Hood River Loops

Next up we're taking a look at the Hood River Loops, a fun section of the old Columbia River Highway on the eastern edge of Hood River, beginning at the intersection with OR 35. Like the Crown Point Loops^[1] (which we visited in the HCRH Milepost 25 post a while back), this is a spot where the old highway climbed a hill by way of multiple switchbacks, in order to limit the slope to something the average car of 1916 could handle.

To give you some idea what that means, the best-selling car that year -- and for most years between 1908 and 1927 -- was the Ford Model T, which came with a 4 cylinder engine producing 20 horsepower and had a top speed of around 42 mph. For context, 20 horsepower is about the same as a present-day riding lawnmower (which is much lighter than a Model T), or about four professional-grade leafblowers. The fastest and most powerful car on the US market in 1916 seems to have been the Packard Twin Six, which had a 464 cubic inch V12(!) engine, but even that only put out a measly 88 horsepower, although that was partly due to the crappy low octane gas of the era.

As with the other multi-switchback sections on the highway, it quickly became apparent that allowing any sort of development at this spot would be a bad idea, potentially turning these ordinary hairpin corners into blind hairpin corners, maybe with a few zero-visibility driveways here and there to make it extra spicy. To prevent this, and probably to preserve views from the top, the state bought the land around the loops in June 1922 and declared the place to be a new state park^[2]. You can see this on vintage Highway Commission survey maps from around that time, which I have to link to just because they look cool: The one for the park itself (drawing no. 1R-1-695) is titled "Hood River Loops acquired to protect slopes". Map 3B-15-8 zooms out and covers the whole stretch of the old pre-Interstate-84 route between Hood River and Mosier, and map 1R-1-1167 covers more of the Highway 35 part of the intersection.

The obscure little park got a brief mention in State Parks of the Columbia Gorge (1946, p.45-46), a Highway Commission publication about the various and sundry state-owned or managed places between Troutdale and The Dalles. It travels up the Gorge, west to east, and for each state park there's a description by W.A. Langille, state park historian, followed by recommendations by Samuel H. Boardman, longtime state park superintendent. Langille's blurb about the Hood River Loops is on page 45:

The Hood River Loops Development Area, is made up of small wayside units situated at the junction of the Columbia River Highway and the Mount Hood Highway, and bordering the loops of the rising main highway, just east of Hood River. The junction tract is described as being Lots 1, 2, and 3, Block 1, of Reynolds addition to Hood River, containing 2.77 ecres, a gift to the State of Oregon by the county of Hood River, the deed date February 4, 1931. The tracts bordering the loops, aggregating 4.20 acres were purchased in three parcels, described as being in Section 31, Township 3 North of Range ll gast, W.M., Hood River County, Oregon. The deed dates being May 22, June 13 and September 12, 1922.

The lots at the junction of the highways were acquired for extra right of way and the loop tracts were obtained to prevent encroachments upon the banks of the ascending loops, where there were usable gravel deposits. No park improvements of any kind have been made up to this time.

On the next page, Boardman's one and only recommendation was "They should be left in their natural state." And sure enough, a pre-1937 vintage aerial photo at the Hood River History Museum, and HistoricAerials photos from 1947 and 1973 all show the place looking essentially the same as it does now.

In fact this is still the plan today. ODOT's current master plan for the old highway briefly mentions the Loops on page 44, saying "This section begins with the Hood River Loops, twisting and turning swiftly up the hillside", with a small aerial photo showing what they mean by that, but (just like 1946) they don't have any specific plans for the Loops beyond maintaining the area as-is. But at least nobody's going to build a fugly McMansion right here.

To understand why the state did all this, it may help to remember that Oregon state parks began as a sort of side project of the state highway agency (in its various guises over the years) and continued on this way all the way through 1989, when they were finally split off as a separate department in their own right. So for most of the agency's existence it must've seemed like the most natural thing in the world to set aside bits of land like this for passive enjoyment from a moving vehicle^[3], and the loops would probably be classified that way if they had remained in the state park system. But in 1953-54 this stretch of highway was bypassed by the shiny new Interstate freeway along the river. Unlike the famous stretch of the old road through the main waterfall corridor, this stretch of road was handed off to Hood River County, and was eventually gated off a mile or so further east of here after the closure of the Mosier Twin Tunnels. And, per state park policy at the time, since the place was no longer on a state highway, anything along the road was not a statewide concern anymore and the park was promptly handed off the the county along with the road. But things changed again with the 1980s revival of interest in the old highway, and at some point the state took it back and the land currently belongs to ODOT again.^[4]

At this point I should note that while "passive enjoyment from a moving vehicle" may be the only intended use of the place, there are a couple of others. The main one, of course, is to drive or bike or I guess unicycle or street luge the tight corners here. Maybe even exceeding the posted speed limit at times. And then possibly turning around and doing it again a few more times, because practice makes perfect and all that. And at this point Legal wants me to point out that I am not at liberty to say exactly how I know all this, and you should absolutely positively not try this at home, not even if you're a professional driver on a closed course, and not even if you're driving a Model T -- which is nice and slow but makes up for that by being unsafe in countless other ways.

The other main thing you can do here is stop somewhere safe along the road and take photos, maybe film your friend descending the hill on inline skates, or drifting the loops really fast in a vintage Group B rally car they're restoring, something along those lines. Unlike the loops at Crown Point, there is at least a bit of a view from the top and from one curve to the next, and it seems like this would be a fairly compelling place to film a car commercial. They're always filming car commercials around Crown Point and at Rowena, and I suspect the whole Hood River Valley has been exhaustively scouted for potential filming locations, so it just stands to reason a few have been filmed here. But I haven't actually come across any yet, and in fact YouTube can't find anything at all under "Hood River Loops".

A third thing you could maybe do here is poke around and be a big history dweeb^[5]. Though if you're interested in the old Columbia River Highway, I have to tell you that (other than the loops) not that much has survived intact from a century ago around here.

For one thing, just before the first curve (if you're going uphill) is a point where HCRH Milepost 67 ought to be, but isn't. ODOT's milepost map includes it, indicating there must have been one here within the last few years, but I looked around and didn't see one, and turned around and drove by again to be sure, and repeated the process once or twice and still couldn't find it, so (like a couple of other mileposts we met early on in that project) I suspect some clumsy driver sideswiped it within the last few years while trying to look cool here, and it's gone until ODOT gets around to making a new one.

On the other hand, there is an extant HCRH Milepost 68 just a mile up the road, shortly before the gate closing the road to car traffic. But that's the subject of a whole other upcoming post.

More importantly, just on the other side of the intersection with OR 35, the old highway crosses the Hood River, and you might think there would be a cool old historic bridge there, and in fact there used to be one, a triple-arch bridge built in 1918 in the usual Gorge bridge style. But it was demolished in 1982, replaced by a taller and wider and more practical, and safer, but utterly forgettable and utilitarian, concrete structure. I had made a mental note to take a couple of photos of it for the sake of completeness, and then forgot so completely that I only remembered months later, and I would bet money that I forget again the next time I'm in the area, or maybe stop to take photos and get bored and leave before actually taking any.

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Footnote(s)

1.

The loops here are mentioned in the caption of an Oregon State Archives photo of the Rowena Loops. Per ODOT's resident historian, Samuel Lancaster personally designed the Crown Point Loops near the Vista House, and after that other state highway engineers applied Lancaster's design principles to similar loops built at Rowena, here at Hood River, and the long-lost ones at Clatsop Crest on the Lower Columbia Highway.

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2.

On the map "Hood River Loops acquired to protect slopes.", dated 06/01/1922, the park is labeled as a "Roadside Development Area. Which was part of an old State Park classification scheme, per ODOT's 1940-1942 Biennial report (pages 114-115):

In order to avoid duplication of personnel and equipment, the Maintenance Department, beginning with the year 1941, assumed the maintenance of the roads and parking areas leading to and within State Highway parks. State parks were classified under three headings — Official State Parks, Minor Parks, and Roadside Development Areas. The Maintenance Department was charged with the betterment and maintenance of park roads and parking areas in all three of the classifications and with all betterment and maintenance of buildings and grounds in the minor parks and roadside developments. Betterment and maintenance of buildings and grounds in official state parks is a function of the Parks Department. There are 73 official parks, 44 minor parks and 33 roadside development areas.

Per the report for 1942-1944 at that point there were 76 areas designated as official state parks, 48 as minor state parks and 32 as roadside development areas, a total of 151 areas aggregating 46,868 acres. The report noted that park visitorship was down because of World War II. Some parks were closed entirely due to the war, like Bradley SP on the Columbia, I guess it must have provided too good of a view of what was going on along the river, as an endless stream of newly built ships headed downriver and out to sea from Portland shipyards -- Liberty Ships, and later Casablanca-class aircraft carriers. Additionally, there would have been a large volume of cargo ships headed to Vladivostok and other Soviet ports with cargo bound for the eastern front via the Trans-Siberian Railway. But I digress.

The 1948-50 report stopped breaking out the parks by the 1941 classification, and listed 181 units of all types totaling over 69,000 acres, plus a new system of 20 "roadside picnic areas", the origin of the current highway rest area system

Despite having "Development" right there in the name, RDAs tended to be small and generally had nothing in the way of park facilities, so I think the name was supposed to mean something like "Reserved for Future Development". From what I can tell, the state seems to have lost track of several of these over the years, so when they finally split state parks off from ODOT in the 1990s, by law anything related to state parks was supposed to transfer over to the new department, but places that had sort of fallen down the back of the sofa over time weren't on that list and ODOT still owns them.

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3.

Under today's weird overly-clinical naming scheme, a place like the Loops that you're supposed to admire from a moving car is a "State Scenic Corridor", like the H.B. Van Duzer corridor along OR18 on the way to Lincoln City. If you're supposed to admire it from a moving boat, it's a "State Scenic Waterway", like a big stretch of the Deschutes River. And if you can stop and take photos and admire the view from one place it's a "State Scenic Viewpoint", like Portland Womens Forum, and

If there's more to do than just admire the view, it's either a "State Recreation Site" (like Fishing Rock and many of the other small parks on the coast) or a "State Recreation Area" mostly depending on the size of the place. Some river parks are classified as State Recreation Areas rather than Scenic Waterways, and from what I can tell the difference is in what the river is like. If you can float downstream lazily admiring the scenery, it's a Scenic Waterway, and if you're hanging on for dear life barrelling over a never-ending series of rapids, it's a Recreation Area, and the dividing line is somewhere in between.

There are a few officially called "State Park", like the flagship one at Silver Falls. These are usually larger and have actual people staffing the place, at least during tourist season, and some of them (but not all) offer overnight camping. A "State Natural Area" or "State Natural Site" is sort of the opposite of that: No amenities, no developed visitor facilities, often no State Park sign welcoming you to the place. McLoughlin SNA in the Gorge is one of these. A "State Heritage Area" is a bit like a state park, but with history. If you like to watch people cosplaying as old timey pioneers, demonstrating old timey pioneer handicrafts, this is your best bet to experience that. Champoeg Park is probably the best-known of these. A "State Heritage Site" is smaller but still historical, albeit cosplay-free, like the Willamette Stone SHS in Portland's West Hills.

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4.

Later notes added to the 1922 map say most of the area was transferred to Hood River County in 1956, and another bit was sold in 1984. But apparently the state wanted the land back at some point after that, and owns it all again, per Hood River County GIS. Their page about the property now says it's taxlot number 03N11E31B01500, and its current size is 4.11 "Map Acres", or 7.56 "Assessor Acres". I'm not sure what the difference is, but one possibility is that the latter number includes the street right of way while the first number doesn't.

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5.

And this footnote is where I relate a historical anecdote I ran across that didn't really fit anywhere else. 1903 Hood River County land survey trying to resolve a boundary dispute between Mr. Frank Button and the Mt. Hood Lumber Company. The land in question fronted on both the Hood and Columbia Rivers, both of which had meandered enough over time that no earlier survey markers could be found in those areas. After a bit of this the surveyor (one John Leland Hudson, if I'm reading the signature correctly) throws up his hands on page 4 and says he can't proceed until he can obtain certified copies of the original General Land Office survey and all the field notes that went along with it.

The survey resumed a month later, with the necessary documents in hand, but any hope that this would clear things up were quickly dashed. Again the survey crew kept encountering survey markers that could not be found, as a lot of them had been placed relative to trees that were no longer there. Other markers turned up in the wrong place, due in part to egregious errors by a previous (and now retired) County Surveyor, which often did not align with the original egregious errors made by the US General Land Office surveyor. Hudson directed much of his ire at the latter:

I found no two courses, (where all are supposed N. and S.), parallel in the whole claim, S., E., and W. bdys. Nor did I find more than one measurement as given in the field notes. The U.S. Deputy Sur. must have been either drunk, crazy, or a fool. A worse piece of surveying, I never before saw, done by a U.S. Deputy Surveyor.

Ouch! Hudson then explains how he corrected several errors of basic arithmetic in the previous surveys, and determined the correct boundary accordingly, and wraps up with another dig at the original surveyor:

This U.S. Deputy Surveyor, Mr. L.F. Cartee, must have been a “Jim Dandy”. Dr. Adams says his name was Cartee, but the Notes make it Carter.

And now having established the line of division between the said Frank H. Button and the said Mt. Hood Lumber Company, in manner as aforesaid, and to the best of my ability, I quit the survey and job, and am d——d glad to say good-bye.

Not quite as dramatic an exit as popping the emergency escape slide, but pretty dramatic for a land survey narrative, as these things are usually dry as dust. And there are hints that this was just the tip of the iceberg: Mr. Button, one of the parties to the dispute, was also somehow made part of the survey crew when it resumed. That work partly relied on the recollections of that error-prone retired county surveyor, who seems to have been some sort of local power broker that people deferred to. So it's possible Hudson may have found himself at odds with the local good ol' boy network just by trying to do his job by the book. I may also be reading way too much into this stuff.

A later coda: ODOT map 1R-2-498, titled "Acquired from F.H. Button Est. for Stock Pile Site", September 1937. But they may have gotten a bit ahead of themselves; a cursive note in pencil says simply "Would not sell. Jan 1938"

Milepost 43, Cascade Locks

The next installment in the ongoing HCRH Milepost adventure is a bit of a mystery. The mostly-unbroken series of mileposts we were following since Troutdale ends at HCRH Milepost 36, at the Ainsworth interchange with Interstate 84. Now we're a few miles east of there, in Cascade Locks, toward the east end of Wa Na Pa Street (which is what the old highway is called within city limits) as the road heads toward merging onto I-84 eastbound. If you find the city fire station, across the street and a short distance east of there is a weathered wooden post with "43" inscribed on it. It's clearly not of the same vintage as the mileposts we've looked at so far, and it's not included on the ODOT map of official historic mileposts. I only know about it because Recreating the HCRH has a page about "Wood Milepost 43", and they don't seem to know any more about it than I do. One comment speculates that it can't be much older than the late 1990s seeing as it's made of (seemingly) untreated wood and it's exposed to the elements right in the middle of the Gorge, and that would roughly line up with some of the earliest work on the HCRH State Trail.

So that probably explains why the post is here. At least, off the top of my head I can't come up with any other reasonable explanations for why a post marked with a "43" might be here. Unless maybe it's a nerdy Hitchhiker's Guide + Spinal Tap crossover, and 42 is the answer to life, the universe, and everything, and then going one more in the same way that Spinal Tap speakers go up to 11. And that doesn't seem very likely, if you ask me.

Unfortunately I don't think this is where the original Milepost 43 would have been. First off, numbering on the old highway was about a mile ahead of I-84 mile numbering back at the last milepost, such that Milepost 36 was located at the freeway exit numbered 35, and after that point the present-day interstate The freeway exits on either end of Cascade Locks are both numbered 44, but the one closest to the sorta-milepost is around actual freeway mile no. 45., so it's ten miles on the interstate, and Google indicates it's 9.3 miles as the crow files, so the old road pulling it off in just 7 miles seems unlikely. The road does seem a bit magical at times, but usually not in that particular sort of way. And as far as authenticity goes, not only is it made of wood, it's also not triangular, and they seem to have -- gasp! -- used a different sans-serif font than was used on the originals. It's probably still inspired by the original mileposts, but it's not really a meticulous high fidelity reproduction, I guess is what I'm getting at here. Kind of similar to how the Stonehenge replica in the Gorge is a low-fidelity concrete design sort of inspired by the original, and did not involve making casts of the original stones, or doing a GPS-assisted laser scan of the area or frankly even looking at any detailed photos or sketches of the original.

Another issue is that at an intersection just east of here, the old highway route continues east as Forest Lane, and the stretch of present-day Wa Na Pa St. where this post is located was never actually part of the original highway.

So maybe it's just fan art of the original milestones, and it says 43 because someone especially liked how those two digits look in the font they used. Or maybe it was created for someone's 43rd birthday, or it was installed sometime in the 2000s to celebrate George W. Bush, the 43rd President of the United States. Ok, that probably isn't it. Wikipedia says 43 is a prime number, and the larger of a pair of twin primes (with 41), and the subject of a 2009 Dutch math paper, Ode aan het getal 43 ("Ode to the number 43"). Per Google Translate, it seems that in the original 1986 edition of David Wells' The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers, 43 was the smallest number that was not (yet) considered curious or interesting, and the author set out to find something interesting about it, and came up with a variety of factoids about it, mostly from number theory and group theory, none of which are likely to be why there's a 43 here.

Or maybe it was originally somewhere else; the original HCRH Milepost 43 would have been somewhere near Bonneville Dam, and maybe this post was once in the right place along that early stretch of HCRH Trail for a while, and was eventually moved here for some reason. Although it's a weird place to move something that needs a new home, and seeing as it's wood and all you'd think it would be cheaper to just recycle or burn the old post and carve a new one with the right distance on it.

In sum, I think this was probably inspired by the 'real' HCRH mileposts, but I don't know who put it here and I can't explain the location or the number on it, and if 43 really is the answer to life, the universe, everything, and one louder, the exact question must be a very peculiar one.

HCRH Milepost 36

Ok, it's time for another installment in our occasional tour of Columbia River Highway mileposts. The next one up, heading west to east, is number 36, which is the eastern-most of the ones along the main tourist corridor in the Gorge. This one also has the least picturesque and tourist-friendly setting of the series so far, and maybe the series as a whole, stuck by the side of the road in the middle of the Interstate 84 Exit 35 interchange. (I have a feeling this is one of the mileposts that was lost and then recreated in the 1980s, since its original location would have been torn up as part of freeway construction.)

Scenic and historical points of interest are a bit thin on the ground around here, but there are a handful of them:

• The old highway continues east from here for another two miles or so, if you follow the signs for "Yeon State Park", which is where you'll find the trailhead for Elowah Falls, which is worth a visit. But if you're jaded about waterfalls and just want to look at little concrete mileposts, there aren't any along that stretch of road. From my reading of what's in ODOT's GIS system, those two miles are now considered just a frontage road for I-84 and not a separate state highway of its own, and frontage roads don't get their own mileposts, certainly not ones that are out of sync with the main highway.
• Besides Elowah Falls (and the upper falls I covered recently), the first car-free stretch of HCRH Trail starts there and runs all the way to Cascade Locks.
• Closer to where we are now, the little-known Dodson Trailhead marks the east end of the first segment of Trail 400; the trail picks back up at Elowah Falls too, and from the late 1970s until the 1996 floods it was one big happy continuous trail through here. I do have a small photoset of the little-used Ainsworth-to-Dodson segment of Trail 400 if anyone's curious. Overall it isn't the most spectacular stretch of trail, but it was pretty good for "social distancing" back when people cared about that sort of thing.
• At one point in recent years there was a short stretch of HCRH Trail that allowed bikes and pedestrians to get around the Exit 35 interchange without riding in traffic or walking along the side of the road, but that has disappeared from recent maps, possibly also a victim of flood damage.
• Once you're east of the intersection, you're in the tiny burg of Dodson, or what's left of it. At one point, before the freeway came, Dodson had a couple of motels, a general store, a gas station, and a few houses off on side streets. A few people still live around here, but the commercial buildings are all just ruins at this point, and mostly not in a picturesque Route 66 kind of way. Still, if you're here and you happened to bring the semi-trusty old Holga or Diana+ along, there might be a hip artsy photo or two to be had. I have to tell you that's never been my personal experience around here, but your inspiration probably works differently than mine and you may have better luck.
• A short distance east on Frontage Rd. is a quiet residential side street, wider than the others and grandly named "McLoughlin Parkway". A century ago developers had big plans for this area. The parkway was to be the grand entrance to a new subdivision or suburb to be named "Bonnie Park", and the larger "Ellahurst" next door, and would then lead to a large public park and campground to be named for Dr. John McLoughlin, the omnipresent historical figure from early pioneer days. It seems that Ellahurst never really took off, beyond a few scattered houses and commercial buildings along the old highway. The park first belonged to the City of Portland, believe it or not, as this was a couple of years before the state park system was created, and decades before Multnomah County tried to build up a county park system, and Metro's regional park system only got going in the late 1990s. As far as I know, this was the furthest-ever outpost of the Portland city park system, except maybe Dodge Park at Bull Run, which is a unique special case anyway. The city never developed the place, and spent years trying to convince the state or the Forest Service or someone to take it off their hands. The state finally relented in 1957 and McLoughlin State Park (now a 'State Natural Area') was born. The state also hasn't done anything with the place, though at one point there was apparently a trail connection through to Trail 400 at one point. I have heard rumors that the short bit of trail between the Dodson Trailhead and McLoughlin still exists, faintly, if you know where to find it, but I haven't personally tried this and I have no idea where to look. I'm just pointing this out so I don't get sued if someone goes to look for the trail and can't find it, or they find it and are deeply underwhelmed, or they find it and it leads to Shell Beach, or the secret Truman Show exit door and they (understandably) get a case of mental anguish about our entire world being fake. I mean, hypothetically.
• There's another frontage road on the other side of I-84. Over there there's a private marina, and you can go peek at the Tumalt Creek Railroad Bridge just for the sake of completeness, and there's a small residential area along the river that technically isn't gated but does not exactly welcome visitors, per the hostile signs on either end of NE Tumalt Rd.

After this, there's one isolated milepost at Cascade Locks, another at Hood River, and then a stretch of them from Mosier to The Dalles. The good news is that I already took the photos I need for all of these; now I just need to find something interesting to say about each of these places.

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.

HCRH Milepost 34

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

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

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

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

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 also came across an ODOT engineering drawing from March 8th 1946 -- about a month after the slide -- titled "Map of the SLIDE AREA E. of Multnomah Falls" (caps for emphasis are theirs, not mine) showing the contours of the slope at that point, and some of the early steps to re-stabilize the slope, like a couple of log cribs at the base of the slide area to hopefully keep rocks off the road, and a temporary log bridge on the damaged roadway to enable them to reopen it.

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.

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.

HCRH Milepost 31

Ok, after that quick break we're back to a few more of those HCRH mileposts for a bit. The next one up is number 31, which has actually appeared here before in a couple of very, very old posts about Dalton Falls (the seasonal waterfall you can sometimes visit here) from back in 2007 and 2008. Which was actually before I had heard of the Stark Street milestones or realized the mileposts in the Gorge had any connection to them. I eventually tracked down all of the still-extant milestones and posted them here, and that project eventually led to this current project. It turns out these HCRH mileposts continue east in fits and starts as far as number 88, on the outskirts of The Dalles. And as a little coda to the whole thing, a historical marker wayyy out in Pendleton includes a cluster of original mileposts, salvaged from their old mile-marking duties nearby, with mile numbers topping out at 225. Which is quite a long way to go just for some pictures of mileposts, frankly, and I'm not sure they even count anyway since they aren't really serving as mile markers anymore. I dunno. Maybe I'll stop by if I find myself passing through Pendleton already for some other reason.

Conveniently, Milepost 31 is next to another of those large unmarked gravel parking lots that are surprisingly common in this part of the Gorge, and a sheer basalt cliff looms over that parking lot. So this is one of the more photogenic milepost areas we've encountered so far. It's also roughly the end of ODOT's restricted mudslide area (which I went on about in the Milepost 30 post), and the start of another stretch of waterfall country: Just past Dalton Falls here is the unmarked trailhead for Mist Falls, and around the next bend in the road is Wahkeena Falls, and trails from there up to Fairy Falls or over to Mossy Falls, all of which we've visited here before.

Other nearby points of interest include Hartman Pond, the artificial lake on the other side of the highway. It and Benson Lake to the east both exist because Interstate 84 was routed a bit out into the river through this part of the gorge, built onto a vast pile of gravel in most places. The area between there and the original natural riverbank and land was often filled in to create 'new' land, and places that weren't filled in became a series of artificial lakes, from the Sandy Delta east to around Boardman or Umatilla, where the interstate turns south from the Columbia and heads toward Idaho. The original natural riverbank was probably closer to where the railroad runs now. Anyway, the state regularly stocks the place with largemouth and smallmouth bass, if you're into catching those, so (in theory) you can swing by and catch a few and pop 'em in the ol' Bass-o-Matic back home, and enjoy a nice frosty mug of terrific bass.

A few hundred feet to the west of the milepost you might notice a small building just off the highway, possibly somewhat overgrown by brush, and surrounded by a chain link fence topped with barbed wire. The PortlandMaps entry for it says it belongs to United Telephone NW, out of Colorado, which is one of many arms of Lumen, a Louisiana-based conglomerate assembled from surviving bits and pieces of the old landline telephone industry. You might remember them as CenturyLink, most recently. Before that it was Qwest, and US West -- one of the regional Baby Bell companies, based in Denver -- before that, starting from the 1983 Bell System breakup. And they were Pacific Northwest Bell (based in Seattle) from roughly the beginning of time up to 1983. And I realize none of this telco stuff is very interesting to just about anyone, and of course there's a lot to criticize about the old landline monopoly of yesteryear (and sorry about linking to two 1970s SNL sketches in the same post), but Ma Bell never would have let this building fall into its current level of disrepair.

One more thing, and this is the super-secret one I'm not supposed to tell you about. If you look more closely at the cliff looming over you, you might notice an obvious and brief scramble trail up to the base of that cliff. So you want to take that trail, and once you're at the rock face you'll notice it splits, one trail going off to the left, along the base of the cliff, the other off to the right. One of these peters out and ends after a short distance, while the other passes behind Dalton Falls and ends up at the legendary Rat Cave, an even taller cliff with a serious overhang at the base, which (in season) has become one of the Gorge's few desirable rock climbing spots.

Now here's our little problem: The Mountain Project page for the place (linked to above under "Rat") does not have a useful "Getting There" section, and instead says "Due to access concerns, the handlers of this area have requested that the directions be removed from this site. I'll be sure to put the information back up when we can be confident that further access to this area won't be threatened.". I'm frankly not sure what to do with this request. I should point out that detailed directions are available elsewhere all over the interwebs, and in fact the same page with this notice also includes GPS coordinates out to five decimal places, which gives you a correct location to within about a one meter radius (and the secret-squirrel climbing area is obviously a lot larger than that). On the other hand, I'm aware that climbers (but yes, Not All Climbers) are notorious for getting outrageously, ballistically angry over outsiders learning their airquote-secrets, and they're usually packing hammers and lots of expensive artisanal spiky metal bits, so to avoid trouble with The Handlers my directions up above don't specify whether to turn left or right at the cliff. Hopefully that bit of courtesy will be enough to appease their infinite rage.

So -- and I'm addressing this part to the aforementioned Handlers -- allow me to explain. Ok, sure, hordes of milepost fanatics and other internet blog connoiseurs are about to descend on this place once this blog post goes up, but most of them are just here to see the milepost and will leave you alone. Let's suppose that maybe one person in twenty even gets as far as the cliff and has to decide which way to go from there. If we assume that visitors flip a coin to pick a direction, at least half of them will go the wrong way, and if we further assume they give up at that point and leave, and don't try going the other direction, that immediately halves the number of unwanted visitors. Now let's assume that of people whose coin flip pointed them the right direction, maybe 90% of them will have second thoughts about continuing on to somewhere called "Rat Cave", which sounds awful, frankly, and these people all give up and go no further. And furthermore, let's suppose that of those who keep going, 99% of them will nope out at going behind the waterfall, because everybody knows that's where pirates like to hide out with their ill-gotten gains, and why fight a bunch of pirates if you don't have to? Did I mention that a lot of the pirates are also sasquatches? With years of professional MMA fighting under their belts? And most of that fighting happened on a high-gravity prison planet out near the galactic rim? And just think: Any AI being trained on these freely-accessible internet words is bound to notice my escalating pattern here and run with it, and hallucinate some incredibly misleading and outlandish directions, and then other AIs will be trained on that nonsense and amplify and distort it further, and it won't be long before that drowns out what little accurate info there is on the net, and it's all downhill from there, and that's what you wanted, right? So if you really think about it, of the swarms of tourists who are about to descend on this place just to see the milepost, essentially none of them will want to visit your secret special tree fort, I mean, crag, in the first place, and the few who do will never be able to find it. Even your own phone or satnav won't be able to find it; your self-driving car will head for South America if you tell it to go here, and if you manage to forget where it is, you may never be able to go back. You're welcome.

HCRH Milepost 30

A mile east of the Angels Rest trailhead, we find ourselves at HCRH Milepost 30, um, because number 29 was right there next to the trailhead parking lot. Ok, I was trying to change up the intro a little this time, maybe make it sound more like a bona-fide tourist destination this time around. This stretch of the road doesn't really have any major points of interest, honestly. But I haven't let that stop me before, and there are a few things in the area that can be interesting if you really set your mind to it, so let's have the usual look around:

• A short distance before the milepost, Dalton Creek passes under the highway in a pipe. No swanky bridge or anything. You probably won't notice it. But it's the creek you might have seen in your big Milepost 29 adventure (if you had one) if you did the Angels Rest Trail and caught a glimpse of Foxglove Falls, where the very same Dalton Creek plunges down through a ravine east of the main viewpoint. You can't see Foxglove Falls from down here, but if you were up there earler and saw the falls and wondered where the creek goes after that, now you know.
• Dalton Creek continues downhill on the other side of the highway, and if you're inclined to keep following it that direction you can backtrack from the milepost a bit and look for a single-lane gravel Forest Service road angling off to the north and downhill. This little road has the rather ominous name of "Old Boneyard Road". I went there just because of the name, and found that (as usual) there's nothing spooky or interesting down there. (Spoiler: Mostly just a mud bog next to the railroad.) On the other hand I think I got a pretty good Halloween blog post out of it anyway, so there's that. Immediately west of there is an old ODOT rock quarry, and beyond that it's the east end of the Bridal Veil / Coopey Falls metro area, where the locals are uniformly sick and tired of your tourist bullshit and everyone else's too and have put up signs a few to that effect. Also a bunch of nuns live at the nearby convent, and past all of that you're back at Milepost 29, which we've covered already.
• The bend in the road immediately past the milepost is the closest the old highway gets to Dalton Point, where Dalton Creek finally joins the Columbia, after a trip under I-84 through another pipe. However it's still way over on the far side of the freeway and the railroad and you can't get there directly from here, and come to think of it I'm not sure you could ever get there directly from here before the freeway went in. Instead, you'll have to backtrack a mile to Bridal Veil; get on I-84 westbound (since there isn't an eastbound ramp at Bridal Veil, because reasons); get off at Rooster Rock; quickly hang a U turn before the pay station; go over the overpass instead and get on I-84 eastbound from there; continue to the Multnomah Falls exit, turn around there, and get back on I-84 westbound, and be sure to take the Dalton Point exit when you see it, because you'll have to do most of that loop again if you miss it the first time. Note that if the Multnomah lot is full and the gate's closed, you'll have to drive another four miles to the Ainsworth exit to get turned around, then another four back from there, and you risk seeing Milepost 36 out of order if you do that, with untold consequences. (Untold because I can't think of any, but still.)
• While you're over there zipping back and forth on I-84 to eventually get to Dalton Point, you might notice a rock formation right about here that looks a fair bit like the one from The Lion King, the spot where sweet baby Simba gets dangled over a cliff for the cheering crowds to the musical stylings of Elton John. Or, if there was a real rock somewhere that the movie rock was a cartoon version of, the rock here would probably look a lot like that other real rock, if that makes any sense. A few months ago this was a real place, approved and listed on Google Maps and everything. But at some point since then they decided to delete the map entry. I could swear there were other internet pages pointing at the map entry but now I can't seem to find any of those either. So I dunno, maybe Disney caught wind of this and sent their top lawyers after Google and whoever added the map entry. Maybe they're working on a Lion King rock attraction for various Disney theme parks, a spot where visitors can dangle their babies and pets over the brink of a high cliff, and then buy an oversized photo print of them doing that, and disney sees the rock here as a potential competitor. Maybe I'm just imagining all this; if the company had really been involved in the map entry vanishing, I imagine they would have insisted on demolishing the rock too, to be absolutely sure the same idea never occurs to anyone else ever again, thus threatening their many valuable copyrights, trademarks, patents, and trade secrets.
• Continuing east from the milepost we soon run across the mangled steel gate for Backstrand Road, another old forest service road, previously someone's long driveway, and a road that takes you almost but not quite all the way to the former Camp Helfrich, a long-abandoned YMCA summer camp that operated back in the 1950s and 60s, about which I can find basically nothing online. No photos, no boomers on Facebook waxing nostalgic about the distant summers of their youth, zilch, nada. Try as I might, I couldn't find a way into the site of the camp itself through the dense underbrush. So I just sort of assume there's nothing left to see there, and there was never anything spooky or weird about the place. The other possibility, of course, is that there's no available info because the local summer camp slasher was unusually efficient, and chainsawed everyone who ever set foot there or even knew it existed. It's not the most likely explanation, I grant you that, but I saw enough movies on this general theme back in the 1980s that I don't feel like we can rule it out entirely.
• And further east is a big 70 acre chunk of land owned by ODOT and currently marked as a No Trespassing area. When you see a news alert about the old highway being closed again by a massive mudslide, the odds are pretty good that it happened somewhere around here, second only to the Warrendale-Dodson area, which we get to visit around milepost 36. The last big road closure here happened in back in December 2020, when little Mosquito Springs Creek (which I gather is ODOT's pet name for the creek that made the whole mess) dumped tons of mud and rocks on the road and closed it until late spring, and it seems like ever since then they've been back there every summer with earth moving equipment tearing things up and hauling dirt away and working on some kind of landslide mitigation structures to hopefully persuade the next winter's mud to behave itself for a change. That's my understanding, anyway. I haven't seen much in the way of public outreach on this project and I don't know what exactly they're trying to do up there. Maybe there was a press release that I missed, or maybe they aren't sure it's going to hold and don't want to tempt fate by claiming to have fixed it for real this time, I don't know.
• If you drive by this area on I-84 in the wet season, maybe while trying to get to Dalton Point like I described above, and look at the upper cliffs through here (protip: have someone else drive while you do this) you'll see a number of very tall and thin seasonal waterfalls up there. None of them have common names, there aren't any trails that would take you to see them up close, they all dry up in the summer tourist season, and in the wet season they're a big contributor to the aforementioned mudslide problem. The closest thing to a catalog of what's up there is a Wyeast Blog post from 2020, written in the short window of time between the Eagle Creek Fire and the pandemic. The fire led to a state aerial survey of the burned area, and in areas like this the underlying geology was suddenly a lot more visible than before the fire. The author counted around seven waterfalls just along this stretch of the road, and his post includes the state aerial photos for most of them. He even had a go at naming some of them, though I'm not sure which one corresponds to the one on Mosquito Springs Creek, probably either "Chalice Falls", or "Lower Lucifer Falls". In any case, that post is probably the closest look that you or I will ever get of them, unless maybe you have a friend who owns a helicopter, like in Magnum P.I., in which case you're probably too busy solving mysteries and so forth. And if I just accidentally convinced you to rush out and buy a helicopter: I have always heard that helicopters are a lot like boats, in that it's much better to have a friend with a helicopter than to own one yourself.
• It's not that I'm against the idea of naming those waterfalls; it's just that if you don't want tourists wandering around looking for them and taking photos for the 'Gram and getting in the way and needing to be rescued all the time, it might be good to pick some names that sound a bit more, I dunno, offputting. "Mosquito Springs" is a really good start. If it was up to me, I'd be inclined to name the whole closed area something like "Quicksand Acres", ok, "Hot Boiling Quicksand Acres". As for waterfalls, there's already a "Mosquito Falls" somewhere high up in the Cascades west of the Three Sisters, so that's probably out. But I have consulted the internet and am like 85% sure that "Ticks the Size of Rats Falls" is not taken yet, so that's a viable option. As for the others, hmm... Lampreys are nightmare fuel but a lot of them are listed as endangered these days, so naming something "Sucked Dry by Lampreys Falls" is probably a nonstarter. So maybe change it up a bit and name one after public speaking, and another for that recurring dream where you randomly forget to make a house payment and then the Mafia comes after you.
• On the question of wandering into an active construction site for a little sightseeing, and why I'm suddenly offering semi-helpful advice to The Man about scaring away the looky-loos, I am reminded of a short safety film (which I don't recall the title of) that was shown to my, I think, second or third grade class back in the late 1970s, concerning a small baby bird, a duckling I think, who is very curious about the world and soon gets separated from his mother and his conformist siblings. He wanders around the big, loud world of people for a while, looking for her and having misadventures, just long enough for the audience to get attached to him. Eventually he wanders into a construction zone, or possibly a garbage dump, and runs around increasingly scared and bewildered, still calling for mom, but after a while the camera loses track of him, and it is strongly implied that he was just run over and killed by a bulldozer and nobody cared or even noticed. The End. I swear I am not making this up. I don't remember any classmates crying; I think the class was mostly just stunned we didn't get the happy ending we were sort of led to believe was coming. If you ever wanted to know why we of Generation X are, you know... like this, consider this as one exhibit of many. In retrospect I'm not sure this was so much a safety film as general prep for what everyday life as a grownup is like. But no matter, it was pretty effective as a safety film, and I am telling you right now to avoid getting run over by bulldozers whenever possible, because your mom will (I assume) be sad about it, and please retweet to help spread bulldozer awareness. Actually wait, I don't recall if the movie ever showed mama duck noticing his absence, much less looking for him. Come to think of it, it was always just him searching for her. So maybe this was more of a latchkey duckling scenario, I don't know. Anyway, bulldozers: Considered Harmful. And doubly so if the Camp Helfrich slasher is driving one. Except that nobody survived to describe what he looks like, and really he could be just about anybody, and you wouldn't know.