Showing posts with label Oregon State Parks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oregon State Parks. Show all posts

Saturday, September 05, 2026

Lincoln Beach Wayside

Here are a few photos from the Oregon Coast's scenic Lincoln Beach State Wayside, a few miles south of Lincoln City and just north of Fishing Rock which we visited recently. You won't find a lot of info about this place online; the State Parks website doesn't mention it, nor does Wikipedia (at least not while I'm writing this), or Google Maps. In fact, the #1 Google search result right now is an Instagram post of mine that shows the park from a distance in the fourth of seven photos. One again demonstrating my weird search engine superpower, where posts here (semi-)regularly make it into the top handful of results for all sorts of topics that (almost) nobody besides me will ever search for.


Background

You might be wondering how a beach park on the central Oregon coast could be this obscure. After a bunch of research I eventually figured out what happened here, but it'll make more sense if I cover a bit of background first.

Development pressures heated up along the Oregon Coast during the 1960s, and there was a widespread perception that public access was rapidly being lost. Land was being divvied up, paved, subdivided, and gated off, and at the current rate the coast would soon become the province of a few rich people who could afford beachfront luxury estates.

Actually let's go back another half-century before that. An earlier bout of coast anxiety in the early 20th Century had led to Gov. Oswald West declaring the state's beaches to be a sort of state highway in 1913, and thus open to use by the general public. And this wasn't that fanciful of an idea at the time; present-day US 101 did not exist yet, and the coast was a place of isolated towns separated by rugged, roadless headlands, and accessible by boat, or by following a few rivers through the Coast Range from the Willamette Valley, or you could walk or ride a horse, or eventually drive a Model T down the beach to the next hamlet. Which in some places was only possible at low tide. In other places it wasn't possible at all due to sheer sea cliffs, and there you had to slowly make your way up and over the obstruction until you could get to the next beach.

The important point right now is that over time people came to see beach access as a sort of fundamental legal right. It helped that, at the time, there seemed to be more money in mass tourism than in letting a few robber barons own everything, and letting a few mustache-twirling villains win just seemed sort of undemocratic with a lower-case D, and the state's dominant Republican party was heavily influenced by the ideas of Teddy Roosevelt a few years after he'd left office. People thought it was a settled issue and found other things to worry about.

As the 1960s wore on, advances in the art and science of expensive lawyering started to identify weaknesses and potential loopholes in the current law. At one point a hotelier in Cannon Beach tried cordoning off the beach in front of his hotel for the exclusive use of his guests, violating an unwritten rule and traditional practice, and general good neighborliness, but not technically the law. Public outcry led to the famous 1967 Beach Bill: Instead of a highway, the beach is now a public park, and anything between the general high tide mark up to the vegetation line, or 16 feet in elevation above the high tide mark, can technically be private property but is legally unbuildable (at least without a special permit that exists in theory, but the state will never give you one), and the public is free to use the whole beach as if it was all one big park. Lawyers have challenged this off and on over time, but the overall arrangement still stands except for one weird unique bit of geography at Little Whale Cove, which is now an exclusive gated community built around a fairly subpar and rocky, but private, beach. Anyway, I'm telling you all of this because the legal limbo beyond the vegetation line does play a role in our story in a bit.


Origin

In a parallel effort, the state parks division (then part of the state highway department) began an effort to add official beach access points along the coast, with a goal of having them no more than three miles apart over the entire coast from the Columbia River to California. Some of these are as simple as putting up an official sign at a point where the town street grid peters out into sand. Along the north coast, closer to populated areas, there was some recognition that maybe a few parking spaces would be nice, and so a number of new small-ish state parks were acquired over the late 1960s into the 1970s, plus a few late stragglers after that heyday.

The park's origins were fairly typical for this time period. Developers had already made their mark on the area: a 1962 subdivision plat of the bluff above the beach, which initially left no room for beach access, since there were no rules requiring that at the time. You might notice the words "Lincoln Beach Park No. 2" on the land north of the subdivision, but that was just the name of the next subdivision to the north. I don't know how this particular stretch of beach came to the state's attention, exactly, but this is almost exactly three miles south of the park at Gleneden Beach, so they may have had their eyes on the general area already. I gather the place they were actually most interested in the whole time was Fishing Rock, just south of here, but it never came up for sale until around 1991, and by then they could only afford to buy half of the property, and the balance went to another gated community. In any case, back in the mid-60s the area had not yet been developed and filled with houses, so the state set about buying up a block of contiguous lots, and generally wheeling and dealing to put together a viable state park. You can see this on ODOT's right-of-way map for the park, dated October 1st 1964, and updated in the following years, showing a crazy quilt of transactions adding and removing bits of land from the wayside over time.

One example of this is in a January 26th 1966 report by the state Highway Commision on land transactions over the past year. This was right around the state's Peak Freeway point, so there were quite a few of these transactions, and the Lincoln Beach wayside makes a brief cameo in the long list of settled condemnation cases:

R-37384 - Stanley Lowther. 0.17 acre for wayside purposes. Offer of $6,000.00 approved by Mr. Jackson December 17, 1965.

(The "Mr. Jackson" here is Glenn Jackson, namesake of Portland's I-205 bridge over the Columbia, in case you were curious.)

An August 1967 Oregonian article giving an overview of the state's beach access program listed a bunch of these places, including ones already acquired, others under negotiation, plus a few proposals they were still studying. Here's that list, mostly because I have photosets from a lot of them (which will become posts here whenever I get around to it.)

Unusually, the park is even mentioned by name in ORS 390.770, the state law defining the legal vegetation line, and most search engine results for variations on "Lincoln Beach Wayside" are for copies of that law, at least until this post you're reading goes live. But explaining what that law means, exactly, gets esoteric pretty quickly, so I moved that stuff into a "Misc." section further down below for anyone who's really curious.


Demise

So things went along uneventfully until 1979, when the state's economy fell apart. The national economy was in a period of stagflation -- low economic growth, high inflation, and high interest rates -- exacerbated by the 1979 energy crisis Demand for new homes dried up, wood product prices plummeted, and a wave of timber job losses and mill closures swept across the state, starting a long, deep recession that the state only recovered from in the late 1980s. The rest of the state's economy soon followed, state tax revenue cratered, and state agencies were told to look for ways to cut their budgets or boost revenue.

Which brings us to the May 1980 meeting of the State Highway Commission (in the previous microfilm reel, on page 1997 of the PDF.) The heads of various agencies within the Highway Department took turns reporting on how the were going to adapt to the huge, unexpected budget shortfall. When they got around to State Parks, Superintendent Talbot stated the top priority was going to be restoring services and avoiding closing any parks, and detailed a few money-saving measures they were about to undertake. The top item was to close some high-cost (which I assume meant money-losing) park campgrounds. I think this was around the time the park campgrounds at Lewis & Clark and Dabney State Parks went away. The second item on the list was to close some beach accesses. Which seems like it would be in conflict with the principle of not closing any parks, unless they counted beach ones differently. Rounding out the four money-saving ideas, they would also end some services like accepting campsite reservations (which in 1979 probably involved staffing a call center), and canceling some planned construction for new infrastructure.

The next volume of State Highway Commission meeting minutes had a brief item on page 37 of the pdf (numbered page 3919 in the original): "On September 26, 1980, approved the sale of an excess parcel of property containing 2.56 acres, located north of Fogarty Creek State Park, for the minimum consideration of $453,000.", approving the sale of the park without even mentioning it by name in the meeting minutes. Things moved quickly after that, at least by state government standards. A new land survey was filed with Lincoln County in November 1980, and several lots were sold at auction within the same month. A followup item on page 111 of the meeting minutes (numbered page 3994 on the original doc) has a small item about a followup sale: "On December 16, 1980, approved a second public auction sale of two lots which were part of a 2.56-acre excess park property north of Fogarty Creek State Park, approved for sale September 26, 1980.". And poof, just like that the park was gone, quickly and quietly, with no hearings about a proposed sale or anything like that. If there was any public outcry or even awareness about the sale at the time it happened, it didn't make the Portland newspapers.

You can also track what happened here by looking at Historic Aerials photos over time, which give us a rough timeline of how things played out: A 1976 photo shows the area still largely undeveloped, while a 1982 shows what looks like a small unpaved parking area and a creek flowing down to the beach, so this is probably what it looked like during the state park years, even though it wasn't anymore at this point. (And in May 1982 a survey for a private party was filed with the county as a prelude to developing the area.). A 1994 photo shows the area all built up and the creek filled in, and from that point forward there's virtually no indication of what used to be here.

Since 1980, the closest legal access points to Lincoln Beach are now the one at Fishing Rock, and another 1/4 mile north at Willow St.


Afterlife

It turns out that when they sold the park, they didn't sell the entire park. They resold the beach lots they'd bought a few years earlier, and the small creek or ravine that led from the bluffs down to the beach, and that whole stretch is just houses now, with no indication there was every anything else there. But below the vegetation line is a rectangular chunk of sand, about one acre total, that still belongs to the state (the highway department, specifically), which is what remains of the Lincoln Beach Wayside. They don't really publicize this place, since there's no direct access to the beach from inland anymore, which obviously cuts down on its usefulness as a beach access park.

I am not entirely sure why they kept it. Maybe they had a policy of never re-privatizing beach land, on the off chance that the development ban would come undone somehow someday. Or the fact that it's mentioned by name in the Beach Bill suggests they can't sell it, and if they had done so a sufficiently high-priced lawyer could potentially make the whole law come tumbling down like a sandcastle in a winter storm.

As for why it's owned by ODOT and not the State Parks Dept. today, that was probably just an oversight when they were splitting Parks off into its own separate department in 1989. Selling off a state park to save the others must have been embarrassing for everyone involved. Kind of like how if you have to sell blood plasma for cash while unemployed, you don't necessarily put that on a resumé afterward. The whole episode was probably memory-holed so deeply that nobody remembered it a decade later when they were divying up which land was for parks and which land was for highways.

So here's the Lincoln County property record for the surviving bit of park, or ex-park, totaling 0.9 acres. As noted above, the eastern boundary is what was arranged in the original subdivision arrangement. The northern boundary is just a quarter-section survey line, while the southern boundary is actually a beach access right-of-way. But don't get too excited; those stairs to the beach are owned by the local HOA and are for use by residents only, and signs warn the peasants not to use it or else, this means you, no exceptions, period.

If you look at the area on street view, you can see the beach from the street at the top of those stairs, but you absolutely cannot use their walkway to get there. Even the official tsunami evacuation map for the area doesn't include the stairs as an approved way off of the beach. I won't hazard a guess as to whether in the event of an imminent tsunami they'll actually have some poor sacrificial security guard stationed there tasering people trying to evacuate that way. But it's an HOA on the coast, so I wouldn't put it past them.

Anyway, the west border is the high water line, everything past there is sometimes underwater and belongs to the state, specifically the "Ocean Shore State Recreation Area". Official state beach access points -- the ones with tsunami evacuation maps and the big safety yellow numbers facing the ocean -- are somehow also part of Ocean Shore, and the state is pretty careful to never provide even a rough estimate of how big it is, so just know that it surrounds us, and binds us, and was in our hearts the whole time, and it's also the friends we made along the way; it's a dessert topping and a floor wax. But it only extends to the lowest low tide point, and beyond there the seafloor belongs to the Department of State Lands instead, out to the 3 nautical mile limit. Between 3 and 12 nautical miles it's federal, as in, Reagan moved the maritime limit out that far by Presidential Proclamation #5982 in December 1988, as allowed by the Law of the Sea treaty (which the US has not actually ratified). But he explicitly didn't grant the added bits of ocean to the bordering states, keeping the 3-12 mile area as an exclusively federal zone, and succeeding presidents of both parties haven't seen fit to do that, and Congress also hasn't acted to change federal laws in all that time, and states haven't sued or unilaterally claimed that the border moved out automatically. My interest here, and the reason I mention all of this, is because adding that extra bit of water would be juuust enough to shove Wyoming aside and take their place as the 9th largest state.

But I digress.


Misc.

A few random small items and tidbits to pass along that didn't fit anywhere else:

  • two pages at Oregon Coast Beach Connection, one about another beach access point further north of here, and the other with some night photos of the beach.
  • The park gets a random shout out in a 2003 iFish thread. Could be right by accident, but I'm going with benefit of the doubt here; people who fish, or some subset of them, spend a lot of time staring at maps and may have seen the name that way, or they're oldtimers and remember when it went in.
  • In a link in the Fishing Rock post, some rocks offshore of here are described as the furthest northern bits of Depoe Bay Basalt, so fish that hang around in such areas would be more plentiful here than the rest of Lincoln Beach in general.
  • A state erosion and flood hazard map from 1997, notes the mean cliff erosion rate for the Lincoln Beach area in general is around 0.6 feet per year. I have not seen enough coastal erosion numbers to know whether that's a lot or not, but the riprap walls along the base of the cliff seem to indicate residents are concerned
  • Chronic geologic hazard map from 2018. Among other things, it labels the coastal land by geological type, and much of it here (as in, what the cliffs are made of) is labeled "alluvium", "colluvium", and most of all "marine terrace deposits", none of which sounds especially sturdy.
  • recent (2021) permit application for applying riprap to the slope in front of several beach houses.

The park is mentioned briefly in a 1978 US Forest Service report "Coding Hazardous Tree Failures for a Data Management System", General Technical Report PSW-29, from the Pacific Southwest Forest and Range Experimental Station, Berkeley CA. Which references a previous report, PSW-24, titled "Tree Failures and Accidents in Recreation Areas: A Guide to Data Management for Hazard Control" describes the system, complete with JCL and FORTRAN source code for some of the programs discussed.

The idea behind all this, as I understand it, was to answer the age-old question: If a tree falls in the forest, and there's nobody around to file a correctly coded "Report of Tree Failure" (Forest Service Form PSW-4600-3) with the central mainframe, did it really happen?

The system used numeric fields for the various details involved in a tree failure: the what, where, when, and why. For the "where" part, they had to issue a document listing the correct codes for everywhere that a reportable tree failure might occur, and as part of this PSW-29 assigns a code to every last Oregon state park in existence in 1979 in the name of meticulous thoroughness. (A biographical note about the first author mentions he has a Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, which I find... unsurprising.) So Lincoln Beach had (and maybe still has?) location number "52220 00" in this system. The generic code for "somewhere in an Oregon State Park" was "52000 00", and the code for "in a coastal Oregon State Park" was "52200 00", so even though the park is just a big rectangle of sand, and precisely zero trees if you don't count driftwood, the resulting database probably contains a few tree failure incidents for the place just due to someone fat-fingering the ID around the tail end of a long boring day of ten-keying state park IDs into an IBM 3270 terminal, or just having a sticky '2' key.

The doc notes that the demise of a tree due to logging is not considered a kind of tree failure and should not be reported as such.

Here's a bit more on those references to the park in the famous Beach Bill, or I think this may have been a later followup to the original Beach Bill; it was in a bill about beaches at any rate. I'm talking about Oregon Revised Statutes §390.770, which is a legal description of the legal vegetation line along the entire Oregon Coast, end to end. So this has got to be one of the chonkiest and most soporific sections of any state law on the books. I have not actually measured it but I would guess it's somewhere in the top 10 at least. It starts out with:

Except for the areas described by ORS 390.760 (Exceptions from vegetation line), ORS 390.640 (Permit required for improvements on ocean shore) applies to all the land located along the Pacific Ocean between the Columbia River and the Oregon-California boundary between extreme low tide and the lines of vegetation as established and described according to the Oregon State Plane Coordinate System of 1927, as follows:

From there it's pages upon pages of survey point coordinates. A few of the points have brief descriptions, including the two that basically bracket the lost wayside:

Li-7-150 451,005 1,080,288

Description of Location of Point Number Li-7-150: A point near the north boundary of Lincoln Beach State Wayside located in section 28 of township 8 south, range 11 west of the Willamette Meridian in Lincoln County.

Li-7-151 450,586 1,080,122

Description of Location of Point Number Li-7-151: A point near the south boundary of Lincoln Beach State Wayside located in section 28 of township 8 south, range 11 west of the Willamette Meridian in Lincoln County.

The Lincoln County survey record for the area shows those points, so you can see where they actually are on a map.

The mysterious coordinates next to the survey point names are not something the average person (myself included) will have seen a lot of. If you hold opinions of the flat earth persuasion, you may want to avert your eyes for the next paragraph or so.

So everybody who has ever used GPS (or a paper map) is probably familiar with the Latitude, Longitude system, either the degrees, minutes, seconds type or with lots of decimal places. You might also be familiar with Public Land Survey System -- the "township, range, section, something within that section" stuff you see all the time in property descriptions. You'll use it constantly if you're a land surveyor or pretty regularly if you're a realtor, and everyone else may encounter it a little bit when buying or selling property, or trying to dispute your property taxes, or fighting your HOA over a property boundary, stuff like that. The land survey system has this legal fiction where it assumes it's operating on a flat plane. It makes the math easier, and at the scale it was designed to operate, the curvature of the earth is a tiny factor you can basically ignore in everyday use. But suppose you need to translate between the two -- like you need to draw a legally precise line down the whole Oregon Coast, for example -- how do you do that? This is where the State Plane Coordinate System comes in.

You may have heard people criticize the "both sides" school of professional journalism, where given a debate with two competing sides, the news coverage tries to chart a middle ground between the two rather than figure out which one is supported by the facts. I've seen this criticism phrased to the effect that the earth is either 100% round or 100% flat, there's no middle ground between them. It turns out that State Plane Coordinates are essentially that middle ground, dividing the United States up into 120 zones, mostly hinged along state boundaries and then within some of the larger states. Oregon, as the *ahem* ninth-largest state, merited a whopping two polygons, a northern one (which we're in here) and a southern one. One way to think about this is to imagine an animated spinning globe from some educational CD-ROM from 1993, and it looks primitive now because you can see the individual polygons it's made of. That's kind of what this system does too: It's not for animation purposes, but it does make the math easier.

So turning those numbers into GPS coordinates is still not trivial; the polygons aren't all the same size or tilted uniformly, and the earth is not exactly spherical either. But you at least don't have to do it by hand. NOAA's National Geodetic Survey has a neat little online calculator called "NGS Coordinate Conversion and Transformation Tool (NCAT)" that can do this translation for you. I had to tinker with it a little to figure out some of the settings to use, so let's suppose you wanted to turn another one of those survey points into GPS coordinates for whatever reason.


"Convert/Transform from:" - leave this set to "Horizontal", unless you also have a height value you want to use.
"Select the type of horizontal coordinate:" - this defaults to "Geodetic lat-long", which is for converting the opposite direction. You want to
select "SPC" (short for State Plane Coordinates). Once you change this, the fields below will redraw with the appropriate input fields.
"Northing" - the first of the two numbers goes here, commas and all. E.g. in "451,005" in point 150
"Easting" - the second of the two numbers. The "1,080,288" in point 150.
"Units" - It's kind of neat that the tool defaults to meters, like they'd do in a proper civilized country, but the numbers given in the state law are in feet, so set this to "US Survey Feet".
There's also an "International Feet" option that seems to give nearly identical results, just a few feet away if you pick it instead.
"SPC zone" - In other words, what polygon do these coordinates go to? The option you want here is "OR N-3601". Though if you're converting a point sufficiently far south you'll need to use "OR S-3602" instead.
"Input reference frame (historically called 'horizontal datum')": Set this to "NAD27", since the law specifies we're using the 1927 version of the coordinate system, a
"Output SPC zone (optional)" and "Output reference frame (historically called 'horizontal datum')" can be left alone.

So with those settings, that puts point Li-7-150 at exactly 44.8483696164,-124.0473724487, and Li-7-151 at 44.8472014030,-124.0479409700. So now you know, and knowing is half the battle. Though I'm not sure what the other half is.

Posted by brx0 at 2:54 PM 0 comments
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Location: 3635 Lincoln Ave, Depoe Bay, OR 97341, USA
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Sunday, June 14, 2026

Barlow Monument, Government Camp

Next up we're visiting the little mountain town of Government Camp, OR, about 56 miles SE of Portland on US 26, and due south of Mount Hood. We aren't here to ski, or snowshoe, or attend any chic apres-ski disco parties (which as far as I know don't exist here anyway), or even sit around eating fondue and making fun of people trying to drive in the snow. We also aren't here for any extreme summer sports. We aren't even here for the hiking this time, though that's usually a good guess. No, this time it's something nerdy, unfashionable, and very small.

We're checking out a little landscaped triangle at the corner of E. Olive St., Little Trail, and Government Camp Loop (the main street through town, and the original route of US26 through here). We're looking at the one bit with a few rose bushes around a large boulder the size of a small boulder bearing a pair of old brass plaques. One is a monument to Samuel Kimbrough Barlow, namesake of the Barlow Road. The Barlow Road was the notorious local toll-road segment of the Oregon Trail, where you paid a premium to avoid drowning in the rapids at Cascade Locks, only for your rugged pioneer family to die of dysentery on their way through the mountains.

The second plaque honors his wife, Susannah Lee Barlow, a recognized Daughter of the American Revolution. The monument location was apparently at a point where the new Mt. Hood Highway (circa 1925) intersected Barlow's old road. And more importantly, it was a point where the new highway angled out of the Government Camp street grid and cut through some platted lots, and that left a 25 square foot scrap of land here, outside the highway right-of-way but far too small to do much of anything with except put up a historical marker.

Origins

The monument was proposed in June 1921 and dedicated in July 1925, in conjunction with the official grand opening of the shiny new Mt. Hood Loop Highway. A followup item in August 1925 noted that the attendees included one F.A. Gaines, presently of Jackson, MS, who had last traveled the Barlow Road as a small child in 1845.

(Elderly pioneers retracing their steps was a popular activity around this time, most famously by Ezra Meeker, who arrived by oxcart in 1852 and then retraced his steps a few times to publicize various causes: By oxcart again in 1906, for historic preservation of the old Oregon Trail; by automobile in 1916, to promote good roads; and by airplane in 1925 because he just sort of wanted to.)

Ordinarily a boulder with a couple of brass history plaques on it would be a minor local curiosity, at best. Plaques on boulders do give off an air of permanence, but they're not a great way to teach history, and getting people to actually read your monumental boulder is a whole other issue. The reason we're talking about it today is that someone had the notion of donating the marker to the state and making it an exceptionally tiny state park. The state initially declined the gift in October 1925, on the grounds that 25 square feet was too small to beautify properly. But they eventually warmed up to the idea; state parks were a sort of side hobby of the state highway department back in those days, so adopting a monument to an early builder of roads (and largely-unsuccessful collector of tolls on said roads) was hard to resist, and so the place was duly surveyed and added to the system. A prime example of this historical retcon is a 1946 historical note that calls Barlow a "pioneer roadbuilder", adopting him as a forefather of the present-day state highway department.

Per the story related there, Barlow claimed he figured out where to put the road by looking for a dip on the horizon, a place where the hills weren't quite as tall. As if he was imitating fellow Kentuckian Daniel Boone finding the Cumberland Gap. Although Appalachian geology is completely different than ours, and a key part of the Cumberland Gap turned out to be a gigantic meteor crater, and we don't have one of those here, as far as anybody knows. Or at least we don't have one yet. What probably actually happened here is the same as what happened in thousands of other places: White guy stumbles across a path used by local tribes for thousands of years. Names it after himself and tells everyone he discovered it, and they agree to believe him, and history is written down accordingly.

On coming across this route, Barlow also saw dollar signs, and somehow enlisted much of his wagon train to help out with a few months of unplanned physical labor building a rudimentary road here, thiiis close to the end of their long journey, and we may never know exactly how voluntary this volunteer work actually was. The Barlows finally arrived in Oregon City on Christmas Day, which is very late in the year to be rolling through the snowy mountains in a covered wagon. The history note doesn't say this, but it sounds to me like they may have narrowly avoided a Donner Party scenario. Barlow quickly talked the Provisional Government into letting him set up a tollbooth. The historical note doesn't explore whether the other wagon train members saw a cent of the proceeds after all the trail work they did, and in any case the Barlow Road tolls were easily evaded by the simple measure of detouring your wagon around the spot where the toll gate was located.

Once the little park was established, it duly appeared on official state highway maps like any other state park would, like map number 5C-10-18 titled "Property Acquired for Right-of-Way in Townsite of Pompeii", dated November 1927, which shows it as a tiny flyspeck, but it does label it and tells you to consult map 1R-1-795 for a closer look. To be honest I'm mostly linking to those because old hand-drawn, hand-lettered ODOT maps just look cool. Also, regarding the "Pompeii" bit: That's what the town's founder wanted to call the place, but the name was unpopular and didn't stick. Maybe locals worried the fate of the original Pompeii might scare away potential homebuyers. Or maybe they were aware of the original Pompeii's pre-volcano reputation as an epicenter of Roman debauchery, even by the empire's usual standards, and figured that might attract the wrong element. Still, if you were thinking of moving to Government Camp and starting a pizza place or a gelato shop or maybe a retro-themed Southern Italian restaurant, but you're stuck on what to call the place, working "Pompeii" into the name seems appropriate.

A few period photos of the monument in its early days can be found online, like a 1920s photo of the new monument at the Hood River History Museum, and another via the Southern Oregon Historical Society in Medford. The local history museum in Government Camp is right across the street from the little monument so they may know something about it too, but their website doesn't mention it and you'd probably have to ask someone in person.

World Champion!

The monument and its tiny park had been around for about a decade when it occurred to a few people that it really was exceedingly small and as such it might even be a record-holder of some sort. In April 1936, the Oregon Journal editorial page just wanted to point out that some unnamed statewide public figure out there was going around claiming that Salem's miniscule Waldo Park was the world's smallest park, at 10 feet by 15 feet, and the paper let it be known this was not actually true, and the Salem park was a whopping six times the size of the true champion up in Government Camp. (It's actually 9.6 times as big, per Marion County property records, which give an official size of 240 square feet). And if this whole "world's smallest park" business sounds awfully familiar -- even though you've never heard of the Barlow Monument before -- just hang on; we're getting to that.

As a side note, Waldo Park is home to a single giant sequoia tree that was planted back in 1872. Assuming the tree stays healthy and continues growing at an ordinary sequoia growth rate, and lives to equal the General Grant Tree in Kings Canyon National Park maybe 1500 years from now, it will have grown larger than the present-day park. But we'll let the worrywarts of the year 3535 AD or thereabouts figure out that one.

June 1936: The Journal reprinted a similar Bend Bulletin editorial, which pinned the inaccurate claim on former State Forester Lynn F. Cronemiller (boo! hiss!). The article asked readers if they knew of other contenders around the world, but I didn't see any follow-up articles naming any, so it's possible nobody else on earth saw this as a thing worth doing.

Brief mentions of the park appeared in May 1937 and June 1938 articles on some of the gems of the state park system. Actually now that I look at the two, the 1938 piece looks like a cut-down version of the previous year's story. The 25-square-foot factoid survived the chopping block, though, and appears in both.

A few events were held at, or rather near the monument 1940-41 as the centennial of the old road approached. For example, a June 1940 dedication of a plaque on a flagpole that had been installed here the year before, with a program of general patriotic remarks and music accompaniment. A photo of the event appeared a few days later on the Journal's photo page, featuring dignitaries from the Sons and Daughters of Oregon Pioneers and the local American Legion post. Directly below this are a couple of photos of the new Oregon Humane Society shelter on Columbia Boulevard, including a cat enclosure with what looks like a really nice climbing structure, even by today's standards. The other photo shows a row of individual enclosures for dogs, each with its own indoor and outdoor section, and mentions one adoptable dog named "Shorty" who was said to be a police dog - dachshund mix. But because 1940 was a dark and primitive time, long before the Internet, the paper did not think to show us a close-up photo of this peculiar-sounding creature.

In May 1941 there was a sort of memorial service and wreath laying at the Pioneer Woman's Grave monument further east along US 26. The writer of the small blurb seemingly got it confused with the monument in Government Camp, calling it the Barlow Monument and claiming she had been a member of the original Barlow party in 1845. I can't find any other sources claiming that, and it probably isn't true. An old USFS sign near the gravesite claimed she died in 1845, but a later DAR plaque at the site (seen in this WyEast Blog post) just gives a date range of "184?", and a later Forest Service sign (also shown in that post) hedges its bets even further and just says "18-?", and all we really know is that it dates to sometime before 1924 when the site was rediscovered by Mt. Hood Highway construction workers. But I digress.

There were undoubtedly additional Oregon Trail Centennial festivities being planned for the next few years, but then World War II came along and distracted everyone, and we don't hear about the Barlow Monument again until July 1950, when the Oregonian finally took notice of it for the first time. The usual 25-square-foot statistic appeared in a July 1950 tribute to Samuel H. Boardman, who had retired the previous week after 21 years as state park superintendent. This article was also the last time I saw it mentioned in print as the smallest state park, which might not be a complete coincidence; I've seen enough organizational politics to know what happens to a little pet project after their champion inside the org departs for whatever reason. And the state had already been deemphasizing it in recent years; it was left off of the 1950 official map of the park system, and not included in the 1946 state park guidebook, and somewhere around that time is when US 26 was rerouted to not run right through downtown Government Camp (such as it is) and straightened into its present-day not-quite-a-freeway form, which reduced the odds of visitors randomly stumbling across the tiny park on their way to somewhere else.

A New Challenger Approaches

Going by all of that, it seem the Barlow Monument's star had already waned quite a bit by February 1954, when an Oregon Journal article covered the quote-unquote "official dedication" of Portland's now-famous Mill Ends Park, though the tongue-in-cheek article insisted the park had already been known by that name for "lo, these many years". Apparently there had been some sort of name contest anyway, and Mill Ends narrowly beat out "Portland Envoy Park", named after the variety of rose planted there. I can't seem to find any info on the net about that particular rose variety, and so Google's dumbass search AI insists it does not exist, and scoffs at you for even asking such a ridiculous question.

So yes, the same newspaper that dreamed up Mill Ends Park was previously involved in promoting the Barlow Monument as possibly the world's smallest, and that has got to be how they arrived at the idea.

From that point forward, Mill Ends Park featured regularly in Dick Fagan's regular column. A May 1955 column indignantly notes that some national magazine had once again proclaimed Waldo Park as the very smallest, and points out that it was a whopping 200 times the size of Mill Ends Park. The present-day Mill Ends Park comes to just 452 square inches, or about 3.14 square feet, so it's also roughly 1/8 the size of the previous maybe-champion up in Government Camp.

A 1955 ODOT map of Highway 26 thru the Government Camp area still shows the mini-taxlot but doesn't bother labeling it like earlier maps had done.

The old Barlow Monument got one more brief mention in an October 1965 tour route article, which just says "Just before entering town you’ll pass the BARLOW MONUMENT, which honors the founder of the trail your route now more or less follows." and doesn't say anything about it being a tiny state park.

So what happened? I think the public sort of lost any interest it ever had in seeking out boulders with brass plaques on them. Which, frankly, was never a great way to teach history, let's be honest here. And the "world's smallest" claim is less compelling if you have to include the "smallest *state* park" asterisks. So as far as I can tell, I think everyone just sort of forgot about the place and it slipped away like spare change falling under the sofa cushions.

For whatever it's worth, there's also a smallest unit of the National Park System: Thaddeus Kosciuszko National Memorial (0.02 acres / 871.2 square feet) is a historic house in Philadelphia where the Revolutionary War hero lived for a few months in 1797 after leading a failed uprising against the partition of his native Poland. The site was added to the National Park system in 1972, partly as a leadup to the 1976 Bicentennial and partly to troll the Soviets, who had once again swiped territory from Poland at the end of WWII.

Other interesting semi-random search results (all of them larger than either Mill Ends or the Barlow Monument) include Septuagesimo UNO, the smallest park in New York City; Park No. 474, the smallest in Chicago; and Prince's Park in Burntwood, Staffordshire, the smallest in the UK. Morton Park in Vancouver BC just might be the smallest park full of creepy laughing statues, and let me suggest that we not challenge them for that particular title.

Today

The present-day park, or ex-park, has a couple of rose bushes around the monument itself, and it looks like someone comes by regularly to fuss over them, but so far I haven't figured out who's responsible for the place these days. A current Clackamas County survey map indicates it's not an official tax lot anymore (if it ever was one), so we can't go by ownership records. Ownership of the adjacent streets is mixed: ODOT still owns Government Camp Loop (the main drag thru Government Camp, and part of the old Mt. Hood Highway) as a "frontage road" for US 26, while side streets belong to the county since there's no such thing as a City of Government Camp. The county has tried to tempt the locals into at least becoming a "village" or a "hamlet", two different flavors of lightweight local sorta-government, but so far they haven't taken the bait for that either.

(Note that "Oregon Trail Hut" next door to the monument is not part of the park, and I don't know who (if anyone) takes care of it, either. It's also not old; it was built by high school students in 1992, which I maintain was not that long ago, at least not in geological terms.)

Anyway, just going by inertia we should probably assume the state still owns it. And I haven't seen any records saying the old state park was ever officially abolished; they just sort of stopped talking about the place after a while. And if it still existed on paper, somewhere in an old file cabinet, ORS 390.111 might apply. That's the 1989 law splitting the department off from ODOT. The law says the new department "has complete jurisdiction and authority over all state parks, waysides and scenic, historic or state recreation areas, recreational grounds or places acquired by the state for scenic, historic, natural, cultural or recreational purposes except as otherwise provided by law". (This transfer did not include things like highway rest areas and roadside historical markers, which are managed by yet another state agency, the Oregon Travel Information Council. Their map of historical markers doesn't include this so they don't seem to have claimed it.)

So, long story short, it's possible this little spot is still technically a state park, albeit one that nobody at any state agency is really aware of anymore. And if it is, it just might still be the very smallest state park. As one data point, here's someone's 2011 blog post I came across that tried to identify the smallest state park in each state, and all of the ones listed are quite a bit larger than 25 square feet.

Another complication to all this is that Mill Ends Park, like the Barlow Monument, is just part of road right-of-way, and Naito Parkway / Front Avenue is technically the route of OR 99W -- a state highway -- through downtown Portland, though it's only state maintained south of Market St., a few blocks south of Mill Ends, but that was not always the case, and I guess what I'm getting at here is that we're within spitting distance of being able to claim Mill Ends may have technically been a state park for a while, though the state may have been completely unaware of this fact, or near-fact, or whatever.

And for the pedants out there who insist it can't be a park unless it includes at least one taxlot (you know who you are) -- which Mill Ends doesn't, and the Barlow Monument may have done once but doesn't now -- the smallest one might be the Vernon Ross Veterans Memorial, located on NE Sandy in Portland's Hollywood District, and the traditional centerpiece of Portland Veterans Day commemorations. At 48 square feet it's almost twice the size of the Barlow Monument, but five of them would fit inside Waldo Park. The flagpole is nowhere near as tall as the tree in Waldo Park, so a "max width to max height ratio" category might be a closer contest, though at that point we're just inventing goofy categories so Salem can finally win at something for once.

OK, Now What?

So it's possible we had a series of local champions, each smaller than the previous one: Waldo Park, then the Barlow Monument, and then Mill Ends (452 in^2), and in 2022 the city of Talent, OR unveiled a park 78 square inches smaller (374 in^2), and a town in Japan unveiled a slightly smaller one (372 in^2) at the end of 2024.

An arms race of incrementally shrinking smallest parks sounds really tedious, and ultimately the way to get the crown back for good will involve enlisting Intel to fabricate the tiniest sub-microscopic circle they can manage with their swanky new deep ultraviolet lithography machines; mount it somewhere outside in something theft-proof, maybe by attaching it to a large boulder, and proclaim that as the new smallest park.

Even that might not be enough, though; back in 1989, material scientists at IBM managed to create a company logo with 35 individual xenon atoms. A square of four xenon atoms would be smaller than that, though I bet a molecule with bonds between the atoms would be a lot smaller than that. And for that matter you could take a single atom and say that just the nucleus is your city park, and use hydrogen instead of xenon for the smallest nucleus so that your park is just a single proton. And that might be the end of the line, since I remember reading that all protons are believed to be the exactly same size, and you can't exactly pull individual quarks out of your proton and do anything with them, because quantum chromodynamics, and even if you could, they're probably all the same exact size too. And if it's all ultimately going to end in a tie anyway, we might as well shrink Mill Ends (and the one down in Talent) to match the one in Japan, but not go any smaller than that, and call it a three-way tie and stop there.

Posted by brx0 at 1:37 PM 0 comments
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Location: 88870 Government Camp Loop, Government Camp, OR 97028, USA
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Saturday, May 30, 2026

Hood River Loops

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More importantly, just on the other side of the intersection with OR 35, the old highway crosses the Hood River, and you might think there would be a cool old historic bridge there, and in fact there used to be one, a triple-arch bridge built in 1918 in the usual Gorge bridge style, which in turn replaced a spindly sketchy rickety-looking 1866 bridge that looked like it was designed and built by people who were familiar with the concept of bridges but had never actually seen one. The 1918 bridge was demolished in 1982, replaced by a taller, and wider, and more practical, and safer, but utterly forgettable and utilitarian, concrete structure. I had made a mental note to take a couple of photos of it for the sake of completeness, and then forgot so completely that I only remembered months later, and I would bet money that I forget again the next time I'm in the area, or maybe stop to take photos and get bored and leave before actually taking any.

Footnote(s)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A later coda: ODOT map 1R-2-498, titled "Acquired from F.H. Button Est. for Stock Pile Site", September 1937. But they may have gotten a bit ahead of themselves; a cursive note in pencil says simply "Would not sell. Jan 1938"
Posted by brx0 at 1:16 PM 0 comments
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Location: 2628 Old Columbia River Dr, Hood River, OR 97031, USA
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Sunday, March 08, 2026

Fishing Rock

Next up we're visiting Fishing Rock, an obscure little state park on the Oregon Coast a few miles south of Lincoln City, at the south end of the Lincoln Beach area. It's a small forested headland between a few miles of broad sandy beaches to the north, and dramatic vertical sea cliffs to the south.

This is one of the more obscure state parks on the Coast, I think for a couple of reasons. First, there aren't any signs for it out on US 101. So you have to already know that it exists and then have some idea of how to find it. (Hint: If you're coming from the north on 101, turn right just after the bead shop.) It wouldn't surprise me if the lack of a sign was intentional; the parking lot for the park is not very big, and it's in the middle of a quiet residential neighborhood full of narrow and sometimes unpaved streets, and it would quickly become disruptive if hordes of visitors descended on the place. I am not really worried about causing that kind of mass tourism rush here; I've already posted it to the 'Gram without ruining the place, and if that didn't do it, featuring it on an obscure 20-year-old blog is definitely not going to do it.

And let's be clear, it's not like there's zero information at all about the place out here on the interwebs. It's still part of the Oregon Coast, and there's a hard limit to how obscure an obscure place can really be here, so (for example) here are two pages about the place at Oregon Coast Beach Connection and one at 101Oregon, and if you're interested in the, I hesitate to say 'hiking', but at least 'walking around' aspects of the place there's an AllTrails page for the little trail through the park, and an OregonHikers page for the stroll down the beach.

The second reason I think this place is so obscure is that it's one of the newer state parks on the coast (as in 1991) and probably isn't part of as many longtime family traditions, the common practice where you always return to the exact same place on the coast every time you go, rain or shine (but probably rain, let's be honest), and you bring the kids and the dogs and have a giant bonfire on the beach, complete with s'mores and beers and illegal fireworks and lots of shivering, and hand that tradition down to your kids for them to hand down to their kids and so forth. By the time the state finally bought the place, most people had already picked a family beach spot that wasn't here.

Actually there's a third reason, which is that getting to the beach involves a short hike through a weird dark forest, and then a steep trail down a slippery muddy slope, and lugging a cooler full of hot dogs and brewskies through all that would be kind of a chore. Don't get me wrong, I'm actually a big fan of the weird dark forest here. I mean, I like weird dark forests in general, and coastal ones tend to be weirder than most, and they aren't all weird in the same way. The specific feeling I got here was "cozy", like you're under an umbrella, maybe, or hiding inside an enormous blanket fort. And there's a small but nonzero chance that around the next corner you might encounter some cute forest creatures having a tea party, and I mean that in the twee Beatrix Potter sense, not the Tumblr fursuit not-safe-for-work variety, which is a whole other forest, if you know what I mean.

I probably ought to point out that this place does less handholding than many of the better-known parks along the coast. There are cliffs here, and there aren't always safety railings, and the standard list of universal cliff dangers applies here (i.e. small children, excitable brainless dogs, taking selfies with your back turned to something dangerous, doing stunts to impress your bros after a few drinks, etcetera.) In fact, that whispering sound you might be hearing right now is Legal telling me to tell you to absolutely not attempt anything discussed in this post, no matter how mundane it might sound, up to and including coming here in the first place. Professional driver on a closed course, bearing no resemblance to any real or fictional person, or non-person, or any animal, vegetable, or mineral, alive, dead, undead, or otherwise. Legal says you should just stay home and watch TV instead, ideally one of those courtroom shows where all the good guys are inexplicably lawyers, somehow.

So regarding the park, and how it came to be, and why it's like this, here's a circa-1990 interview with David G. Talbot, the recently-retired longtime director of the state Parks & Recreation Department, who had run the agency in its various incarnations since 1964. Fishing Rock gets a quick mention on page 4 -- apparently it had been on the state's wishlist for a long time but they had never managed to make a deal for it, and Talbot noted that buying it now might get expensive.

The point is, that kind of thing will happen increasingly on the coast. They aren't making beachfront anymore. The prices are going to go up. If we wish to save Fishing Rock and the other undeveloped coastal properties that come up intermittently, we may have to shed our conservative mentality and pay whatever it takes because we'll not have many other chances. We haven't thought in those terms for a long time.

Speaking of which, his department may have been deep in negotiations when he said this, or were about to talk, or possibly had a deal in hand already; I don't know the precise timeline, but Lincoln County property records show that the state bought the land on September 3rd 1991 from the previous owner, "Fishing Rock Enterprises Inc.", for $570,000. That comes to about $1.3M in 2026 dollars, which seems like a real bargain, at least by Oregon Coast standards. The deal came with deed restrictions that limited developing the land for anything other than a park, and gave the seller a right of first refusal to buy the land back if the state decided to dispose of it, though that expired back in 2021. The terms do allow the state to transfer the land to Lincoln County, so long as the county agrees to abide by the same deed terms.

But Talbot was right, in a way: The state wasn't able to buy the whole property, just the northern half with the rock. The southern half of the property was subdivided (by the aforementioned Fishing Rock Enterprises) into an upscale gated community, also named Fishing Rock, and the picturesque sea cliffs to the south of the park are now owned by the HOA. You can get some idea of what the area used to look like by comparing HistoricAerials photos from 1982 -- which shows undeveloped land south of the park and 1994, which shows the southern half of the property in the early stages of becoming a subdivision.

The state's 2017 South Beach & Beverly Beach Management Units Master Plan includes a short section about the park and covers some of its identified issues:


Fishing Rock is a small, day use park perched on sandstone bluffs above the ocean. There is a trail leading through shore pine forest to grassy cliffs and to the north down to the beach. The park contains some difficult to access tidepool areas and offshore rocks. The parking lot is located in a residential neighborhood and it not signed from the highway at the request of the neighbors. The majority of park users are local residents who use the trail to access the beach. The beach access trail is steep and the cliffs are unfenced, which, combined with the spectacular natural scenery, lends the park a wild, undeveloped feeling.
...
The majority of the park is in good ecological condition. Vegetation consists primarily of mixed shore pine and stunted sitka spruce forest, with some native shrubs and open grassy areas at the cliff edge. There are no known populations of invasive plant species in the park.
...
Land for the majority of the park was acquired in 1991, with a small additional property purchased in 2002 for development of the existing parking lot. This area was once the location of Major Ludson’s Siletz tribal allotment.
...
ISSUES:
The beach access trail is steep and eroded in many places.
• There are several informal trails leading into the park that are used and maintained by neighbors.
• Some fencing along the cliff edge was installed in the past, but the bluffs are eroding and a large portion of the fencing has been lost. Currently, the bluffs are mostly unfenced, and there is existing signage to alert visitors to the safety hazard.
• The park is not visible or signed from the highway and is not listed in OPRD’s online informational materials. As a result it is relatively unknown to the general public.
• The park functions primarily as a community beach access.

If we're going to split hairs here -- and I'm pretty much always up for that -- strictly speaking the actual Fishing Rock is the largest of the big black basalt rocks just offshore, right off the tip of the headland here. And the deal with offshore rocks, all of them, of any size, is that the federal government kept them for itself at statehood, on the theory that they might be needed for lighthouses someday, and lighthouses are a federal responsibility, per the Lighthouses Act of 1789. And then once the feds were done building lighthouses the other rocks became a National Wildlife Refuge as well as a federally designated wilderness area, and are strictly "Keep Out" unless you have a special permit that they almost certainly won't give you. So if you were hoping maybe the state would build a rickety catwalk or rope bridge or zipline or something out over the churning ocean to the rock, you're out of luck, sorry. I dunno, mostly I mention this at all because it's one of a handful of parks on the coast where the park doesn't actually contain the place or thing in the name. The little state wayside at Twin Rocks, south of Rockaway Beach, is another one of these.

Speaking of the rock, the May 1974 issue of The Ore Bin, (a publication of the Oregon Dept. of Geology and Mineral Industries) was a special issue all about coastal geology between Lincoln City and Newport. It discusses Fishing Rock briefly as an outlying example of "Depoe Bay Basalt":

This middle Miocene basalt flow was described by Snavely and others (1965) and named by the same writers (1973). The flow is exposed along the shore at Depoe Bay and forms the wall that separates the inner and outer bays (Figure 6). Here the rock is a pillow basalt breccia consisting of more or less dense ellipsoidal masses (pillows) of basalt enclosed in a matrix of angular basaltic glass fragments formed by the sudden chilling of hot lava coming in contact with sea water (Figure 9).
...
Numerous dikes and sills of this type of basalt cut the Astoria Formation just east of Depoe Bay, and it is believed that lava erupted from local fissures and flowed into the ancient sea (Snavely and Macleod, 1971).
...
The Depoe Bay Basalt extends northward from Depoe Bay but lies inland from the shore until it appears again at Boiler Bay, where small isolated masses, through their superior resistance to erosion, impart an irregularity to the inner edge of the bay. It lies along the shore north of Boiler Bay as far as Lincoln Beach. The rock knob at the mouth of Fogarty Creek (Figure 8) and the sea cliff northward to Fishing Rock (Figure 11) are of this basalt, and an isolated remnant of the flow forms a reef opposite Lincoln Beach Wayside, just north of Fishing Rock.

(The "Lincoln Beach Wayside" mentioned above is another, even more obscure, state park, but that's a topic for a whole other blog post.)

A more recent DOGAMI publication, "Landslide and Erosion Hazards of the Depoe Bay Area, Lincoln County, Oregon" (1994) includes a mention of Fishing Rock in a section about seismic risks:

Faults at a high angle to the shoreline offset the 80,000 year marine terrace deposits downward about 18 feet on the north side of Fogarty Creek and down another 15 feet on the north side of Fishing Rock. It may be that these faults are somehow related to the offshore faults. Since many of the offshore faults may be active (Goldfinger and others, 1990), these local faults may be as well. If so, they pose a dual threat of earthquake shaking and direct offset of the surface. For example, the fault that probably follows Fogarty Creek could conceivably cause offsets in the highway bridge there. The fault at Fishing Rock could affect local houses and roads, including Highway 101. Detailed mapping and age determination of these faults is recommended.

The authors go on to note that their study was about landslides, not earthquakes, and had only looked at the latter as a potential trigger of the former, but since you're already reading their paper they might as well grab you by the lapels and pitch the followup earthquake study that somebody really ought to do at some point before the Big One hits.

Seismic studies of expensive real estate have a curious way of just not happening, and I don't know whether this proposed followup study ever took place.

So I think we've got the "Rock" part covered pretty well, but what about the "Fishing" part? I didn't see anyone fishing, but the internet says yes, fishing is a thing here. For a few quick examples, here are some mentions in the Oregon Fishing Forum forums: two threads from 2017, a 2015 one, and a 2009 one. Meanwhile over on iFish.net: Two threads from August 2015, and one from 2013. Apparently the thing to catch here is something called "surfperch". The state Fish & Wildlife dept. has a page on how to fish for them, which claims they're one of the state's "most underutilized fisheries", I imagine because their habitat is not really conducive to commercial fishing. It seems that their niche in the Great Big Circle of Life involves swooping in and nomming on tidepool creatures during high tide, in the middle of the crashing surf, pretty much exactly where you don't want to be in a boat of any size. And apparently nobody invented a workable tide-powered fishwheel during the era when that would have been allowed, and that might be the only viable way of hoovering them out of the sea on an industrial scale.

Among the many fun surfperch facts I have encountered recently, I was surprised to learn that their favorite of the many items on the tidepool menu is the Pacific mole crab, better known locally as the "sand flea". I say locally because other parts of the world have unrelated creatures that also go by "sand flea", and some of them are bitey while others (including our tiny "mole crabs") aren't. Surfperch will happily eat other things, but apparently the key to success at fishing is to catch some sand fleas at low tide, then use them as live bait once the tide comes in. Which, I dunno, that sounds really tedious and maybe harder than the actual fishing part, and the more I look at them, I'm starting to think they're actually kind of cute. Like if peanut M&Ms were an inch and a half long and came in grey and had lots of tiny little legs on the bottom.

The "underutilized fishery" lament above doesn't mean this is a no-rules free-for-all zone. As of 2024, Fishing Rock is now bordered to the south by the newly-designated Fogarty Creek Marine Conservation Area. That page indicates the rules aren't finalized overall, but it does say "No take of shellfish and other invertebrates in the intertidal or subtidal zones. No take of fish from a boat." Which seems to indicate you can still fish from on shore there, but you can't use sand fleas as bait, or at least not sand fleas that you caught within the conservation area. This is not legal advice, but I suppose it might be legal if you took up raising sand fleas at home like some people do with earthworms, and managed not to become too attached to them over time, and they don't all escape into your car when you hit a pothole on the way to the coast and go randomly boinging around the interior while you're trying to drive, or something.

Anyway, the conservation area extends south to about Fogarty Creek, the next state park down the road, and south of there is the Boiler Bay Marine Research Area, a marine protected area covering the intertidal zone from the mouth of Fogarty Creek, which is about half a mile south of Fishing Rock, south to Government Point at Boiler Bay, the next park after Fogarty Creek. In the research area, you are not supposed to remove anything at all from the intertidal zone (including mole crabs, or fish, or minions of Cthulhu), but further offshore is not a protected area. And let me point out if I haven't already, this is not my area of expertise, and I don't know the rationale for protecting these areas specifically, whether it's because they're relatively intact ecosystems, or degraded and imperiled ones, or just average chunks of ocean that can be protected without impacting the local fishing industry too heavily, to juice up our marine protected area numbers.

That whispering you hear again is Legal butting in with one more disclaimer. It seems they're concerned that you, o Gentle Reader, might see this surfperch business and high-tail it out to the coast to partake of Neptune's infinite bounty, only to catch nothing that day. (Purely by luck of the draw, I should add; you're plenty good at it, as far as I know.) And Legal worries that if this happens you might catch a case of mental anguish and/or emotional distress, and sue for that plus triple gas money. So this is where I remind you that (as the old saying goes) there's a reason it's called Fishing Rock, not Catching Rock.

Posted by brx0 at 3:41 PM 0 comments
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Location: Fishing Rock State Recreation Site, 3330 Fogarty Ave, Depoe Bay, OR 97341, USA
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