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.

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.

HCRH Milepost 29

Ok, next up we're visiting HCRH Milepost 29, which is one of the easier ones to visit since it's right by the Angels Rest Trail parking lot. The red pushpin is not exactly where the milepost is; I think Maps realizes the trailhead is a thing lots of people are interested in and it really, really wants to direct you there instead. I imagine Google does this just in case the trailhead is some sort of business and therefore a potential advertiser.

• Obviously the Angels Rest Trail is the main point of interest right here. Or at least that's why everyone else is here. And a few of them may look at you funny while you're taking photos of the milepost, at least until mileposting goes mainstream and sells out to the man, and every social media influencer has to swing by and do a video or take a selfie here.
• On the way up the trail, you'll soon encounter Coopey Falls and Upper Coopey Falls in close succession, and when you get to the top of Angels Rest you might be able to see Foxglove Falls if it's flowing.

• An unnumbered county road -- another of those "local access" roads we keep running into -- branches off near the Angels Rest parking lot and heads into the old mill site, next to power lines. Back when the mill was operating, this was part of the company town and there were houses along this little road. It just so happened that the mill went on the market around 1990, right when there was zero chance that anything connected to the timber industry would attract historic preservation dollars. In retrospect, though, I can't help thinking they could have been turned into vacation rental cabins, or maybe seasonal housing for Scenic Area staff or state park employees, maybe reserve one for an Artist in Residence program, who knows.

  Since that didn't happen, and there's nothing much down the road anymore, it could be turned into a trail pretty easily It slopes gently down into the mill site and ends up close to the base of Bridal Veil Falls. Seems ideal for bikes but I'm not sure where it would go from there, if the idea was to, say, climb back up to the highway west of the falls.

• You'll probably notice there are still a number of houses east of the old mill site that weren't demolished after the mill closed. These buildings were never part of the company town, and for a while this area was known as the adjacent town of Coopey Falls, back when there was a need to tell the company town and the normal town apart. This distinction was very, very important back in June 1935, as there was an ugly labor dispute going on nearby at the Bridal Veil sawmill. Activists from the Sawmill and Timber Workers Union, local No. 2532, had rented some property at Coopey Falls as a base of operations while trying to unionize the Bridal Veil sawmill. Portland was still a conservative city in a conservative county in a conservative state back in those days, and the local DA and county sheriff were determined to break up what they said was an illegal strike, which meant any strike of any kind at all, and sheriff's deputies and state police were sent in to administer beatdowns and evict the union from the Coopey Falls property by any means necessary. They even set up a police roadblock near Troutdale, turning back anyone who looked like they might be a union member or interested in becoming one. The following month, Congress passed the pro-labor Wagner Act (aka the National Labor Relations Act of 1935), the start of the one brief decade or so when federal labor laws weren't overwhelmingly tilted in favor of big business, ending with the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act.
• Next we've got several items that involve a trip up Palmer Mill Road, an old narrow gravel road that heads uphill next to Bridal Veil Creek. The start of the road doubles as an overflow parking lot for Angels Rest, and another couple of hundred feet up the road a small creek passes under the road in a culvert. This is tiny Mead Creek, home to a really obscure waterfall that we visited a while back.
• After that, a faint roadbed forks off to the right and continues along sort of parallel to and between the old highway and Palmer Mill Rd. This is another piece of County Road 634, which we last encountered in the form of a gated road between Latourell and the Bridal Veil Falls area. The county doesn't seem to think this one even rises to being a "local access road", and I think they just classify it as a random bit of unused county-owned right of way. Which is probably just as well, since this track eventually ends at a 50' sheer cliff right above the HCRH. I don't know exactly what happened here, and have never seen any pre-HCRH photos of this spot that might clear that up, but if I had to guess I'd say there was a surprisingly large amount of dynamite involved. I mean, I guess the road could have ended here and you'd pay someone to winch your covered wagon down a vertical cliff like at Laurel Hill on Mt. Hood. But Oregon Trail (the game) was pretty clear that the sketchy winch stuff was only a hazard on the Barlow Road route, south of Mt. Hood, and the river route is where you usually drown in rapids juuusst short of the end of the trail. Although a late bout of dysentery can still take you down whichever route you pick.
• You might have also noticed what looks like another overgrown gravel road off to the left. It branched off just west of Mead Creek and runs parallel to Palmer Mill while continuing to climb the hill, whatever this hill is called. It looks kind of interesting but as of right now I have never followed it and know nothing about it, beyond the fact that it seems to peter out in the forest after a mile or two and it might connect to the wider trail network up there.
• Continuing up Palmer Mill Road there are completely unofficial spots where you can scramble down to Middle and Upper Bridal Veil Falls. I have actually never been to either of them. I see photos and I always think I'd like to see them in person at some point, then I go to YouTube and see videos of people scrambling down into the canyon in a sort of semi-controlled plummet, and that reminds me why I haven't been there. There's a proposal floating around out on the interwebs to put in a proper trail connecting both waterfalls to the state park and the famous lower falls. Long story short, I would like that trail to exist. And not as a memorial trail named after me due to my having The Accident here.
• Eventually you'll come across concrete barriers on the road, which is as far uphill as you can go on Palmer Mill in a vehicle. Not that I would recommend driving on Palmer Mill in the first place; I've done it before, but it's not really my idea of a good time. You can keep going by bike for another mile or two, but then there's a stretch a bit further along where the Forest Service decommissoned the road entirely, and dumped old logs all over it, after the Eagle Creek Fire. Because of something to do with erosion and stream health, if I remember right, and if you manage to get past the impassable part another gated stretch of road will take you the rest of the way to Larch Mountain Road. And on the other side of Larch Mountain Road, Palmer Mill becomes forest road NF-20 and takes you to the forbidden Bull Run watershed.
• As for trails that do exist, there's a veritable labyrinth of unofficial trails and old logging roads connecting Angels Rest and Palmer Mill Road. That link goes to OpenStreetMap, which I gather is the closest thing there is to a canonical map of the area, maintained by some of the same people who maintain the trail network. I admit I haven't spent a lot of time poking around up there and don't have a photoset to share. I gather the scenic highlights are mostly vintage abandoned cars, most with varying degrees of target practice damage. Not something I usually seek out, but I suppose they at least give future archeologists an accurate picture of what the 20th and 21st centuries were like, unless they're scavenged for meth money first. Rumor has it there's event an abandoned vintage JetSki somewhere up there, and the archeologists of the distant year 3025 may find that a bit more confusing. It would be fun to leave a stone tablet up there noting the JetSki came from Noah's Ark and was used to scout for dry land during the big flood (and also for harpooning sea dragons), but it broke down and had to be abandoned nearby, and ended up here when the waters receded.
• Speaking of archeologists of the distant year 3025, just downhill from the Angels Rest parking lot is Bridal Veil's town cemetery. I have a theory, or more of a suspicion really, that at some point centuries from now archeologists will take an interest in digging up cemeteries of old logging towns out of morbid curiosity about all the various gory ways a person could die in the timber industry of a thousand years ago, way back when the earth still had trees and oxygen.

HCRH Milepost 28

Ok, the next stop on our eastbound tour of HCRH Mileposts is number 28, as seen above. For anyone just joining this little adventure, this milepost marks 28 miles eastbound from downtown Portland, as measured from the corner of SW Washingon & Broadway, across the river on the old Stark St. Ferry, then across the eastside on Stark to the Sandy River, and then along the original Columbia River Highway route to here. And it's taking us a while because we're stopping every mile to look at another one of these things, and (since the mile markers themselves aren't that compelling to visit) I usually rattle off some trivia about what else is nearby.

So 28 miles puts us just west of the Bridal Veil area, and it's another case where I ended up just snapping a couple of photos while rolling by, since there's nowhere to park right next to it, and parking further away and then walking along the shoulder doesn't seem overly safe. I mean, taking photos while rolling past at 5mph isn't 100% safe either, nor do you get a lot of quality photos that way, but it seemed a bit better than the other options at the time. The milepost itself was intact last time I checked, so -- as usual -- let's take a quick peek at what's in the surrounding area:

Roughly across the street and downhill from the milepost is a large house that looks for all the world like a plantation house from the deep South. This is not a common architectural style in the Northwest, and the reason it looks that way is because it was originally built to be a fried chicken restaurant. No, seriously. That was the big national food trend around the time the old highway opened, and it was kind of a special occcasion dish and not something most people made at home a lot, so several chicken dinner places opened along the old highway, enough that you needed a sort of theme to stand out from the crowd. The Chanticleer Inn (located where Portland Womens Forum State Park is now) obviously had the view as a big selling point, while Forest Hall here went for genteel Southernness. Patrons were asked to call ahead and make reservations, and the restaurant bragged (in a genteel sort of way) that they had an actual black chef who had moved here from Kentucky, and dinner at Forest Hall was the real deal. (Now imagine if the road had opened a century later, in 2016: The road would be lined with cutesy little cafes selling twee artisanal cupcakes, and very few of them would have survived the pandemic.)

Later on, in the 1940s, the restaurant changed hands and was called the Maxwell House for a while, named for the owners and not the long-gone grand hotel in Nashville, TN or the national ground coffee brand named after the hotel, though the name sort of referenced them in a way you couldn't get away with now, in the modern era of advanced global trademark policing. I don't know if the owners meant to reference this, but the Nashville hotel was also famous for hosting the first national meeting of the Ku Klux Klan in 1867, and long story short there was no limit to how problematic a simple chicken dinner could be in those days^[1]. You still see still occasional news reports of white racists trying to harrass black people with sneering references to fried chicken or watermelon, which is just about the least effective racial insult I can imagine. The harrassers always think they're being so bigly and threatening, but outside their little cultural bubble they just come off as jealous they weren't invited to the cookout, and have to go home to another plate of microwave hot pockets or a big glop of mayonnaise casserole.

Anyway, the most important thing to know about all this is that the building is now a private residence, and has been for years, so don't go knocking on doors and poking around as if it not being a restaurant is negotiable somehow.^[2]

Also nearby (and frankly the one big attraction of this mile of the road) is Bridal Veil Falls State Park, which is home to the namesake waterfall, and the overlook trail, and the "Pillars of Hercules"^[3]. The latter is a group of eroded basalt columns that you can see from the overlook, and (unofficially) from below too, while avoiding speeding trains that pass very close to the otherwise climbable rocks. I gather that rock climbers do this all the time, though that's not much of a data point as to whether it's a good idea or not.

There are another couple of large waterfalls further upstream on Bridal Veil Creek, but we'll get to those in the next post, since visiting them currently involves a trip up Palmer Mill Road, which begins near the next milepost up the road.

There's a historic HCRH bridge (albeit one of the lesser ones), a Union Pacific railroad bridge (just as utilitarian as all the others), and the few surviving remnants of the of the old sawmill that was here from the early 1880s to the early 1990s.

On the private sector side, Bridal Veil Lakes (a wedding venue) is somewhere up Henderson Road, while Bridal Veil Lodge (a bed-and-breakfast) is right across the street from the Bridal Veil state park's parking lot. And I guess that's about it for this edition, except for all the footnotes.

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footnote(s)

1. Years ago I lived in a small-ish town where I shared a first and last name with one of the few local dentists. He didn't list a 24-hour contact number for his office, so every now and then people would find me in the white pages and call at all hours thinking they were calling their dentist at home. I would try to explain they had a wrong number and I was not a dentist, much less their dentist, nor I did not have their dentist's private home number handy. That was usually the end of the conversation, but I remember a few trying to haggle, like they thought I could be persuaded to drive to a stranger's house at 3am with a pair of pliers and maybe a small hammer, and, obviously, no novocaine, to yoink their bad tooth. My point is, I don't know the current residents of the house, but you should assume they're about as likely to fry you a chicken dinner as I am to have a go at your bum tricuspid.
2. Further along the local spectrum of problematic-ness was the "[racial slur] Chicken Inn", a notorious restaurant chain that doubled and quintupled down on crude racial caricatures as their entire theme. And yes, there was a Portland location (and a Seattle one), and yes, they were hugely popular for decades, right up until sometime in the mid-1950s when society hit one of those cultural tipping points and the really overt racist stuff just wasn't respectable anymore. Kind of like the moment around 2020 when Confederate statues and monuments finally stopped being respectable, although the new orange president is doing everything he possibly can to roll that back. Not long after the Portland location closed, the building was stripped of its... decor (which hopefully nobody kept as a memento), and Clyde's Prime Rib moved in, and has been there ever since, since prime rib plus live jazz never really goes out of style, or at least it hasn't in 70 years. At whatever point the city eventually hits the 90% vegan + EDM-only threshold they might need to re-imagine the place a bit.
3. The original Pillars of Hercules are, of course, the giant rocks standing on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar in Greek mythology, and marking the edge of the known world. The northern rock being the Rock of Gibraltar, and the southern one is... well, nobody seems to agree on that part, and maybe the Greeks just sort of assumed there was another Gibraltar on the other side and didn't bother checking, because if the mighty Hercules could create one pillar with his bare hands (and the myths differ on whether he created them or was just here performing mighty deeds in the neighborhood once upon a time) he could certainly create a second one, and as a proper civilized Greek he would feel obligated to make a matching pair for the sake of classical symmetry. I had this idea that the two pillars were supposed to be enchanted and would occasionally rush out and smash together, crushing any ships that happened to be between them. But no, I was thinking of the Clashing Rocks, or Symplegades, a completely different pair of rocks that were tasked with guarding the Bosporus, the strait that serves as a gateway to the Black Sea, and is now the center of present-day Istanbul. Also, the rocks were a danger to Jason and the Argonauts, and not Odysseus and his crew, who never went anywhere near the Bosporus. I mention all this because the local Pillars were so named because the original 1870s railroad tracks once passed through a narrow gap between two of the pillars until the tracks were moved in the 1890s or so, and I was about to make a dumb joke that the tracks were moved because the pillars got ornery and kept crushing trains as they passed through, and then a few years later a random commenter would notice and point out my mistake and laugh and tell the others, and the crowd of sneering Classicists would quickly get out of hand, and it would all be very embarrassing. So, sorry about the tangent, but I had my myths crossed for a bit, and it could happen to you too, so I figured a quick PSA was in order.

HCRH Milepost 27

Next up we're stopping at HCRH Milepost 27, roughly halfway through a mile-long stretch where the old highway runs right along the base of a ~100' bluff to the south. Nearby on the north side of the highway is an inexplicably large gravel parking lot, with no obvious signs saying what it's for. This parking lot is the only legal place to park anywhere near the milepost, so our list of the various and sundry sights and sounds of mile 27 starts there.

• Now that you're off the road and can look around more closely, you might notice a small and probably unofficial sign labeling it "The Oasis". I don't know why it's called that. The sign's perched on top of a very official "Camping Prohibited" sign, and there are no other amenities to the place. No restrooms, no drinking fountains, no picnic tables, no gift shop or snack bar, no rentable hammocks in the shade, nothing. It doesn't even offer any protection from cruel desert bandits or ill-tempered camels, so it's not the original kind of oasis, either. If anybody knows why it's called this, feel free to drop a note in the comment section because I'm stumped here.
• Just north of the parking lot there's a sort of low rocky rise covered in trees. If you look semi-closely you might notice a trail or two heading uphill into those trees, and you might be wondering if it goes anywhere interesting. The "Oasis" link above goes to an Flickr photoset including some photos from up that extremely short trail, such as it is. From the top you can see the river, and I-84, and more low-lying farmland that sometimes floods in the winter. There's no indication that, say, D.B. Cooper has been hiding out back there with his money, unseen and uncaught since 1971, although that would certainly explain the "Oasis" sign, assuming he's the one who put it there, which I admit is a real stretch.
• Once upon a time there was a restaurant here. For a while it was caled "The Dell" and was owned and operated by members of the Shepperd family who still lived nearby, and it might have been called "The White Elephant" at some point either before or after, unless that was the place up by the Vista House. Apparently there's a Facebook group for people who grew up in the Gorge, and this is what they've pieced together from childhood memories, at any rate, and the "Jack O'Lantern" was definitely not located here, it was way over by Horsetail Falls. Anyway, there hasn't been a restaurant here since sometime in the mid-20th century, probably around the time the local stretch of I-84 opened. Long enough that National Scenic Area rules would seem to prohibit any new businesses from ever setting up shop here again, even something as simple as a coffee cart or a lemonade stand.
• Meanwhile on the south side of the old highway, the road runs right along the base of a roughly 100' bluff, with numerous seasonal waterfalls spaced across it in the wet season e.g. Cruiser Falls and Huerta Falls, and a popular ice climbing area on the increasingly rare occasions when the gorge stays below freezing long enough.
• The east bookend to that mile-long bluff is right about here, a point just west of Shepperds Dell, where a narrow ravine cuts down through the bluff to almost street level. Looking up the ravine, about 150' back from the highway, there's a seasonal waterfall maybe 40'-50' high that's usually flowing outside of the core summer months, though it's really not that impressive even at the best of times. The creek crosses under the HCRH in an old culvert, then exits a pipe and tumbles further downhill next to one of the most impressive stone walls that I'm aware of along the old road. And it's covered in ferns, at least in the wet season, reminding me a bit of the groovy ex-Weyerhaeuser headquarters building in Federal Way, WA (in suburban Seattle). And on the north side of the road, instead of an Oasis you have a very small area with room for just a couple of parked cars, and prominent No Parking signs. So for the sake of argument let's just agree that I parked somewhere else far, far away and used antigravity boots to drop in here and take some photos. As you might notice on that photoset, I figured I needed a nickname for this spot and came up with "Forbidden Falls", which makes it sound kind of remote and fearsome, like it could be the subject of a National Geographic cover story someday. But the name is like 98% tongue-in-cheek silliness, since it's really just about the inexplicable no-parking signs. The other 2% is just doing it for the sake of alliteration, and also for clickbait value in case I ever get around to doing a blog post about the place. Surprisingly according to the internets there doesn't seem to be a single waterfall in the whole northwest already named "Forbidden Falls", just a "Forgotten Falls" near Lolo Pass on Mt. Hood, and another in the far NW corner of northern Idaho, and it may not even exist, plus Idaho doesn't really count anyway.
• Further east, we finally get to the main event of mile 27, namely Shepperds Dell itself, plus the famous HCRH bridge over the aforementioned dell; and Bishop's Cap, the large rock formation just east of the dell and the bridge. Which, if I'm not mistaken, is so named because the road passes uncomfortably, unavoidably close to it, and if the rocks catch you unaware they might reach out and grope your car and then shame you for tempting them, and then declare bankruptcy so you can't sue them over it. I mean, in a sort of metaphorical way, and I think we'll just move along to the next item now and not explore that metaphor any further.

• Further down the road, but still short of Milepost 28 (because them's the rules), you might catch a glimpse of the historic highway's one and only cow underpass. Now, photos from odd angles can be deceiving, and unused (I think) tunnels under the street will tend to fill up with mud and gunk over time in this climate, and I have never actually owned any cows and maybe I'm underestimating what they can get used to over time, but that tunnel does not look anywhere near tall enough for cows to mosey through, and maybe not wide enough either, and getting in and out of the uphill side of it looks pretty steep and cramped, and you do not want your cows in the tunnel getting panicky when a loud truck drives over the top or somebody honks nearby. It just does not seem up to the job, not fit for purpose if you ask me, and I realize you didn't, and come to think of it the extensive National Register of Historic Places paperwork never actually asks "Did it work?" or "Was it any good?"; it just needs to contribute to the overall vibe of concretey 1916-ness, which it certainly does.

  If you were thinking of switching careers in 2025 and going into cattle rustling, be aware that this might be the spot where the sheriff's posse inevitably heads you off at the pass. At least I don't know of any other passes suitable for cows, over-, under-, or by-, around these parts so it'll have to do, even if it's a squishy undignified mud tunnel. I still say it's a relatively honest living, though, at least compared to contemporary jobs like "influencer", "AI evangelist" or "dogebro".

• Circling back to Shepperds Dell for a moment, there was an interesting series of occasional posts over at Wy'east Blog about Shepperds Dell and the history behind it:

  1. "The Farmer and his Dell"
  2. "Heirs to George Shepperd's Legacy"
  3. "The Big Fir at Shepperds Dell"
  4. "Postscript: Shepperds Dell Fir"

  The first article tried piecing together a bio of George Shepperd, who famously donated the land around Shepperds Dell in memory of his late wife. That post noted this was his second marriage and the first had ended in divorce, and while looking for something else entirely I happened to stumble across more details about the exceptionally ugly and contentious 1893-95 divorce case that once roiled the Greater Latourell Falls - Bridal Veil metro area. And let me preface this by saying I'm not picking a side and not judging anybody, and I have no special insight into which allegations were true and which were false or exaggerated, and we should all recognize that people are complicated and always have been, even back in the 1890s. Also I feel like I need to explain that I'm only covering this episode at all because the key people in the case are all historical figures who have major scenic highlights of the Gorge officially named after them (or at least after their families), and it's only natural to be a little curious about the people these places are named for. On another note, you might notice that the exact spellings of both "Shepperd" and "Latourell" vary over time and between articles. This didn't seem to trouble anyone at the time, so basically I went with whatever spelling each news item adopted.

  • December 12, 1893. "Alienated her Affections". George Shepard (how it was spelled in this article) sued Joseph C. Latourell (son of the town's founder) for $10k for alienating his wife's affections.

    Both parties live at Latourelle Falls, and there was a large delegation of spectators from that section here to witness the trial. Most of them were friends of Shepard, but his recital of his trials and tribulations provoked amusement rather than sympathy. There was no trouble in his family, so he said, until Latourelle began calling at his house. In the summer of 1892 he went East, and while he was away his wife became very indiscreet and attended dances and entertainments with Latourelle, and occasionally remained away from home all night.

  • June 29th 1894: "Latourell Must Settle"

    It was in March 1893, that George Sheppard filed suit against Joseph Latourell for alienating the affections of his wife, but the case was not tried until the following December, when the plaintiff got a verdict for $1000. During the interim, however, Latourell sold his farm and stock for $500 to his brother Henry, and was in a position to laugh at Sheppard when that person got his verdict. Sheppard’s attorney was George W. Hazen, who at once instituted suit to get the property transfer set aside, on the ground that it was expressly made to defeat the collection of Sheppard’s judgment.

    The article goes on to note that the sale was indeed set aside and Latourell was ordered to pay up. I am not sure what to make of the greatly reduced award and am curious how 19th century courts went about estimating the true dollar value of someone's affections.

  • November 14th, 1894 news item, in which the tables were suddenly turned.

    George Sheppard, of Latourelle Falls, will have an examination before Justice Bullock this afternoon on an information filed by his wife, Matilda Sheppard, charging him with adultery.

  • The next day the paper had a longer report on the hearing. It seems the day was spent arguing over postponing the case due to an absent witness, and the attorneys expressing their great personal and professional dislike for one another. The article goes on to note It is alleged the case is the outgrowth of spite work on the part of Mrs. Sheppard., possibly stemming from the earlier court cases.
  • Another hearing in the case on November 20th. Mrs. Sheppard was the first witness, though the article just says "she told her story very clearly" without sharing any details. Two additional witnesses stated they had seen Mr. Sheppard in the company of young Miss Bertha Williams (also of Latourell Falls, and attending the Sheppard hearings along with her mother) going in the direction of Brower, which was another mill town just up the road from Latourell, and this news quickly spread at the speed of small town gossip, though one of the witnesses later denied reporting it to anyone. And as far as I can tell this was all the evidence they had, just two people seen publicly "going in the direction of Brower". Which seems a bit weak, unless maybe that phrase was an oddly specific local euphemism for something else entirely.

    I mention that last bit because the (long-lost) town of Brower was named for George Brower, a local timber baron, though the general public mostly knew him (and his wife Marion) for their ongoing ugly divorce saga. Two earlier attempts in Multnomah County family court were denied on the grounds that hating each other and wanting out was not a good enough reason to meddle with society's sacred institutions and so forth. George Brower ended up selling his local businesses and moving to Colorado, which was the (relatively) easy divorce state at the time, like Nevada was in the mid-20th Century. After remaining there for the required full year, he was finally granted a divorce, and he headed straight off to the UK after that. Where he promptly met and married an actress in Liverpool. When the happy couple moved to Portland, Marion had them both arrested for polygamy. She claimed to have evidence he had ventured outside the borders of Colorado at least once during his year there, which she argued invalidated both the divorce and remarriage, and doomed the newlyweds to many years in jail. A grand jury failed to indict the couple, and the Brower case faded out of the news after that.

  • January 11th 1895, "A Nasty Case on Trial". The Sheppards were back in the courtroom, this time a divorce case, while in parallel George had filed adultery charges against his wife and Mr. Latourell. The article doesn't delve into the day's testimony in detail, describing it as "of a prurient nature"
  • January 19th 1895, also titled "A Nasty Case on Trial". We're told the case drew a large crowd of spectators again. As a little background, the article explains that "The parties accuse each other of all manner of infidelities", and notes that "Nearly all of the Latourelle Falls community has been called to testify in the case".
  • Matilda's 1942 obit listed her as Matilda Latourell, aged 82. Meanwhile the Wyeast Blog post above noted that a year or so after the divorce George married Martha Williams, Bertha's recently-divorced mother. So it's possible that while everyone pointed fingers and acted deeply scandalized by young Bertha, she was apparently covering for her still-married mom the whole time.

  So my big takeaway from all that is that both parties apparently ended up with people they were happier with. You could go so far as to say the people they were meant to be with, if you believe in all that destiny stuff. But because this happened in 1895 and not 2025, and no-fault divorce didn't exist, getting to that point involved multiple years of lurid, breathless news stories and a knock-down, drag-out court battle, and general humiliation in the public eye. And this sort of thing played out in court daily across the country, turning people's unhappy private lives into a cruel and tacky public spectacle, then inviting the public to come and wallow in it for fun. Sort of like daytime talk shows since the 1990s, or putting offenders in the stocks and letting the public throw vegetables for a small fee, or bullfights, or bear baiting back in Elizabethan times. And the worst part is that our new orange president and his followers want to drag the country back to those days. Which they'll do as soon as they figure out how to exempt themselves from ever being on the receiving end.

HCRH Milepost 26

Next up we're at HCRH Milestone 26, which is located right at Latourell Falls. Specifically at the west side of the Latourell Creek Bridge, by a wide spot in the road that serves as summer overflow parking. There's an old monument to Guy Talbot here -- he was the state park's primary donor-slash-namesake, and nearby is a crosswalk for the park's loop trail, so you could just start the trail from here if you wanted to. The crosswalk doesn't have crosswalk stripes, I think because it didn't have crosswalk stripes in 1916, and traffic safety would not be historically accurate. And the reason there weren't crosswalk stripes here back then was because the trail used to cross the road on a sort of skybridge over the highway, and no crosswalk was needed. If you look closely you can still see a concrete support for the old skybridge on the north side of the road, mostly overtaken by underbrush now.

Going from that to having a mere crosswalk here is kind of suboptimal, since a lot of traffic on the road isn't disposed toward noticing pedestrians. Some of the traffic is going to be cars or motorcycles racing the clock, going for a new personal best Vista-to-Latourell-and-back time. Others are visitors from rectangular corn states, a bit white-knuckled about the twisty drive but also giddy about seeing a waterfall for the first time and maybe not watching for road hazards that closely. A crosswalk signal for the trail crossing seems like overkill, but a crossing guard during the summer might help. Rebuilding the old skybridge like it once was is a non-starter, since modern RVs and shuttle buses would probably struggle to get under it. And going by current trends, the average family SUV will expand to be at least that size in a few years. But do I have an idea for a little adaptive reuse. And this isn't one of my usual dumb ideas, nor is it very expensive, at least not directly. You know how local bike activists are always saying there aren't enough bike trails in the Gorge, even with the HCRH State Trail now mostly complete? My idea helps with that too, a little. So, back during the 2019 Tour de France, someone jumped a BMX bike over the race and made it onto all the daily highlight reels, and maybe the old skybridge piers are a place where regular people could finally give that cool bike trick a try without having to learn French and go overseas and take a bunch of advanced performance-enhancing drugs and so forth. The lack of a bridge also means there won't be a lot of hikers on that particular stretch of trail, at most probably just a few parkour runners, and I think they might legally count as bikes for jumping purposes (Note: I am not a lawyer, so don't cite me as an authority on this.)

After passing through Latourell the older old road crosses the HCRH again, becoming Alex Barr Road (County Road 566 at first, then as CR 648 after the junction w/ Toll Road), and immediately starts climbing again. It's one of two surviving backroads into the Gorge, and two "local access" roads branch off of it: Henderson Road (Road 634) runs above and parallel to the HCRH along the stretch between here and Bridal Veil Falls, and if reopened to hikers and cyclists would open up access to the top of Shepperds Dell Falls, Huerta Falls, and all the other seasonal falls along the way. Further up, a road now called Toll Road (and once known as the Latourell Falls Toll Road, and either way numbered as another part of Road 566) climbs sort-of diagonally uphill to a junction with Brower Rd. near where it crosses Young Creek, and where the old Brower sawmill used to be. The Donohue Creek trail system is nearby, and in theory you can go all sorts of places via roads 458 and 550, the latter climbing up Larch Mountain and ending up somewhere deep in the forbidden Bull Run Watershed. For a while during the area's logging heyday, the road's right of way was shared with a log flume, starting at the mill in Brower and ending at another mill in Latourell. It's not surprising that the flume was either torn out or (more likely) burned many decades ago after the area ran out of loggable trees. I'm not saying I wish it was still there, much less that someone ought to build a new one, but back when I was in third grade my teacher got married over spring break and honeymooned on either Maui or the Big Island, and showed us lots of photos when she was back, and they had gone to... it was either a former log flume or an old irrigation canal or aqueduct, that was either officially repurposed as a waterslide, or at least locals used it as one whenever The Man wasn't looking, and she said it was really fast and scary compared to the ordinary waterslides at the mall, and I thought that sounded really fun and exciting at the time. Whereas now the first thing that comes to mind is all the many reasons -- entirely reasonable reasons -- an authentic log flume waterslide would be shut down or sued out of existence on day 1.

As for the town itself, it still has a number of sorta-historic old houses, but has no hotels or restaurants or antique shops or gas stations or any other businesses these days, and no city hall or public library or any churches, not even a post office. Despite the town's heyday as the entertainment and nightlife capitol of the western Gorge, today there are no nightclubs, no dance halls, no music venues, or anywhere else dedicated to carousing and carrying on into the wee hours. In short there's nothing for you as an outsider to see or do there, and there's no reason to linger around there annoying the locals. They do happen to have a local water utility, the Latourell Falls Township water system, a topic I was curious about after learning about the disgusting medieval water system used by the old company town over at Bridal Veil. That state filing says it's a local government entity, and Townships are a common form of (mostly rural) local government in a lot of other states, largely in the Midwest, where they function as a sort of sub-county, delivering various public services on a smaller scale. And technically the Oregon state constitution does mention "towns" and "townships" a few times, mostly when saying "cities and towns". But there aren't any state laws that spell out exactly how they're created, or how they're run, or who runs them, or what they can and can't do, and and I (possibly naively) assumed that meant we didn't have any townships here. And maybe we don't, and I'm just misreading the scarce factual info I've come across. At one point I was up to around six footnotes of a paragraph or two each, just for this one item, speculating about what might be going on here, and going off on further tangents about special districts and local justice-of-the-peace courts and whatnot, and I realized I would never, ever finish this post if I included all of that stuff. Alhough, apropos of nothing, here's the relevant Oregon state law on organizing and operating a local Weather Modification District, if you're into that sort of thing.

This township stuff did remind me of an old, old post I did about the little town of Greenhorn, OR way back in 2006, which has had an average population in the low single digits for decades now, just enough to keep the state from abolishing the city government due to it being a ghost town. Various sources claim Greenhorn also operates under a "township charter", without explaining what that means any further. I dunno, I guess I'm intrigued by the idea that we might have a whole tier of local government that was vaguely authorized by the 1859 state constitution and promptly forgotten, and it's just been off doing its own thing ever since, a bit like Starfleet's Section 31 except they send you a water bill every month.