Waespe Falls

Next up we're visiting Waespe Falls, one of the tall seasonal waterfalls between Multnomah Falls and Oneonta Creek. This is a short distance east from Nesika Falls, its equally obscure neighbor just down the road. Of the two, this one has probably been glimpsed by more people; if you start at the Oneonta trailhead and follow the trail uphill a short distance to the junction with Gorge Trail #400. Just west of there the 400 crosses a small stream. If the creek is flowing, look uphill from there. It's a steep talus slope mixed with trees and vegetation, and includes a bit of old stone wall that -- I think -- was built as a rockslide barrier and isn't part of an abandoned road or trail. Beyond that and higher up, the steep slope becomes a high basalt cliff, and the falls are where the nearby creek tumbles off that cliff. Alternately if the creek is flowing and the forest isn't too overgrown it may be visible on Street View, like here for example.

Like Nesika, the name is of fairly recent origin and either originated or was popularized on the OregonHikers forums. In particular, the oldest references to it by name -- any name -- that I've seen anywhere on the interwebs are a pair of 2011 OregonHikers threads. Which were followed by later ones in 2013 and 2022, and most of these involved someone bushwhacking up to the falls by following the creek straight uphill. Some people reported that the climb was "easy", while others found it impossible, mostly due to all the loose rocks they had to struggle through. One of the posters who made it to the base posted some photos to SmugMug like this one. And those links along with the Northwest Waterfall Survey page linked up above are about the only information there is about it online.

The name is also not official, or really recognized much beyond the Northwest hiking and waterfall hunting corners of the internet. It's derived from Waespe Point, a prominent rock formation next door to the falls. And the point was named in 1983 to honor the late Henry Waespe, a prominent local citizen and president of the Trails Club in the 1950s. I have no idea how to pronounce that name properly, but I think the name of the falls should be pronounced "wispy" even if he didn't say it that way himself, because it just sort of fits that way.

As with Nesika Falls, Waespe Falls is rather tall (when it hasn't run dry for the year), and there are no published numbers on exactly how tall. So let's go back to Oregon's official state LIDAR map and see if we can figure that out. On the state LIDAR map, with both the "Bare Earth Lidar Hillshade" and "Bare Earth Slope (degrees)" enabled, pick two points on the creek that are as close to what appears to be the top and bottom of the falls, without actually being part of any vertical drop. The lowest-slope points you can find on either end, so ideally the top is just before the stream abruptly falls off a cliff, and the bottom point is anywhere on the perfectly flat and calm pool the falls drop into. If you don't try to do this, your results may vary widely depending on exactly which pixel you clicked on this time and exactly how the map converts that into six decimal places of latitude and longitude. I like to try this a couple of times to see whether the numbers are anything close to reproducible. In any case it might be useful to think of this as giving an upper bound, like you probably won't come in short of the actual height unless you're doing it all wrong. So, bearing that in mind, and note that I'm counting what looks like three adjacent tiers together as one big waterfall (and using these top and bottom points), it seems to be around 425' high, roughly the same height as Nesika.

Since I was in the area, so to speak, I did the same thing with a couple of other intermittent streams in the short distance between Waespe Falls and Oneonta Gorge. The first one east of Waespe comes to "just" 240' and may disappear into a talus slope after that. (top, bottom), while the next-east one from there seems to come to around 650' in 4 distinct tiers (top, bottom), and a third immediately east of that (top, bottom) comes in at around 385' in 3 tiers, and it also seems to sink into the ground below the drop. So none of these are going to be very substantial and I don't recall ever seeing any of them flowing in person, either close up or from a distance. I suspect they go beyond "seasonal" into "ephemeral" territory and only flow during and maybe right after a big rainstorm and are otherwise dry year-round. I tend to draw a line there as for what's included in this ongoing project, for the very practical reason that if something only flows during a big storm, it means you have to do a lot of hiking during big storms. And in this part of the world, doing that means spending a lot of additional time being cold and miserable, which I am generally opposed to.

Meanwhile to the west of Waespe, between it and Nesika Falls, is the big talus slope that's home to the "Fire Escape Trail", which we already covered in the Nesika post.

Also (going by the very terse directions) the falls might become an ice climbing spot known (as of 2019) as Unfinished Business; Northwest Oregon Rock (published that year) noted it was about 200' high and up to that point nobody had climbed it past the first 80 feet or so. We haven't had a lot of extended cold snaps since 2019 around here, so that matter may still be unfinished, as far as I know. I can tell you it won't be me who climbs it; I only bought the book because it's kind of a whole alternate geography overlaid on a part of the world I know reasonably well, and because it turns out that some of the best ice climbing spots in the Gorge double as very photogenic (yet very obscure) seasonal waterfalls when they aren't frozen.

I checked the Oregonian database to see if anyone mentioned seeing a waterfall near the Oneonta trailhead before the internet. I don't think I found anything like that, but somehow came away with a bunch of links anyway. As usual, this is the part of the post where it helps to have a Multnomah County library card so that the links below actually take you somewhere useful.

(If I wanted to go off on a very long tangent here, and thought anyone might be interested enough to read it, or I was interested enough to write it anyway, Waespe's family was socially prominent enough that you could assemble a whole biography of him just from newspaper articles. From birth announcement to obit, with society weddings and business and philanthropic stuff in between, and leading a lot of Trails Club hikes over the years. But that would be quite a long tangent and if you're really that curious you're welcome to get out your Multnomah County library card and go write that book (or at least a Wikipedia bio, or something).)

• An October 1934 story on the shiny new Horsetail-Oneonta Loop, just completed by WPA workers. The author describes both creeks in great detail, including a number of side trails that are either lost or abandoned now, like one to what it called "Pathfinder falls", a pair of waterfalls between Triple Falls and the first trail bridge on Oneonta Creek (there's a second bridge above Triple Falls, and maybe more further up.) One of those would have to be Upper Oneonta Falls (or Middle depending on whose naming scheme you use), but I have no idea what the other one would be. The article doesn't mention anything Waespe-like, but at the end he does say there are a lot more sights and side trails beyond those he just told us about.
• A 1939 story about good picnic spots in the Gorge. Says people overlook the trailhead and just think of the Oneonta Gorge itself, which is basically still true, even though it's been closed since 2017 due to the fire. The trailhead itself isn't very photogenic on its own.
• A 1953 story concerning a timber swap between the Forest Service and a timber company that preserved some land along Oneonta Creek, trading for land of equal value somewhere outside the Gorge. A little mixing business with philanthropy: You get positive headlines, and the equal value swap gets you more land and trees. The article suggests the swap would make possible an alarming idea that was making the rounds at the time:
  
  

  Its becoming a part of the public preserve will make more feasible a road up the Oneonta trail, which would cross the Oneonta near a triple falls and approach the upper Horsetail falls before descending again at Ainsworth state park on the old Columbia highway.

• A 1970Leverett Richards article on the Horsetail-Oneonta loop, which he refers to as a "granny trail". Mentions that the trail forks near the end and you should take the right fork to get down to the highway. Doesn't say where the other fork goes, assume it's some predecessor of Trail 400 but it seems a bit early for that.
• In a sign that the 1970s really were an extremely long time ago, a 1971 story about Multnomah County sheriffs deputies setting up a sting to catch car prowlers. Now they just sort of accept that nothing can be done about it, any more than you can affect the weather, and it's probably your fault anyway for having objects (valuable or otherwise) in your car, and really for going outside in the first place when you should be in church or cowering at home watching Fox News.
• November 1979 Roberta Lowe article in the Oregon Journal, laying out a hike starting at the deeply obscure Exit 35 trailhead and ending at the Oneonta trailhead, these points chosen because Trail 400 on either side of those was still unfinished. For people looking for an advanced challenge, this article -- in a major urban daily newspaper -- explains how to find the 'infamous' Mystery Trail, which (almost) nobody on the internet will even give you directions to now because someone might try it and get hurt. You can be sure it's dangerous when even she says not to go beyond the first 3/10 mile on it, though she also insists that initial segment is a "fun side trip". I should note that present-day conventional wisdom holds that this is a down-only trail and taking it uphill would be an ridiculous idea. On the other hand, the newspaper archives show Mazamas hikes doing exactly that on a semi-regular basis back in the 1930s and 1940s, and the instructions don't say anything about bringing a can of spinach to chug for energy, so who knows.
• March 1980, Lowe on the nearly complete Ak-Wanee Trail, an old name for the Multnomah-Oneonta segment of Trail 400. Mentions the Elevator Shaft branch and the abandoned spur trail to Nesika Falls, but nothing about another seasonal falls near the Oneonta trailhead. Does mention the unnamed 'turnout' for the 400 down from Nesika Falls at least
• July 1982, some killjoy editor must have pestered Roberta Lowe to cover some hikes for mere mortals for a change. Her idea of this was setting up a car shuttle and doing the Oneonta Trail as a "lazy, downhill trip" from the top of Larch Mountain. Which, yes, is downhill. For 8 miles. And to spice up the trip without making the hike itself harder, she notes that you can shave 8.5 miles off the car shuttling part of the trip by taking Palmer Mill Road (a steep, narrow gravel road, at times with a sheer dropoff into Bridal Veil Creek) instead of driving all the way west to the ordinary Larch Mtn. Rd. junction west of the Vista House. You can still do the lower part of that to where Palmer is closed to vehicle traffic and then follow Brower Rd. up instead, which saves miles but not as many. Energy crisis was barely in the rear view mirror then, and we have high gas prices and inflation again now, so I'm not telling you not to do this; just saying it's not exactly a luxurious driving experience, and your vehicle is probably larger (and wider) than the average car of 1982.
• It was back to business as usual in August, with a 9.6 mile loop along the Franklin Ridge Trail, and a 10 mile loop that includes a trip up the unofficial and rather steep Rock of Ages Trail. Because when your newspaper is going out of business in another week or two, you might as well swing for the fences.
• Within a couple of years the Oregonian decided the Lowes were ok; here's a 1987 piece on the long-abandonded but newly reopened Bell Creek trail. Bell Creek is an Oneonta Creek tributary that begins on the upper reaches of Larch Mountain, and is remote enough -- and/or lucky enough -- to be home to a grove of genuine old growth trees.

Harrison Falls

Next up we're visiting Harrison Falls, the main attraction in Oregon's Lindsey Creek State Park. Which is located next to Interstate 84 around eleven miles west of Hood River. If the park and the falls don't ring a bell, you're not alone. Your grandparents might remember them, though; they used to be highlights of this stretch of the old Columbia River Highway, but fell into obscurity after they were bypassed in 1964 when the old was transmogrified into part of I-84. Not only did the state neglect to put in an exit for the place, they also couldn't be bothered to put in a trail going there from the nearest exit at Starvation Creek, a mile east of there.

So after 1964 there was no official, legal way to visit the old park for just over half a century, until a new segment of the HCRH Trail was extended to Lindsey Creek from the east in 2016. It still isn't crowded, since it will always be a longer drive from Portland than a lot of the better-known classic Gorge destinations. Getting there from the Hood River side is still a bit inconvenient, as there isn't an exit at Starvation Creek, and you can either continue west on 84 to Wyeth and turn around there and get to Starvation Creek that way, or take the HCRH Trail from the Wyeth side (via another segment of the HCRH Trail that opened in 2019), or take the trail from Viento State Park instead. The last option adds another mile to the trip each direction, but it's a flat mile, so there's that.

Once you've made it to Lindsey Creek, there's nothing obvious there to suggest there's a big waterfall nearby. No signs, not even one with the name of the creek. Also no obvious trails, nothing. And you can't hear the falls, either, thanks to the noisy freeway right next to the HCRH Trail. So virtually everyone on the trail just passes on by and continues on their way with no idea what they're missing. But today is your lucky day, because I'm going to tell you the secret. It frankly isn't much of a secret: All you need to do is be on the left (south-facing) side of the creek, and follow the creek as it heads upstream. Once you're doing that you might notice an obvious boot path caused by other people going this way to see the waterfall over the past century and change. The creek bends to the left a bit, and once you go around that corner, bam, you're there. Seriously, that's all there is to it. I should point out that there was a downed tree in the way when I visited, and I didn't see any obvious way to get past it without going for a swim, but I have no complaints with the results I got. You might be able to get closer with some circus acrobatics, or you could chainsaw the log, or let the state know and wait for them to remember they own the place and send someone to officially chainsaw it, or just wait for the log to decay naturally. The last two options could take decades, and Legal is telling me to tell you not to even think about chainsawing anything ever, or do any acrobatics, and most of all not to combine the two, not even if you're a Cirque du Soleil cast member and you perform chainsaw acrobatics regularly in front of a live audience. Or, just in general, don't do anything that might give you an expensive case of "mental anguish".

This was my first time checking out the Lindsey Creek area, but I first heard about the place sometime around 1990. I was staring at a detailed map of the area for fun, as one does, and happened to notice it. USGS maps of the area have consistently marked a spot just labeled "Falls" on Lindsey Creek for decades, and the map I was looking at also showed the state park boundary, albeit labeled in a weird font that distinguished it from ordinary non-abandoned state parks. I knew enough of what had happened to the old highway to correctly guess that these areas further east had been closed off due to the freeway. I also owned a copy of the Don & Roberta Lowe guidebook 35 Hikes, Columbia River Gorge, which explained that the closest thing there was to an official way to explore Shellrock Mountain next door was to look for the wide spot on the eastbound shoulder along I-84, pull off and park there, and then hop a chain link fence. I even noticed other vehicles parked there now and then. But I just couldn't warm up to the idea of parking there and never tried it. In fact, I would go so far as to say I have a personal rule about not parking on -- or walking along -- the shoulder of a freeway unless maybe it's an emergency, and even then it's not Plan A. I know, I know, yet another controversial hot take out here on the internet, but I call 'em like I see 'em.

With the arrival of better maps (including the state LIDAR map that I keep going on about), and somewhat easier access to the area, it has come to light that the unnamed waterfall shown on old USGS maps is not the one we're visiting right now. This second waterfall goes by "Lindsey Creek Falls", and sources disagree on exactly how to get there. Zach Forsyth's waterfall book lists six more waterfalls even further upstream, although visiting them seems to involve hiking up another 2000 vertical feet and then canyoneering back down the creek. Or at least that's how he did it.

The next watershed to the west of Lindsey Creek is Summit Creek, and it's in a similar situation: The first waterfall (starting from the river and counting upstream) is known as "Camp Benson Falls", and the second goes by "Summit Creek Falls". It's maybe not the most logical system, and the names aren't actually official, but apparently the names all predate the 1964 closure so convincing everyone to listen to reason, for a change, and use Upper and Lower Lindsey Creek (and Summit Creek) Falls instead is probably not going to happen.

I had planned to check out Camp Benson Falls too on this visit, but when I got to where the creek was supposed to be it seemed to have dried up for the season so I didn't investigate further. Since then I've seen a claim somewhere that the creek will sometimes disappear into the rocks shortly after the falls at times of low flow, so it's supposedly worth checking out even if the creek looks dry where it meets the HCRH Trail. I have not personally witnessed this in action and am not claiming it's true, just relaying something I saw on the internet somewhere, as one does on the internet.

As you might imagine, 'Recreating the HCRH' has a lot of information to share about this area. The pages about the Summit Creek to Lindsey Creek and Lindsey Creek to Starvation Creek parts of the old road are good places to start. Also (via the Wayback Machine), Columbia River Images pages for Lindsey Creek and the other watersheds nearby. The Lindsey Creek page quotes Oregon Geographic Names as to where the name of the creek comes from:

"This stream east of Wyeth is reported to have been named for one John Lindsey, who took up a claim near the creek. Lindsey is said to have taken part in the battle at the Cascades in 1856, and was wounded therein. He was at one time a fireman on one of the river steamers. The Union Pacific Railroad had a station named Lindsey nearby in the 1930s."

I recall seeing additional factoids about this, first that his name might have been James instead of John, nobody really knows for sure, and secondly that he specifically took an arrow to the shoulder during an 1850s Indian rebellion. Another Recreating the HCRH page concerning the former bridge here cites Columbia River Images but just mentions the homesteading part. And really, being an early homesteader was a sufficient reason -- and by far the most common reason -- to get a geographic feature named after you in those days. (To any indignant descendants of pioneer homesteaders: I did not say easiest, just "most common". Regaling us with lengthy quotes from your ancestor's Dysentery Diaries is really not necessary.)

As for the train station, here's a circa-1920 map showing it, and a lower-resolution 1906 map not showing it. So that might be a useful data point. Either way it definitely predates 1930.

Some accounts go on to note that nothing else is known about Mr. Lindsey beyond the anecdotes relayed above. I did check the old newspaper archives on this point and can confirm he is seemingly not mentioned in the news at all during that rough time period or the following decades. In fact nothing interesting appears under any of the potential names until 1911, when we meet respected Portland chiropodist James Lindsey, who was arrested in 1911 for moonlighting as a mostly-respectable cocaine dealer. As in, respectable enough to get a really light sentence, due to being a family man and a pillar of the community and all, and also for an elderly female customer caught up the bust to not be charged with anything. But not quite respectable or well-connected enough to keep either of their names out of the newspaper. The moral of this story, of course, is to seek out and take good care of your regular customers at local media outlets, and make sure they know it. Because there's no way that last week was the last time they're going to need a little Colombian deadline powder, after all. Also it would be a better story if the creek was named after the later Lindsey, perhaps as thanks for his essential help with the hike up Mt. Defiance.

So, with those preliminaries out of the way, it's time for another timeline, that portion of a lot of posts here where it really helps to have a Multnomah County library card so you can follow along from home, if you like, or just to verify that the linked articles actually say what I'm saying they're saying. I tried to cast a wide net for material for this one: Lindsey Creek in the news, including any waterfalls on the creek, on the rare occasions they come up in the news. Or things connected to various businesses that tried to make a go of it here, and the railroad, which called this area "Lindsey" and would drop you off here if you asked nicely, and might even stop to pick you up if you asked nicely in advance and they noticed you in time. And a few bits about Mt. Defiance, roughly from the era when Lindsey Creek was the main way to get there. And some odds and ends about the life and times of Alfred S. Harrison, the falls' namesake.

• We start at the summit of Mt. Defiance, July 26th 1905, where a local religious sect was encamped awaiting the apocalypse. It seems a mysterious stranger had come to Hood River recently, calling himself "Daniel the Second" or "Second Daniel", with a dire prediction. He claimed Mount Hood was about to erupt, sometime between July 27th and August 10th, and catastrophic floods would follow, drowning anyone who remained in the Hood River Valley. Also there would be a plague of yellow jackets and other insects, plus a day of complete darkness prior to the flood phase of the apocalypse. So he and his little band of followers were planning to ride it out on the highest point in the area that was not part of Mount Hood. Or maybe go back to town and burglarize everyone who had skipped town until the 10th just in case. The article doesn't say that, of course; that's just me coming up with alternate theories, as I tend to do. It did mention the locals had considered forming an angry mob to go throw rotten eggs at the encampment, but soon had second thoughts. Maybe once they realized how difficult the hike would be, even if they weren't lugging crates of rotten eggs. I couldn't find a followup article on how things had turned out after August 10th, or the further adventures of Second Daniel and his exciting new religion.
• Speaking of Mt. Defiance, there's another Mt. Defiance in the Washington Cascades, north of I-90 and west of Snoqualmie Pass, a few hundred feet taller than the Gorge one. And both Northwest Defiances are most likely named for another, much shorter Mt. Defiance in upstate New York, near Fort Ticonderoga. So, the original wasn't the site of a legendary US victory, nor was it the most dramatic or imposing mountain for miles around. Honestly people probably just liked the name, regardless of it commemorating anything in particular.
• December 22nd 1911, a notice on the front page of that day's Oregon Mist (the local paper in St. Helens) from several local businessmen including Alfred S. Harrison, informing readers that they had agreed not to be open on Sundays, henceforth.
• May 1912: A horticulture expert of the day visited Hood River, toured a few local orchards, and proclaimed a bumper crop of apples was in order that year, perhaps six times larger than the previous year's harvest. I don't know how that year's harvest went in reality, but if he was wrong he could have done a lot more damage to Hood River than Second Daniel ever dreamed of (and stay tuned for more on this point).
  
  I only mention all of this because the article has a brief aside about Mt. Defiance. It seems that around this time it was claimed to be "the highest wooded point in the United States". Which is quite an expansive claim, and I would go out on a limb and guess it's a bunch of malarkey. And if it was true, that would make it the highest point you could hike to and still have trees blocking the view. Which is not a great claim to fame, if you really think about it.
• August 1912: A.S. Harrison was named president of the Columbia County Progressive Party, better known as Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party, created to support his third-party run for president that year.
• May 1914 article on the just-published report on the proposed Columbia River Highway route through Hood River County. The section of railroad from Lindsey Creek to Viento was said to prove that roadbuilding in this area of loose talus slopes was indeed possible.
• June 1914. The Oregonian and the Journal both raised an eyebrow at the divorce case of Alfred S. and Jennie M. Harrison, which he had sued for, on the grounds of "cruelty". They had been married almost 19 years and had six children, and resolved the custody situation the reverse Brady Bunch way, splitting the family down the middle: Dad got the three oldest kids, while mom got the three youngest.
  
  Before this, Harrison's name appeared in the paper a few times in the "At the Hotels" section, a service newspapers used to provide if you wished to announce you were here on business for a few days. In 1900 he was listed as visiting from Kalama, WA, and in 1902 he was visiting from St. Paul, and from Scappoose in 1904, and living in Portland in 1908, and Vancouver in 1914. The 1908 and 1914 items showed the Harrisons traveling together, while a subsequent 1915 item had him visiting from St. Helens, solo.
• January 1915, a bill was introduced in the state legislature to protect creeks along the new highway from being dammed for hydropower. "Lindsey Creek, forming Lindsey Falls" was among those listed for protection. That's all the description the article has, so it's anyone's guess which falls they had in mind.
• Also in January 1915, an account of through-hiking the nearly complete highway, in the brief window before there were cars on the road. Which sounds like it would be an interesting story, but it was written in some of the most overwrought purple prose of the 1910s, which is really saying something. They spent a week wafting about the gorge and pestering every Italian stonemason they ran across, eventually coming to the Lindsey Creek area, where they had a "leisurely climb well up on the base" of the mountain. Which I suspect is Pre-Raphaelite for wimping out after the first mile or so.
• June 1915: "5 Scale Mount Defiance", in which a Forest Service team summitted the mountain, but were forced by storms to descend 1000 feet before making camp for the night. Also they ran out of water at one point and had to descend further to find more. And they saw two deer, or possibly the same deer on two separate occasions. And if it sounds like the intrepid explorers and the paper were trying to put an unuly heroic spin on things, you would be correct. Elsewhere in the world, at that very moment, Ernest Shackleton was in the Falkland Islands, trying to arrange for a ship capable of rescuing his crewmen still stranded in Antarctica. So the heroic framing of this thrilling mountain adventure was just the spirit of the times. Nobody had the bad manners to point out that an entire doomsday cult had managed to camp at the summit a full decade earlier.
• Also in June 1915, an A.S. Harrison & Co. ad in the St. Helens paper, promoting their "really good groceries" and calling the firm "St. Helens' Leading Merchants"
• July 6th 1915 article previewing the grand opening of the new highway, with a motorcade of important dignitaries making their way to distant Hood River. After breakfast at Crown Point, they would sightsee their way eastward, having lunch at Lindsey Creek, then detouring around the unfinished tunnel at Mitchell Point, before exploring the Hood River area the rest of the day, with adventures further east planned for the following day. So, the place played a key bit part in a regionally important historical event, once.
• August 1915. Harrison was in Portland for a big trade show for furniture and general retail goods, and is listed along with a long list of attendees. At this point he owned and operated a general store in St. Helens, and looking at the attendee list it seems like most attendees owned small town general stores around the state, and were in town looking for products to sell -- since the whole idea of a general store is that you'd have a little of everything for sale.
• a 1916 announcement showed him marrying someone else.
• May 1916, two men were arrested in Hood River for a very 2020s-sounding crime, stealing a few hundred pounds of copper telephone wire from a jobsite near Lindsey Creek. The men were spotted by telephone linesmen and then trailed by a city marshal through "the jungles along the Columbia" and back to an abandoned power plant near Hood River, where they were seen stealing brass fittings from the old generating equipment. The wire was recovered from a local secondhand dealer who had bought it no questions asked. And the internet says meth had already been discovered by then (in 1893, by a Japanese chemist, to be exact). So the thieves may have even had a 'modern' motive.
• July 1916: "Mazamas To Ascend Peak That Is Overlooked By Most Climbers". The club had scheduled a hike to the top on their calendar for the year, and the author describes a couple of recent scouting trips to figure out a route, the first attempt being abandoned after the party ran out of water. The present-day trail did not yet exist, and they planned to start at Lindsey Creek as the most logical place, since the ridge to the east of the creek sort of segues into the mountain and the current trail mostly ascends there, though the trailhead is further east now.
• An item by the same author over in the Journal, describing the scheduled hike and an easier one over to Mitchell Point scheduled for the same trip, for club members who didn't feel up to tackling the main expedition. He noted that everyone would get an early start after camping at Lindsey Falls.
• August 1916: Harrison was busy co-founding the state grocery association and planning the group's first annual convention for the following month.
• Said convention was held in Pendleton during the Pendleton Round-Up and it sounds like everyone had a grand old time, with guest speakers discussing topics like "The Bread Problem" and "The Progress of the Coffee Peddler", and a discussion about the trading stamp question.
• But in December 1916, A.S. Harrison & Co. of St. Helens filed a dissolution notice with the state. Which might explain why the previous items were the last we hear about his involvement in the state grocers' association.
• A Mazamas group did the Defiance climb again in 1917. This time around it was just presented as a regular club hike, although the announcement notes it would be a steep, difficult climb, gaining 5000 feet over the course of four miles or so. Oh, and after following an initial bit of existing trail the rest of the ascent would be a strenuous bushwhack through brush and timber.
• August 1917, Harrison bought a shiny new Chalmers automobile, listed in a short-lived feature of the paper's motoring section naming everyone who bought a new car and what they bought. The Oregonian must have eventually realized this was not going to scale up very well once everyone was buying and selling cars.
• The same month, placed an ad in the St. Helens Mist advertising "My Delivery Team, harness and 2 wagons for sale, cheap. Talk quick if you want a bargain."
• Harrison seems to have owned an auto garage for a while, but it burned down in September 1917, also taking out an adjacent movie theater.
• June 1918, Harrison led Columbia County in buying World War I bonds.
• A month later, he joined with a few other local businessmen in starting a bank, the First National Bank of St. Helens. Here's a photo of a rare $5 bill issued by the bank in 1929, which is a thing private banks did back in those days. The bank was eventually absorbed by Portland's US Bank in 1933.
• Winter 1919 saw a record freeze in the Gorge, with the Hood River area reaching -27° at one point. Which was enough to kill off many of the area's apple trees. So anyone who caught apple mania after that national fruit expert came to town in 1912 (a few bullet points ago) and had planted nothing but apples off to the horizon was in for a rough time, since apple trees generally take about 8 years before they start bearing fruit, and this freeze came along about a year short of that. So in an extraordinary bit of bad luck, people who got into the business at that point could have lost everything without ever making a single dollar or producing a single apple. A lot of people who had the resources to start over got into pears after that as they're a bit more tolerant of snowpocalypses.
• In the early days of automobiles, license plates were reissued every year or couple of years, plate numbers starting over at 1 every time this happened. They were just digits, so personalized plates that spell things weren't possible yet, but you could request certain popular numbers and people would draw lots to determine who got to be that number for the next year or two. Harrison ended up with plate number 13 (November 14th 1919). The article doesn't say whether he requested the number or it was randomly assigned to him.
• The next time we hear about him, five months later, he'd had another big career shift. Now he was in South Bend, WA, as president and co-founder of the newly chartered First Guaranty Bank. Which became First National Bank of South Bend two years later, after scoring a "national charter", which is a special document that allows you to use "First National" in your name. I mean, your bank's name. Maybe your individual name too, though I'm not sure that's ever been tested in court.
• One of the privileges of being an officially chartered National Bank back then was that paper money entering circulation via your bank was printed with the name of your bank and the signatures of your bank's president and cashier. This page (at an Astoria coin dealer) has an image of a $20 bill issued through the National Bank of Commerce of Astoria. The author wanted more info about banknotes issued by the 7 other National Banks that existed within a 50 mile radius.
• It turns out this was actually the second "First National" sort of bank to be based in South Bend. The original one had failed in 1895, and the legal saga around this failure dragged out for years afterward. most likely related to the Great Recession / mini-Depression of 1894. There were probably a fair number of Pacific County residents who had lost everything after depositing their money with the bank's older namesake. I'm no expert on the banking industry, but given that history, I would have simply picked a different name for the new bank, or founded it in a different town if I was really attached to "First National". For a bit of contemporary contrast, consider Cincinnati's Fifth Third Bank, created by the 1908 merger of the city's Third National Bank and Fifth National Bank. I wouldn't call those the most creative bank names I've ever encountered, but at least they weren't duplicates.
• And in September 1920, fresh off of starting a bank, he started another bank -- Willapa Harbor Mutual Savings & Loan Association -- as a sort of subsidiary of First National of South Bend, operating out of the same offices. For most of the 20th Century, a Savings and Loan was yet another sort of bank with different rules and regulations around what it could and couldn't do. I suppose there must have been some sort of advantage at the time in having one of each kind of bank.
• June 1923, the Harrisons were heading to England trying to sort out some legal issues around a "family estate of considerable value" they had been trying to gain title to since before WWI.
• September 1923, Harrison had just returned from Europe and wanted everyone to know that the WWI cemetery at Belleau Wood was being cared for properly, though a fundraising campaign to purchase the land surrounding it was still ongoing. The last paragraph of the story adds context explaining his interest in the area:
  
  

  Mr. Harrison visited the territory over which his son, Robert, fought during the war and was particularly interested in the splendid manner in which the graves are being cared for in the various parts of France.

  
  
  Of course that was over a century ago, back when people were primitive and unsophisticated. Now it's 2024 and we live in the future and we just re-elected a bigly orange president who says the people under all those headstones were "losers" and "suckers" and you had better not disagree with him, or else.
• December 1923, Harrison took out an eight-year lease on the Gale Hotel in Dallas, OR.; in August 1925 the hotel was reported sold by Emma V. Harrison of St. Helens, partly in exchange for the Campbell Hill Hotel in Portland at what's now NW 23rd and Burnside, and an ad the next month described her as the owner and manager.
• May 1925, a Trails Club trip up Mt. Defiance, but starting from the Green Point area to the south. Which is said to be a much easier route in the present day, though it may have been harder a century ago. From the summit they would then descend the old-school hard way and end up at Lindsey Creek. The hike would be led by someone named "Harold Bonebrake". Which is possibly not a good omen, if you've ever had the pleasure of descending that trail.
• March 1926: Harrison popped up again, now a Portland resident again, and petitioning the Oregon state engineer for a permit to take water from an unnamed stream in an unspecified location, for domestic purposes.
• A typical ad for Harrison's Auto Camp in the June 5th 1927 Oregon Journal, listing the place's various modern amenities.

  FREE
  Picnic Grounds
  Harrison's Auto Camp, 56 miles east of Portland, Columbia Highway, at Lindsey Creek Falls. 2-room cottages, best of water, lights, fountain service, lunches, groceries. Phone, through Hood River. Write Wyeth, Or.

• Harrison Auto Camp hosted a wedding in December 1927. So I imagine they must have had indoor facilities for hosting it, given the usual Gorge weather in December.
• In fact a small item on January 7th 1928 has a couple of photos of the Harrison home at Lindsey Creek, which was flooded after the creek became dammed by snow and ice.
• July 1928 article reprinting some facts from a Forest Service regional fact sheet. Basically an FAQ, decades before the term was coined, and compiled by several Forest Service employees, including Albert Wiesendanger, of Wiesendanger Falls fame. It included a list of heights of various Gorge waterfalls, ordered west to east, which informs us that that "Lindsey Creek Falls" is 104 feet high, while "First falls west of Starvation Creek" (which should be Cabin Creek Falls) comes in at 93 feet, and equally obscure Moffett Creek Falls at 74. A similar list printed in May 1986, on the publication of Gregory Plumb's waterfall guide, says the falls are 160 feet high, and located 1.25 miles up Lindsey Creek. Harrison Falls didn't quite make that list.
• In July 1930, Harrison wrote a letter to the editor about the state's admittedly boring license plates. He suggests they'd be much more distinctive if they were cut into an animal shape instead of always being a boring rectangle. The state never took him up in the idea, but in 1970 Canada's Northwest Territories adopted new license plates shaped like polar bears.
• Here's a 1931 Metsker map of the area (via Historic Map Works), showing where the Lindsey train platform/station/depot once was, which was east of the creek and Harrison's auto camp, located closer to Warren Creek than to Lindsey. Also the train always ran north of the highway through here, along the river. There probably wasn't much in the way of a train station here in the first place, but anything that once existed would almost certainly be under the westbound lanes of I-84 now.
• April 9th 1933. Harrison found a weird gun from the pioneer era and was donating it to the Oregon Historical Society after refusing several offers by collectors. The article includes a long, skinny photo of the gun, and explains what makes it weird: "The most unusual feature of the weapon is the manner in which the hammer is placed under the barrel instead of on top and operates as a combination of hammer and trigger. The barrel is octagon shaped and is about 44 caliber."
• In a followup item a few days later, we hear from a local gun collector who owned five guns of the same variety, and (it sounds like) talked a reporter's ears off about them while showing off his vast collection accumulated over four decades.
• April 21st, 1933. A Mazamas hike announcement: They would meet at Lindsey Creek and climb Mt. Defiance from there. Which is how the Mt. Defiance Trail used to work back in those days. The ridge east of Lindsey Creek is the one the trail ascends, so it's the logical place for the trail to be, but the additional flat stroll over from Starvation Creek became necessary after the state abandoned the park when the highway became the Interstate. The OregonHikers page for the present-day trail notes that the old trail route is still sort of visible at the point where it intersects the current trail. So I guess if you're somehow bored with doing Mt. Defiance the normal way, the old-school route might still be doable. Though you'd still have to walk to the trailhead, so there's no real advantage to doing that now.
• March 1939, the first time we hear about the Lindsey Inn, a "tourist camp" located here, was a brief notice that it had been sold to a Chicago buyer. Probably the same place as Harrison's, but without Harrison? This was followed by occasional real estate ads offering it for sale starting in 1942.
• Hood River History Museum archives have a 1930s photo of the Lindsey Inn, which was located on the south side of the highway and immediately east of Lindsey Creek. That page says the state bought it in 1943 for future highway expansion, but down below there's an item about the state selling it in 1944. So either that deal didn't go through or the state had to repurchase it again sometime before 1964. Or maybe the state bought the inn for the land and resold the developed part that they didn't want? Because 1943 is also when the state park was created, and the area just isn't big enough for a bunch of unrelated land transactions.
• September 1944. A roundup of State Highway Commission business included selling the Lindsey Inn at Lindsey Creek to the highest bidder for $320.
• August 1948, the State Board on Geographic Names renamed the lake at Lindsey Creek's headwaters, from "Mud Lake" to "Bear Lake". Because someone cared enough to get this on the agenda. Not sure if they were trying to attract more visitors or to ward them away. The board also made the name "Lindsey Creek" officially official at this point, and renamed nearby Warren Creek and Warren Lake from the previous "Warm Creek" and "Warm Lake". Warren Creek is the creek that flows through Hole-in-the-Wall Falls, and I don't recall the mist from the falls being notably warm, at least.
• December 1951, another Highway Commission roundup, awarding a $1.4M contract for widening the Lindsey Creek Bridge and for grading and paving 3 miles of highway in the vicinity.
  
  The bridge's Recreating the HCRH page says the original was demolished "circa 1950". Which is probably taken from the highway's National Register of Historic Places nomination form. But that form also says the McCord Creek bridge was demolished circa 1950, when it actually served as the eastbound side of I-84 until it was finally replaced for real in 1997. But if the 1951 work was a widening, not a demolition, and if the 1964 Interstate work through here started with the existing US 30 and added westbound lanes where the railroad used to be, it's possible the original bridge or some part of it still exists in there, just extended beyond all recognition.
• June 1953, mentioned in an article about great picnic spots across the Oregon state park system. The article includes a long list of state parks as of 1953, with details about each of them. The one here is brief: "129 acres, 56 miles east of Portland on Columbia River. Wayside picnic area along the Columbia River on Lindsey Creek."
• November 1956, a brief funeral notice for Emma V. Harrison. Says she was born in 1875 and had one child from a previous marriage. Could not find a notice for Alfred, but
• June 1958, mentioned again as a nice picnic spot in an article mostly about Wallowa Lake, last of a four-part series about the fun of driving around Oregon with a travel trailer.
• A July 1960 article about the newly introduced Oregon Sportsman's Guide includes the item about fishing Bear Lake (a small lake high up in the Lindsey Creek watershed) as an example of how thorough the guide is. Here's someone's Flickr photo of the cover of the 1960 edition, for anyone who wants to go wallow in cozy midcentury-ness for a while.
• The state park got a quick mention in a 1963 history of the state park system, which overall is a fairly dry timeline of land transactions. It does explain the reason for the park briefly: "Preservation of the aesthetic value of that portion of the Columbia River Gorge prompted acquisition of the park land.", but doesn't mention anything about waterfalls, or trails that begin here, or anything like that. We're told that 38,628 people visited the park in 1962, but they didn't bother counting in 1963, and also didn't explain why they stopped counting visitors.
• A 2008 OregonHikers thread mentions a long-lost Forest Service trail shown on an official 1963 trail map. It appeared to travel along the ridge between Lindsey Creek and Summit Creek, and -- seeing as the Mt. Defiance Trail was trail #413, and the Wyeth Trail -- the closest trail over on the far side of Shellrock Mountain -- was numbered #411, so naturally the one between them was numbered #412. Though that number has since been reused for a 1.5 mile trail in the Rainy Lake - Green Point area. The poster tracked down part of the old trail, which still existed thanks to being a forested ridgetop with very little understory. The thread calls it the "Lindsey Ridge Trail", but that name doesn't appear on the map that referenced it. One comment says it didn't appear on a 1930s map of the same area; it would be pretty sad if the 1963 trail was a recent addition given what happened the following year.
• August 1964, "Columbia Gorge Scenery Lovers Aroused Over Planned Changes of Railroad Route" The railroad-straightening and freeway-widening projects went hand-in-hand. It was 1964, so by the time the public found out what was coming it was already a done deal, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Same highway commissioners who gave us the Marquam Bridge, and attempted to bulldoze new freeways through NW and SE Portland in the name of Progress. There was nothing in the article saying the state was also about to cut off all access to several state parks along the route. They didn't announce that part; they just went ahead and did it.
• An April 1965 Journal article covers the damage done to state parks in the Gorge by the floods of December 1964. We're told that a number of the damaged parks would just be abandoned in place as-is, since they were about to be cut off from all public access by the new freeway anyway. The article continues:

  Lindsey Creek State Park, 7½ miles west of Hood River, lies buried beneath stones. Fireplaces and outhouses are gone. So is the velvety moss-draped coolness.
  
  It will be years before anything can grow.

• After that Lindsey Creek fell out of the news until an April 1970 column by Leverett Richards, the Oregonian's longtime hiking columnist, describing the unmarked and long-forgotten Mount Defiance Trail. The Mazamas were just beginning to work on reviving it, and the trailhead had not been relocated yet, so the instructions start with parking along the shoulder of the Interstate and hopping a fence, and then you were supposed to look for an unmarked trail starting behind an underground cable sign. Richards describes the trailhead site as "the former Lindsey Creek State Park".
• May 1981 fishing article includes a list of potential fishing spots on the Columbia that you might have overlooked, via US Fish & Wildlife, and one of these is the pond formed by the railroad cutting across the bend in the river here. Going by the names I recognize, a lot of the sites on the list, maybe all of them, are lakes formed by the 1960s railroad-straightening project, which means the river-facing side of each lake is a steep gravel embankment with freight trains thundering by just steps away, while on the other side you're generally sandwiched in between the lake and I-84. So I guess it all depends on how much unpleasantness you're willing to tolerate in exchange for maybe catching a fish at some point.
• By 1982 the Mt. Defiance Trail had been rerouted to the present-day arrangement, starting at Starvation Creek and following a stretch of the old highway for a while before heading uphill. Lindsey Creek gets a mention as scenery in this Roberta Lowe column about the trail. Here's her cheerful description of how hard the trail is:
  

  Some mountaineers quip that perhaps you need to climb Mount Hood in order to get in shape for Mount Defiance. Actually the latter isn’t that hard but how you feel during and after the hike is a good indicator of your physical condition.

  
  
  Lowe continues by noting that the summit would still be covered in snow in early June, and offers some advice on making it to the top anyway. Which might actually be an ideal time to go, assuming the nasty bitey black flies at the top haven't hatched yet or are dormant under the snow. And also assuming there's still snow at the top in June in the 2020s.
• June 1984, A visit to Lindsey Creek was part of a big festival of organized Gorge hikes, organized by Friends of the Gorge. The hike description is a real puzzle: "Hike from Starvation Creek Park to Hole-in-the-Wall Falls and Lindsey Creek. Climb 1000 feet to hanging valley of Warren Creek for views and wildflowers. Then visit Perham Creek and viewpoint. Elevation gain 500 feet, four miles total." The first sentence is covered by the present-day HCRH Trail, and the Warren Creek part might be a spot early on along the Starvation Ridge Trail, while Perham Creek is a couple of miles further east, and a viewpoint there probably means doing part of the old Wygant Trail. Not sure how you fit all of that into a four mile hike, but ok.
• After that, Lindsey Creek didn't appear in the news again until 2011, when a lost, injured hiker was rescued there, three days after tumbling off a cliff and breaking a leg. In a followup story she said she survived by eating berries and caterpillars (!) and tried a slug but found it inedible.

Nesika Falls

Next up we're having a look at Nesika Falls, another very tall but little-known Columbia Gorge waterfall right in the middle of the main tourist corridor, a just a little over a mile east of Multnomah Falls and even closer than that to the Oneonta trailhead. If you're heading east on the old Columbia River Highway, you might notice a small parking lot with some sheer cliffs and mossy boulders behind it, and absolutely no signage of any kind to tell you why there's a parking lot here. Its most common use seems to be as a turn-around spot for tourists trying to score one of those $20 VIP parking spaces at Multnomah Falls Lodge, which may involve a slow crawl thru the tiny lodge parking lot followed by flooring it down the road (or continuing a slow crawl down the road, depending on traffic) to the closest turnaround (i.e. here) and back (i.e. here), and coming back for yet another slow crawl thru the completely full lot. A useful rule of thumb here is that if you find yourself using any driving techniques you learned during holiday shopping, you should accept that you are not currently having fun, will not begin having fun anytime soon, even if a parking spot opens up, and should probably rethink your plans for the day.

The second most common use of this lot is as unofficial (but free) overflow parking for Multnomah Falls. People who park here to use this spot as Multnomah Falls overflow parking tend to just trudge along the road, ignoring all the "No Pedestrian Access" signs along the way, including the ones on the narrow East Viaduct, and trying to duck in time every time an RV with extra-wide side mirrors rolls through. I tried that route once way back in the early 90s (as described here) and absolutely do not recommend it. What you want to do instead is look for trails heading up into the forest, and take the westbound one. There are no signs to tell you this, but this spot is an access point for Gorge Trail No. 400, the still-incomplete trail that might connect Troutdale to Hood River someday. The eastbound trail is easier to find, right at the east end of the parking lot, but it's not the trail you want right now. To find the westbound trail, cross the little road bridge or culvert immediately west of the lot, and look for a trail a few steps beyond there. When you cross the bridge, look down at the little creek it crosses. This is the same stream that forms the falls we're here to look at, so if it's just a trickle or it's dry entirely there's nothing to do but come back another day in a wetter season.

Assuming the creek's flowing, follow the trail uphill a short distance, maybe 50'-100', look uphill, and try to work out the route of that little creek as it comes downhill. If the creek's flowing but you don't see the falls, try going a bit further, or go back a bit, and look for gaps in the trees and underbrush, and keep trying until you see something resembling the photoset above.

Once you see it, look back toward the parking lot and note the large rock formation that completely blocks the view of the falls from the highway. If that wasn't there the waterfall would probably be a bit less obscure than it currently is.

After you've seen the falls from a distance and taken a few photos, continuing westbound on the 400 will take you to Multnomah Falls, specifically to the first switchback past the bridge. So you can either continue uphill to the top and skip most of the crowds, or you can head downhill, elbow your way thru the crowds, and hit the snack bar for a plate of genuine Multnomah Falls nachos, or whatever. Before choosing your adventure, look behind you at the junction. A vintage plaque, low to the ground, announces this is the "Ak-Wanee Trail", though nobody really uses that name anymore. This trail officially opened in 1978, and the name honors a young Yakima tribal member who worked on trail construction here and died in a car accident shortly before the trail opened to the public.

The trail figured in several Roberta Lowe newspaper columns over the next few years, primarily in the Oregon Journal:

• A 1979 Journal column explaining exactly how to find the unofficial and very, very steep Elevator Shaft trail.
• A 1980 Journal column explaining that the new trail had not been properly manicured yet, and was still a bit rough.

• 1984 Oregonian column (after the Journal went under), on hiking the 400 from Multnomah Falls through to the obscure Exit 35 Trailhead east of Ainsworth State Park. (That point marked the end of the trail until the short-lived Warrendale-Dodson segment opened a few years later, and it became the end of the trail again in 1996 after a big chunk of trail was erased by massive landslides a bit east of that trailhead.) The column mentions a dead-end bit of abandoned trail uphill from the present-day trail, built as an abortive attempt to route the trail closer to Nesika and Waespe Falls (another seasonal waterfall we'll visit as soon as I finish that post). They would certainly be less obscure if that had worked out, but we're told that the necessary blasting could have posed a hazard to cars and trains below so they dumped that idea.

  The abortive spur trail seems to still exist, according to the state LIDAR map, with the trail junction located right about here. Though so far I have completely failed to find this trail at ground level. That's one limitation of LIDAR maps, especially in this part of the world: You can make out exactly what the ground is shaped like, but when you go to visit in person that ground may be under an impassable layer of brush, fallen limbs, poison oak, devils club, rusty nails, broken glass, old barbed wire, etc., and there's really no way to be sure until you get there. Another limitation is that LIDAR really just tells you that a potential creekbed intersects a cliff at a given spot and obviously can't tell you if there's any water in the creekbed.

• Also nearby, unofficially, or maybe closer to Waespe Falls next door, is the lower end of the Fire Escape trail, which is marked at the upper end by an ominous sign that reads "Fire Trail - Emergency Only". Peope often confuse it with the very similar Elevator Shaft trail which is a mile or so to the west, closer to Multnomah Falls. Even the OregonHikers Field Guide page about the Elevator Shaft manages to confuse the two. The key thing to know is the Elevator Shaft is supposed to be uphill only, while the Fire Escape is said to be down only, and for the life of me I have no idea why. I suppose it reduces the odds of people having to pass each other on these precarious routes, if nothing else. I have never done either one, but my understanding is that the main difference between the two is that the Elevator Shaft has an actual trail carved into it, with over 100 tight switchbacks, and you can see it on LIDAR and even Google Maps' satellite view, while the Fire Escape is just a talus slope that's known to be descendable in a pinch.

One unsolved mystery I have: If the bridge and maybe the parking lot date back to around 1916, and the trail only arrived in 1978, what was here before that? Was it really just a turnaround spot for heading back to Multnomah Falls all that time? I have no idea.

The name is fairly recent; it's just named after the Trails Club lodge near the creek, way up above the falls. It sort of fits with the existing pattern of real or invented Indian names bestowed on various places by non-Indians, mostly in the early 20th century. Which is not really ideal, but the lodge is about the only named landmark anywhere nearby, so I guess it'll do in a pinch. The other idea that's been proposed is some variation on "Farula Falls" or "Caddisfly Falls", as it's one of a handful of Gorge waterfalls that are home to Farula constricta^[1], one of several rare caddisfly and stonefly species endemic to the Gorge. It's not a terrible name, but the thought of using it makes me sort of anxious, like I can't shake the idea that it'll attract the wrong kind of attention, from the sort of people who would happily wipe out the last survivors of an endangered species just to own the libs.

To summarize uses of either name across the interwebs: We've got two old OregonHikers forum threads in January and May 2011, followed by a 2013 thread about a then-new trails layer in Google Earth. IIRC one of those threads mentions what might be the abandoned spur trail, referring to it as a "convenient game trail". The name also appears on someone's WentHiking page and another photo linked from there. And that's about it, really.

If I'm not mistaken, under the right weather conditions this area becomes a celebrated ice climbing spot known as "New World Amphitheater", as discussed in two threads at Cascade Climbers, and featured in the Gorge ice climbing chapter of Northwest Oregon Rock. Translating their maps and names into non-climber, I thiiiink Nesika Falls freezes into "Black Dagger", while "Brave New World" is either a different route up the falls or it goes up one of several ephemeral streams immediately to the east, I'm not totally sure which. And "Blackjack" corresponds to a creek west of Nesika but I'm not 100% sure which one. I don't think I've seen any of these theoretically rather tall waterfalls actually flowing, so this is kind of a moot point, and it's why I generally don't bother with ephemeral waterfalls in this project: The only reliable way to see them would involve visiting while a major storm is in progress, which in turn means spending lots of time getting drenched and being cold and wet and miserable, which I can't recommend.

As I understand it, to be a great Gorge ice climbing spot, a place needs a couple of things: A fairly low-flow waterfall (ones that dry up in the summer are great for this) so it'll freeze all the way and not be a firehose in the face of anyone climbing it, and it should be one that runs down the face of a cliff instead of projecting outward like a lot of the major ones do, so it'll freeze on the cliff and not just make a big ice stalagmite at the base. This is not the case everywhere, btw; Helmcken Falls in British Columbia is supposed to be the world's ultimate ice climbing spot, and it's on a major river and forms a giant ice cone over the winter. But around here, if those conditions are met, then it's the taller the better. Speaking of which, I haven't seen any numbers on exactly how tall Nesika Falls is, so let's have a look at the state LIDAR map and see if we can work that out ourselves. I usually do this by trying to pick points above and below that clearly aren't part of the falls but as close to it as I can get, and subtract the altitude of one from the other. This tends to give numbers on the high side of the range but hopefully not by much.

First off -- starting at the old highway and proceeding uphill -- LIDAR says there's a small lower falls below the main one, maybe 15'-20' tall and hidden sort of behind the big rock formation here. (top; bottom). I haven't actually seen this one; it must be hidden in the dense brush back there, and you may need a machete to get a better look at it.

Then we have the main falls, which I think is what's shown in all of my photos. Given a top point at ~815', and a bottom one at 395', that gives us a 420' main waterfall. Seriously.

Then we have a number of smaller upper falls that are set back a bit from the main one and I suspect aren't visible from below. These miiight be visitable from above with a bit of bushwhacking, but I haven't tried this myself and this is not a legally binding warranty. Also, most of these drops are fairly short, and short drops on a small creek may not be very impressive in person, and your photos of them may not necessarily bring fame and fortune, just so we're clear on that. With those disclaimers out of the way, here's what LIDAR says is up there:

1. Upper falls #1 (100') (top, bottom)
2. Upper falls #2 (~30') (top, bottom)
3. Upper falls #3 (~20') (top, bottom)
4. Cascades(~50') (top, bottom)
5. Upper falls #4 (~25') (top, bottom)
6. Upper falls #5 (~20'?) top, bottom
7. And another 20' one on a small tributary east of the main creek (top, bottom)

Just west of there, the one on the next sorta-obvious stream to the west (top, bottom) might be the "Blackjack" of the ice climbing world. It seems to drop a whopping ~550', which would be pretty impressive if there was any water at all going over it most of the year. But then, the lack of water means it erodes slower and stays taller longer, so whatever.

Before we wrap this up, let me point out a few other points of interest nearby, two of which are completely gone now, and another that never made it past the proposal stage but is kind of interesting anyway:

• One of these points of interest was right by the parking lot until quite recently. The creek passes under the highway on an original 1914 bridge, or maybe it's just a culvert, and either way it's pretty small and boring. Around 1979, a local Eagle Scout decided this just wouldn't do and did some amateur masonry here as his Eagle Scout community service project, adding an ornamental bridge railing to the existing bridge. Thus reminding people why we don't usually task Eagle Scouts with civil engineering projects. Recreating the HCRH calls it the "Eagle Scout Bridge", and has a photo or two of it in its post-1979 state. There's even a photo of it in the Library of Congress archives. The National Register of Historic Places nomination for the highway labeled it a "non-contributing structure" and had a few brief and opinionated words to say about it:

  Historically, there has been a structure at this crossing of an unnamed creek since the CRH's construction. The present masonry parapet walls on this small span date from the early 1980s, and represent an unsuccessful attempt to "restore" this bridge in the highway's style.

  I started calling it the Monkey Jesus Bridge: In both cases a well-meaning member of the public decides to improve a thing that doesn't need improving, and... doesn't. It's said that for many years afterward, if you hung around nearby at dusk on the right evening, sometimes the ghosts of ancient Roman engineers would appear and poke at it with sticks and make cutting remarks in Latin about the crooked arches and the barbarian tribes that must have built them. It helps to remember that these guys have been guzzling wine from the same ghostly lead flagons for the last 2000 years and have become a bit irritable over the years. But that's all a moot point, because it's gone now. At one point during the pandemic there was an extended closure of the highway due to a combination of winter landslides and trying to clean them up in a full social distancing environment, and ODOT took advantage of that long closure to quietly make the 70s bridge railing vanish without a trace. There was no public outcry; in fact almost nobody noticed it was gone. And the esteemed Romans have switched to haunting the McMansions of Mt. Scott. Imagine something like Poltergeist, but the ghosts are just unreasonably angry about classical orders and the Golden Ratio, and barbarian tribes who don't even know how to build a villa properly.

• There was also an Oneonta train station or platform somewhere right around here in the early 20th century. A 1927 Metsker map has an all-caps "ONEONTA" label right around the turnout location, while the inset bit of map shows the locations of the "McGowan's Cannery", "Columbia Beach", and "Warren's Cannery" train stops, all in the Warrendale-Dodson area east of here. I haven't come across any historic photos of any of these stations, and most likely they were cheap and rustic, just enough platform so people could get on and off the train with a little dignity. The original road survey map for this stretch of the HCRH, aka County Road 754, covers the Multnomah Falls thru Oneonta Gorge area on page 2 of the PDF, and it definitely shows a train station named "Oneonta" that's separate from and some distance west of the "Oneonta Falls" label. It seems awfully strange to me that any train stop would be anywhere except right in front of Oneonta Gorge, or as close to there as is practical. There was never a town here, or farmland, or or any other reason to come here besides the famous wade-to-the-waterfall spot. Even the Oneonta Trail (which accesses the additional falls upstream of the gorge) wasn't built until the 1930s. Also note that although the tracks seem to be right next to the highway here, and it kind of looks like you could drop someone off or pick them up for their train commute into the big city, the space in beween the two is a roughly 100' cliff, and the highway engineers of 1916 neglected to put in a grand staircase to connect them.

• The mystery not-a-trailhead also appears to be the exact spot where the Columbia River Highway would have intersected the never-built eastern half of County Road 625 (map pdf; ordinance pdf), since it was supposed to intersect the highway near the old train platform. This proposed road dates back to the 1890s, and the unbuilt part was a truly absurd idea. The western, built segment of road ran roughly parallel to -- and uphill of -- the Palmer Mill Road that Gorge fans may be more familiar with, which is actually a former railroad grade. The parallel country road might still exist as part of the maze of unmarked trails, tracks, and goat paths up in the Palmer Mill - Angels Rest area. The built segment ended around the location of the long-gone Palmer sawmill and its vanished mill town, and it won't surprise anyone to learn that the Bridal Veil Lumber company was the primary force behind the proposal.

  From the Palmer area, the unbuilt segment would have made its way sort of northeast, descending into Multnomah Basin, albeit by a somewhat different route than the Multnomah Basin Road that was eventually built. Which brings us to the absurd part: From there, starting just east of the top of Multnomah Falls, the road would have dropped toward river level, or at least railroad level, by a series of tight, precipitous switchbacks immediately east of the unofficial Elevator Shaft trail. If you're ever tried that trail or even looked at it up close, it is very difficult to imagine how a usable road could ever be built there or anywhere nearby, especially back in the horse-and-wagon days. That segment ended right around the trailhead here, and then continued east along more or less the present-day route of the old highway as far as Elowah Falls, then home to another sawmill. The Bridal Veil timber company was behind the proposal, and some suspected that the plan wasn't to actually build the road as proposed, but to establish a public right of way across the land of nearby landowners, with the goal of eventually putting an enormous log flume through there. Some neighboring landowners were surprised to find their signatures had been forged on the petition, when they didn't actually support the proposal. One filed an objection noting that the road would be useless to him, as it was too steep for horses to climb while pulling an empty wagon.

So what next? What's the future of this place? The key thing to know is that the land is a piece of Benson State Park (like the lake next to Multnomah Falls) and is not owned by the Forest Service, and the state will probably never have the money to do anything with this place; they may not even know they own it. The lot was recently added to Google Maps as "Parking to hike to Multnomah Falls", and as that idea takes hold it'll start filling up before sunrise like every other place marked as Multnomah Falls parking. If you put up an official sign and drew attention to the place, either as Multnomah Falls economy parking or for the falls here, you would immediately have a parking nightmare on your hands, and I'm not sure where additional parking could possibly go; the other side of the road is a cliff, but (looking at street view from I-84 not quite a sheer cliff, so maybe a few parking spots could go there with a bit of creative cantilevering. And then revive the bit of spur trail so people have somewhere nearby to go instead of it just providing a longer way to either Multnomah Falls or the Oneonta area. And figure out how your signage should break it to midsummer tourists that the falls might have gone dry for the year and they really should have visited back in March while they were still semi-awesome. It would almost certainly accrue a bunch of one-star Yelp and Google reviews from the sort of tourist who doesn't get the whole "nature" thing, and thinks there's a hidden control room somewhere behind the scenes where a bored bureaucrat controls all the valves to turn the waterfalls off and on, while people at the other control panels handle the weather and the animatronic wildlife.

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Footnote(s) 1. Insect stuff

More specifically, the species is known from one male and one female specimen, both collected here in April 1989, along with several collected at Mist Falls around the same time. All of them are now part of the 10 million specimen Entomology Collection at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. The 1992 paper describing F. constricta is here:

Wiggins GB, Wisseman RW. NEW NORTH AMERICAN SPECIES IN THE GENERA NEOTHREMMA AND FARULA, WITH HYPOTHESES ON PHYLOGENY AND BIOGEOGRAPHY (TRICHOPTERA: UENOIDAE). The Canadian Entomologist. 1992;124(6):1063-1074. doi:10.4039/Ent1241063-6

The paper is unfortunately paywalled and I'm not sure I want to shell out $36 just to read it, JSTOR doesn't carry the journal, and unfortunately Sci-Hub has an incomplete copy of that issue, ending before it gets around to the paper in question. So that appears to be a dead end, but that's modern science for ya. Here's the abstract for it, at least:

Three new species are described in the caddisfly family Uenoidae: Neothremma prolata, from Hood River County, Oregon; Neothremma mucronata from Lassen County, California; and Farula constricta from Multnomah County, Oregon. Following examination of the holotypes of several species, misinterpretation of the male genitalia morphology of Farula wigginsi Denning is corrected, leading to the recognition of that name as a junior synonym of F. petersoni Denning. Interpretation of male genitalic morphology in the original description of F. geyseri Denning is revised. Phylogenetic relationships are inferred from male genitalic morphology for the species of Neothremma and Farula. Biogeographic patterns of the species in both genera are highly congruent with the phylogenies.

Let me just point out that coauthor Wiggins had the rare privilege of debunking Farula wigginsi, a proposed new species that someone else had named in his honor.