Hood River Loops

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Footnote(s)

1.

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

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2.

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

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

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

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

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

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3.

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

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

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

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4.

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

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5.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lewis & Clark State Park

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.

1. Lewis & Clark Nature Trail
2. Broughton Bluff Trail
3. Lewis & Clark Trail No. 400

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Lewis and Clark Nature Trail

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.

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Broughton Bluff Trail

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.

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Lewis & Clark Trail No. 400

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

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Historical Odds and Ends

• 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