was later abandoned after that risk diminished due to war and disease.
• December 1928: Exploring the road to Mt. Hood and winter sports via 1928 Oakland Sedan, with an extended stop at Laurel Hill to visit this half-forgotten historic place while they were in the area. The article asserts that "Zigzag" refers to the switchbacks the Barlow Road was eventually retrofitted with, after the first few years of winches and pulleys and price-gouging fees to use them. And that sounds plausible, I guess. The "Little" part is because this is a tributary of the somewhat larger Zigzag River nearby, which flows into the Sandy River a few miles west of here, and the Sandy joins the Columbia at Troutdale, and so forth. I haven't visited any of these, but the NW Waterfall Survey says the [Big] Zigzag River is home to at least three waterfalls: [Upper] Zigzag Falls, way up above the treeline and the PCT on Mt. Hood, and a Middle and Lower falls downstream from there, and my usual LIDAR-based guessing technique says they're about 125', 110', and 60' high, respectively.
• July 1929 public notice about an upcoming Mazamas work party to build a connector between the Little Zigzag Trail and the Hidden Lake Trail. The latter starts just down the road, goes to Hidden Lake, and continues uphill from there, eventually connecting to the Pacific Crest Trail as it circumnavigates Mt. Hood. For variety, the other trail off the same road (the Paradise Park Trail) also connects to the PCT and even continues uphill from there for a while. The official Forest Service page for the present-day Hidden Lake Trail admits the lake is really more of a pond, but "is still a pleasant destination". Meanwhile the Forest Service Interactive Visitor Map does not show a connector trail like the article describes, so either they never finished it, or it was abandoned at some point later on.
• September 1950, Little Zigzag Canyon was mentioned briefly in an article about the multiday loop hike around Mt. Hood, via the Timberline and Skyline Trails. The Skyline Trail was the immediate predecessor to today's Pacific Crest Trail, and the PCT/Timberline loop is still a very popular hike, following more or less the same route.
• A section of highway through here, either the old one or the new one, I'm not sure which, was officially dubbed the "E. Henry Wemme Forest Corridor" in 1955. I have never seen that name used to describe this area, and have never seen it on any maps or road signs, so maybe everyone just sort of forgot.
• Typical mentions of the river and its canyon over the years involve lost climbers and hikers; this and the 'big' Zigzag River in the next canyon clockwise from here seem to be where a lot of lost people have ended up, either by hiking straight downhill and hoping to bump into civilization, or, well, just tumbling into one of those river canyons along the way. A June 1981 article on the subject interviews several exasperated forest rangers and search-and-rescue experts, who rattle off long lists of dumb ways people have gotten hurt on the mountain over the years. Like not knowing how to use their climbing tools, or not trusting what their compass is trying to tell them. The article relates this to 1981 pop culture by comparing the large area west/clockwise from Timberline Lodge the "Mt. Hood triangle", by analogy with the Bermuda Triangle.
• One oddball search result was from August 1987, and the term "little zigzag" described the typical antenna shape of that amazing new modern marvel, the cellular telephone. The phones had launched three years earlier and there were now an estimated 884,000 cellular phone subscribers nationwide, including around 100,000 in just the LA metro area alone. A spokesman for the local cell company hastened to add that the devices were not just for rich and famous celebrities anymore, and they were now becoming popular among busy executives and even "unglamorous" small business owners. Which is not really relevant to our main subject, but it was kind of cute, and most of the photos in this post were taken with a distant descendant of 1987's chonky car phones.

Grover Cleveland Park • Ka Hoʻoilina Mau Loa

Next up we're visiting downtown Honolulu's Grover Cleveland Park, named after the rather obscure 19th century president.

Cleveland is honored by a park in Hawaii for a rather unusual reason. He took office shortly after the 1893 coup that overthrew Queen Liliʻuokalani. Cleveland strongly opposed the coup and refused to annex the islands, following the scathing Blount Report on what had happened. As it turns out, Honolulu's Thomas Square is named for a similar reason. In that case, a British admiral who reversed an unauthorized seizure of the islands by an ambitious subordinate who did a bit of freelancing while Thomas was out of the area. Cleveland was succeeded in office by Republican William McKinley, who annexed the islands shortly after taking office and who -- controversially -- still has a high school named for him nearby.

Technically it's not really a city park, just a landscaped plaza with a fountain outside the state Attorney General's office and the Department of Labor & Industrial Relations, across the street from the state Supreme Court.

There aren't a lot of other parks and monuments dedicated to the memory of Grover Cleveland around the country, much less the world, but there's a much larger example located in Caldwell, NJ, his hometown.

The fountain in the middle of the plaza is titled Ka Hoʻoilina Mau Loa (The Eternal Legacy), created in 1994 by local artist Donald Harvey, who also did the similar Wave Flight at the airport. A public art walking tour brochure from the nearby Hawaii State Art Museum briefly describes the fountain:

The sculpture symbolizes Kamehameha the Great, Ruth Ke'elikolani, Bernice Pauahi Bishop, and the generous legacy they have left behind to the people of Hawai'i. Both women are suggested in the center form, inspired by the Hawaiian crab claw sail design. The three outer forms are an abstraction of the bows of ancient Hawaiian double-hulled canoes and sails.

And here's a Facebook video of the fountain running since I forgot to take one of my own.

Reconfigurations

I just happened to be at Mt. Tabor fairly regularly last summer because of a weekly-ish electronic music thing there, and around last July I noticed there was suddenly a new walkway connecting the SW corner of the park to Division St., basically a car-free extension of SE 64th Ave., between the big Portland Parks nursery and maintenance yard and a large retirement community to the west. On taking a closer look I realized the new walkway included some new public art, so I took a few photos and poked around on the interwebs for a bit, and a new art post was born.

This is called Reconfigurations, and it's credited to a number of local artists. Here's the description from that Public Art Archive page -- which is apparently where info on RACC art goes now, instead of the RACC maintaining their own database. (This move may be a good thing in general, assuming Public Art Archive has stable funding and won't randomly go belly-up and disappear right when I need some info from their site, and the Wayback Machine is archiving their pages. Unfortunately this humble blog contains a lot of now-broken links to the old RACC website that probably need to be updated at some point. Anyway, here's their description of what's going on here:

Three sculptures inhabit a new path leading into Mount Tabor Park. Each sculpture consists of one very granite boulder sawn cleanly in half. At each sculpture the two boulder halves will be arranged in different ways, both in relation to each other and to the newly planted tree.Six Oregon writers collaborated to create a poem that is engraved on the sawn stones faces of each sculpture, to be experienced as one traverses the path. The resulting compositions of trees, stones and words will bring people's attention to the slow but steady ongoing natural process of trees growing happening all around us, and help local residents stay engaged with the natural processes and park landscape they visit over and over again. The pieces will also act as touchstones accompanying residents and the community over their lifetime. How the sculptures evolve will be for us to imagine, and future generations to experience. Those future Portlanders will in turn try to picture how these artifacts started out long ago.

The RACC announcement for the walkway's July 2024 grand opening describes the concept a bit more clearly: ...three pairs of stones engraved with written text each with a tree in the middle which will eventually move (reconfigure) the placement of the stones over time.

This might be the first time I've heard of a project designed to be slowly pushed around by tree roots over time. As in most cities, tree roots can be a real public nuisance here, for lifting and cracking sidewalks, infiltrating all sorts of underground pipes. But Portland also has a bureau-level city agency dedicated to protecting trees at all costs. Which has led to some weird "only in Portland" incidents over the years, those things that are easily demagogued by the sort of people who already bear ill will toward the city.

The other big thing that happened around the same time on Division was the grand opening of the city's first BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) service, though the rapid part is a bit... debatable. Which leads to my one ad only complaint about the project, which is that the shiny new FX2 bus rolls right past the artsy new park entrance without stopping, and the closest stops are about four blocks away in either direction. Because apparently the Parks Bureau and TriMet couldn't be bothered to coordinate their efforts even the tiniest little bit. I may be misremembering, but I could swear that public agencies used to be better at this.

Anyway, for more info about all of this, here are some links to websites of the artists, and specifically to pages on their involvement in the project, where available:

• Adam Kuby
• Stephanie Adams-Santos
• Samiya Bashir
• Trevino Brings Plenty
• Anis Mojgani
• Sam Roxas-Chua
• Dao Strom

Knight of Tomorrow 574

The next public art we're having a look at is Knight of Tomorrow 574, by NYC artist Linda Stein, on the Portland State campus next to the university's "Walk of Heroines". Here's her description of it, via a university art page:

Knight of Tomorrow 574, made of bronze, represents the heroism of all women by signifying an “everywoman” who has met the challenges of history and contemporary life. My participation in Portland State University’s Walk of the Heroines is a natural progression in my own goals as a feminist artist honoring the heroism of women in all societies and all eras. It is partly a response to running from my Ground Zero studio during 9/11. This experience­–combined with childhood fears, my feminist abhorrence for gender inequality, and our contemporary culture of Perpetual War–led me to contemplate themes of Protection, Parity and Peace. My feelings of vulnerability, insecurity and powerlessness coalesced into a desire to create an iconic form that symbolized the strong, protective, heroic female image providing the sense of safety I sought, and a symbol of our humanity.

As you might have guessed from the 574 in the name, this is part of a long-running "Knights of Protection" series, including (apparently) at least one other copy of Knight of Tomorrow 574 in a scenic waterfront location in Boca Raton, FL, which came up briefly in a wider 2015 interview.

In a weird pop culture side note, Stein had a cameo role in the original Borat movie, in a segment where Borat tries to interview Western feminists about something or other. Stein wasn't in on the joke at the time, and later told the BBC "He may do better with homophobia and racism, but he just didn't do very well with sexism", and indeed she was flooded with angry emails from men who had enjoyed the segment unironically. This was a somewhat early example of the toxic obsessive dudes who seem to plague every corner of the internet these days.

To me this episode sort of crystalizes what's wrong with the Borat character and the whole subtype of satire where you satirize a thing by just doing more and more of it and hoping the audience figures out it's a joke at some point. If the people you're satirizing enjoy it unironically and aren't even a little bit offended by it, maybe it isn't landing the way you intended.

HCRH Milepost 33 • Quarry Haul Road

In the last HCRH milepost visit we had a look at Milepost 32, the one right at world-famous Multnomah Falls. This time around we're a mile east of there, at Milepost 33, and it could hardly be more different. Instead of a world-famous crowded tourist attraction, we're visiting the scene of an expensive and embarrassing accident from the 1940s that was quickly papered over and forgotten by just about everyone.

It seems nice enough here; there's a rare flat grassy area right next to the highway, and even a small turnout right at the milepost, just big enough to park a small car or two. If you stop here and walk to the other end of the little meadow to where the trees start, you'll notice some old concrete barriers that are somehow not visible from the highway. Continue past them into the trees and suddenly you're on an old gravel road. Not just a trail, an actual road, gently angling up and away from the highway. So today we're going to look at where this road goes, and the dumb idea behind why it was built, and what happened after that.

A bit of background first: The famous Columbia River Highway opened in 1916, and thanks to the magic of induced demand it was quickly swamped by big trucks and other commercial traffic, and drivers of all sorts who just wanted to get to Point B as soon as possible and had zero interest in the road's meandering curves and scenic vistas. Before long the state Highway Commission -- today's ODOT -- started planning a new highway route that would traverse the gorge close to river level and as close to a straight line as was possible while still following the river. The problem with this idea, and the reason why the original road didn't do this, is that in general, the needed freeway-width flat land along the river just didn't exist, and you either had impassable swamps, er, wetlands, or sheer basalt cliffs that dropped straight into the river. The mid-20th Century solution to this problem was to simply dump gravel into the river until you had enough new land, and then build your sleek modern freeway there. (That's probably going to end badly at whatever point Big One -- the 9.0 earthquake they keep telling us is coming -- finally occurs. At which point the whole freeway probably liquefies and slides into the river. But hey, we had a good run.)

Bragging about I-84 has long since gone out of fashion, so I don't know how many million or giga-gazillion tons of gravel were used in this project. And I'm not going to hazard a guess, for the same reason I've never won one of those contests to win a big Mason jar of candy corn by guessing how many candy corns the jar contains. (Also I hate candy corn and would rather not win a big jar of it, thanks.) Obtaining that much gravel seems to have been the gating factor on how quickly they could build the new highway, and then one day someone looked around and realized the gorge is full of steep talus slopes composed of loose rocks, already about 80% of the way toward being the gravel the project needed. In fact there just happened to be a huge talus slope roughly one half-mile east of Multnomah Falls, and if enough of these rocks could just be moved a short distance downhill to the river, and then crushed into proper gravel, it would be a huge time saver. Some members of the general public raised a few questions about this idea, but in December 1939, the Oregonian assured readers that the gravel operation would not be an ongoing eyesore:

At a point a half mile east of Multnomah Falls, where Contractor G.D. Lyon needs 535,000 yards of rock to build a two-mile toe along the river’s edge, a haul road, 1900 feet long, is being built into the great rock slide which will provide material with a minimum of blasting. The natural tree and shrub screen between the present Columbia River highway and the haul road will not be disturbed,except at the point where the latter crosses the former. Plans already are made to augment this screen with additional plantings so that eventually the cut will not be discernible from either the present or the new water highway.

And going by that criterion alone the project was a rousing success. You could drive by this spot every day for years and have no idea the old digging site was here. For a better idea of what they were planning, check out this ODOT project map, dated October 1st 1940 (see page 7), and note that it closely matches the LIDAR image below:

This is what the area looks like on the state LIDAR map. From what I've been able to figure out, the little parking lot next to Milepost 33 is where the old haul road crossed the highway, and the survey map shows that the grassy area was part of a small temporary detour so the haul road could slope downhill right through where the highway normally was. And you can see the road continuing east and downhill to the railroad, right next to present-day I-84.

The other end of the road -- which we were hiking on before that extended tangent -- ends at the big talus slope east of Multnomah Falls. You might see some water trickling out of the base of the talus slope. At this point you're just a few feet downhill from where Trail 400 crosses the talus slope, as well as the start of the the infamous Elevator Shaft trail. If you look closely at the lower left corner of the image, you can even see a part of the trail, which climbs that talus slope in a seemingly endless series of tight switchbacks. I've read there are over 100 of them overall but have never tried counting them myself, either on the map or in person. LIDAR seems to show a couple of additional switchbacks continuing down to the highway, as if there was (or still is) a way to start the ascent from down there somewhere, maybe from a car dropping you off.

But back to our story. Work on the river-level highway paused during WWII and resumed afterward, and so we skip forward to February 1946, when a gigantic landslide covered the old highway and the railroad (and the spot we were just standing at in the last paragraph) in a massive pile of rocks for several hundred feet. (more photos on page 26 of that issue). News updates continued over the next week: A followup article the next day noted that even more debris had come down since the initial article. One photo has the position of the road drawn in as you wouldn't otherwise know where it was. The stream draining the Elevator Shaft watershed had an impressive canyon at that point. Another followup on February 8th notes that roughly another million tons of rock had come down just overnight, and it was the worst landslide the Highway Commission's Gorge operations had ever encountered. A further update on the 11th included another photo of the geological mayhem.

Today there aren't any obvious signs of what happened from the road -- if you got here coming from the west, you passed right through the site of the slide half a mile before Milepost 33, probably without noticing anything out of the ordinary -- and it's also hard to visualize where the slide happened or just how big it was by looking at present-day maps. Historic Aerials imagery from 1953 shows the slide site pretty clearly, as the recently-exposed rocks are visibly lighter than the rest of the talus slope.

I haven't figured out exactly how long the highway and railroad were closed, but it obviously would have been an extended period of time. Union Pacific was understandably apoplectic about this nonsense, and sued for damages in August 1947. The case was settled in 1950 with terms not disclosed immediately. The suit had alleged the slide was caused by human error:

The slides covered the main line, burying some 250 feet of track to a depth from 20 to 30 feet. The company contended the slides were caused by highway workmen who disturbed the natural repose and natural drainage of a mountain slope a half mile east of Multnomah falls.

So what does that mean? Suppose you are in a place with gravity, and you have a pile of objects. Could be just about anything: Football-to-watermelon-sized basalt rocks (to pick a random example), but also gravel, dry sand, wet sand, snow, coffee beans, ball bearings, Legos, holiday party rum balls, $100 bills, tapioca pudding, skulls of one's enemies, etc. No matter what it's made of, there's always a maximum angle that limits how steep your pile can be, determined largely by object shape and friction between individual objects in the pile. Increase the angle beyond that -- add more things to the top, or remove some from the base -- and now your pile is unstable. At that point things will tend to tumble down the sides of your pile and accumulate there, decreasing its steepness until it's back in equilibrium. Or to put it in fantasy novel terms, the Oregon Highway Commission and its contractors coveted gravel above all else, and in their quest for more of it they delved too greedily and too deep, and instead of awakening the local Balrog (a demon of the ancient world), they awoke the universal laws of gravity, with predictable consequences.

I was about to say something to the effect that everyone learns this early on when playing outside, like the time you and your friends decided the big gravel pile at the construction site down the street was Mt. St. Helens, and kicking rocks away from the base was how you made it do realistic landslides. Eventually it would be time for a full-on eruption, and then you'd just throw gravel at each other until you got bored or someone got hurt. But that was 1980, which I have to admit was a long time ago now. In 2025, any adult who sees you doing this will call the police, and Officer Friendly will come and shoot you, and your parents, and your friends, and their parents. And everyone in the Nextdoor group for your neighborhood will be in smug agreement that you totally had it coming, and you got what you deserved for going outside ever. Playing with gravel in 2035 will have a similar outcome, except it'll all be done with AI drones rather than Officer Friendly shooting you in person, supposedly for force protection reasons but really because it's cheaper and it scales up really well.

Anyway, the story ends the way a lot of stories do that involve corporations and government agencies: There's an undisclosed settlement, the involved parties never speak of it again, the incident goes down the memory hole and is quickly forgotten, and then nobody learns anything from what happened or tries to do better next time. The End. And on that cheery note, we're off to milepost 34.

Larch Mountain Crater Loop

Here are some photos from a loop hike around the crater atop Larch Mountain. And, well... it's less scenic than you might think. I guess because it mostly wanders around down in the densely forested bowl of the crater, which tends to rule out distant horizons. You also don't get any of the dramatic things that come to mind when you think of volcanic craters, like bubbling pools of lava, or magic rings being forged or tossed into said pool of lava, or Robo-Ahnold melting in lava, though come to think of it that was molten steel and not lava, but either way, no melting Robo-Arnolds. Also no stinky fumaroles, or geysers, or boiling mud pots or anything like Yellowstone, or anything like Crater Lake either. No B-movie starlets being tossed into the crater to appease a primitive volcano tiki god. No dramatic springs bursting forth at the headwaters of Multnomah Creek or Oneonta Creek, just sort of a swampy muddy area with some water trickling out here and there. There aren't even any dramatic vistas looking up at the crater rim or the Sherrard Viewpoint from below. Although you may get a bit of that if you go off-trail and try to find the talus slopes downhill from the viewpoint, but when I took these I was pretty content with just a quiet low-key stroll through the forest along the official marked trails.

Going off-trail also runs the risk of blundering into the forbidden Bull Run Watershed immediately next door. In fact a short stretch of the Oneonta Trail actually passes inside the watershed boundary. The trail also intersects a couple of old logging railroad grades that look a lot like hikeable trails but will take you deep into the Forbidden Zone (note this dates back to a time when the city was ok with clearcuts in the drinking water reserve, a practice that was finally abolished in the early 1990s(!), and check out my Forest Road NF-1509 post for more on that if you're curious). I seem to recall there are signs at these spots telling you not to go any further, and if you're the sort of person who doesn't read signs or doesn't think the rules apply to you, you probably don't spend your time reading obscure humble blogs either, and I'm wasting my time trying to explain this... Yeah. Anyway, this is one of a short list of sorta-unusual hazards you might encounter on the otherwise fairly chill route around the crater.

Another, I guess, hazard to be aware of is that several of the trails around here are marked for use by mountain bikes as well as hikers, which is fairly unusual in the Gorge. I did encounter a couple of them on the way, zooming downhill rather quickly. It was fine, though; they passed without incident, and no "Coexist" bumper stickers were angrily scraped off that day, and I am not actually complaining here, just pointing out the one unusual thing to keep an eye out for. The Cycle Map layer on OpenStreetMap shows which trails allow bikes, and I think the main limiting factor on which trails do is the Mark Hatfield Wilderness boundary. You see, the federal Wilderness Act of 1964 was written long before the mountain bike was invented, and the word "bicycle" does not appear anywhere in the law. But the law prohibits any "other form of mechanical transport" within wilderness areas (right after explicitly banning cars, motorboats, and aircraft), and that phrase has generally been interpreted to include bikes. But not canoes or rowboats, because reasons. By contrast, the law also says nothing about bringing personal electronics along, and technically does not prohibit you from bringing a laptop, connecting to satellite internet, and whiling away the hours with some backcountry crypto trading, or being extremely mad online about the latest superhero movie, or grinding out some Python code for your latest startup. That would merely violate the spirit of the law, but seemingly not the letter of it.

The other unusual thing to keep an eye out for is dumb SUV drivers who can't tell a hiking trail from a forest service road. There was an incident around September or October 2024 where someone decided they would rather not to do the quarter-mile hike from the parking lot to the Sherrard Point viewpoint, and decided to drive down the trail instead. Admittedly the first part of the trail is paved and almost looks like it could be a one-lane service road, if you decide the signs saying it isn't a road don't apply to you. They got a few hundred feet down the trail before sliding off the non-road, and only a couple of trees kept it from tumbling all the way down into the crater immediately. The driver and any passengers must have just abandoned it where it was, and then the Forest Service did not come up with a way to safely remove it in time before it broke loose and tumbled the rest of the way down into the crater. Or at least that's what I heard eventually happened; I only saw it when it was still perched there just off the trail, and I was there after midnight to see the aurora and stumbled across it by flashlight, and at first didn't realize it had already been there a couple of weeks. So obviously I had to look it over a bit and make sure there wasn't anyone inside that needed help. Now that's a creepy thing to run across at night in the forest. I'm not saying you're very likely to encounter a ginormous SUV four-wheelin' it down the trail here, or a recently wrecked one that failed at driving down the trail, but it's already happened at least once, so the odds of it happening again are clearly greater than zero.

HCRH Milepost 32

The ongoing weird project around visiting old Columbia River Highway mileposts is now up to mile 32, which just so happens to be right at Multnomah Falls. Or, strictly speaking, right around the west end of the Multnomah Falls Lodge parking lot, which is a short distance west of the actual falls. If you're driving along on the old highway during tourist season you'll be stuck in traffic for a good long while here and will have plenty of time to contemplate the milepost out your passenger side window. You'll also get a good look at the East and West Viaducts and the Multnomah Creek Bridge if you're interested in that sort of thing, or if you just need something to distract a car full of screamy kids or cantankerous oldsters while you sit in traffic.

If inching past at 2mph isn't your idea of a good time, you have a few options. The most popular is to park in the large lot along I-84, which (during the summer tourist season) now requires a reservation up to 14 days in advance, and costs $2, and even then there may not be any parking available. (Or you could just show up after 6pm, which is actually the best time to go, but don't tell anybody that.) Or you can park in the tiny, congested lot on the old highway across from the lodge, which will now cost you a whopping $20, on the off-chance a space opens up. Or you could try parking back at Wahkeena Falls or in the Oneonta - Horsetail area and hike from there; those don't cost anything (yet) but the lots are often full by mid-morning. There's usually parking at Benson State Park, across the railroad tracks from Wahkeena Falls, but it's $10 to park, and there are no official trails between there and the outside world so you'll have to bushwhack a bit. You could even park up top at Sherrard Point and hike down from there, though it's $5 to park, and a 14 mile roundtrip, and the return trip is uphill the whole way. If you'd rather not drive, period, the Columbia Gorge Express bus (run by the Hood River County bus system) will set you back $10, or $40 for an annual pass. Union Pacific trains pass through here frequently at high speed, but this line hasn't carried passengers at all since the late 1990s, and stopping at Multnomah Falls was discontinued sometime between 1920 and 1950, and the trains go by fast enough that riding the rails hobo-style is probably not a safe option here. Or you could go by bike; this involves riding in traffic on the (hilly) old highway, so it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but at least nobody's charging for bike parking yet (as of July 2025). Unfortunately, getting really, really good at going by bike may involve a few clandestine trips to the back alleys of Eastern Europe to visit doctors with active Interpol warrants, and that gets expensive rather quickly.

That's a whole lot of trouble to go to just to look at a concrete post with a "32" on it, so you might as well look at the falls too while you're here. Maybe hit the Larch Mountain Trail and visit the five additional waterfalls further upstream (Little Multnomah, Dutchman, Wiesendanger, Ecola, and Upper Multnomah). Wiesendanger is probably the most photogenic of the bunch, and you especially don't want to miss Ecola Falls, the very spot where harpoon-wielding sasquatches once hunted the legendary Larch Mountain beaked whale (allegedly).

Keen-eyed readers might have noticed that I didn't say anything about getting here by boat. River cruise ships do exist along the Columbia, but they don't stop anywhere near here. There isn't a pier to dock at, for one thing, and then no way for tourists to get across I-84 except for waiting for a gap in traffic and then running across, which I can't recommend, and the gift shop at the lodge isn't set up for that many tourists descending on it all at once. Those problems are all solveable, but there would still be Fashion Reef to contend with. The name sounds like a tiki bar, or the overpriced tropical t-shirt shop next door to the tiki bar, but no. As an April 1949 Oregonian story explains, it's an awkwardly placed rock out in the river, and got its name from a longstanding nautical tradition: If a ship -- in this case an early 1850s river steamboat named Fashion -- er, "discovers" a new maritime hazard by smashing into it, they name the rock after the ship. Or the sandbar, as with Astoria's Desdemona Sands. This is obviously one of the lesser forms of immortality out there, though I suppose maybe you name your ship after yourself and then crash it into an unnamed rock, and be sure it looks like an accident. On the other hand, there were plenty of other steamboats plying their trade on the river in those days, nearly all of them of the non-collidey, non-sinky persuasion, and I can't recall the name of a single one of them off the top of my head. Draw valuable general-purpose life lessons from this at your peril.