Foxglove Falls

Next up we're taking a peek (albeit not a very close peek) at the Columbia Gorge's Foxglove Falls. This is the waterfall you can see looking east from the top of Angels Rest, tumbling down the far wall of the deep canyon on that side of the viewpoint. I think it's right about here on the state LIDAR map. The canyon is due to Dalton Creek, which we've visited a couple of times downstream in the Dalton Point and Old Boneyard Road posts, and we were in the vicinity of in the Backstrand Road post. The creek is just not very big, and just goes to show what a little water can do to solid rock (albeit relatively weak and crumbly solid rock) over geological time.

As far as I know the Angels Rest viewpoint is the closest mere mortals can get to it without advanced technical gear and skills that I don't have. Although way back in 1918 there was a short-lived proposal to turn the whole Angels Rest area into a private tourist attraction, complete with pack mule trail rides just like at the Grand Canyon, promising great views of the hanging gardens above Dalton Creek among other things. That obviously never panned out, and I'm not sure how serious of an idea it ever was, as the proposal was just one of a series of real estate and stock schemes that had played out over the previous few years. The most serious of these plans involved the backers laying their grubby hands on the bankrupt woolen mill at Pendleton, relocating it to a new company town right at Wahkeena Falls (then known as "Gordon Falls"), damming Wahkeena Creek to power the mill, and Dalton Creek to supply water to Gordon Falls City (the future great metropolis of the western Gorge) and of course selling a bunch of unregulated stock to finance this exciting new 100% guaranteed goldmine. Except that the deal fell through when local interests in Pendleton bought the woolen mill instead, and shareholders in the Gordon Falls Co. lost every cent of their money overnight. It was never clarified whether the backers knew this was about to happen, but they somehow managed to hold onto the land after the company cratered and soon tried a few other moneymaking schemes continuing into the 1920s, like the pack mule adventure park, and at least one proposal to build mansions all over the top of Angels Rest, before eventually losing the land over unpaid taxes during the Depression.

If you're wondering why the waterfall isn't called "Dalton Falls", after the creek, I'm afraid it's a long story. There was a minor local internet controversy about this back in the mid-2000s, and like most internet controversies it was never really resolved to anyone's satisfaction. The name currently applies to a prominent seasonal waterfall on a different creek just west of Mist Falls (and right around HCRH Milepost 31), which we've visited a couple of times, here and here. A theory gained currency that this mismatch was a fairly recent mistake, either by uninformed people on the early internet, possibly echoing a misguided guidebook author or two in the 1970s, 80s, or 90s. The name and location of the creek (and its mouth at Dalton Point) were pretty well documented, thanks to various surveys and property records, so (the idea went) the real Dalton Falls should be somewhere around here too.

Eventually people settled on the waterfall below (and semi-glimpse-able from) Angels Rest as the most likely candidate, the theory being that it was probably named not long after the area was logged, and it would have been a lot more prominent back then. And I think that's the explanation I've repeated here a few times. But then the Eagle Creek Fire happened, and that made Foxglove Falls much easier to see from the Angels Rest viewpoint (like in the photos here), and closer to what people would have seen a century ago. But it still isn't a prominent sight from down on the old highway. So now I'm not really sure anymore. As in, maybe the creek and the falls were always in different watersheds, a testament to the once-widespread fame of the mysterious W. Dalton they're both named for. The name seems to have existed already when the old highway was still under construction, so maybe the falls are a lot more prominent when seen from further away, like on a steamboat heading upriver (for example), than they are from the HCRH. That's certainly true for Mist Falls as well as the "Dalton Falls" at milepost 31, where up close you can only see the very lowest tier of the falls. But then, making an accurate, detailed map from a steamboat was subject to its own hazards back then, like having a bourbon or three too many, losing all your money playing cards with a friendly gentleman named after a state (or even worse, two states, like "Colorado Tex"), and then the friendly ladies wearing all those feathers abruptly stop paying attention to you after you run out of silver dollars. Why, it's enough to make a mild-mannered cartographer scribble "Dalton Falls" on just any old place, and we've been stuck with it ever since.

This whole thing would've been helped immeasurably if anyone had thought to make a clearly labeled set of daguerreotypes of second-tier Gorge landmarks back in the day, but no examples of that have surfaced so far. Barring that, the other thing that would resolve this pretty quickly would be newly-discovered evidence that W. Dalton was some kind of monster and needed cancelling. Like maybe he came west while on the run from charges back home in Alabama, where he was accused of mistreating his many, many slaves. Or something along those lines. And as a result every last thing that might have been named after him, here and across the northwest, would have to be renamed.

Meanwhile the name "Foxglove Falls" is relatively recent, originating in a 2007 OregonHikers thread as a way to sidestep arguments about various things named Dalton. It featured in a number of forum threads there after the name was invented:

• April 2007: "Hidden in plain sight: a waterfall at Angels Rest!"
• February 2008: "Foxglove Falls 2-9-08"
• late February 2008: "Angels Rest via Foxglove Canyon"
• late February 2010: "Guess where I went today..(Revealed: Foxglove creek) 2-20-10"
• Early December 2010: "Foxglove Creek"
• Mid-December 2010: "Dalton Falls to Mist Falls Loop 12/19/10"
• Late December 2010: "Dalton - Foxglove Conundrum"
• Later December 2010: "Mesachie Creek"
• Mid-December 2013: "No Waterfalls on Devils Rest 11-Dec-2013"
• Late December 2013: "Angel's Rest (Nostalgia) Trip! (Dec 27)"
• March 2017: Angel's Rest direct (bowl to the east)"
• December 2018: "Palmer Mill Rd/Primrose Path - Dec 7, 2018"

It also has a Northwest Waterfall Survey page now, and generally seems pretty established at this point. The page wisely doesn't hazard a guess as to how tall it might be; the LIDAR link up above points at what looks like the most prominent single drop in a series of closely spaced drops, each in the 20'-40' range, with the creek rushing steeply downhill between them, and at one end of the scale you could point at the one bit I think I have photos of, which might be in the 40' range. Lumping them together with the top here and the bottom here gives a total height of 220', while pulling in everything from the very top to the point where all four main tributary creeks join together here comes to 436', almost exactly 11x as tall as the low-end number. So that's not especially useful, as vital statistics go.

Regarding the new namesake: Foxglove is not native to the Pacific Northwest, but you may see it growing as an invasive plant in the Angels Rest area. It seems that decades ago, someone involved in building or maintaining the unofficial trail network above Angels Rest was also an amateur gardener, and as this was before the modern environmental movement got going, it seemed like a good idea at the time to combine two hobbies and improve the forest with some of their favorite ornamental plants, and then name a few of the trails after what's planted along them. So until quite recently there were three trails named Foxglove (Foxglove Way, along with the Upper and Lower Foxglove Trails), and a steep, rocky Primrose Path that apparently needed a re-primrosing on a fairly regular basis, and I think a couple of other plant-themed ones whose names escape me at the moment.

Sometime around January 2022, another anonymous individual decided three trails was entirely too many Foxgloves and unilaterally renamed a couple of them. Renamed them in the OregonHikers Field Guide wiki, and on OpenStreetMap, and even posted freshly-made hand-carved wooden signs at all of the affected trail junctions, replacing the few decades-old ones that had survived the Eagle Creek Fire. Whether you like the change or not, you have to respect that level of dedication.

Cape Horn Viewpoint

Next up, here are a few photos from the Cape Horn Viewpoint, right on SR14 on the Washington side of the Columbia Gorge. It's basically just a wide spot on SR14 with a nice unobstructed view to the south and east and an official sign. This is right around a blind corner on a busy state highway and there aren't any signs telling drivers it's coming up just ahead, so it's very easy to zoom right by and miss it. But then, the wide shoulder that passes for a parking lot is already as big as it can get, and it's quite often completely full, so doing anything that would attract more would-be visitors might be counterproductive. So visitation is on sort of an if-you-know-you-know basis. If you miss it and want to try again, the first good place to turn around is the Salmon Falls Park and Ride, which is maybe a mile past the viewpoint. There's nowhere safe to park on the other side of the highway, and if you could, crossing the road there isn't exactly a good idea either, so keep going and turn around a second time at Belle Center Road, another mile westbound from there, and try not to miss it this time.

Incidentally, there's a Belle Center Creek that runs sorta-parallel to Belle Center Rd. and becomes a rather tall waterfall south of the intersection with SR14. A handful of trip reports can be found online, but the land is not actually public property, and is probably not going to become public property anytime soon. It seems there's a long-running dispute going back to at least 2009, and still going as of 2023. The root cause seems to be the landowner's passion for, or obsession with, ziplines. More precisely, his interest in building and operating them without clearing it with the county or complying with the National Scenic Area's many, many rules and regulations. Even spent a brief period behind bars for noncompliance, early on. And unusually, I feel kind of sympathetic toward his efforts. Not in a "rules and regulations shouldn't exist" libertarian sort of way, more of a, this guy seems to genuinely feel this is his life's purpose, like he's sort of a Johnny Appleseed of building ziplines, and I bet that would be a fascinating TED talk. Was there a moment he realized this was his life's work, or was it more of a gradual thing? I am genuinely curious.

Anyway, one practical detail you ought to know: The Cape Horn area is also home to a Forest Service-run recreational area, which I covered in a Cape Horn Loop post back in 2020, which I think covers the surrounding area pretty well, or at least it's up to my usual standards. The important detail right now is that the viewpoint is not connected to that trail network in any way. This is not a trailhead, and there's just enough parking for people to stop, get a photo or two, and then get a move on. I think this is also true of the Ozone Crag rock climbing area and other similar spots to the west of here, meaning you can't park somewhere else and take one of the hiking trails to the climbing area.

I also have one historical tidbit to share about this stretch of the highway. If you stand near the railing and look north you might notice that the highway continues on a concrete viaduct for about 500 feet or so. This was not in the original design for the road, and exists thanks to a 1927 construction accident, where either the state transportation department or a contractor got the math wrong and used wayyy too much dynamite, which turned a nice stretch of freshly built scenic highway into a field of boulders and gravel a few hundred feet below. Incredibly, nobody was killed or seriously injured when this happened, so it's ok to point and laugh at Washington's hapless highway engineers. The nearly-complete highway was delayed in opening for another 3 years, so this was a much more consequential screw-up than Oregon's exploding whale incident of November 12th 1970, though the whale incident is still funnier. Bonus fun fact, Tonya Harding (the legendary/notorious figure skater) was born on the same exact day the state detonated that whale. As far as anybody knows this was just a weird coincidence and the two facts are otherwise unrelated.

Speaking of which, here's the trailer to a low-budget action film she co-starred in shortly after all that Nancy business.

Mead Creek Falls

Ok, next up we're taking a peek at another very, very obscure Columbia Gorge waterfall. Mead Creek Falls is nearly 200' high, and it's a short stroll from one of the busiest trailheads in the Gorge and maybe the entire Northwest, but nobody's seen or heard of it, and we're going to go see why.

If you're on the old Columbia River Highway, heading east from Bridal Veil Falls, it's about half a mile to the intesection with Palmer Mill Road, a lightly-used, steep, narrow, sketchy gravel road that follows Bridal Veil Creek up into the hills. The intersection is paved, though, and officially doubles as overflow parking for the incredibly popular Angels Rest Trail. Shortly before you get to the intersection, looking to your right, you might notice a small stream that's flowing partly in an ugly semi-corroded steel pipe. To your left, the creek continues downhill a bit and then vanishes underground. From there it flows in a pipe under the old Bridal Veil sawmill site and then I-84, and joins the Columbia in that undignified state. Seems pretty unpromising at first glance, but I was looking at a couple of state GIS maps recently (as one does) and noticed a couple of things. First, the state LIDAR map (which I reference a lot here) showed the creek going over a 180'-200' sheer cliff a short distance upstream of Palmer Mill Road. And second, the state map of fish migration barriers had an entry for the ODOT-owned culvert carrying the creek under the old highway, and that map item said the creek was called "Mead Creek". It's not a USGS-approved official name, but at least one state agency has a name for the thing, and that's official-ish enough as far as I'm concerned. So with those two bits of information in hand, it was time to go look for the mysterious Mead Creek Falls and take a picture or two to prove it exists.

So I hit the road on New Years Day. It was a surprisingly slow day at Angels Rest, so I was able to find a parking space in the overflow lot. From there, I walked up Palmer Mill Road for maybe 100' or so to the creek. I only saw the one creek, so it wasn't hard to find. Turning and facing upstream, there's a short side street or former driveway branching off just to the left (east) of the creek. (I think this was actually for the old mill town's primitive and disgusting drinking water system.) I started walking that direction and soon noticed a boot path to the right, heading uphill and back toward the creek. So I followed that, but it sort of peters out before long when the route gets steeper, and after that it's just bushwhacking uphill folowing the creek, and hopping across it as needed, and trying to avoid blundering into thickets of devil's club if you can help it. After maybe 1000' of this (and 300 vertical feet, much of it on loosely-piled river rocks) I eventually came across an RV-sized boulder a short distance from the base of the falls, and didn't see an obvious way to get around it while staying safe and dry, and I figured the boulder was close enough for now, so I took another batch of photos and turned around.

I'd love to say the falls are a hidden gem, but I was frankly a bit underwhelmed. They're as tall as I expected, and the setting feels like a near-twin of Lautourell Falls, lichen-covered cliffs and all, and it would be a spectacular crown jewel of the Gorge, if only there was more water going over the falls. But as it is, it looks a bit dwarfed by its surroundings. The asterisk here is that I've only been there once so far, and I have no idea whether this is a typical rate of flow or not. The winter of 2023-24 had been unusually warm and dry up to that point, and maybe potential visitors just need to wait for the next big winter storm, or hold off and wait to visit in a non-El Niño winter. Or maybe invent a time machine and travel back a few centuries to when the upper creek was fed by dense old growth forests and global CO2 levels were more reasonable.

Or who knows -- I haven't really explored the sorta-plateau above the falls at all, but it's said to be a confusing labyrinth of old logging roads and unofficial trails, full of random items that random people have lost or dumped or built up there over the last century or two. (See for example a 2013 OregonHikers thread, "More Lost Trails in the Gorge".) As I understand it, presently there are abandoned cabins in varying states of collapse; a bullet-riddled 1941 Chrysler and parts of other discarded vehicles; a few surviving train parts from the logging railroad era; at least one vintage Jet Ski, supposedly; remains of abandoned pre-legalization weed farms, and it's anybody's guess what else. There's probably one of everything up there. Every last lost sock, an entire Sasquatch subdivision (complete with HOA), Jimmy Hoffa's discreet-but-luxurious witness protection villa, it's anyone's guess really. Maybe a cleverly concealed dam is still diverting most of the creek over to the Hoffa compound's vast Jacuzzi complex. Maybe all it would take to fix the falls would be an earnest Eagle Scout and a few helpers with big cans of WD-40. I mean, after the 111-year-old Hoffa finally kicks the bucket, obviously. I would personally not bet money in favor of this explanation, seeing as I just dreamed it up for this blog post, but stranger things have happened.

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Footnote(s)

1. fish barrier map

At some point the state transportation department either named the creek or recorded a name that locals were using, back when there was a company town built right around here. I don't know why, or when, or who it's named after, but I was poking around looking at the state's official Oregon Fish Habitat Distribution and Barriers map when I ran across it, and I'm pretty sure that's official enough for my purposes.

That map draws from a variety of sources and tries to catalog anything and everything that might impede, discourage, disempower, confound, bewilder, or annoy a migrating salmon on its way to or from the Pacific Ocean. Hydroelectric dams are on this list, obviously, plus things like waterfalls that are too tall for a salmon to leap over (which is about 5-6 feet), down to really mundane things like storm drains and culverts under streets, since it turns out salmon don't really like swimming through underground pipes. So the waterfall we're visiting is not on that map, but the creek passes under the old scenic highway in a long corrugated steel pipe that probably dates back to the old sawmill days, located here, and that's where I noticed the name. (I suppose the falls aren't on the map on the idea that any salmon foolish enough to try running the series of tubes is not going to make it far enough for the falls to matter.)

That data probably originated with the Oregon Department of Transportation since they're in charge of things like culverts under state highways, and sure enough, the name appears in ODOT's TransGIS system, and specifically in the department's "DFMS Culverts (Advanced Inspection)" map layer in ArcGIS.

There's also a pipe under Palmer Mill Road, but it's a county road and for the equivalent info for it you'll need the county's ArcGIS and select the "Culverts_Transportation_View" layer. It doesn't list the creek name or tell us anything new, but since I went to all the trouble of finding the map I figured I'd include a link to it anyway.

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2. LIDAR stuff

I quickly realized Mead Creek corresponded to a place I'd noticed before here on the state LIDAR map: An obvious streambed intersecting a nearly 200', near-vertical rock wall, in the classic curved amphitheater shape that often indicates a major waterfall. And I have sort of a rule of thumb that if there's a creek or river or what have you named X, and there's one waterfall on it, and it doesn't already have a name, and you need to call it something, you don't need anyone's permission to call it X Falls. Two waterfalls? Upper X and Lower X Falls. Three? Upper, Middle, and Lower. And so far I haven't needed a default naming scheme for four or more. So at this point all that was left to do was to go test the "Mead Creek Falls" hypothesis and take a few photos to prove it's real. Same basic idea as Sasquatch hunting, really.

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3. Bridal Veil Water Works

While researching this post, I did learn one more fun fact about the little creek here. From the beginning of the mill and town in 1886 right up until April 1982, Mead Creek was the Bridal Veil area's sorry excuse for a drinking water supply. In April 1982 the US EPA finally got around to testing all of the local water systems across Portland-area counties, and immediately issued a boil water notice for the Bridal Veil system, to remain in effect until the company got its act together and complied with federal clean water standards. That Oregonian article primly blamed this on "elevated bacterial levels", while the Oregon Journal story about the situation explained matters without the Oregonian's squeamish tiptoeing around:

Bridal Veil takes its water from a surface water source and normally does not treat the water in any way...
…
EPA environmental engineer Jean Knight said evidence of fecal material was found in the water supply at Bridal Veil, which only has a “pipe coming out of a stream” for its water supply, to which chlorine is occasionally added.

“Some people said they’d been ill, but most hadn’t gone to a physician to have it confirmed,” she said.

The Journal piece didn't quite connect all the dots either, namely that the town's raw sewage went back into the same creek the water was drawn from, and they figured this was fine because the water intake was uphill from all the sewage stuff.

Recall that this came about midway through Ronald Reagan's first term, during the height of deregulation mania. Reagan wanted to abolish the whole agency and repeal the laws it enforced, and he packed it with ideologues who did everything they could to sabotage the agency's work. Their refusal to enforce rules and regulations and basic laws of the land led to repeated national scandals. So the fact that they had their hair on fire about the Bridal Veil water system really ought to tell you something.

There had been a few clues that the system was not exactly a paragon of modern 20th century sanitation. Way back in June 1960, the Multnomah County health department issued a temporary no-swimming order for the lagoon at Rooster Rock due to high levels of sewage germs detected there. One sample tested at nearly three times the level considered dangerous. Multnomah County's Health Officer offered a shifting set of explanations for this situation; first he claimed it was just natural seasonal variation in the river's normal bacteria levels, nothing to see here, folks. The Oregon Journal noted, however, that water samples taken further upstream at Bonneville Dam did not show the same elevated levels.

Investigators had even observed untreated raw sewage flowing into the Columbia a mile and a half upstream and already knew its origin, and they suggested that it might be part of the problem. But no, the county health guy now insisted the Vista House restrooms were the real source. Asked to explain the elevated microbe counts found at the river beaches at Rooster Rock, he explained that he didn't put a lot of stock in microbe counts and preferred to rely on his own personal intuition as to what the real problem was, thank you very much. It was pretty obvious at that point that he was never going to point any fingers at Bridal Veil, no matter what. Oddly enough, this episode happened just a couple of weeks after the Kraft corporation announced the impending closure of the mill. A health officer with better political instincts would have just said he's studying the problem, and then taken credit for the drop in bacteria after the mill closed.

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4. 1990 study

Jumping forward to the post-sawmill era, the creek and the water supply problem came up briefly in a couple of studies. First up is an April 1990 "preliminary" study on the current state of the mill site, due to the impending sale to the Trust for Public Land. The Mead Creek cameo is on page 9 of the study:

At the time of the Site Examination no olfactory evidence was observed which indicated that the woodlands are currently contaminated with hazardous materials. A visual inspection revealed fifteen to twenty empty one gallon bleach containers near an empty water tank (refer to Figure 1 for location). According to Pat McEllreath, current mill site manager, prior to the installation of a water well in 1982 the town water supply required treatment. It is likely that these bleach containers are left over from the water treatment process.

Figure 1 is on page 14 of the linked doc, and shows little squares labeled "water tank" and "well and pumphouse" along Palmer Mill Road. I assume these were removed during the 90s sometime along with the old mill and associated mill houses. Most likely the well site was chosen so they could plug it into the existing water system with the least effort. The pile of discarded bleach bottles tells me the local public works guy was all about least-effort approaches.

An obscure Forest Service map that covers a lot of land ownership details has a bit more info on the old mill site. If I'm reading things right, the Trust continues to hang onto a pre-existing easement for the water system dating back to April 1937 (the year the mill was sold and reopened to make Kraft cheese boxes). The description of it makes it sound very elaborate, though a lot of it probably never made it past the wishful thinking phase.

Easement for the use of a water system in favor of adjacent property owners. Consists of flumes, tanks and pipelines for domestic water use, a dam and diversion point for water power, and flumes, tanks and pipelines for fire protection.

The 1990 study was labeled preliminary because nobody had looked around yet for contaminated soil, and there was no way to estimate even a rough ballpark figure for any future plans without first knowing what shape the local dirt was in. So they recommended doing that as the next logical step. As far as I know this still hasn't happened, because looking for problems you can't afford to fix is always a tough sell, in any kind of organization.

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5. 1992 historic structure inventory

After the sale, it became clear there was an imminent nature vs historic preservation fight. The new owners commissioned a study involving several local architects and historians, basically explaining that the surviving buildings in town were not significant individually, and as a group they weren't a good example of a company mill town, and either way just about everything was in extremely poor condition and there was literally nothing worth saving about the place. A map of the town on page 16 shows all the structures in town, including the water tower and well pumphouse, but the study didn't discuss them any further. The most interesting part is that the study includes photos of the exteriors and in many cases interiors of these buildings, and a lot of these houses were kind of cute. And I know you can't judge the condition of an old building just from photos, but a lot of them looked fixable. This study came just a few years before everybody decided Craftsman bungalows were cool again, and who knows, maybe the preservation battle would have played out differently if that had happened a little sooner. However this was also happening right in the middle of the spotted owl wars, and removing all traces of the timber industry may have felt like a moral imperative at that point.

Around the same time, another consultant produced a 287-page report concerning the history of the mill and the town. I've only skimmed it so far but it seems a bit more evenhanded than that architecture study.

Also in 1992, management of the still-brand-new National Scenic Area issued the unit's first Management Plan, and at that point the vision for the Bridal Veil area was meant to be about historic preservation, which obviously is not how it turned out in the end.

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6. 2002 study

In 2002 a group was paid to do another round of quick preliminary work, this time they had a couple of months to dream up a preliminary restoration plan for the site. In it, we learn that the proposed followup work in the 1990 doc had not yet happened, and future planning of the kind they were tasked with was fairly stymied due to still not knowing basic stuff like how much topsoil you might need to dispose of as part of any cleanup effort. And this isn't even considered a high risk site for toxic chemicals, seeing as cutting a large tree up into 2x4s does not actually involve a lot of chemicals. (Unless you're making the pressure-treated stuff, obviously.) The Mead Creek cameo doesn't mention the creek by name:

The natural course of the small stream on the east end of the property appears to have been altered. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) topographic contour maps indicate a westerly course for the stream. This is supported by the site analysis. The stream above Palmer Mill Road south of the site appears to follow a historic bed, but below the road it is channeled in a metal trough. At the point where the stream crosses the Historic Columbia River Highway, it enters an enclosed culvert. It reemerges on the north side of this road where it drops several feet to a stream bed that does not follow the natural topographic contours. Evidence of activities to control and maintain this bed can be found along an unpaved road, in the southern slopes of the site.

Maybe this diversion is why the ugly pipe was left in place, to make sure the creek doesn't revert to its original course without permission. Later on, the study suggests daylighting the creek through the old mill site, if it turns out to be feasible, so imagine they'd get rid of the remaining piping at that point too. That was one of the study's few concrete suggestions, along with putting in an official trail or two connecting the Angels Rest and Bridal Veil trailheads, and adding ADA-compliant access to Bridal Veil Falls. The study didn't propose doing anything with Mead Creek Falls; it's quite possible the authors didn't realize it existed.

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7. 2015 master plan for state parks in the Gorge.

Part 1 is mostly an inventory of the current park portfolio and the highlights and ongoing maintenance needs of each, and results from a public opinion survey. Eventually they get around to summarizing the suggestions they got from the general public. Including some variants on finally building out Trail 400 from Troutdale out to the current "mile 0" where the Angels Rest trail starts. Some oldtimer or amateur historian suggested "George Joseph and Larch Mountain", which was a doable hike a century ago. You would start by doing the trail to Upper Latourell Falls, then taking a now-lost route that went to the top of those falls and then continued upstream beside Latourell Creek. Eventually you'd exit the state park and follow the creek through farm country for a couple of miles and then end up on Pepper Mountain. You could turn around there, which was the usual practice, or go down the other side of Pepper Mountain and find County Roads 458 and 550, which would get you within bushwhacking distance of the summit of Larch Mountain. And from there, the Larch Mountain Trail would get you back downhill to Multnomah Falls, or you could just go back the way you came. I just sort of assume that any hike that involves traipsing across private farm or timberland is a nonstarter in 2024. I have not actually gone around ringing doorbells and asking residents if it's ok, but I suspect even that wouldn't go over very well these days.

Part 2 discusses some proposals for the future. One, on page 182, is a new twist on the long-proposed trail between Angels Rest & Bridal Veil Falls, which ought to be a no-brainer but somehow nobody can figure out how to make it happen. Instead of taking a direct, short, level route from one to the other, and maybe reusing one of the old roadbeds in the area, it would follow Bridal Veil Creek upstream a bit and then head uphill, apparently crossing Mead Creek somewhere upstream of the falls, and joining the Angels Rest Trail partway up. Looking more closely, I think the main driving factor of that particular route is that it stays on Oregon State Parks land the whole way, even though one of the main bullet points on the idea was "Requires partnership with USFS" (which kind of reads like they weren't looking forward to that part, for whatever reason. Or maybe I'm reading too much into that.) This reads like a scaled-back version of the 2012 proposal for a Bridal Veil Canyon Trail, which would create public access to rarely-seen Middle and Upper Bridal Veil Falls and cut over Angels Rest after that, making for a longer route.

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8. Mead who? Mead what?

Other than the ODOT connection I mentioned earlier, there are exactly zero search engine or Oregonian database results for the creek name. Closest possibility (but still a real stretch) that I ran across dates to September 1985 and the filming of Short Circuit. Apparently the stretch of HCRH between Bridal Veil and Crown Point was a filming location, and the robot star of the film was designed by the legendary Syd Mead. He's probably best known for his work on Blade Runner, and for designing V'Ger for Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). It's a fun theory but I wouldn't bet any money on it. Another possibility is that it's not a surname at all; maybe someone was trying to explain what color the creek was, downstream of the gentle townsfolk of Bridal Veil back in the day. And if so: Ewwwwww!!!

Panther Creek Falls

Our next adventure takes us to the absurdly photogenic Panther Creek Falls, a bit north of the Columbia River Gorge in Washington's Gifford Pinchot National Forest. This is a bit further afield than most of the weekend hikes I post here, so a few notes are in order: It's about a 90 minute drive from Portland, first heading east to the town of Carson, WA, and then north on Wind River Highway (or Wind River Road; signs are a bit inconsistent on this point). The map above has all the route info you need, and I would just add a couple of details:

• First, the directions have you turn right off Wind River Something-or-other onto Old State Road. This is a loop road that intersects the highway twice, and the directions assume you take the second turnoff. If you leave the highway and the intersection isn't a right angle, you jumped the gun and are on the first of the two junctions. Just stay on the road till you're back at the highway, do a U turn, and you're back on track. I think the road you turn left onto is initially called "Panther Creek Road" and doesn't become forest road NF-65 until the national forest boundary.
• Second, the parking lot for the falls could really use an official sign to that effect. But right now there isn't one, so your best bet is to look for what looks like an old rock quarry on the right side of the road, forming a rough parking lot. There's only one of these along the road, unless maybe you're on completely the wrong road, so it's a good clue that you've arrived. Most likely there will be a few Subarus parked there already when you arrive. I was strictly looking for official USFS signage and kept going for a few extra miles before turning around, but that's just me.

As far as I can tell, as of 'press time' you don't need a Northwest Forest Pass to legally park here, though that could change at any time. This is the regional National Forest parking permit, which runs $30/year, or you can rely on $5 one-day passes you can print at home if you don't like planning ahead and don't mind paying the inkjet cartels every so often. I had a day pass with me due to an earlier stop the same day, so (required or not) I left it on the dash just in case, as a sort of talisman to ward off prowling tow trucks.

I think there is supposed to be a sign for Trail #137, right across the road from the quarry/parking lot. When I stopped by there was just a bare pole on the left side of the road, but there was only one of those, and the trail starts just to the right of that pole. The trail switchbacks downhill a short distance to a junction: A sign there says "viewpoint" is to your right, and to your left is another trail branch to the base of the falls. The viewpoint is not at the actual top of the falls, but at the point partway up where Big Huckleberry Creek rumbles in and joins the main falls. That's the heavily-flowing bit in the first photo. If I was going to be a tedious pedant about it, I would pause here and go off for a few paragraphs arguing that it's actually a separate waterfall and then try to think of a name for it, since the side creek already has lower, middle, and upper falls of its own. The more important thing for you to notice is all the wooden railings keeping you on the trail, and the multilingual forest of warning signs, and the makeshift memorial right behind you as you watch the falls from the viewpoint, all of which are due to a tragic fall back in 2018.

Backtracking up to the trail junction, the other branch of the trail heads downstream a little and then switchbacks down to another viewpoint. This is where the first photo was taken, and you can see the whole falls you had a partial view of at the top. But wait, there's more: This lower viewpoint is also the top of another, lower tier of the falls, which adds another 30' or so to the total height of the falls. Right now there's no legal way down to the bottom of this bottom tier, and I have no idea how one might get down there safely, or back up. Strictly from a picture-taking standpoint the ideal thing would be a bridge at the same level as the inter-tier viewpoint, but downstream a bit so photos can include the whole falls, and make it a proper solid bridge, not a bouncy one, so long-exposure shots aren't ruined by other people walking across. But the Forest Service will probably never have that kind of money, and I'm pretty sure I can live with the current arrangement if I have to.

This is one of those places that the internet made famous, and this humble little blog is far from the only place you can read about it. It has the inevitable Washington Trails Association, Friends of the Gorge, and OregonHikers pages. And, unusually, its own Wikipedia entry, which features a photo seemingly taken from a point that's now off limits after the big post-2018 trail redesign. Other pages about the falls include ones at Adventures PNW, Aspiring Wild, Outdoor Project page, and World of Waterfalls. And despite all the stereotypes about social media, I have not actually encountered any Instagram photos of anyone doing yoga poses in front of the falls, unless maybe you count this one from early 2018. And it might also be of someone doing Gangnam Style dance moves instead, and either way they're far away and in rain gear, so I don't think it counts.

You might think a 140' waterfall that looks like this would've been famous since pioneer days, or at least from Carson's heyday as a hot springs resort town in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I mean, just look at it, c'mon. But that doesn't seem to have ever been the case. I fired up the local library's database of the local newspaper, which runs back to sometime in the 1850s, and there is precisely one mention of the falls in all that time, and it's a story about the accident in 2018.

So looking at other pre-internet (or at least pre-WWW) print media, the falls got high marks in both Plumb's Waterfalls of the Pacific Northwest and Bloom & Cohen's Romance of Waterfalls, two early guidebooks on the subject, both from the early 1980s. But many potential visitors would have read the parts about following bad roads off into the middle of nowhere, where -- if you could even find the trailhead -- you then faced a steep scramble downhill through the brush to a sketchy, dangerous viewpoint, while lugging a heavy camera and tripod around, and hoping a few of your 36 film photos turned out ok, or fewer than that if you were shooting 120 or 4x5 film.

The only other pre-internet mention of the place I've come across (though surely not the only one that exists anywhere) is a 1990 Forest Service publication, specifically some appendices to the master plan for the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. Page E-5 explains that despite the falls, Panther Creek as a whole just isn't "outstandingly remarkable" enough to qualify as a federal Wild & Scenic River.

It turns out that this isn't the only waterfall named Panther Creek Falls; an oddly similar one exists in the mountains of northern Georgia, and is also owned & operated by the US Forest Service. In fact it's only a few miles from Tallulah Gorge, which I visited and took a few photos of back in the late 90s. An Atlanta Journal-Constitution article from September 2023 (a few days ago) offers the heartwarming tale about an elderly golden retriever that got heat exhaustion along the long trail to the falls, and all the strangers who pitched in to help along the way to get the dog back to the trailhead safely. The dog is fine now, btw, but has officially retired from further hiking adventures.

I went back to the newspaper database and tried a few other search terms, just in case that led to anything interesting. The falls have evidently never gone by "Panther Falls", since the only use of that phrase came in a 1931 headline, when a woman and her daughter homesteading near Coquille were startled awake by a cougar either falling or jumping onto the roof of their cabin. (Slow news day, I imagine.)

In the same vein, there are Panther Creek high schools in both Cary, NC and Frisco, TX, and whenever one of their sports teams loses there is often a headline containing the words "Panther Creek falls", like this example from 2022.

And finally, I tried just "Panther Creek", and found a few results for that at least:

• Most were about a different creek by the same name near McMinnville, namesake of a prominent Yamhill County winery and a bunch of area real estate listings.
• The correct creek was mentioned briefly in a 1981 Roberta Lowe article in the Oregon Journal, but just in the driving directions on the way to an even more remote trailhead, the start of a long, technical hike up in the Indian Heaven area. Lowe columns were often like this, because the Journal felt its readers were grown-ups and trusted them to judge for themselves if they were up for that level of adventure. The paper went out of business the next year for unrelated reasons, and we never had to witness how this policy fared during the heyday of personal injury lawsuits.
• A March 1937 first-person account, relating what sounds a bit like a 1930s version of Cheryl Strayed's Wild: Miss Jacqueline Arte (age 24) becomes fed up with the noise, chaos, commotion, hypocrisy, artificiality, and general wrongness of modern life, turns her back on society, and sets off to hike the Cascade Crest Trail (a predecessor of the Pacific Crest Trail), packing a change of clothes, a book of Nietzsche, and a .38 pistol. (Ok, not just those three items, but it sounds more 1930s, more hardboiled when put that way.) She started off at Panther Creek -- which served as the boundary between the modern world and the great wilderness -- and headed for Mt. Rainier, by way of endless meanderings and side trips. In Part II, she decided to hole up in a remote cabin and spend the winter writing a book. But ended up blowing out a knee dealing with firewood, and eventually had to be rescued after running low on food. Though she initially refused to leave until she was done writing.
• This wasn't Arte's first wilderness adventure; in October 1934, the Oregonian noted her arrival at Crater Lake, having set out on a unhurried trip down the Skyline Trail (Oregon's predecessor to the PCT) the previous April, this time with the aid of a wayward pack horse named "Red Wing". The article said she was done hiking, but Crater Lake is of course nowhere near the California border, and she continued on her way south and eventually wrote a first-person account for the paper once she decided she was actually done for real, in January 1936. Fifteen additional months seems an exceptionally long time to hike from Crater Lake to California, but she explained she'd run low on money and supplies at one point and took a job as a ranch hand for a while, after panning for gold didn't, er, pan out.

I really wish I knew what became of Miss Arte after the 1937 episode; she doesn't appear in the Oregonian again after that, or in any other newspaper covered by the library's newspaper database, for that matter. I also don't see any references to books published under her name, though using a pen name would explain that. Maybe she decided society wasn't so bad after all, and settled down and had a quiet ordinary life after this; or maybe she hit the wilderness again and went completely off the grid this time, and vanished once and for all, the end; maybe she just moved out of town or across the country or changed her name and news of her further adventures never made it back to little old Portland. In short, the trail has gone cold. So on the remote off-chance anybody out there happens to know the rest of her story, please feel free to drop a note in the comments down below. Thanks!

South Roadside Falls

So this post marks one of those extremely rare occasions where I actually wrap up a series of posts, without leaving any unfinished ones forgotten in Drafts or letting the project scope creep out of control so it can never finish at all. Or at least that will be true assuming I can get this one finished. This series covers a group of mostly-nameless seasonal waterfalls along the Sandy River stretch of the Historic Columbia River Highway. To recap, this was part of a mid-pandemic effort to find obscure and less-visited places to go, in order to get outside while avoiding all other human beings to the greatest possible degree. That worked out really well in a lot of places but not here, exactly, as people kept stopping to take photos of whatever I was taking photos of. Ok, technically it happened twice. So far we've had a look at:

• Keanes Creek Falls, the southernmost of the five
• City Limit Falls, the northernmost of the bunch
• North Roadside Falls, continuing south from there
• Middle Roadside Falls, apparently the tallest one, if you trust my math and map-point-picking skills

And this one finishes the set, unless you count a couple of others that are so seasonal that they only seem to run literally in the middle of big winter storms. Which to me just doesn't seem worth pursuing.

Heightwise, given the top (167.75' / 162.25') and bottom (61.45' / 61.22'), the math says it's around 100.8 - 106.5 feet high. Which, possibly.

You might notice that the highway shoulder is especially wide along this stretch of road. It turns out the stretch of riverbank through here is a small Metro-owned public park, and it's here to provide public river access, specifically public fishing access. There aren't any signs around that say this, but there's plenty of room to park, and usually a car or truck or two parked here, so I guess enough people find out about the place by word of mouth. This is actually not the only spot like this; depending on whose map you look at there are either three (lettered A thru C) or five (numbered 1-5) of them, all on the east bank of the Sandy, and located between the Stark St. & Troutdale bridges.

And if this doesn't sound like a very Metro thing to do, you're absolutely right; these sites were part of the old Multnomah County park system before Metro absorbed it in 1994, and you can check out a 2008 post of mine for more than you probably care to know about that whole thing. I couldn't find any info on when the county may have purchased these places, the closest data point I have is a

a March 1963 Oregonian article about the county's ambitious new parks plan, with a map showing roughly where the county's new parks would be. Their focus at the time was on adding neighborhood parks to serve then-unincorporated parts of the county, and the only ones, current or proposed, east of the Sandy would have been neighborhood playground-type ones in the Springdale and Corbett areas. The river access parcels aren't mentioned and don't appear on the map, so either the county hadn't bought them yet, or river access fell under a separate budget category or a whole different department and didn't count.

As I understand it, the rationale behind these fishing spots is that the Sandy might be the best river for salmon in the region, and the stretch between the two bridges is possibly the best part of the river, and it would be undemocratic to have it limited people who can afford to own a boat, or build a house on the river. For many years the state prohibited fishing from boats anywhere upstream of the Stark St. bridge for similar reasons, the idea being boaters had an unfair advantage over people fishing on the riverbank when both were allowed. So when the state pushed the no-boats boundary back four miles to Oxbow Park in December 1987, some people reacted like democracy itself was being eroded in favor of rich people always getting whatever they want. And who knows, maybe that really was an early symptom on the way to January 6th 2021. This happened in the middle of the Reagan-Bush era, when a lot of little things like this happened, so the timing's spot on, at least.

Anyway, here's the list, starting here and heading downstream:

• Unit C (1.21 acres, aka unit 4) is where we're at now. If I'm reading it right, a 2007 iFish forum post is saying this place is called "The Willows" out in the real world.
• Unit 5 is not actually river access, but two tiny pieces of land on the waterfall side of the road, 0.11 and 0.01 acres respectively, with the larger one possibly including the falls we came here to look at. For anyone who missed the wrong day in grade school weights and measures class, one one-hundredth of an acre is equal to about 344 square feet, equivalent to an 18.5' square.
• As for unit 2? Maps that have the sites numbered it show it as a long and extremely skinny bit of riverbank, roughly the whole stretch between City Limit Falls and North Roadside Falls, while maps that give the sites letters don't show this one at all, and PortlandMaps has it listed as private property, so I'm not sure what's going on here. I think the forum post from above is saying this area goes by "Duck Hole", unless maybe the highway speed limit signs have moved around since 2007. Google seems to think it's a popular place, or at least one that gets talked about a lot, so I dunno. I guess my point here is that if you want to know more about it (and what the legal situation is, etc.) your best bet is to go ask someone who actually knows what they're talking about, because I sure don't.
• Unit B (0.43 acres, aka unit 3) is further downstream, right around the (relatively) busy intersection of the Columbia River Highway & Woodard Road. Thing is, there's not really anywhere to park around this one, and there are several "No Parking" signs are posted on both streets just in case anyone even thinks about trying it. So this one may be more of a locals-only thing. Or maybe it isn't a thing at all; I am absolutely clueless about the fish situation here, and you're on your own for that.
• And finally there's Unit A (0.1 acres, aka unit 1), which may have been public access at one point but is now home to a boat launch for the Multnomah County Sheriff's River Patrol, accessed from a shared driveway to the south that's clearly posted No Trespassing. Given what the river patrol does, and the kind of river the Sandy is, the place is probably haunted too. I mean, if you believe in that sort of thing, and I'm not saying I do.

Middle Roadside Falls

Continuing from the previous post, a short walk or drive south on the Columbia River Highway brings us to the next seasonal waterfall. "Middle Roadside Falls", which is another of the 'meh' names I made up just so I'd have some titles for blog posts. This one might be the tallest of the five waterfalls in the area, assuming you trust any of the height numbers I've been coming up with, which I'm not sure I do. The top (189.14' - 198.31') and bottom (64.93' - 86.06') points I came come up with once again give a height number that seems to be on the high side. As in 100-130 feet high, or technically 103.08 - 133.38, although I doubt the second decimal place is significant. I guess what I'm trying to figure out is whether my LIDAR-assisted guessing is any more accurate than the old-fashioned kind, and what I'm doing wrong if it isn't.

On the subject of whether to believe state GIS systems, the unnamed stream here (like the others nearby) appears on a state map of barriers to migratory fish. Which is technically true, but the entry here is just for the long culvert under the street, with no mention at all of the maybe-130' waterfall about a foot or two upstream of the pipe. So if anyone's divvying up habitat grant money sight unseen based on that dataset, it could lead to some really odd projects getting approved. At least the map has you click through a EULA first, agreeing that the data comes "as is" and isn't guaranteed to be accurate or complete or useful for any purpose whatsoever, which I guess is nice because nobody ever clicks though EULAs without reading them.

(The same dataset insists there's an 8' waterfall on Johnson Creek just west of Bell Ave. in Milwaukie, complete with a midcentury fish ladder, that as far as I can tell doesn't actually exist. But I haven't yet gone looking for it in person, and I may need to go do that just to be extra sure.)

North Roadside Falls

In the previous post we made a quick visit to "City Limit Falls" (a name I just made up), one of about five seasonal waterfalls you'll see right along the Columbia River Highway as it heads south out of Troutdale. Continuing south from there brings us to the middle trio of the five, which occur within sight of each other on a 0.2 mile stretch of the road. Inconveniently the middle three don't have names or much in the way of distinguishing features, so these photos got hung up in Drafts for months while I figured out what to call them. Which is a really dumb problem to have, so I'm not going to bore you going on about it. The important thing is that we're visiting "North Roadside Falls" this time around. The name describes the location, and (to me) "Roadside" also has an air of "roadside attraction" which kind of fits because of a weird phenomenon I noticed: Normally people just drive on through here on their way to the big tourist spots, but if you stop and people see you standing there taking photos, they'll stop and take photos too. Or at least it's happened to me a couple of times. I dunno, maybe I just look like I know what I'm doing, and people think if they don't stop where the experts do they'll miss out on the full Gorge tourist experience. Ok, that or I'm drawing a lot of unjustified conclusions from a sample size of two. And your mileage may vary, obviously.

But if people will stop if they see you taking photos, maybe they'll also stop for actors pretending to take photos and then decide they need a cup of your "famous" hot cocoa or lemonade or maybe a hot dog from your stand nearby. And maybe pick up a commemorative shot glass or spoon from your gift shop next door for their display case back home, and while they're occupied you slap a bumper sticker on their RV and they proceed to drive around the country proudly advertising your cozy little tourist trap. And more tourists come, and you put in a motel, and a petting zoo, and you light the falls at night, and add a pump system so they don't dry up in the summer, and you put the kids thru college that way. But then they're off doctoring and lawyering and succeeding generally and don't want to take over the family business, so after a while you sell the place and retire to Florida, and the new owners let it go to seed and eventually burn it all down for the insurance money and do 6-10 years in the state pen for it, and I've completely forgotten where I was going with this idea.

Anyway, as in the previous post, I looked at the state LIDAR map to try to figure out how tall this one is. Given a top point somewhere between 132.53' and 152.59' above sea level, and a base in the 62.47' - 79.21' range, that comes to, er, 53.32' - 90.12', which is broad enough to be almost meaningless. I think the 79.21' number is an outlier for the base as most of the other height measurements around that point are more like 64'. And yet, a height somewhere in the 70'-90' range seems way too tall again, even knowing that we're only looking at the bottom part of the thing from street level. So who knows, really.

City Limit Falls

Ok, so back in May of last year I did a post about Keanes Creek Falls, one of the little seasonal waterfalls along the Sandy River stretch of the old Columbia River Highway. (Specifically, the one across from where the old Tippy Canoe dive bar used to be.) I mentioned in passing that it was the southernmost of about five waterfalls along a 0.6 mile stretch of the road, and it should come as no surprise to anyone that I decided I had to go back and visit the others. Which I did, so (after the usual delays) here we are at another of them.

Now, the problem with this sort of mini-project is that blog posts need titles, but none of these waterfalls seem to have names, and the creeks they're on also don't have names. So I figured I'd have to make up some nicknames for them just to tell them apart. Which is the hard part, of course; there's an old tech industry saying dad joke that the two genuinely hard problems in Computer Science are cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

In any case, here we are at the northernmost of the five, which happens to be just a few feet outside, or possibly inside, of the current (as of December 2022) Troutdale city limit along the old highway. That seems to be the only landmark nearby so I went with "City Limit Falls" for this one. Google seems to think there aren't any other waterfalls by that name anywhere on Earth, which may be a clue that it's a dumb name. For one thing, the name instantly becomes wrong if the city limit ever moves. But hey, I just need titles for a few blog posts, I'm not trying to be Columbus or anything.

For a little context on what's going on here, this stretch of the highway runs along a narrow bit of floodplain with the Sandy River one one side and near-vertical basalt cliffs on the other, generally about 150'-250' high. Those cliffs are actually the eroded west side of Chamberlain Hill, an old volcano that's part of the same Boring Lava Field as Portland's Mt. Tabor and Kelly Butte. Above the vertical edges the mountain is mostly gentle rolling farmland, with a steeper cone at the 909' summit. Note that you can't actually visit the top; the road that seems to go to there ends in a cluster of gated driveways, as you can see on Street View here. So you should probably ignore the auto-generated Peakbagger and Lists of John pages about the place. The key point right now is that it rains a lot here, and rain that falls on the west side of the hill has to go off a cliff to get to the Sandy River. This particular creek has carved sort of a north-facing grotto so it doesn't get a lot of direct sunlight even in late afternoons, and it's harder to see from the road than some of the others. You catch a glimpse of it heading south but there's nowhere to park when you're going that direction. Heading north there's room for about one car to park on the shoulder, though you won't really see the waterfall until it's in your rear view mirror going that way. So if you want a good look at this one, you sort of have to study a map and plan it out ahead of time. Honestly it's probably easier to walk or bike this one, though admittedly I haven't actually tried that.

I don't have any fun facts to share about this one, so I guess the next order of business is to figure out how tall it is. I'm not very good at just looking at things and guessing, and I don't own any climbing gear or surveying equipment to measure it either of those ways. But I do know my way around the state LIDAR map fairly well, so we'll see what we can come up with that way. The map has a "Bare Earth Slope (degrees)" layer, where the steepest terrain is coded as white and flattest is a dark grey. So the trick is to find the river/creek/stream you're interested in, then squint at the map and find the points where it becomes very steep and then flattens out again, and and take those as our top and base. Each point on the map has several elevation numbers, up to around 10-12 of them; then the slope at a given point is derived from those altitude numbers with a bit of simple calculus, which you fortunately don't need to compute on your own. For the overall height, take the highest and lowest elevation from both points (124.77' and 117.37' for the top point and 68.06' and 61.54' for the base), then do a little subtraction, and that gives you a range. Sounds easy, right? The only problem (which may not be a problem at all) is that this consistently produces numbers that are quite a bit higher than what I come up with standing at the base and guessing (which -- as I keep saying -- I am notoriously bad at). As in, I get around 50-60 feet (49.31' - 63.23' to be precise) from the map and would not have guessed over 25-30' here. I'm not sure where the discrepancy is creeping in; maybe the map numbers are absolutely spot on, and you just can't see the very top of the falls due to the angle. Or the point I picked as the top is somewhere above the real top and I'm picking up extra height that way. I'm honestly not sure.

Upper Perdition Falls

Back in October of last year (2021), I did a post about Perdition Falls, which is an unofficial name for the seasonal waterfall just to the right of Multnomah Falls. In that post I briefly mentioned something about there being another smaller waterfall on the same creek, just upstream and right next to the long-closed Perdition Trail. The trail closure means there's no legal way to visit the upper falls in person. It didn't occur to me that they might be visible from below, at least. But I happened to be at Multnomah Falls last week for lunch and as soon as I got out of my car some dusty weird corner of my brain went "Wait a minute, what's that?". There's really no mistaking it once you know it's there, and as a bonus that makes it easy to tell where the old trail was (and still is, unofficially).

The mildly weird part is that I don't recall ever seeing it before. This is only mildly weird, because my powers of observation are... a bit off. So it's entirely possible I've seen it regularly for years and it just sort of never registered somehow. But it also may have been completely hidden by trees before the 2017 fire, and it seems as though you can only see it from the I-84 parking lot and not from any closer, and I can probably come up with even more excuses if I have to.

In any case, I think I've located the falls on the state LIDAR map right around here, and I used the latitude & longitude from that placemark to create the embedded Google Map here, for anyone who has, I dunno, rocket boots and can get there without using the trail. The advanced technique of clicking around the area on the LIDAR map and guessing what spots might the top and bottom of the falls gives me height numbers in the 20-40 foot range most of the time, with the wide error bar completely due to the human in the loop.

The original dataset has latitude & longitude numbers out to a whopping eleven digits, which I actually had to trim down to six to make Google Maps happy. Which got me wondering just what these decimal places mean in terms of physical distance. One degree latitude comes to about 69 nautical miles, or 111.1 km, anywhere in the world, while the length of one degree longitude varies by latitude: It's the same 111.1 km at the equator, but around 79km at the 45th parallel, and a bit shorter than that in the gorge (the number eventually goes to zero at the poles). Going with the latitude number, one decimal place is 1/10 degree, or 11.1km, while a change in the sixth decimal place is 11.1cm. At eleven decimal places (or 10^-11 degrees), a change in the last digit is a distance of 1111 nanometers, which just so happens to be about one wavelength of near-infrared light of the type typically used in LIDAR. So while 11 digits looks impressive, I'm not sure how many of those are actual significant digits.

So I stumbled off a Google tangent at that point, as I tend to do, so here's a short list of links mostly about lasers that I'm not even going to try to relate back to the subject of this post.

• Slides from a Portland State geography class explaining how airborne LIDAR works, aimed at people who might be using the data later in the term.
• A 2018 paper calculates theoretical accuracy limits for LIDAR in self-driving cars, and comes up with something around 0.1mm.
• A 2019 paper proposes that better resolution can be achieved by ditching the lasers in favor of spooky quantum magic with entangled photons.
• Which in turn leads to Wikipedia articles about things like quantum metrology (which LIGO might use someday) and quantum lithography (which might be used in chipmaking someday)
• A paper about a specialized Leica camera designed for LIDAR applications. This particular model was from way back in 2011, so it's useful information in case they start showing up at Goodwill or something.
• There seems to be a lot of overlap between LIDAR vendors and major defense contractors, so you're always just a few clicks away from stuff like this article. One of the lesser-known Geneva conventions from the 1970s bans using lasers to blind people, and another bans any weapons that cause 'undue suffering'. The article argues that there's a way around these unfortunate legal obstacles, which is to use a laser powerful enough to instantly vaporize whoever it's used on, so they don't suffer first. And no suffering means there's no problem and you can go around lasering people to your heart's delight. Of course those lasers don't actually exist yet, not in airborne form at least, so (as usual) a massive federal research program is needed in order to bring this inspiring dream to life.

Rowena Plateau, June 2022 (II)

As promised in part I back in August, here are more photos from the Nature Conservancy preserve at Rowena, OR, taken back in June around the tail end of desert wildflower season. These were taken with an old Sony DSLR from Goodwill and a couple of equally old Sony/Minolta lenses, including a 50mm macro lens that I've decided I'm a huge fan of. If there's a trick to taking sorta-ok macro photos, without a tripod, on a windy day in the Gorge, I guess it would be to just take a ton of photos to boost the odds you'll get some decent ones between wind gusts. If I was actually trying to make money off this stuff it would probably help to find a really pretentious way to phrase that, maybe some mumbo-jumbo about the zen of inhabiting the still spaces inside the wind, and offer to teach people how to do that in expensive multi-day workshops. If only I could say all that with a straight face, and I was more of a people person, and also unscrupulous.

In any case, I unfortunately don't have an ID on the beetle in the first couple of photos. You can kind of make out that it has tiny hairs on its thorax that pick up pollen as it wanders around this arrowleaf balsamroot flower, sipping on nectar (or eating pollen, or whatever it's doing.) It seems reasonable to guess that some pollination happens while it goes about its business.

As the saying goes, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data", but a brief search came back with a few other photos on the internet of similar beetles on balsamroot flowers, so at minimum this is not a one-off occurrence: Someone's Flickr photo (taken further east on the Washington side of the Gorge), and stock photos on Getty Images and Alamy The Alamy one shows a pair of pollen-covered beetles mating on the side of a balsamroot flower, so it may not be safe for work if your boss is an especially prudish entomologist.

But I haven't seen anything in writing saying the plant is pollinated by such-and-such beetle. I did run across a 2005 study on the pollination needs of the plant. It notes that essentially no previous studies had been done on pollination for the whole balsamroot genus, but then zooms in on the habits of a couple of native bee species and never mentions beetles at all. The study was motivated by practical concerns, namely an interest in growing balsamroot seed commercially, as the plant seems to be good for habitat restoration, and both livestock and wildlife seem to think it's delicious. There are already other seed crops that rely on native bees, such as Eastern Washington's alfalfa seed industry and its dependence on alkali bees, so maybe it just seemed natural to focus on that and not the care and feeding of some weird desert beetle. And admittedly this beetle didn't seem to be in any great hurry to buzz away to the next flower, which helps if you want photos, not so much if you're an international seed conglomerate and your CEO needs a new yacht.

So we're at a dead end regarding beetles, but a Forest Service info page about the plant has a couple of other unrelated nuggets. First, it describes the flowers as "bigger than a silver dollar but smaller than a CD; about the size of a small floppy disk", which is overly wordy but gives you a strong clue as to the age of the author. Later, toward the end when it describes the plant's culinary and medicinal uses, it says cryptically that "The root could be used as a coffee substitute", without elaborating any further. A page at Eat The Planet repeats the claim, as do a lot of other search results, but nobody on the whole wide internet says whether the resulting beverage is regular or decaf. Which to me is the one key detail about anything described as a coffee substitute. No caffeine and it's just another way to make hot water taste bitter, which is not so interesting. Either way, the public deserves answers.