Next up we're visiting Lewis & Clark State Park, at the west end of the Columbia Gorge just across the Sandy River from downtown Troutdale. Let me start off by saying this post is not an adventure through pristine wilderness; the the park's essentially a glorified highway rest area -- it officially opened in October 1955 along with the nearby segment of I-84 -- surrounded by a few recreation options. (The park is classified as a "State Recreation Site", if we're going to split hairs.) The park is best known as a Sandy River access point for fishing and boating, and the high bluffs above the river have become a popular rock climbing spot in recent decades. The park is not famous for hiking, but it does have a few trails, and that's what we're here to check out. None of them are very long and most are easy, but one has sort of a weird mystery associated with it, which we'll get to in a bit. And don't miss the historical odds and ends down at the bottom, stuff that didn't fit anywhere else.
- Lewis & Clark Nature Trail
- Broughton Bluff Trail
- Lewis & Clark Trail No. 400
So the first trail, and the only one with a sign, is the "Lewis & Clark Nature Trail", which is a mostly-paved loop around the landscaped "rest area" part of the park, with a few signs describing various native plants. In practice I imagine it's largely used by people and dogs who need a stretch after a long drive along I-84. When I started writing this post I sort of assumed the trail and the dated, weathered sign were original features of the park, but it turns out they were added in 1980 for the 175th anniversary of the Lewis & Clark expedition camping here for a bit in November 1805. And yes, a bit of my surprise is due to being of just the right age where 1955 is ancient history, while 1980 is a year I have clear childhood memories of, and therefore things from then cannot possibly look dated or weathered. (And yes, I have yet another birthday this month, why do you ask?)
An April 1980 Oregon Journal article described the upcoming trail:
When completed, the trail will feature many of the 150 flowers, shrubs, and trees identified and described by Capts. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in their journals which, besides an account of their travels, were a compendium of scientific data covering botany and other disciplines.
The one-half mile loop trail, with a gravel covering, is in place and site preparation has been finished. Only a start has been made on the plantings.
The article then notes that they only had Oregon grapes in place so far, but a vine maple was coming soon. The article continued:
Plans are in progress for various planting areas to be “adopted” by garden clubs, civic and educational groups, each to plant and maintain its own plot. Twenty-two such groups have been enlisted so far.
...
The nature trail is a project of the Oregon Lewis and Clark Trail Committee, chaired by Dr. E.G. Chuinard, Portland orthopedic surgeon. Dr. Chuinard is a nationally known Lewis and Clark scholar, and the trail has been a dream of his for many years.
The article goes on to mention that, as an orthopedic surgeon, he was proud that the new trail would be wheelchair-accessible, at least by the pre-ADA standards of 1980. Chuinard later wrote a book that more or less combined his professional and personal interests “Only One Man Died, the Medical Aspects of the Lewis & Clark Expedition”
An August 1979 Oregonian article described the proposal in similar terms, adding that this would be a great new use for the park, replacing the overnight campground that had been there since the park opened. Apparently the campground was considered a nuisance and drew 'undesirable' people to the area, though I'm not sure whether that meant partiers or something worse. A November 1978 letter to the Oregon Journal opposing removal of the campground explained that it was the only low-income camping option for people passing through the area in the summer, and Ainsworth was (and is) the closest alternative, much further from Portland and Troutdale. The Oregonian article went on to quote someone with the State Parks Division who hoped they'd be able to get rid of the adjacent dirt bike area just north of the park as that was considered a nuisance too.
1979, the oregonian editorialized in favor of the trail. The editorial board may not have paid close attention to the proposal up to this point, and it's hard to imagine a bunch of cynical old-school newspapermen caring a whit about gardening, but one historical constant about the Oregonian, from the 1850s to the present day, is that they will always endorse any proposal that involves being mean to poor people, whether as a deliberate goal, or as foreseeable collateral damage. So with this editorial, the project was virtually a done deal.
The nature trail was dedicated in October 1980. For the big event, the paper interviewed Roger Mackaness, a Corbett landscape architect, nursery owner, and part-time Job Corps instructor, who was handling the practical side of the project, translating Chuinard's daydream into an actual garden full of live plants.
“I can’t guarantee that anything will grow”, said Mackaness, explaining that certain plants such as sagebrush and prickly pear have to be grown from seed. “Eastern Oregon plants take special care.”
Varieties of plants to be found on the trail include cliff dwellers, desert lovers, high mountain and shore plants, he said.
Making the task even more difficult, the plants will be ordered in the manner in which Lewis and Clark discovered them, and each planting will be landscaped to mirror the topography found in the plant’s natural habitat.
“This will be a trailhead for a 90 mile hike to The Dalles”, Mackaness said. “In the 1/4 mile nature trail you could see the same kind of plant life you’d see if you hiked to The Dalles.”
The article goes on to explain that the plantings should be complete in another two years or so. An Oregonian article on the trail dedication notes that the trail had been in the works since 1974, and the very first mention of it I saw came in a 1975 article by Chuinard, which mentions that a group in Charlottesville, VA was proposing an "all the Lewis & Clark plants" garden there.
In April 1982, a Lewis and Clark mini-garden opened at the Oregon Zoo, featuring some of the same plants, with Chuinard and other members of the trail committee in attendance. The Journal assured readers that
The new garden also is intended to complement, not compete with, the nature trail at Lewis and Clark State Park near the mouth of the Sandy River, which, when completed, will have examples of all or most of the plants identified in the Oregon country by the famous explorers. A sign in the zoo garden calls attention to the Sandy River project.
It's not clear what happened after that, as the Oregon Journal went out of business later that year and they covered the garden effort much more closely than the Oregonian ever did. Probably the same thing that often happens with efforts that start as one person's dream and that rely on volunteers to keep going. Especially when that one person was already a retiree and eventually retires "for real" from civic efforts too and moves out of the area to be near family, as the Chuinards did in 1987. He had already moved on to a new project at that point, trying to persuade the city to build a Lewis and Clark museum out at Kelley Point Park. He and the committee had originally wanted to build the museum here, piggybacking on a proposed ODOT port of entry, as Chuinard explained in a 1984 op-ed in the Oregonian.
He argued this was a great location for a museum (although the State Parks Division and environmental groups disagreed) and a logical follow-up for the still-incomplete nature trail. The museum would have been located in the still-barren 12 acre plot north of the 'main' park, between the railroad and I-84, which I think is where the county's short-lived offroad motorcycle park was located during the 1970s.
an August 1985 article has more details about the proposal.
The problem with the trail, Chuinard said, is that the flowers do not bloom at the same time, and most are not at their peak during the short season of pleasant weather in the Columbia Gorge, when visitors are not subjected to rain or the cold east wind.
Which is true of the entire Northwest, frankly. He went on to suggest that we were rapidly falling behind Washington State in both quantity and quality of Lewis & Clark visitor centers, which is an odd sort of arms race to have. But I suppose that was how things got funded in 1984.
The present-day trail does not exactly look as though it has 22+ garden clubs and civic groups avidly maintaining their individual plots. Some of the signage has been updated fairly recently, though, possibly for the Lewis & Clark bicentennial in 2005. One of the newer signs concerns native medicinal plants, and has a sidebar snarking about the Lewis & Clark expedition dosing themselves to the gills with mercury and other toxic patent medicines of the era, I guess for a little contrast. Which is a fair point, and not one a circa-1980 sign would have mentioned, necessarily, even if the nature trail's main proponent wrote an entire book on the subject.
The second trail is an obvious but unnamed trail that heads south and upward from the landscaped area. This is the access trail for the popular rock climbing area along the southwest-facing part of Broughton Bluff. This area is enormously popular when weather permits, which was not the case the day I visited. Which is great if (like me) you just want to take photos of the rocks and not try going up them. I only followed the trail to the point where you're looking almost straight down at the old Columbia River Highway bridge over the Sandy River, but I gather it dead-ends at the state park property line, not much further south from there. The potentially-climbable cliffs continue for a while south from there, but they're on private property and it seems the owners don't want the liability issues, and also don't want to sell. In terms of the trail having other features, there's one small and (as far as I know) unnamed waterfall along the way. I don't know whether it runs year round or it's just seasonal. Either way, I can't say it's worth going out of your way to see if you aren't there to climb any rocks, given all of the vastly better hiking options a few miles to the east. Small bit of trivia here, the place is named for a junior officer on the the George Vancouver expedition who made it roughly this far upriver, and is best known for naming Mt. Hood and Mt. St. Helens, along with a bunch of other names that didn't stick, like calling the Sandy the "Barings River", after the British bank that imploded in 1995 after a rogue trader lost all their money. Broughton didn't name the bluff after himself, though. That came later, after a 1926 lobbying campaign by local Girl Scouts.
In addition to the main trail, a scramble route goes to the top of the bluff, starting right at the point where the main trail rounds the sharp corner from the north face of the bluff to the southwest face. I only found out this existed afterward so I don't have any photos from the top, but blog posts at Casing Oregon and Columbia River Gorgeous include photos from up there, and a video from TheCascadeHiker shows both trails, first the main one, then backtracking to the one to the top. Unfortunately the park boundary also runs along or very close to the top of the bluff so you can't really go anywhere once you've made it to the top. A century ago (early November 1920) you could take a streetcar here from downtown Portland, climb the bluff (which went by "Troutdale Butte" back then) and then east and up to the top of Chamberlain Hill and back, but I get the impression that hikers and climbers and random tourists wore out their welcome here decades ago. In any event it's just ordinary farm country up there once you're away from the edge, and not one of those weird Venezuelan islands in the sky, especially not the kind with dinosaurs. Could be worse, though; if Portland's urban growth boundary didn't exist, the entire top of the bluff would likely be a nasty gated community full of ugly McMansions, and security goons from the HOA would pour boiling oil down on anyone who dared to climb here. So there's that.
As it is, the top of the bluff is just ordinary farm country growing normal farm products. It did have one brief brush with semi-importance back in 1961, when the top of Broughton Bluff was part of an elaborate surveying project by the US Coast & Geodetic Survey, the agency behind all of those pre-GPS vintage survey markers. This project involved a team of engineers, families in tow, traveling from place to place, marking and surveying, building and disassembling survey towers, measuring and remeasuring until the exact position of everything was nailed down to 1/300th of an inch, then going somewhere else and starting the process all over again, like the world's nerdiest traveling circus. I imagine that probably made for a weird childhood. The article mentions that the survey had been delayed by higher-priority projects like laying out Cold War missile bases.
September 1974 article on climbing here, mentions in passing that there are a few other things to do, like smelt dipping (no longer possible since the smelt runs collapsed in the 80s), camping (replaced by the garden), and dirt bike riding (also abolished, and replaced by an empty lot). While chain smoking or working your way through a case of Blitz beer or both whenever you had a hand free.
And finally, at the far corner of the landscaped triangle, an unsigned trail heads east into the forest, and off the edge of most maps of the park. It's clearly a "real" trail, constructed by people who knew what they were doing, and not just a random use path, and it seems to get some level of regular maintenance, and you get the distinct impression that a trail like this is bound to go somewhere interesting, sign or no sign. So you keep going, doing a roughly flat, roughly straight traverse east, part of the way up the bluff and parallel to I-84 and the railroad (which you are never out of earshot of). But after a couple of miles it just sort of fades out and ends, and you can either turn back at that point or try bushwhacking further for a while and then turn back. The only real destination along the way is a stretch with several house-sized boulders toward the end of the (obvious) trail, known to local climbers as "The Zone". I can't say it's an amazing nature experience, but if you think of it as more of a very easterly city park along the lines of Portland's Forest Park, it's actually not that bad. I feel like I need to say this because the OregonHikers page about the trail snarks about it (which is quite uncharacteristic for them), saying they only did it just for the sake of completeness.
So why is there a trail here, if it just sort of ends at a random spot in the forest? That isn't typically what trails do. One clue is that although there's no sign for the trail in the park, if you look at the right maps you'll see occasional scattered references to it here and there calling it the "Lewis and Clark Trail 400" or some variation thereof. (I'm almost positive the name also appeared on an official PDF map of the park at one point, but I can't seem to find a link to that map now.) The "400" is the key detail: Under the longstanding trail numbering scheme in the Gorge (which I think is a Forest Service thing, although some trails on state land use it as well in the name of consistency), trails are all numbered 400-something, (other than the Gorge bit of the Pacific Crest Trail, which is #2000 for its whole length), and the number 400 was reserved early on for a hypothetical east-west trail stretching 90 miles or so from Portland out to Hood River or possibly The Dalles, depending on who you ask. This trail has never really existed over that full distance, but a few segments do, and it's slowly grown (and occasionally shrunk) over time when people take an interest in the idea for a while and funding becomes available. A couple of segments further east are known as the Gorge Trail #400, which I'm sure I've mentioned here once or twice. So right now the official west end of the westernmost existing chunk of Gorge Trail is at Angels Rest, which is obviously nowhere close to Troutdale, and that's how it's been for decades. That is, except for the obscure bit of dead-end trail we're visiting here. Which I guess makes it the trail equivalent of a freeway ghost ramp.
Note that Trail #400 is not the same thing as the under-construction Historic Columbia River Highway trail. It covers more or less the same ground but is a very different proposal, a paved path aimed primarily at road cyclists, often immediately next to the freeway, and encompassing surviving bits of the old highway where possible. I've walked on a few parts of it, and it's fine, I guess, but it's nobody's idea of a relaxing nature experience. And since the entire theme of the effort is around the old highway, the initial part of the route involves riding on the old road, sharing it with Winnebagos and monster SUVs and so forth. Which is not doable at all if you're on foot.
It's also not the same thing as the Hatfield Memorial Trail, which is supposed to be an east-west backcountry route, staying as far away from civilization as possible under the circumstances. A trail along these lines was proposed by the Sierra Club way back in 1971, and a fairly long route can be assembled out of parts of several existing trails, though some of these trails receive little or no Forest Service maintenance and it's an ongoing struggle to keep them from being taken back by the forest.
An early version of that idea (or part of it) was the proposed Talapus Trail, which would have connected Larch Mountain to Wahtum Lake by way of the Bull Run Watershed, a large area that's normally closed to all public access because it's the primary source of Portland's drinking water supply. I am not sure how that was supposed to work, whether they were going to tweak the closure boundary or just accept that a few backcountry hikers wouldn't be a problem, or they just hadn't figured that out yet. The notion being kicked around as early as 1974 (back when calling it "Hatfield Memorial" would have alarmed Senator Hatfield), and an August 1980 article was already looking ahead to a third east-west linkage once Gorge Trail #400 and the Talapus route were done and dusted. This third route would have run right along the Columbia shoreline, which isn't even on anyone's long-term ideas list anymore, as far as I've seen. It always shocks me to see how many grand plans of the 60s and 70s came to a crashing halt on election day 1980; I'm sure that there were a few clunker ideas in there, but I'd love to go visit the timeline where the entire Reagan Administration never happened, and the wingnuts and their ideas never took over, and just see how the year 2020 played out over there versus here. It can't have been worse, anyway
The notion of a Trail 400 that specifically started here seems to have burst onto the scene in 1979 with the state's new Columbia Gorge parks master plan, which envisioned what it called a "low-level gorge trail":
Proposed development of trail head parking for the "low level gorge trail", which, when fully completed, will complete a link for hikers from Troutdale to The Dalles, a distance of 90 miles. Portions of the trail have been completed, but access through some western properties is still being examined.
Toward the end of the article it mentions that funding was uncertain, and construction probably wouldn't begin until 1981-83 on any of the listed projects, and that was dependent on federal money coming through. Other interesting and sadly unbuilt ones include a trail between Rooster Rock and Latourell Falls, and a railroad underpass connecting Wahkeena Falls and Benson State Park. The plan mentions that the old Rooster Rock Wagon Road -- which we visited a few years ago in the Palisade Falls post -- would connect to the low-level trail as it passed through the area.
So the first problem with the trail and the rest of these grand plans was the date: 1979 was immediately before Ronald Reagan was elected and began slashing non-military budgets, and stomping on anything that looked vaguely environmental just to spite the hippies. The envisioned construction period also overlapped with Oregon's deep multiyear recession of the 1980s. So without money or political interest, the project fell by the wayside and has never been revived, just like other grand projects of the 1970s like switching to the metric system.
As for why it stops where it does, the current trail extends past the eastern edge of the park and out onto Forest Service land for a while, and remains largely federal as far as the Corbett area other than some assorted bits of ODOT-owned land and one stretch owned by the Union Pacific railroad. It's as if the state built as much as they could on their own and then the feds never picked up the baton. As for the railroad bit, I didn't see anything saying they were blocking the proposal, which I think would've been newsworthy if that had happened. I did see that they'd tried subdividing it into residential(?) lots at one point but didn't sell any of them, and the land hasn't been buildable since 1986 due to National Scenic Area rules). So maybe they'd still be up for selling that area, or at least doing an easement for a trail, though I obviously have no way to know that.
November 1981 - Multnomah County closed a mile of Henderson Road between Latourell & Bridal Veil, though holding on to the old right-of-way to maybe become part of trail #400 someday. The article mentions that the old road had once been part of the 1870s wagon road between the Sandy River and The Dalles. I gather the steep, long-closed, long-forgotten (but again never-vacated) Latourell Hill Road was once part of the old wagon route too, but I don't know if it was ever envisioned as a trail route.
Small calendar item from September 30th 1983, noting volunteers could come join a "work party clearing new low-level Gorge Trail No. 400 east from Lewis & Clark State Park".
Further east, the state was trying to arrange a land swap with the federal Bureau of Land Management for land further east along the proposed trail route; the article describes the 2 mile long parcel as 100 acres of steep north-facing bluffs next to the rail line, but I can't pin down which parcel they're talking about or who owns it now. The Friends of the Columbia Gorge was strongly opposed to the idea. It seems that a couple of rare and potentially endangered plants were known to live in the area: Sullivantia oregana and Dodecatheon dentatum, and the Friends figured they would no longer be protected properly with the plants in state hands. Thinking BLM would do a better job than the state would of protecting the environment seems a bit odd in the 2020s but maybe things were different back then.
The trail also ran into a degree of local opposition, as the park had a sketchy reputation back in those days, beyond the usual urban legends about highway rest areas. The trail was proposed around the same time the campground was removed, and the county-run dirtbike park next door was still there, and rural residents to the east found it easy to imagine the trail would funnel an urban crime wave in their direction. For example, a 1979 article about a longtime resident of the tiny town of Latourell (it's just downhill from Latourell Falls, but not visible from the Gorge highway) raised concerns about a proposal in the new state plan to turn a local historic house into a youth hostel for people through-hiking the new trail. Local residents strongly opposed the idea, the word "youth" being even more loaded then than it is now.
As another example, a 1982 article lamenting that 37 different government agencies were involved in managing the Sandy River area. mentioned rowdy campers at Dodge Park as one of the issues facing the area, holding all-night beer parties and such and driving away respectable visitors. A State Parks representative mentioned that similar problems had receded at Lewis & Clark after the campground had been removed. Other people wanted to talk about habitat protection, but the paper reported that toward the end, after the lurid stuff and the riling people up about big gummint bureaucrats.
By 1984 the Oregonian was wringing its hands again about the now campground-free, dirtbike-free park, as the area nearby saw its second homicide in as many years. I haven't looked up the news stories about those but it sounds like both were related to arguments between transients. The mayor of Troutdale was freaking out and blaming the park, conveniently outside city limits. A spokesman for the county sheriff's office explained that "Other than those two murders, we have no phenomenal problem at Lewis and Clark state park", to which the mayor responded "Don't you think one murder a year is too much?", as if this was now a long term trend. The article went on to lump in a recent homicide at a truck stop half a mile away, a sexual assault in Troutdale Community Park (now Glenn Otto Park) three years earlier, and the general unruly crowd atmosphere at Glenn Otto as if those were valid data points about Lewis & Clark being scary. I've complained before about how bad crime reporting was in the 80s, but it still startles me. Nobody was even trying to figure out actual cause and effect, just pointing fingers at everything randomly and freaking out even further when that approach didn't move the needle.
Despite all that, the effort forged ahead for another couple of years. Here's a 1985 interview with the Oregon State Parks regional administrator. The article explains that a trail from Troutdale to Hood River had been a longtime dream of his, noting however that some of the remaining parts would be expensive, like at Tooth Rock west of Eagle Creek. There's also a bit about another then-ongoing project to build a four-mile trail between Bridal Veil and Latourell Falls, with improved views of the falls at Shepperds Dell, which I imagine would have doubled as another Trail #400 segment. Seems this was never constructed either, which is a shame. The interview was in conjunction with the grand opening of another Gorge Trail segment further east, between Ainsworth and Yeon State Parks. Unfortunately that entire segment was destroyed by an enormous landslide in 1996 and has never been rebuilt.
Someone giving a presentation about the proposed trail at Portland State in 1986.
The 1986 talk was the last mention of the proposal that I could find in the newspaper archives, but I still had several open questions, like exactly what the intended route was, for example. I ended up looking for old planning documents to see if they offered any more clues, and luckily the 1994 state parks plan for the Gorge mentions the proposed trail a few times. (For whatever reason, all of the state parks department's master plan archives vanished off the net sometime in the last few months as part of a site redesign. But as usual, Archive.org has our back, or mine anyway.) From page 15:
Trail connections and/or trailhead development is proposed for a low elevation route from Lewis and Clark to the OPRD properties just west of Hood River via segments of the HCRH and via other new routes, and from the east side of Hood River to Mosier along the Historic Columbia River Highway (HCRH) to Mosier.
and then on page 26:
Trail use continues to be popular in the Gorge especially at the higher elevations. There has been an effort by recreationists for many years to see the establishment of a series of connections through the gorge at a lower elevation and along the river where possible. Most notable among these efforts are the Historic Columbia River Gorge Highway (HCRH) connection projects, the trail 400 project, and the Chinook Trail.
(If the name "Chinook Trail" is unfamiliar, you aren't alone; I had never heard of it before either, but it's a long-term effort to build a backcountry trail over on the Washington Side of the Gorge, eventually connecting with either the Gorge Trail, or the Hatfield Trail, or a fresh new backcountry trail on the Oregon side to form a big long loop.)
Anyway, in a later section of the plan, we finally get some details about what they had in mind. (The acronym NSA in this context means the then-new Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, not the shadowy intelligence agency.)
#1 Lewis and Clark to Portland Women's Forum, MP CRGNSA trail proposal No. T27. Trail Maps 1 and 2
OPRD's proposal for this trail deviates from the NSA proposal in that Chamberlain Road is used rather than trying to build a trail through the complex ownerships near Corbett Station. By constructing a pedestrian walk along the county road, a trail connection could be accomplished much sooner and at less expense. Easements will be needed across the north face of Chanticleer Point.
The connection of this trail to Portland Women's Forum cannot be accomplished until parking is expanded at Portland Women's Forum to accommodate the long term parking requirements of trail users. Additional trailhead parking could be developed at the Corbett Station quarry if a suitable trail route from the quarry to Portland Women's Forum or from the Lewis and Clark to Portland Women's Forum trail route could be found.
Google Books has the 1992 Federal management plan for the new scenic area, which describes that proposal in a couple of paragraphs:
Trail Description: The land is primarily in private ownership. This trail would provide a link between the Portland/Vancouver metropolitan area and the Scenic Area. The trail would provide views of both the Columbia River and the pastoral landscape of the western Gorge. This trail would form part of a loop trail that links to the Sandy River Delta Trail. Recreation Intensity Class: mostly 1.
Development Proposal: Four miles of new trail are proposed to provide opportunities for hiking and scenic appreciation. There is an existing trailhead opportunity at Lewis and Clark State Park; a parking area is proposed at the existing borrow pit at Corbett Station in the GMA. Some sections of the trail traverse steep bluff lands and would require sophisticated design and construction.
For whatever reason, the Management Plan "as amended thru September 1st 2011" deletes the entire section of concrete proposals and just speaks somewhat vaguely about high level goals.
Getting back to the state plan, it has maps after page 100, which show the trail eventually connecting to the old wagon road between Portland Womens Forum and Rooster Rock, and then making its way over to the Vista House. The maps also show that the proposed trail would be both Trail 400 and the Chinook Trail; following the maps further east, the two routes diverge above Multnomah Falls, Trail 400 following its familiar (if currently closed) route, and the Chinook Trail taking a parallel route further south/uphill, and this arrangement continuing all the way to Hood River. I imagine this would let you hike to Hood River and back mostly as a loop (albeit a long, skinny sort of loop), or put together more reasonably-sized loops out of parts of the two plus connecting trails. The key detail here is that significant chunks of the Chinook route would be new construction, and as the first route to Hood River is not exactly making rapid progress, it feels like building a brand-new second route is a bit of a longer-term vision, to put it mildly. Maybe it'll be ready around the time the gorge has fully regrown from the Eagle Creek fire, who knows.
Metro's 1992 Metropolitan Greenspaces Master Plan described the proposal: "The Chinook Trail is a proposed Columbia River Gorge loop trail that will connect Vancouver Lake, Maryhill State Park, Biggs, and Portland. It will travel in part on existing trails. The concept was formalized in 1988 as a rim-top trail where possible."
These plans only get a very brief mention in the 2011 Master Plan for Lewis & Clark specifically, which mostly focuses on parking and congestion, and improved river access. It does acknowledge that the trail exists and ideas for it are out there, but doesn't propose doing anything about them.
[I]t is a hub for a series of existing and proposed trails that will eventually connect Portland with the City of Hood River. This includes an eventual link with the famous “40-Mile Loop” trail network on the east side of the Sandy River on federal and state land and with cycling routes along the Historic Columbia River Highway
and a few pages later:
There is a walking trail at the foot of Broughton Bluff along the edge of the lawn that extends northeast along the north face of the bluff at least as far as the eastern property boundary.
The state's 2015 Gorge master plan (which I guess supersedes the 1994 plan) more or less includes the 2011 plan by reference and repeats the ideas from there (chapter 8, pages 148-149, here). The map on page 149 incorrectly shows the trail heading off onto private property, which (as I noted above) is not actually true. Which is not an encouraging sign.
More recently, Metro -- Portland's regional government, which runs Oxbow Park further south on the Sandy (among many other things) -- has taken an interest in the long-running proposed trail, calling it the "Lower Columbia Gorge Trail". A 2014 map from Metro shows it as a "proposed regional trail" heading east off the map as a connection from Portland to the Gorge. The agency's 2017 "Green Trails" guide describes it as one of several future "inter-regional" trails, along with the Willamette Greenway south to Eugene-or-so, and two routes west to different destinations on the coast. The interesting thing about this is that, per a 2019 map, the "Sandy River Connections" project area is one of 24 "acquisition target areas" where they're interested in buying land or paying for easements. Historically they've just been interested in property along the Sandy, but the maps shows their "ok to buy within this area" radius, which looks like some number of miles past the urban growth boundary, and everything out to Rooster Rock seems to be fair game, in theory. And it's basically all state and federal land east of there, so that might be sufficient to fill in the gaps. Metro has local bond money specifically dedicated for this, too, where the state rarely does, and the feds are rarely interested these days (though that might change after the inauguration in January, unless Trump blows up the world before that.)
Which brings us to a "Now What?" section. For the sake of argument, let's assume first that schools, healthcare, housing, antipoverty programs and other concrete human needs are being funded properly, and there's money left over after that, and we don't need to have a zero-sum argument over what to cut in order to build something new. Let's also assume that within the recreation budget, maintenance and repair is already funded, so we aren't trading off against restoring Eagle Creek and other fire-damaged areas, reviving ones that were abandoned or relegated to unmaintained status like the old Perdition Trail at Multnomah Falls, the viewpoint at the top of Wahkeena Falls, and so on.
This is not the most wild or scenic stretch of the route. not aware of any key points of interest along the route, and land ownership around corbett is an issue. and I'm not personally sold that it would be important enough to buy except from willing sellers. the current thing that attracts funding is the bike-centric HCRH Trail, which follows the 1916 route of the old highway. eventually there may be an interest in doing the same thing for the circa-1940 pre-I-84 water-level route (per the Tunnel Point post), for cyclists who'd like to skip the tourist traffic (or just the additional elevation gain and loss) along the initial chunk of old highway. So a hiking trail could maybe piggyback on that in spots where there isn't space or money to build both. with or without HCRH trail involvement, one slightly-outside-the-box idea might be to cross the overpass at Corbett and walk along the river for a bit, either to Rooster Rock (where there's another existing overpass) or maybe to a new pedestrian bridge over I-84 at Tunnel Point and heading east from there to squeeze past Palisade Falls
- The very first piece of the park that the state owned was actually the gravel parking area just across the river from Glenn Otto Park, purchased way back in July 1936, probably for the sake of public fishing access. They don't appear to have named it right away, and the old survey map for it just calls it "Parking Area".
- land acquired in 1954 in a 3-way deal: Timber co. buys the land, swaps it for non-scenic BLM land elsewhere, BLM donates it to the state. Article says the goal was to eventually assemble a big park running the whole length of the gorge, which I suppose the National Scenic Area basically is.
- September 1955 article on the soon-to-open park
An article from December 1965 about what would eventually become Estacada's Milo McIver State Park explained that it was needed as a safety valve because existing parks along the Sandy and Columbia were overflowing with visitors. Rooster Rock and Dabney each attracted 250k visitors that year, and Lewis & Clark pulled in 350k people, who were packed into the park's "anemic" 56 acres like an "outdoor sardine can". For contrast, in 2019 Rooster Rock was the 19th most visited state park with 667k visitors, down 29% from the previous year for some reason. I can't find numbers for the others since they didn't make the top 20, or the bottom 20.
A 1965 article inventorying parks and recreational opportunities in East Multnomah County mentioned Lewis & Clark as one of the area's shiniest and newest parks, and explained that we would soon need even more parks like it. The author explained that in the time before white settlers arrived, local tribes had a word for the ennui that comes with having too much free time and no work that needed doing, in the months after the salmon and berries had been dried for the winter and so forth. He argued a similar situation was looming for Americans of the near future: "The Portland urban dweller of A.D. 2000 — perhaps even sooner — will find himself suffering from the same malady, what with the coming 30- and 20-hour week, the extended leisure time, and an increasingly easy life." .
- October 1967, in the upcoming election Troutdale voters were being asked to approve a controversial sewer bond issue, which on one hand would result in the city no longer dumping raw sewage into the river, just upstream of the park's public beaches. On the other hand, doing this would cost money.
- 1969, a Multnomah County Commissioner was bound and determined to site a new metro-area garbage dump in the sandy river delta, just downstream, although locals opposed the idea. Residents must have prevailed eventually, since there's no dump there now.
- A 1969 article explained that conventional wisdom among local park rangers -- including one responsible for both Dabney and Lewis & Clark -- was that out-of-state visitors were typically cleaner and nicer than local residents, contradicting a widespread public notion of the time. A visiting family from Pendleton at Lewis & Clark reported that someone had knocked their tent over, accusing them of being Californians and demanding that they leave the state.
- August 1970, county turned down a proposed rock quarry south of the park, after turning down another proposal in corbett, 2 miles from Crown Point. The developer couldn't see why people opposed the idea, explaining that the quarrying was temporary and he planned to build houses on the site as soon as the mining phase was done.
- August 1971, park hosted a unit of Green Berets who were retracing the Lewis & Clark route for some reason.
- October 1972, bit about historical sites being gobbled up by development. seemed to focus on lewis & clark sites, including here, which had no historical marker at the time. gov. mccall promised to fix that particular detail
- May 1974
E.G. Chuinard of the Lewis & Clark Trail Committee (seen above/later) writes in response to an earlier editorial about typos on a sign at the park. He explains that the typos are how Lewis & Clark spelled things and are thus historical in nature and not incorrect.
- the aforementioned editorial, titled "History in Misspelled Words".
- the coming-soon article
- the unveiling, with photo
- December 1975, a columnist waxing on about a seasonal waterfall a bit upstream of the park. (w/ photo)
- March 1976, the county had leased land for the motorcycle park as an alternative after passing a restrictive off-road vehicle ordinance. forgot to rezone the land for the new use at first.
. a story on the same page mentions the shiny new Trojan Nuclear Plant was being swarmed by smelt and had to report it to the feds.
- March 1977, report on the annual smelt run
- September 1977: In an extremely 1970s episode, the park was the destination of a 5 mile river race from Dabney State Park, sponsored by the local 7-Up bottler and US Army recruiters, as one of many local festivities organized around the annual Jerry Lewis Telethon. (!!) Local telethon content was hosted by Ramblin' Rod. Other events included a 3-day CB radio jamboree, and a disco car wash at Beaverton Mall. leading up to this were a few weeks of danceathons, skateathons, bike races, raft races, waffle feeds, and shoot outs.
- July 1978, mentioned on a list of good picnic spots around the state. The list is interesting. hagg lake, blue lake, baldock rest area were state parks, cook park was washington county, belle view point was publicly accessible
- May 1981, legislative hearing endorses the so-called "40 mile loop", now "the intertwine", which
- August 1981, adjacent county land had been operated as a motorcycle park, but closed due to budget cuts. Recall that the county had opened it after an ordinance cracked down on offroad motorcycles. But closing the motorcycle facility did not revive o
