HCRH Milepost 68

Next up we're back on the Columbia River Highway milepost project again, which we left back at Milepost 36 at the Ainsworth intersection off I-84. Or at the unusual Milepost 43 on the east side of Cascade Locks, if you think it counts. This time around we've skipped ahead to Milepost 68, which is located just east of Hood River, near the end of the dead-end (for cars) segment of the old highway and one mile east of the Hood River Loops, where Milepost 67 is supposed to be and currently isn't. I would like to tell you that the rest of the mile east of the Loops is an overlooked scenic treasure, and you shouldn't miss it even though it's not on the way to anywhere at all. But it really isn't, and from the loops to the gate on the road is basically just generic Gorge forest scenery, with no waterfalls or scenic viewpoints or other attractions. I mean, obviously besides the milepost here. Then, shortly after Milepost 68 you get to the west end of another bike/pedestrian-only segment of the old highway, officially known as the "Mark O. Hatfield West Trailhead", named after one of the state's longest-serving 20th century US senators. This car-free stretch continues for another four miles, ending at the other Hatfield trailhead just east of Mosier.

Vintage ODOT maps of the old highway (including maps 3B-15-8 (December 1922), and 6C-15-7 (which is not currently available online)) show another long-vanished state park here, the "Hood River-Mosier Forest Wayside", which began a short distance past milepost 68 and continued east past milepost 70. Map says it was an "Official Park", indicating it was given a high priority for maintenance and visitor facilities and whatnot, but I think it was always just intended to be a stretch of protected scenery.

The obscure little park got a brief mention in State Parks of the Columbia Gorge (1946, p.47-49), 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.

The Hood River-Mosier Forest Wayside begins at Mile Post 68.22, a mile or so east of Hood River, and ends at Mile Post 70.48, a little over two miles of highway distance. The tracts are described last being in Sections 31, 32, and 33, Township 7 North of Range 11 East, W.M., all in Hood River County, containing 101.50 acres, more or less. These tracts are designated in the deeds as being "Indian Deed Inherited Lands", conveyed to the State of Oregon by noncompetent "Cascade" Indians who were of Hood River origin. Their names and the respective acreages are: Katie Coon, heir of Charles Coon and Jack Coon, 36.83 acres; Thomas Jim, a single man, 28.60 acres; Martha Aleck, widow of Joe Aleck, 15.07 acres; William Johnson and Isabel Johnson, his wife, Frank Johnson and Celia Johnson, his wife and Edward Johnson and Esther Johnson, his wife, 21.00 acres. All were respected citizens of this community. In his younger days Jack Coon was a noted bear hunter. For several years Joe Aleck, Martha's husband, carried the White Salmon mail and ferried passengers across the Columbia in an open, not too seaworthy skiff. He had three sons all of whom met death in river accidents. At the time of her death in 1939, Martha Aleck was the oldest member of the Hood River Indians, erroneously reputed to be a hundred years old. She was a small child, possibly two years of age, at the time of the Indian troubles at the Cascades in 1856. Her father was warned by a friendly Klickitat Indian that the Yakimas planned to attack the settlement the next day. To avoid being involved in the conflict he put Martha, her mother, and their meager possessions into his canoe and left for Hood River at midnight before the trouble started. This would fix Martha's age at eighty five, more or less, when she died.

The east end of this wayside forest is approximately a half mile from the Hood River-Wasco County line, and marks what is practically the east limit of the western Oregon Douglas fir forest area along the Columbia River Highway. Within the length of the wayside forest there are two small, privately owned, triangular tracts that corner on the highway right of way and interrupt its state owned continuity. Although the acreage is not great, their sylvan value is high, especially in this locality, which punctuates the waning edge of the fir forest that borders the highway on its march from the ocean to the treeless region beyond.

The only improvements in this wayside were fire breaks fire hazard reduction and a lineal survey, by CCC forces in 1934.

Boardman's recommendations were quite simple, as they tended to be for scenic corridor-type parks:

The waysides should always be kept in their natural state. Connecting forties should be acquired.

The bit explaining how the state got the land is not great, to put it mildly. At one point federal policy was to divide reservations up into individual allotments, as a way to sort of pressure people to adopt western ways and become respectable yeoman farmers just like their caucasian neighbors. And if they didn't do that to your satisfaction, on your preferred timetable, it was apparently rather easy to have them declared "incompetent", which caused their land to be forfeited to the state or to local governments, and then often sold off to the highest bidder. And this is how various reservations were progressively whittled away to nothing, all the while blaming the victims for somehow lacking personal responsibility. The history blurb does not elaborate on exactly when various people were kicked off of their land, whether it was done specifically for the highway and the state park or if it had happened years earlier.

The state doesn't own the land now. When present-day Interstate 84 opened along the river around 1953-54, the state abandoned this stretch of the state highway and let Hood River and Wasco counties take over their parts of the road, and the rules at the time said the land couldn't be a state park anymore if it no longer bordered a state highway, so they handed it off to the US Forest Service, which still owns the area. And it's safe to say that the current administration (as of 2026) absolutely will not entertain the notion of returning any land back to heirs, or tribes, or anyone, no matter how egregiously they were swindled out of it decades ago.

On another note: The state has, so far, not invested in recreating HCRH mileposts along the bike/pedestrian-only sections, so after milepost 68 there's another gap until we pick back up at number 73 outside of Mosier. This may be just as well given the next number in the sequence, so there is no, um, Milepost 69 around here just begging to be stolen constantly.

This seems like a minor nuisance, and it is, but think of all the other downstream problems that just don't occur because it's not here. First, all college campuses with fraternities are several hours' drive from here, and any would-be thieves would naturally be driving blackout drunk the whole way, both directions, so it prevents that. Then, if they make it as far as Milestone 69, a group of bros drunkenly trying to break it off at the base are likely to take some injuries in the process, given that it would be a fairly large hunk of reinforced concrete, so it not existing prevents that problem too. As well as any future injuries it would otherwise cause at subsequent frat parties, or while being endlessly stolen and stolen back and re-stolen all the way down fraternity row and back. Eventually it will end up forgotten in someone's garage, and it will be embarrassing for everyone when their kids find it, and there might be further hypothetical injuries while quickly hauling it to the dump or the nearest Goodwill.

Or suppose that one of the original thieves, now a successful real estate developer, often blames his middle-aged back problems on that fateful heist, and after a few drinks likes to refer to it as "an old 69 injury". He overuses this joke because it's the only halfway-clever one he's ever thought of. Lately, though, he's noticed it doesn't get the same laughs it did back in the 90s, especially in professional settings, but he has no idea why. Sooner or later he'll be perma-cancelled over it after using it in front of the wrong audience and video of the event hits social media.

So by simply not replacing this particular milestone, the state prevents an entire chain of cringey events. Although the sort of person who would get into this hypothetical mess in the first place will probably just get himself perma-cancelled over something else equally cringey instead.

Hood River Loops

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

Footnote(s)

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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"

Milepost 43, Cascade Locks

The next installment in the ongoing HCRH Milepost adventure is a bit of a mystery. The mostly-unbroken series of mileposts we were following since Troutdale ends at HCRH Milepost 36, at the Ainsworth interchange with Interstate 84. Now we're a few miles east of there, in Cascade Locks, toward the east end of Wa Na Pa Street (which is what the old highway is called within city limits) as the road heads toward merging onto I-84 eastbound. If you find the city fire station, across the street and a short distance east of there is a weathered wooden post with "43" inscribed on it. It's clearly not of the same vintage as the mileposts we've looked at so far, and it's not included on the ODOT map of official historic mileposts. I only know about it because Recreating the HCRH has a page about "Wood Milepost 43", and they don't seem to know any more about it than I do. One comment speculates that it can't be much older than the late 1990s seeing as it's made of (seemingly) untreated wood and it's exposed to the elements right in the middle of the Gorge, and that would roughly line up with some of the earliest work on the HCRH State Trail.

So that probably explains why the post is here. At least, off the top of my head I can't come up with any other reasonable explanations for why a post marked with a "43" might be here. Unless maybe it's a nerdy Hitchhiker's Guide + Spinal Tap crossover, and 42 is the answer to life, the universe, and everything, and then going one more in the same way that Spinal Tap speakers go up to 11. And that doesn't seem very likely, if you ask me.

Unfortunately I don't think this is where the original Milepost 43 would have been. First off, numbering on the old highway was about a mile ahead of I-84 mile numbering back at the last milepost, such that Milepost 36 was located at the freeway exit numbered 35, and after that point the present-day interstate The freeway exits on either end of Cascade Locks are both numbered 44, but the one closest to the sorta-milepost is around actual freeway mile no. 45., so it's ten miles on the interstate, and Google indicates it's 9.3 miles as the crow files, so the old road pulling it off in just 7 miles seems unlikely. The road does seem a bit magical at times, but usually not in that particular sort of way. And as far as authenticity goes, not only is it made of wood, it's also not triangular, and they seem to have -- gasp! -- used a different sans-serif font than was used on the originals. It's probably still inspired by the original mileposts, but it's not really a meticulous high fidelity reproduction, I guess is what I'm getting at here. Kind of similar to how the Stonehenge replica in the Gorge is a low-fidelity concrete design sort of inspired by the original, and did not involve making casts of the original stones, or doing a GPS-assisted laser scan of the area or frankly even looking at any detailed photos or sketches of the original.

Another issue is that at an intersection just east of here, the old highway route continues east as Forest Lane, and the stretch of present-day Wa Na Pa St. where this post is located was never actually part of the original highway.

So maybe it's just fan art of the original milestones, and it says 43 because someone especially liked how those two digits look in the font they used. Or maybe it was created for someone's 43rd birthday, or it was installed sometime in the 2000s to celebrate George W. Bush, the 43rd President of the United States. Ok, that probably isn't it. Wikipedia says 43 is a prime number, and the larger of a pair of twin primes (with 41), and the subject of a 2009 Dutch math paper, Ode aan het getal 43 ("Ode to the number 43"). Per Google Translate, it seems that in the original 1986 edition of David Wells' The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers, 43 was the smallest number that was not (yet) considered curious or interesting, and the author set out to find something interesting about it, and came up with a variety of factoids about it, mostly from number theory and group theory, none of which are likely to be why there's a 43 here.

Or maybe it was originally somewhere else; the original HCRH Milepost 43 would have been somewhere near Bonneville Dam, and maybe this post was once in the right place along that early stretch of HCRH Trail for a while, and was eventually moved here for some reason. Although it's a weird place to move something that needs a new home, and seeing as it's wood and all you'd think it would be cheaper to just recycle or burn the old post and carve a new one with the right distance on it.

In sum, I think this was probably inspired by the 'real' HCRH mileposts, but I don't know who put it here and I can't explain the location or the number on it, and if 43 really is the answer to life, the universe, everything, and one louder, the exact question must be a very peculiar one.

HCRH Milepost 36

Ok, it's time for another installment in our occasional tour of Columbia River Highway mileposts. The next one up, heading west to east, is number 36, which is the eastern-most of the ones along the main tourist corridor in the Gorge. This one also has the least picturesque and tourist-friendly setting of the series so far, and maybe the series as a whole, stuck by the side of the road in the middle of the Interstate 84 Exit 35 interchange. (I have a feeling this is one of the mileposts that was lost and then recreated in the 1980s, since its original location would have been torn up as part of freeway construction.)

Scenic and historical points of interest are a bit thin on the ground around here, but there are a handful of them:

• The old highway continues east from here for another two miles or so, if you follow the signs for "Yeon State Park", which is where you'll find the trailhead for Elowah Falls, which is worth a visit. But if you're jaded about waterfalls and just want to look at little concrete mileposts, there aren't any along that stretch of road. From my reading of what's in ODOT's GIS system, those two miles are now considered just a frontage road for I-84 and not a separate state highway of its own, and frontage roads don't get their own mileposts, certainly not ones that are out of sync with the main highway.
• Besides Elowah Falls (and the upper falls I covered recently), the first car-free stretch of HCRH Trail starts there and runs all the way to Cascade Locks.
• Closer to where we are now, the little-known Dodson Trailhead marks the east end of the first segment of Trail 400; the trail picks back up at Elowah Falls too, and from the late 1970s until the 1996 floods it was one big happy continuous trail through here. I do have a small photoset of the little-used Ainsworth-to-Dodson segment of Trail 400 if anyone's curious. Overall it isn't the most spectacular stretch of trail, but it was pretty good for "social distancing" back when people cared about that sort of thing.
• At one point in recent years there was a short stretch of HCRH Trail that allowed bikes and pedestrians to get around the Exit 35 interchange without riding in traffic or walking along the side of the road, but that has disappeared from recent maps, possibly also a victim of flood damage.
• Once you're east of the intersection, you're in the tiny burg of Dodson, or what's left of it. At one point, before the freeway came, Dodson had a couple of motels, a general store, a gas station, and a few houses off on side streets. A few people still live around here, but the commercial buildings are all just ruins at this point, and mostly not in a picturesque Route 66 kind of way. Still, if you're here and you happened to bring the semi-trusty old Holga or Diana+ along, there might be a hip artsy photo or two to be had. I have to tell you that's never been my personal experience around here, but your inspiration probably works differently than mine and you may have better luck.
• A short distance east on Frontage Rd. is a quiet residential side street, wider than the others and grandly named "McLoughlin Parkway". A century ago developers had big plans for this area. The parkway was to be the grand entrance to a new subdivision or suburb to be named "Bonnie Park", and the larger "Ellahurst" next door, and would then lead to a large public park and campground to be named for Dr. John McLoughlin, the omnipresent historical figure from early pioneer days. It seems that Ellahurst never really took off, beyond a few scattered houses and commercial buildings along the old highway. The park first belonged to the City of Portland, believe it or not, as this was a couple of years before the state park system was created, and decades before Multnomah County tried to build up a county park system, and Metro's regional park system only got going in the late 1990s. As far as I know, this was the furthest-ever outpost of the Portland city park system, except maybe Dodge Park at Bull Run, which is a unique special case anyway. The city never developed the place, and spent years trying to convince the state or the Forest Service or someone to take it off their hands. The state finally relented in 1957 and McLoughlin State Park (now a 'State Natural Area') was born. The state also hasn't done anything with the place, though at one point there was apparently a trail connection through to Trail 400 at one point. I have heard rumors that the short bit of trail between the Dodson Trailhead and McLoughlin still exists, faintly, if you know where to find it, but I haven't personally tried this and I have no idea where to look. I'm just pointing this out so I don't get sued if someone goes to look for the trail and can't find it, or they find it and are deeply underwhelmed, or they find it and it leads to Shell Beach, or the secret Truman Show exit door and they (understandably) get a case of mental anguish about our entire world being fake. I mean, hypothetically.
• There's another frontage road on the other side of I-84. Over there there's a private marina, and you can go peek at the Tumalt Creek Railroad Bridge just for the sake of completeness, and there's a small residential area along the river that technically isn't gated but does not exactly welcome visitors, per the hostile signs on either end of NE Tumalt Rd.

After this, there's one isolated milepost at Cascade Locks, another at Hood River, and then a stretch of them from Mosier to The Dalles. The good news is that I already took the photos I need for all of these; now I just need to find something interesting to say about each of these places.

Upper McCord Creek Falls

The next installment in our ongoing waterfall thing takes us back to McCord Creek in the Columbia Gorge once again, where we're finally paying a visit to Upper McCord Creek Falls. The main event here is the much larger Elowah Falls, which I did a post about wayyyy back in 2008. As I recall -- this was like 18 years ago now and I may have some details wrong -- I had a rare and precious morning of no AM meetings (or at least none where my absence would be noticed), and headed to the Gorge for a short hike with a shiny new DSLR I was trying to get the hang of. (The linked post shows I came away with distinctly mixed results, I have to say in retrospect.) The traditional McCord Creek hiking route is sort of a Y-shaped twofer: After a short distance in from the trailhead, you hit a signed trail junction. The path to the left goes to Elowah Falls, and the other one to the right heads to Upper McCord Creek Falls. So you just pick one, follow it to the named waterfall, then backtrack to the junction and do the other. So that was the plan, but I got busy fiddling around with the new camera at Elowah Falls and ran out of time for the "B side" of the hike that day. As I recall, I had to get back to the office in order to leverage some proactive synergies outside the box on a go-forward basis, thereby placing all the wood behind the arrow, and my presence was essential for this one. I did jot down a TODO item to go back and take a few photos of the upper falls for the sake of completeness, but doing that by itself just never seemed compelling enough to become a top priority.

I did swing by in mid-2017 to take some bridge photos for a different project, but shortly after that the Eagle Creek Fire put the whole area off limits for several years. These photos are from May 2021, which IIRC was just days or a week or two after the area finally reopened, coinciding with the fun and all-too-brief "Mission Accomplished" phase of the not-really-post-pandemic era.

Before we get into the big rambling historical timeline section, a quick comment about the name situation. The lower falls are "Elowah Falls", while the upper falls go by "Upper McCord Creek Falls", and it's weird and inconsistent and I don't like it, and we'll cover how it got that way down in the timeline part. So I thought I'd check the shiny new and improved USGS place name GIS server to see what it said about the upper falls and exactly who came up with this silly naming scheme. And I saw... absolutely nothing. There is no database entry for the falls under any name, which means the dumb current naming scheme is still fixable. So I'm hereby launching a national, no, global but mostly national lobbying campaign to call them "Upper Elowah Falls" instead. I'm going to conduct this campaign in my usual way, by explaining how things ought to be once or twice on the Internet and then waiting patiently for public opinion to come around, which I've noticed can sometimes take quite a while. In the meantime, the two names are equally legal, so don't be surprised if you see both names. "Upper McCord" because old newspaper articles tend to use it, and it (hopefully) keeps the search engines happy, and "Upper Elowah" because it's just better.

---

Timeline

• January 1910 article on the proposed new highway goes into great detail on the proposed route, including how the route at "Kelly Creek" would avoid conflicting with the railroad. A March 1915 construction update used the same name. A May 1915 update also used "Kelly Creek" while noting "Pierce Creek" was an alternate name for the same place.


• A January 1915 list of scenic crown jewels of the area, mentions "Pierce Creek Falls", a few months out from the Big Renaming


• The invented name "Elowah Falls" was unveiled in April 1915 along with a number of other fanciful quasi-sorta-Indian place names throughout the Gorge. The Mazamas committee that did this made it very clear that they were only renaming the lowest and most accessible waterfall on any given creek, which resulted in our destination today being named "Upper McCord" instead of "Upper Elowah", and the creek somehow not being "Elowah Creek". Turns out they made "McCord Creek" official at the same time Elowah was introduced, naming the creek after the early pioneer who built the first fishwheel on the Columbia right here at the mouth of the creek, beginning the era of modern industrial-scale overfishing. So that's not entirely great, if you ask me.


• W.R. McCord's 1923 obit -- so yeah, he was still around when they named the creek after him, which is also not great -- states he was a carpenter by trade and came to Oregon by wagon in 1850, where he helped build the first steamboat on the Willamette that same year, and ended up building fishwheels since that was a big growth industry at the time. Eventually he invented the snailshell fishwheel, which was the proverbial better mousetrap except for salmon, the world beat a path to his door, he beat a patent troll in court and lived happily ever after, basically.


• As an aside, regarding fishwheels: This device is incredibly simple and far too effective. It's just a waterwheel that spins in the current like any other, but with nets or baskets instead of regular flat paddles. You would search around and find a spot where salmon tend to congregate on their migration upstream, and build your fishwheel there. As it spins in the current, any fish that happen to congregate in the wrong spot are simply scooped out of the river and transported away for, er, processing. Any fish that notices something might be amiss here and swims off to congregate somewhere else is home free, and yet this is all it took to drive most salmon species to near-extinction within a few decades. This leads us to the inescapable conclusion that salmon are literally dumb as rocks, even dumber than the average fish in the sea, and will just sit there watching placidly and doing nothing for self-preservation as the other salmon around them are scooped up by the barrel-ful. Frankly, between salmon and the local smelt industry, a lot of local fortunes in the Northwest were built by preying on perhaps the two biggest imbeciles in the ocean. Delicious imbeciles, but still. And then, just adding insult to injury, eating them has been promoted as a "brain food" on and off for decades.


• OregonHikers thread with an old photo of McCord Creek circa 1915, showing the falls, and the old pipeline that ran along where the upper trail is now. The blog side of Curious Gorge has some photos of the old Myron Kelly pulp mill here. A caption explains that the mill consumed fast-growing cottonwood trees, not Douglas fir. The main thing for right now is that you can see that the CCC workers had a head start on making a trail here.


• Sources differ on exactly what sort of business Kelly was engaged in. Some say he had a fish processing business, others say it was a pulp mill, but either way it needed a steady water supply, and somehow just taking water out of the creek as it flowed past his business wasn't sufficient. And beyond the piping, apparently he even dug a canal connecting McCord Creek with Moffett Creek, one watershed to the east (right about here, I think), presumably to divert more water into McCord Creek than would otherwise be there, or maybe it worked the other way around in case the creek was at flood stage, to protect his pipes and infrastructure downstream. I dunno, none of this makes a lot of sense to me. But then, I've never claimed to be that kind of engineer, so who knows. And I always try to remember, just because somebody built something doesn't mean it was a good idea or that it was built properly and worked as designed.


• Some of this may be confused with Frank Warren's Warren Packing Company cannery nearby in Warrendale. At its peak in the early 1880s, the company operated as many as 14 fishwheels at various locations along the Columbia, about a third of the total. And the Columbia was the global epicenter of the canned fish industry at the time, which meant Warren and his company were kind of a big deal for a while. The hamlet of Warrendale (or what's left of it now) is named after him, and for a time the business was profitable enough to support the Warrens in a life of luxury, such that after a long trip to Europe they set out for home aboard the shiny new RMS Titanic. As the story goes, after getting his family into a lifeboat, Frank Warren stayed behind helping others and became the only Oregon resident known to have died in that disaster. Salmon stocks had been in decline since the early 1880s, and the Warren company shut down not long after the sinking. And that's the point when Rod Serling cuts in and says something about the endless mysteries of the deep, and cosmic balances, and accounts being settled one way or another.


• The fishing and timber industries along the Columbia basically ran themselves out of business in the 1910s, by catching all the fish and cutting all the trees as fast as they could. After all of that cratered, obviously it was time to build a scenic highway and invite the world to come experience the pristine natural wonders. Usually a pivot like this takes a generation or two of waiting for the oldtimers to die off, but here the change happened within a couple of years. For example here are two articles from January 1916 explaining that an additional $12,855 would be needed in order to build out the initial, rather ambitious trail plan for the Gorge, and backers hoped the feds could be persuaded to chip in toward that number. Just $100 would be earmarked for the proposed McCord Creek Trail, as this was one of the less technical proposals at the time.


• Note that the original McCord Creek Trail was quite different from the present-day trail. It began right at the old McCord Creek bridge, back before it was incorporated into I-84 (and eventually replaced), and simply followed the creek 1/4 mile upstream until it got to the lower falls, and ended there.


• A September 1917 guide to the Forest Service portion of the Gorge reads like the trail had been built and was now open. It goes on to say "The trail is being built so that you can go back of the falls and look through the ever-moving, transparent curtain of water", which is a bit surprising since the present-day trail doesn't do this. I don't think there's even a side trail that does this. Maybe they never got around to building that part, or maybe it was closed at some point due to rockfall hazards.


• August 1919, early Trails Club group hike to the McCord Creek area, described as one of the wildest and most beautiful areas along the new Columbia River Highway. The invite mentions requiring hobnail shoes, and says they'd be exploring around the rock rim of Elowah Falls, as today's trail didn't exist yet. Getting there from Portland was another story, though: Would-be explorers were told to catch the early O.W.R.&N. train east from Portland and get off at the Warrendale station a short distance from McCord Creek.



• An April 1926 hike blurb stating that the Trails Club would be paying another visit to the upper falls. Which, again, sounded like a serious challenge:

  Trails Club To Climb. -- A hike along McCord creek to the upper falls, involving some steep climbing, will be made by the Trails club Sunday. The party will leave the Park and Yamhill stage terminal at 8:30 and hike seven miles from Warrendale. Members of the party will wear mountain climbing outfits, including hob-naled boots and gloves for rope work. The hike will be led by Fred Steeble.

  The reason for all the gear is that the present-day trail inset into a sheer cliff did not exist yet, and would be built as a Depression-era CCC project. The place wasn't entirely pristine; as part of local logging operations, there was a water pipeline running along where the trail is now, built into a relatively soft rock layer that was easier to work with. Which gave someone the idea that a trail could run through the same spot. I have no idea what route this intrepid party might have taken in lieu of the current path.



• The 1927 Metsker map of the area indicates the land around the falls was still private property at this point, labeled as "Cont. Com. Bk.". Maybe that's short for "Continental Community Bank", or maybe it's "Commercial" instead of "Community"; the name doesn't ring a bell either way. but I don't claim to have an encyclopedic knowledge of historical local banks, and there isn't a whole lot of continuity between pre-1929 banks and present-day banks.


• September 1930: upcoming Mazamas hike noted they would be exploring the shiny new Nesmith Point Trail. Today it branches off the Elowah Falls trail before it encounters the main trail junction. But I'm not sure what the route was like originally; I haven't found a trail map from back then to verify this, but it's possible that today's trailhead only went to Nesmith Point at that point, and got repurposed after the original McCord Creek trailhead was lost to freeway construction. Or it may have not been the present-day trailhead, exactly, but there was a separate trailhead that just went to Nesmith Point.


• A May 1936 story belatedly telling readers all about the shiny new McCord Creek Trail extension to the upper falls, built the previous year by CCC work crews. Apparently this original trail was a bit different from today's version; the old trailhead was right at the old highway's McCord Creek Bridge, and hikers just followed the creek upstream to the falls, and continued on to today's Upper McCord side trail to get to the top. Or that's what I gather from the description, as no map is provided. The trailhead also featured a large log of petrified wood that had been uncovered by construction at some point. This log had recently been fenced off to discourage souvenir hunters, and I gather it was later dynamited as part of I-84 construction by aggressively unsentimental highway engineers. The paper had already written about people trying out the new trail for a while; they must have realized they had never actually done a grand opening announcement for the thing.


• Nov. 1935 -- Benson HS hiking club had a go at the new trail
• Same month, Jefferson HS students involved in dedicating the new trail
• February 1936: A photo on the Oregonian's "Pictorial Highlights" page showing a man in silhouette pondering a frozen Elowah Falls.
• 1937 photo of the now-sorta-protected petrified tree mentioned earlier.



• June 1936 brought a deeply weird bit of amateur archeology by the Oregon Journal's editorial board, seemingly not their first excursion into the topic. Here it is in full, presented in Comic Sans for effect:

  By Extinct Races

  The world over, and in all time, men have been killers. The cave men, in jungle days, were no exceptions -- the story of mankind has been war, war, war, even down to the late conquest of Ethiopia.

  Rock fortifications near Mosier, in the Columbia Gorge and down the river from The Dalles, were recently described on this page. They are believed by geologists to have been the work of a race of pigmies in which the men were only 4 feet in stature and to have existed about the time of the Mayans.

  Similar formations of piled rock are found near the summit of Wind Mountain, east of Carson, on the North Bank highway. The formations consist of several groups of rock terraces or breastworks in rows, one above another, at irregular intervals on the south and east slopes of the mountain. That the rockpiles were defense works of an extinct race seems certain, as behind the artificially built walls are trenches. Inquiry in the long ago of Indians in the district brought out no information as to when or by whom the fortifications were built. Back in 1908 there was a clearly defined trail up the mountainside on the north slope, but in 1926, when examination was made, it was difficult to locate the trail.

  Another curious formation that is clearly the work of man is a source of interesting speculation. It is on the left side of the cliff, at the end of the ravine leading to McCord Creek Falls, on the upper Columbia River Highway. It consists of a roughly rounded mound about two feet high and about three feet in diameter. It was the top of a small bluff, the sides of which were cut away to form a narrow, flat platform surrounding it. At a lower level is a slightly wider platform, similarly formed. It, too, is unmistakably the work of man, and, being in full view of the falls, one can easily imagine impressive Indian or other ceremonials of savages being performed to the beat of the tom-tom and the "tum-tum" of the falling waters.

  These mystic formations are the only written story of a past age and lost races. Geology should unravel them, and their meaning be interpreted to people in language they can understand. So translated and explained, the rock piles and other formations of the long, long, ago, converted into carefully kept parks in The Dalles area, would become a lure to attract many a sightseer.

  Ok, so the piled rock structures on Wind Mountain are still generally seen as artificial, but the fortification theory went out of vogue decades ago. People eventually realized that mountaintop fortifications beyond a watchtower don't make sense unless you also have cannons and gunpowder so you can actually do something about the invaders besides just watch helplessly from above. I'll just note this theory was most popular in the decades right after World War I, when anything that might look a bit like a trench transported people back to the horrors of Flanders fields.

  A present-day popular theory says something about young people going on vision quests and finding their spirit animals. But that really sounds like something New Agey white people would have dreamed up in the 70s, or something they'd have Chakotay go on about on Star Trek: Voyager in his role as a "rainforest Indian" of no particular tribe. (A situation Paramount got into thanks to inadvertently hiring a fake-Indian consultant to help define the character and his backstory.)

  As for those elaborate ceremonial platforms at McCord Creek, I don't recall seeing any such thing anywhere near the upper or lower falls. I suppose if you're in a mindset to expect ancient ruins everywhere, you're going to see them everywhere, even if nobody else does. Of course we're a much more rational and advanced society now in 2025, and you don't just go around blaming unexplained maybe-structures on mysterious extinct people of a lost age. No, these days if you think your local present-day native people could not have pulled off a given construction project centuries ago, you can just claim they had help from space aliens and leave it at that, because nobody can really prove they didn't.



• Upcoming Pathfinders hike in July 1940, one of the few announced group hikes after the initial burst of enthusiasm.


• A very detailed article in the May 26th, 1940 Oregon Journal about the classic Mt. Hood - Columbia Gorge scenic loop drive. This was about the height of the route's scenic-ness, before highway engineers began bypassing the road's many attractions in the name of speed and efficiency and capital-P Progress. Naturally Elowah Falls gets a mention, though sharing the limelight with the petrified tree.


• 1942 letter to the editor, in regard to wartime scrap metal drives and the proposed scrapping of the old Battleship Oregon, pointing out there was plenty of rusty old metal just lying around the McCord Creek area and maybe we should gather it first before chopping up any major historical artifacts.


• The 1944 Metsker map shows the land was now (unsurprisingly) owned by "State of Oregon", and it even shows more or less where the falls are. It also highlights the first waterfall over on Moffett Creek, and shows that the old YWCA campground on the 1927 map was gone by 1944.


• The upper falls trail was the scene of a harrowing rescue in May 1945: A couple and a friend of theirs were descending the trail and stopped to admire the view. The friend leaned against the pipe railing along this stretch of trail... and the railing promptly gave way, depositing him on a small just-less-than-vertical spot 50-60' below the trail, perched a few inches above the remaining 750' or so drop down to McCord Creek. The couple quickly took their clothes off to construct a makeshift rope. It was a few feet too short, so the woman tried lowering her husband on the rope to reach the guy. Still too short. Then they searched around and found a ~20' stretch of wire in the bushes, lowered the husband again, and had him stretch the wire to the rapidly-tiring friend. That was finally enough length, and they gingerly made their way back up to the trail. The article concludes:

  Secor [the friend] was given first aid at the Eagle Creek ranger station. The rope could not be photographed Tuesday night. Mr. and Mrs. Short had put it back on.

  If I had to pick one object to have on hand for an outdoor emergency, I'd still probably choose a mobile phone with bars, but if that isn't available it's hard to go wrong with some quality 1940s tailoring, I guess. Also, do NOT lean your weight on that pipe, or really any pipe that you didn't personally install.

  The other thing that occurs to me -- and I have no idea how to turn this into useful general-purpose advice -- is that if enough people had done like that 1942 letter proposed, and scoured the McCord Creek area for scrap metal, there might not have been a random 20' length of wire just lying in a bush nearby, and the whole rescue might have come up short in that case. And there's just no way people in 1942 could have known or planned ahead for any of this. It's just one of those spooky details, I guess.



• July 1952 article reminding readers that taking kids out to the Gorge is a great summer activity. The described route sounds the same as it was after 1935, but that would change in the next few years as the road was transformed piece by piece into a modern interstate freeway.


• In 1959, Elowah Falls was obscure enough to figure in an Oregon geography quiz in Dick Fagan's long-running "Mill Ends" column. You know, the column the tiny park with the leprechauns is named for.



• 1960: Narrow escape for a tugboat crewman just off the mouth of McCord Creek when the boat capsized while it and two other tugs were repositioning a dredging ship. Not really related to anything else in the story, but the newspapers were pretty light on Elowah Falls news in the 1950s and 1960s. In other news on the same page, a Troutdale foundryman was declared the victor of the town's annual smelt-eating contest, after gobbling 122(!) of the greasy little fish during the two-hour contest.

  
  

  And before you get the idea that 1960 was a sweet and innocent time in Oregon, the main story on the page concerned the state Eugenics Commission, which had just refused an unnamed woman's request to have her tubes tied due to not wanting any more children, and being unable to afford the procedure. They turned her down, stating they only acted to "protect society from those who are mentally ill or defective", and by law had no official interest in people's economic conditions. The article notes that a month earlier, Governor Hatfield had angrily denied accusations that he favored sterilizing "unwed mothers". The article tentatively suggests that just maybe it might be a good idea in some cases, strictly on a voluntary basis, given the high cost to society of "illegitimate children". And today, over six decades later, one of the two major political parties in the US is still trying to drag us back to those days. But I'm digressing, and you didn't come here to read about politics, and the more I write about politics the more stressed and unhappy it makes me.



• Mentioned in a 1964 article on driving the Gorge-Mt. Hood loop. It calls the falls "McCord Creek Falls", which was common for a while. Around the same time people started using "Tanner Creek Falls" instead of "Wahclella Falls", and "Moffett Falls" or "Moffett Creek Falls" instead of "Wahe Falls", and in general the use of romanticized Indian and pseudo-Indian place names assigned by white people just sort of fell out of favor for a while, but somehow not in a way that was of any benefit to native people.


• March 1975 article is a tale about what exploring the Gorge was like before the internet. The author glimpsed Elowah Falls from the freeway a few times, and finally she and her husband went looking for it, finally running across the modest trailhead at Yeon State Park. The signage at the time mostly talked about Beacon Rock across the river, and the doings of Lewis and Clark and the Oregon Trail pioneers, and not so much about the trails that started here or where they went, so the couple went into the trip not knowing what to expect. Sounds like they were rather bowled over by the experience. Which is about what it was like when I went there the first time, circa 1990.


• A letter to the editor in response reminds everyone that the lower falls are called "Elowah Falls", not "McCord Creek Falls", despite what you might think going by what the other falls are called. It would have been so easy to avoid this naming mess almost exactly 60 years earlier, but no....


• A July 1977 article describes the trail without all the pre-internet research difficulties, and grumbles about people picking all the wildflowers (which is kind of an anachronism too). Like the 1975 article, it notes that the trail to Elowah Falls ended at the creek at that time. At one point it mentions the iron railing on the way to the upper falls, which (she says) is there for you to lean against. Please recall the 1945 incident I mentioned earlier and note that this railing is now close to 90 years old at this point and substantial parts of it may be original, and any extended warranties the state may have bought on it have long since expired, and it just flat-out looks sketchy, and even if it's in perfect condition, recall that the average hikers of 1935 (and, frankly, 1977) were, um, a bit more svelte than their present-day counterparts. I am not pointing fingers at you, personally, of course, or at myself for that matter; I'm just saying that the combined weight of either of us, or both of us, along with that one mysterious stranger up ahead who's also leaning on the same pipe while gobbling donuts from a box, taken as a whole, may verge on exceeding certain engineering tolerances.


• The upper falls figured in several Roberta Lowe columns in the Oregon Journal over 1981-82. The paper was in the throes of going out of business just then, which might have emboldened her in adding some of the more advanced details in her hike ideas.


• April 1981 column inserts the Elowah Falls trail and Upper McCord side trip into a longer route covering a chunk of the shiny new Trail 400. Starting at the McLoughlin State Park trailhead, heading east thru the McCord Creek area and then continuing on to Tanner Creek and our waiting car shuttle. The whole stretch west of McCord Creek was abandoned after the 1996 floods so this exact route is not currently possible. I've heard that this stretch of trail was not really very scenic anyway. Further east, she casually mentions that a certain unmarked side trail is the start of the unmaintained, highly unofficial, and highly scenic Munra Point Trail



• Other column came in June 1982, and really swings for the fences with another unusual route. As in, first you hike the nice trail for normies that gets you to the upper falls. Then you cross the creek and start an uphill scramble/bushwhack for about a mile, gaining 1100 vertical feet in the process, while your boring friends chill at the picnic table that used to exist down at the upper falls. If you do it correctly you end up at little-visited Wauneka Point, home to panoramic views and a large collection of native rockworks, similar to those found in a few other places around the Gorge. The official Field Guide route is longer and easier and generally follows established trails (albeit for small values of "established" in some cases), and that page mentions the existence of the Lowe route and points at at least one trip report that followed it. But they say it's only suitable for the very experienced hikers of the present day. But that's the route that was once published in a family newspaper. One may feel more empowered to do this when a.) you're an established journalist writing for an established newspaper, and b.) said newspaper is on the brink of going out of business in a few months so it's not like there's any money in suing you if somebody gets hurt. At one point she even suggested leaning out over the railing on the upper falls trail to get a better view.

  In passing, the article points out where to find the equally unofficial Nesmith Ridge Trail, which goes the same place as the official Nesmith Point Trail, but starts at the upper falls and is generally considered a better and more scenic route. She had actually covered this route more extensively a month earlier, framing it as the next logical step after reviving a number of other vintage trails from the golden days of yore. I missed this article at first because she -- correctly -- called the falls "Upper Elowah Falls".

  You'll also see boot paths here that just sort of follow McCord Creek further upstream. As far as anybody knows there's nothing interesting to see up that way. No waterfalls on LIDAR, no viewpoints, nothing historical or archeological to look for, just a little mountain stream burbling along thru the forest.

• A third Lowe column from the same time period bypasses both waterfalls, and instead informs us that the long-abandoned Moffett Creek Trail had just been repaired and reopened, and she was ready with a guide to this rustic backcountry trail. The name suggests it's a trail up along Moffett Creek, something that was proposed back in the mid-1910s but never built due to the high estimated cost of labor and dynamite. Instead, it branches off the nearly-as-remote Tanner Creek trail (which starts near the far end of Tanner Creek Road / Forest Road 777) and switchbacks up and down to cross the upper reaches of the Tanner, Moffett, and McCord Creek watersheds, passing through some Bull Run infrastructure just outside the closure boundary along the way. I have never even cast eyes on this trail, much less hiked any distance on it. Anyway, Lowe cheerfully explains the sights along the way and offers tips on safely fording the various creeks you'll encounter, getting you as far as the top of the Nesmith Point Trail, the return leg for your car shuttle loop. The description of that last part is pretty much a handwave; maybe it was edited for length, or she just assumed everyone knows that part already. Either way, after completing the hike as described you'd still need to drive up sketchy Road 777 again to pick up your other car. Except that it's been gated and closed to the general public since the late 90s, due to being a Forest Service road that was too easily accessed by people who don't know what Forest Service roads are like.

  I am slightly tempted to feed these and other Lowe articles into the latest GPT-style AI and have it generate an endlessly cheerful practical guide to taking the One Ring to Mordor, explaining how the ring may chafe a bit and become heavier as Mordor approaches, but the usual first aid for blisters ought to do the trick. But I digress again.



• A 1986 list of tallest waterfalls in Oregon, sorted by height, accompanying an article on waterfall geology. This was back when the local newspaper of record had a regular geology columnist, which they did for a number of years after the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens.


• January 1994: Terry Richard column naming the Elowah + Upper McCord twofer the Hike of the Week.


• Sometime after that, the bike-centric HCRH State Trail project reached McCord Creek, and the state added a paved trail between the existing Yeon trailhead and Cascade Locks. I don't recall whether it all opened at once or in phases, but it was the first new trail option here since the 400. The HCRH trail and the 400 intersect repeatedly on their sorta-parallel paths through the Gorge, creating new ways to turn out-n-back hikes into loops. The HCRH trail is nobody's idea of a pristine wilderness experience, and to me the main reason you might want to use it would be to shorten the return leg, in case a storm system moves in or that knee you hurt back in 2013 starts twinging again, or you're being pursued by Mafia goons from out of town who don't know there's a back way back to your car now.


• April 2016 article suggests spending Spring Break week visiting as many Gorge waterfalls as possible. There was a time not so long ago when you could do this and come away thinking you'd done all the major attractions. But now you'll come to realize you've barely scratched the surface of what's out there. The upper and lower falls get a shout out because they're an easy twofer if you're going for sheer numbers.


• Of course the Eagle Creek Fire happened the very next summer, and the area was closed for several years afterward. During that time the only glimpses we got of the area were some aerial photos taken by the state for damage assessment. A Wy'east Blog post on the Gorge after the 2017 fire includes a bunch of these photos and tries to make sense of what had changed.


• A May 2019 article similar to the 2016 "see every waterfall" challenge, but not limited to the Gorge this time for obvious reasons.


• January 2021 OregonHikers forum post about a recent visit, by someone who had volunteered with the post-fire restoration work. He explains the restoration work included repairing a lot of long-neglected CCC stonework, including a long-closed viewpoint that gives a higher-elevation view of the lower falls.