HCRH Milepost 23

Next up we're at HCRH Milepost 23, at the intersection of the old highway with Larch Mountain Road. At this point the highway veers off to the left and vaguely downhill, heading to the Vista House, while Larch Mountain Road veers off to the right and starts climbing right off the bat. At one point not so long ago I might have gone off on a tangent here about whether this spot is where the "real" Gorge starts, but I'm going to pass this time -- it's one of those arguments where you spend the first hour defining what "real" means, and you can define it to mean anything and get whatever result you want, and that can be fun if you're debating with friends over beers and nobody's taking it too seriously. And I'll have you know that I come off as a reasonably normal and well-adjusted human being in person, and friends and even coworkers have never witnessed me chasing internet rabbit holes all the way down. But I digress, so let's skip ahead to the attractions and points of interest and places of note.

Nearby Attractions, and Points of Interest,
and Places and Things of Note, roughly ordered West to East:

• Before you get to Milepost, you obviously have to stop at Portland Womens Forum, the little state park where you stop for 30 seconds and take a quick photo of the Vista House. I don't think this practice is even for good luck or anything; you just sort of have to do it anyway in the name of tradition, no matter how many photos you already have of the Vista House from the exact same location. The light and the weather conditions do vary a bit, and I guess if you keep at it you'll end up collecting the whole set of those conditions eventually, so there's that. And right behind the famous viewpoint is a gated gravel road. There are no signs telling you what it's for or where it goes, but this is the old wagon road down to the railroad tracks and almost to Rooster Rock (except for I-84 in the way), and more importantly it's part of the secret path to Palisade Falls.
• Immediately east of the viewpoint is a stretch of road known as the Galaxy Note 20 Memorial Highway, due to an unfortunate yet spectacular incident back in December 2023, as I explained on the 'gram here.
• Out-of-town visitors: At some point on this journey you might decide you love the look of columnar basalt (which you'll see at a couple of future stops on this lil' tour) and want it to be part of your domestic environment. But -- record scratch -- you hate the cold, wet weather here (which is understandable, quite honestly), and have zero interest in moving here permanently. Never fear, there are other ways to live your dream. One of these would be to turn right at Knieriem Rd. and go hit up the Howard Canyon Quarry, a couple of miles south and outside of the official protected scenic area. They specialize in ornamental basalt columns and will happily sell you literal tons of the stuff. You could just set the columns up around the house, or out in the yard somewhere, maybe as part of a nice realistic water feature. For the rich Texans out there, you can tell your friends and neighbors that you shot a real Northwest waterfall while you were here and had it taxidermied up real nice.
  
  However: If you want to make the really big bucks, have your basalt shipped to Florida instead -- any old vacant lot in Florida will do -- and charge admission and tell everyone it's the ruins of a temple from Atlantis, 100% built by the ancient aliens from TV. Most people -- or at any rate enough people -- will believe you and automatically buy whatever snake oil you feel like selling, because Florida, and soon you'll have an army of true believers at your command... right up until the first moment they get bored, and then you've lost them. So the secret is just to keep the escalating PR spectacles coming as long as you can, and then flip the place to some ambitious sucker investor just before you run out of ideas. Couple of free starter ideas to get you going: 1. Lady Esmerelda, the Fortune-Telling Alligator, specializing in horoscopes and lottery numbers, and really generic advice for the lovelorn. 2. Fake a UFO sighting with some cheap weather balloons. These days if you stage it well enough the Air Force will freak out and shoot it down right over your Jacksonville Temple of Atlantis, and hordes of tourists will descend on your tourist trap, but somehow you were ready for this onslaught with a whole warehouse full of "And all I got was this lousy T-shirt" T-shirts. Those two ideas should be enough to get you started, and you can thank me later.
• Just shy of the milepost and off to your right, you might notice an open-sided steel cube, a couple of feet on each side, balanced on one corner atop a black-painted metal post. Some of the cube's edges are painted red, others white, and a couple of them are blue with white stars. If you look closely, there's a small wooden cross lying inside the cube. Older street view images show it standing up vertically from the 'base' corner, inside the cube, so it must have fallen over fairly recently. I am a bit frustrated to report I cannot find any info at all about this thing -- specificially who created it and why. Frustrating because I could swear I once read a story about it in some local media outlet, maybe Willamette Week or the Tribune, but neither has searchable archives online and I only vaguely remember the story, or I only think I remember it and I have this completely wrong. Two competing maybe-memories are saying the backstory is either a.) it was added just before the Scenic Area Act went into effect in 1986 and was grandfathered in, or b.) it was added not long after the law took effect, but so far the feds have shied away from enforcing the usual rules and regulations because of that little wood cross in the cube, since the Supreme Court would jump at any opportunity to strike down the whole law over someone's little wood cross and generally privilege religious stuff over all other things. I still have no idea what the cube stands for though, since cubes don't really appear in mainstream Christian iconography, or in traditional USA patriotic imagery for that matter. I dunno, maybe someone caught wind of the Pythagoreans and their weird obsession with the dodecahedron, and figured they ought to claim at least one regular polyhedron for Jesus before somebody else claims them all for their made-up false religion. And I admit that isn't a very good theory even by my usual standards.
• You might notice that the photos above show another small cross and sort of diorama next to the milepost. This is not a roadside attraction or a scenic highlight or even a historical marker, exactly. I thought I should explain briefly, though, for any visitors from overseas who might encounter it or another like it and don't know what it is. This is a little roadside memorial, and these usually honor a person or people who died in a car accident at this spot. They aren't official in any way, and are built and maintained by friends or relatives, pretty much for as long as people continue taking care of it. I haven't checked yet, but there are probably strict but largely unenforced laws on the books in Oregon limiting the size and duration and so forth of roadside memorials, because it's hard to imagine the state legislature passing up a chance to invent a new misdemeanor. I recall first seeing roadside memorials in Georgia and South Carolina in the mid-1990s and first seeing them in the Northwest in the early 2000s.
• Since the milepost marks the turnoff for Larch Mountain Road, Milepost 23 is the closest milepost for everything up that direction, starting with the famous
• View Point Inn, as seen in the first Twilight movie, specifically the prom scene. Also from the olden days of the old highway, but mostly the sparkly vampire movie, let's be honest here. For a little reality check, the place's Yelp reviews from before the fire were all over the map. We're told the current new owners (as of January 2025) have big plans and are going to fix up and reopen the place, for real this time. So we'll see how that turns out.
• If you were to turn left at the once and fugure sparkly vampire hotel and continue along Columbia Avenue, you'll see that there's a small residential neighborhood back there, and the road extends north to the Vista House, though that end is gated off to deter tourists. This area was actually platted out as a subdivision called "Thor's Heights" way back in 1913, and then scaled back in 1917 after (I assume) prospective homebuyers came to realize what the weather was like here most of the year.
• Continuing on the Larch Mountain side trip, there are a lot of closed roads up there -- mostly old logging roads -- that can kind of double as trails, at least if you aren't too picky about where you're going. I spent a lot of time exploring this area during peak Covid as a way to get out and get some steps in my legs without encountering any other human beings whatsoever. And I realize this list might be ruining a bunch of prime secret spots just before the H5N1 bird flu mutates and sweeps the world and causes another lockdown wave, and that wouldn't be a great outcome, but hey, there's always the coast range to explore. So in that spirit, here are a few explorable Forest Service roads, and some BLM and even Multnomah County roads too since we're in the area anyway.
• Also the trails at Donohue Creek, Buck Creek, and Pepper Mountain -- though to be honest two of those three are also old logging roads.
• And then there's the famous (but still not famous enough) Sherrard Viewpoint at the uppermost tippy-top of Multnomah County's hometown favorite shield volcano. Which turns out to be an excellent place to view the Aurora Boralis, on the rare occasions it deigns to visit us.
• Backtracking all the way back to the intersection and then hanging a left at the milepost, there are a couple of turnouts along this narrow cliffside stretch of the old highway. First up is a spot with a couple of large, raised concrete disks, which turn out to be the tops of old water tanks, formerly the water supply to the Vista House. I don't know how deep they go or if they're currently used for anything. If not, I have an idea. The dumb idea I already regret proposing is to remove the concrete tops of these tanks, and turn them into large public hot tubs with a nice view. Probably need some kind of shuttle bus since there's nowhere to park here, and things like better guardrails to arrange, but honestly I'd like to stay focused on the big picture for once and let the detail folks figure that stuff out. It would be amazing on a chilly drizzly afternoon toward the tail end of fall foliage season, and I can already tell that keeping drains clear of fallen leaves that time of year is going to be a mess, just as an example.
• The other turnout you'll see is the Bird's Nest overlook, a small viewpoint with the usual Gorge-style stone railing plus some actual seating, if you feel like lingering around to watch the sunset. The surprising thing is that this was just a gravelly wide spot in the road until 1995, when ODOT designed and built it in the style of the old highway.
• And just like that, ta-daaa, we're at the Vista House, which hopefully requires no introduction because this post is quite long enough already. It has always seemed like there ought to be more to the place than there is; in a recent Instagram post I suggested it ought to have a secret level below the lowest one we know about, ideally home to a fabulous Art Deco speakeasy and jazz club that the authorities never got around to busting, which remains secret to the present day because it's tradition at this point, and also because letting tourists in would ruin it. Anyway, poking around looking for secret doors is probably a waste of time, but be sure to have a stroll along the sidewalk as it circles around the Vista House, and then check out my Crown Point viaduct post to see what's under that sidewalk (spoiler: not solid rock). Or you could look at the post first, but where's the fun in that?

HCRH Milepost 22

The next HCRH milepost on this weird little excursion is Milepost 22, which is right in the midst of the highway's farm stand corridor. The milepost looks a bit worse for wear right now, tilted and possibly broken off at the base. Street View imagery from June 2023 shows it tilted like it is now, while previous versions from October 2021 back thru October 2007 all show it upright.

Nearby Attractions:

• Obviously the farm stands are the main event on this stretch of the highway, specifically the blueberry farm right across the highway, and the lavender farm next door to it. This is also your big chance to sneak a peek at the fallen milepost without looking like a suspicious weirdo poking around in someone's yard. So of course I procrastinated until past the end of farm stand season because the place always seemed crowded, so instead I had to roll by and take photos from the car like at Milepost 18. But you don't have to do that.
• A couple of religious retreat / conference centers just down the road, almost next door to each other: Menucha (Presbyterian, specifically First Presbyterian in downtown Portland) and Crestview Manor (very conservative Christian), both of which began as early 20th century grand manor houses owned by local captains of industry, built during that brief window of time before rich people realized they could just high-tail it off to Palm Springs during the wet months and do all their conspicuous consumption down there instead, while maintaining a low-key residence here for the tax-free shopping or whatever. Anyway, one tidbit for this humble blog's usual readership is that Menucha grounds map shows a number of trails and viewpoints around the site. I seem to recall that at one point you could buy a day hiking pass and wander the grounds taking photos without attending a conference, but I don't see any mention of that on their website anymore, so it may have been discontinued during the pandemic or thereabouts, I don't know.
• There's also a historic Grange hall just off the highway and behind some trees. Fortunately this Grange doesn't seem to have gone all militia-y like some others around the Northwest have. So if you're in the market for an indoor wedding venue in the Gorge, this might be a good option. If, on the other hand, you're planning a large, traditional outdoor wedding in the Gorge, any time of the year, with hundreds of guests, dozens of contractors, and tons of rented stuff that absolutely must not get wet or dirty, or be blown over by the wind, or hit by lightning, or stomped by krakens or kaiju, please be aware that hubris angers the gods. Mostly the rain gods, but the wildfire ones sub in over the summer, and I just feel like I shouldn't be a party to this and have no useful advice to offer except to reconsider. There's a whole genre of event they call an "elopement wedding", which is kind of like actually eloping except that you can tell people about it ahead of time, even your parents if you want to. So you and your intended, and your officiating friend who got ordained online last week, and your photographer, and a reasonable number of friends go for a hike somewhere in the gorge and have a brief ceremony (and extended photoshoot) wherever the mood strikes you, and roll with it and adapt if the weather goes sideways, and it's cute and looks spontaneous and doesn't bankrupt anyone, which is always a plus. Note: I'm not in this business and don't know anyone who is, and am not selling anything. I just like the idea and can confirm that this sort of event almost never triggers a kraken release.

HCRH Milepost 21

We're starting the new year with another Historic Columbia River Highway milepost. Milepost 21 is at the HCRH intersection with NE Evans Road and (sort of) with Corbett Hill Road. This is more or less the center of Corbett: To the west are the post office, the water district office, the elementary and high schools, and an incongruous tech company of some sort. To the east are the local general store, the rural fire department, the (future) local history museum, and an incongruous biotech food lab of some sort. To the north, Corbett Hill Road connects to I-84, while Evans Rd. heads south into the wilds of rural east Multnomah County, becoming SE Gordon Creek Road at the intersection with Hurlburt Rd., then winding south through various adventures and ending up in Sandy or thereabouts.

If you were expecting posts about mileposts 19 and 20 before getting here, you may be in for a wait. Milepost 19 is clearly visible in Street View imagery from June 2023 but I've looked for it several times and I'm mostly convinced it isn't there now. Up ahead we'll see at least two others that have obvious, recent vehicular damage, so if I had to guess what happened to #19, that would have to be the leading theory. I haven't been paying close attention to the subject over time, so I don't know if this is part of a wave of milepost damage or this actually happens all the time and the state just grumbles quietly and replaces them as needed. I would believe either, frankly.

I think Milepost 20 would be somewhere near the HCRH intersection with Mershon Rd. if it existed. It's not there now, wasn't there the last time Street View rolled through, and also wasn't there during any previous Street View visits, back thru 2007. The semi-interesting thing about this location is Mershon Rd. may be the oldest of several east-west routes predating the famous old highway, and sufficiently old road survey docs (like this one from 1889) refer to it as the "Portland and Dalles County Road", better known as the Dalles Wagon Road. Which was the HCRH's predecessor, though I don't think it was ever built all the way to The Dalles. Little remains of it today, as it was largely built over by the O.W.R.&N. railroad well before the HCRH went in. Which is a strategy that works amazingly in the original 1980s SimCity since the devs never imagined anyone doing that and did not penalize you for only building transit and nowhere for cars.

Nearby Attractions:

• Corbett Country Market, the local grocery store, liquor store, gas station, and bbq joint. I don't do a lot of restaurant reviews here, but I've had their tri-tip sandwich and highly recommend this place based on that.
• The local historical society museum isn't open yet, but they have an actual building under construction.
• About a block east from the milepost are NE 365th and 366th Avenues, which I thiiink are the highest-numbered streets anywhere on the Portland-centered street grid. I think the closest competitor on the west side (since unincorporated Washington county uses this system too) would probably have to be NW 341st Avenue just outside Cornelius city limits between Cornelius and Hillsboro.
• local community website, complete with local forums that people actually use and everything, sorta like the 1998 internet was everywhere.
• The secret 100' waterfall west of the old rock quarry at the Corbett I-84 exit, near the site of a 1903 train robbery.
• To the south, and further away, there's the obscure North Oxbow area (the largely ignored eastern half of Oxbow Park), and several even more obscure Metro natural areas, including at least one more secret waterfall, and this one will knock your socks off. (Metaphorically, I mean, and no offense intended to people who don't believe in socks.) But telling you more about it (including the location) is out of scope for this current project, so you'll have to wait a bit.

HCRH Milepost 18

The next HCRH milepost we're visiting is for mile 18, which is located at a really awkward point where the highway is crawling uphill next to the Springdale Job Corps Center. There isn't a good, safe place to stop anywhere nearby, since mileposts weren't meant to be destinations themselves, not even the retro ones. But hey, that's what they said about the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas Nevada Sign at first, and look how that turned out. Anyway, I'm saying all this to explain why the photos look like they were taken quickly from a moving vehicle: It's because they were. The trick is to set up burst mode and point your phone in the right general direction, and take a bunch of photos while staying focused on driving, and then discard all photos not containing a milepost. Consider the, er, famous Michelangelo quote about sculpting David by simply chipping away everything that was not David. And TBH I just copied that existing process, merely adapting it to photos of little concrete posts. Just putting that out there cos Big Mike paid his dues and deserves proper credit.

Nearby Attractions:

• I keep meaning to stop and look at the cool metal dragon statue in front of the Job Corps main entrance and I haven't gotten around to doing it yet. I gather Job Corps is one of the federal programs on the chopping block for the next president we won't name and his oligarch pals, so I should probably get a move on about this one. More importantly, go see it while you still can, whether I do or not.
• This stretch of the highway runs right next to an unnamed creek -- I ran across a 1935 road survey map that called it "Prosperity Creek" but I have no idea if anyone still uses that name 90 years later -- so the ravine it runs through here is probably either "Springdale Canyon" or "Prosperity Canyon", though I've never seen anyone use those names. The state LIDAR map says there's a spot downstream of the Job Corps entrance where the creek goes over a couple of 20'-25' drops close together and then flows into the Sandy River at the far upstream end of Dabney State Park, but I have not actually tried looking for it, and that bit of the park is probably underwater a lot in the wet season, so investigating further may not be doable.
• South of the Job Corps property is Metro's highly obscure Springdale Natural Area, ~230 acres of Sandy riverfront land that seem to be nearly inaccessible from the outside world. The internet says this nature area is home to Smith Creek Falls, which looks to be around 50' high, and is (probably) accessible only by boat. Some joker (not me, promise) added it to Google Maps a while back, asking "Who has ever seen a more picturesque location in all the earth? 🌎🌍". I'm no philosopher, but I think the answer to this is "nobody", but only because it's a trick philosophical question: Nobody has ever actually seen Smith Creek Falls. Therefore nobody has seen both it AND other places that might be the most picturesque. Therefore the number of people who have seen it and other candidates and then chose somewhere else as the best must be exactly zero, yay, Smith Creek Falls wins.
• On a point of (much) more general interest, I keep hearing that Springdale's historic Springdale Pub is a must-visit pizza destination and I haven't been there yet. I'll keep you posted.

HCRH Milepost 17

A few of you out there might remember an old project I did around the Stark St. Milestones, a series of very old stone markers along Stark St. each carved to indicate the distance in miles from downtown Portland (measured specifically from the intersection of SW Broadway & Washington St.), with a surprising number of surviving stones, from milestone P2 embedded into a wall at Lone Fir Cemetery in inner SE Portland, out to P14 on the campus of Mt. Hood Community College, along the east edge of Gresham and Troutdale. I mentioned a few times that Stark was eventually extended across the Sandy River to join the new Columbia River Highway, and they decided to continue the existing mile numbering as the highway continued east. I didn't follow suit immediately; I was just happy to have collected the whole set thru #14. You will not be surprised to learn that I recently decided to go ahead and do HCRH mile markers as a project. I didn't see anyone else doing it, for one thing, and for another I'd recently bought a fun new car and this was a fresh excuse to take it out for a spin on several weekends over the summer.

As for the scope of this project: After MHCC there are apparently no markers for miles 15 and 16, and it's unclear whether those ever existed. Then there's a continuous stretch of mileposts from 17 thru 36 (except for the currently-missing 19 and 20). There's an odd one-off wooden Milepost 43 around the eastern outskirts of Cascade Locks, and a few sporadic ones numbered in the 50s and low 60s this side of Hood River, picking up again east of town at 67 and continuing east to around 88 on the west side of The Dalles, and I've heard there are even more of them way out in the Umatilla area with mile numbers in the 170s, but those may not be part of the same "miles from Portland" sequence, in which case they don't count. So the exact end of this thing is TBD, and for those of you following along at home (and rushing out to visit each one as the next post goes up) the important thing to know is that mile counts always reset at state lines and so there's no risk of blundering across into Idaho (where the shadows lie) by chasing these things around.

That may seem like a lot of surviving mileposts, given the originals were made with 1910s reinforced concrete and not stone. It turns out most of the ones you'll see out there are replacements that only date to the 1980s, which was practically yesterday. But -- crucially -- a couple of them did survive from way back when, and the new replacements copy the originals' design, and -- also crucially -- they didn't explain which two are the originals so it could be any of them, and the only way to be sure you have photos of these important historical artifacts is to find all of them. (Or, I guess, you could just call up ODOT and ask, but where's the fun in that?)

So with all of that background out of the way, the first milepost we encounter on the way east is Milepost 17, which is located along a shady shoulder of the highway around 1/3 mile past the Stark St. Bridge, before the entrance to Dabney State Park. Note that the shoulder is actually marked No Parking, I think because parking here would let a few visitors stroll into the park and scratch their disc golf itch without paying. So if you just pull off the road briefly to take photos of a concrete milepost, this will probably not lead to getting tasered by The Man, though you never know.

I think another thing I'll do for these posts is list some "nearby attractions", and sort of figure out what that means on the fly. (I think Wordpress is able to do that automagically based on geotags, but Google yoinked most of their Blogger engineers away to go build Google+ before they got around to building this.) Anyway, here's what's nearby:

• An old post about the Stark St. Bridge, currently closed for emergency repairs.
• Flickr photos from Dabney State Park right here, since the related blog post isn't done yet. And I could swear I have more material than the two short video clips in that set. I think I must have mis-filed them somewhere.
• Some very obscure seasonal waterfalls across the highway from Dabney, like this one maybe 300 feet past the milepost.
• A short distance past the entrance to Dabney, at the intersection with Nielson Rd., is the site of "Dabney Springs" aka "Troutdale Springs". Which until quite recently was another minor relic of the old highway, a free-flowing water fountain installed by the state Highway Commission sometime in the early years of the old highway, as a source of radiator water for your poor overheated Model T Ford. Decades later, local hippies decided it was a source of pure mountain spring ambrosia, unsullied by The Man and his chlorinated fluoridated dihydrogen-monoxidated corporate mainstream "water". Even though the water flowed out of an iron pipe, embedded in a big concrete block, and the state never actually said where the water came from or even promised that it was safe for humans to drink. Eventually (sometime earlier this year) this attracted enough hippies to become a regular traffic hazard -- I dunno, maybe they kept twirling in the street or something -- and The Man came and shut it all down. I don't have a post about this or any photos of it or anything, but a recent ZehnKatzen Times post has all the details here.
• Flickr photos from the obscure Stark St. Viaduct, another HCRH-style bridge uphill from the bridge on the Sandy River. That post isn't done yet either.
• If you crossed the Stark St. bridge and then turned left instead of right onto the HCRH, and continued around the bend in the river, you'll soon be at Keanes Creek Falls and the former Tippy Canoe dive bar, and past there a series of small roadside waterfalls on the way to central Troutdale.

Crown Point Viaduct

Ok, we're back in the Gorge again, looking at yet another bit of historical 1910s engineering from the old Columbia River Highway. Virtually every new visitor to the Gorge stops at the Vista House to have a look around, maybe use the restroom and have a peek at the gift shop, before continuing down the road as it winds around Crown Point and then switchbacks down the hill to Latourell Falls and points east. We're here having a look at that initial bit of road, the part below the Vista House with the sidewalk and streetlights on the outside of the curve. And the reason we're doing that is because the sidewalk (and probably part of road) aren't built directly on solid rock, but on a concrete viaduct structure similar to the ones on either side of Multnomah Falls, so it gets categorized as another historic Gorge bridge, just a curving one along the edge of a high cliff that doesn't cross over water. There aren't a lot of clues to this when you're actually walking on it, but you can see it clearly in photos taken from the Portland Womens Forum viewpoint, or from nearer spots like the Bird's Nest overlook. So I've included a few photos from those places.

Anyway, when I say it gets categorized as a bridge, I mean that all the internet resources I usually consult for semi-interesting factoids about bridges have the same kind of info about the Crown Point Viaduct too. Obviously there's a Recreating the HCRH page for the viaduct, and it had a BridgeHunter page back in the day (now available via the Wayback Machine). Its entry in the old highway's National Register of History Places nomination calls it "Crown Point Viaduct, No. 4524", and describes it briefly:

This 560-foot spiral viaduct was constructed of reinforced concrete and runs for 225 degrees of a circle around Crown Point. It functions as a 7-foot-wide sidewalk and curb with a 4-foot-high parapet wall on the outside of a 24-foot roadway cut into the rock formation. A dry masonry retaining wall stabilizes the hillside above and below the viaduct and masonry parapet walls that ring Vista House (see under “Buildings”), the sandstone public comfort station completed on top of Crown Point in 1918.

The Historic American Engineering Record collection at the Library of Congress has a writeup about it, plus several black & white photos, including two photos from underneath the deck. I wanted to point those out in particular because I don't have any photos taken from down there, so go look at those if you really want to see close-ups of that area. I did sorta-consider the idea for a moment, way back when I was taking photos for various other Gorge bridge posts in 2014 or so, but realized I just didn't want to, and remembered that nobody is paying me to do any of this, so I skipped it.

But continuing with the usual sources, ODOT's 2013 historic bridge inventory, page 214 describes it briefly as "Twenty-eight 20-ft reinforced concrete slab spans as a half-viaduct surrounding Crown Point, a rock promontory overlooking the Gorge", while their guidebook Historic Highway Bridges of Oregon elaborates a bit:

The Crown Point Viaduct was the first structure started on the Multnomah County portion of the Columbia River Highway. Samuel C. Lancaster was the supervising engineer for both Multnomah County and the State Highway Department. Lancaster located the highway to encircle Crown Point, a promontory rising vertically 625 feet about the river. (Crown Point was designated a National Natural Landmark in August 1971.) The "half-viaduct" prevented unnecessary excavation or fill to establish a roadbed on the point. The structure is 560 feet long and consists of twenty-eight 20-foot reinforced concrete slab spans. Vista House, an observatory and rest stop dedicated to early Oregon pioneers, was completed on Crown Point in 1918.

Lancaster often gets credited for everything along the old highway, but like most of the regular bridges along the road, the viaduct was actually designed by the engineer K.P. Billner, who wrote about his Gorge bridges in the February 10, 1915 issue of Engineering and Contracting, Vol. XLIII No. 6, pp. 121-123. Most of the article is about the Latourell Creek Bridge, but he included a bit about the Crown Point Viaduct too:

At Crown Point there is an abrupt cliff rising to a height of about 700 ft. In rounding the turn above the river the road follows a curve of 110-ft. radius through an angle of 225º. A 7-ft. concrete sidewalk and railing crowns this cliff. Surmounting the 4-ft. solid railing there are electric lights, at 20-ft. intervals, which are visible from the transcontinental trains and from the river boats below. A high curb protects this walk from the traffic on the road.

The accompanying photo shows the top of Crown Point with the road like it is today, but with the original natural rock formation in the center instead of the Vista House, which would not be constructed for a few more years.

I didn't run across much in the way of historical anecdotes concerning the viaduct bit specifically, but I've got two, and you can draw whatever conclusions you want from them.

First an odd episode in December 1927 when Samuel Lancaster had a freakout over accumulated ice on the road during a winter storm, insisting that everything from the Crown Point viaduct through to Multnomah Falls was in imminent danger of collapsing if something wasn't done immediately to clear the ice off the road. A couple of days later county engineers inspected that stretch of the road and confirmed it was fine and in no danger of any kind of apocalypse. I can see Lancaster being a little overprotective of his "babies", but this is not how civil engineers usually react to potential dangers to something they had a hand in building.

Oh, and in March 17th 1942 the Crown Point viaduct -- along with the east and west Multnomah Falls viaducts -- was officially placed on a list of 934 new "prohibited zones", newly off-limits to anyone considered to be an an "alien enemy", meaning anyone of Japanese ancestry. The order also added Idaho, Montana, Utah, and Nevada to a list of "military areas"; Oregon, Washington, California and Arizona were already on that list as of a previous order two weeks earlier. This happened a month and change after FDR issued Executive Order 9066, and shortly before the government started shipping Japanese-American citizens off to internment camps. The linked Wikipedia article shows a deportation order for the Bay Area dated April 1st, less than two weeks after this. And it just so happens that I'm finishing this post on election night 2024, and things aren't looking great for the civilized world right now, and the prospect of the very same 1798 law that enabled internments being used again against immigrants seems to be right there on the horizon all of a sudden, and I was kind of hoping finishing this post would be a nice distraction from watching election news, and now it's actually not helping at all. Because history isn't just a selection of quaint anecdotes, and tends to be intertwined with the present in all sorts of unexpected ways, especially when you don't want it to and least expect it.

Nesika Falls

Next up we're having a look at Nesika Falls, another very tall but little-known Columbia Gorge waterfall right in the middle of the main tourist corridor, a just a little over a mile east of Multnomah Falls and even closer than that to the Oneonta trailhead. If you're heading east on the old Columbia River Highway, you might notice a small parking lot with some sheer cliffs and mossy boulders behind it, and absolutely no signage of any kind to tell you why there's a parking lot here. Its most common use seems to be as a turn-around spot for tourists trying to score one of those $20 VIP parking spaces at Multnomah Falls Lodge, which may involve a slow crawl thru the tiny lodge parking lot followed by flooring it down the road (or continuing a slow crawl down the road, depending on traffic) to the closest turnaround (i.e. here) and back (i.e. here), and coming back for yet another slow crawl thru the completely full lot. A useful rule of thumb here is that if you find yourself using any driving techniques you learned during holiday shopping, you should accept that you are not currently having fun, will not begin having fun anytime soon, even if a parking spot opens up, and should probably rethink your plans for the day.

The second most common use of this lot is as unofficial (but free) overflow parking for Multnomah Falls. People who park here to use this spot as Multnomah Falls overflow parking tend to just trudge along the road, ignoring all the "No Pedestrian Access" signs along the way, including the ones on the narrow East Viaduct, and trying to duck in time every time an RV with extra-wide side mirrors rolls through. I tried that route once way back in the early 90s (as described here) and absolutely do not recommend it. What you want to do instead is look for trails heading up into the forest, and take the westbound one. There are no signs to tell you this, but this spot is an access point for Gorge Trail No. 400, the still-incomplete trail that might connect Troutdale to Hood River someday. The eastbound trail is easier to find, right at the east end of the parking lot, but it's not the trail you want right now. To find the westbound trail, cross the little road bridge or culvert immediately west of the lot, and look for a trail a few steps beyond there. When you cross the bridge, look down at the little creek it crosses. This is the same stream that forms the falls we're here to look at, so if it's just a trickle or it's dry entirely there's nothing to do but come back another day in a wetter season.

Assuming the creek's flowing, follow the trail uphill a short distance, maybe 50'-100', look uphill, and try to work out the route of that little creek as it comes downhill. If the creek's flowing but you don't see the falls, try going a bit further, or go back a bit, and look for gaps in the trees and underbrush, and keep trying until you see something resembling the photoset above.

Once you see it, look back toward the parking lot and note the large rock formation that completely blocks the view of the falls from the highway. If that wasn't there the waterfall would probably be a bit less obscure than it currently is.

After you've seen the falls from a distance and taken a few photos, continuing westbound on the 400 will take you to Multnomah Falls, specifically to the first switchback past the bridge. So you can either continue uphill to the top and skip most of the crowds, or you can head downhill, elbow your way thru the crowds, and hit the snack bar for a plate of genuine Multnomah Falls nachos, or whatever. Before choosing your adventure, look behind you at the junction. A vintage plaque, low to the ground, announces this is the "Ak-Wanee Trail", though nobody really uses that name anymore. This trail officially opened in 1978, and the name honors a young Yakima tribal member who worked on trail construction here and died in a car accident shortly before the trail opened to the public.

The trail figured in several Roberta Lowe newspaper columns over the next few years, primarily in the Oregon Journal:

• A 1979 Journal column explaining exactly how to find the unofficial and very, very steep Elevator Shaft trail.
• A 1980 Journal column explaining that the new trail had not been properly manicured yet, and was still a bit rough.

• 1984 Oregonian column (after the Journal went under), on hiking the 400 from Multnomah Falls through to the obscure Exit 35 Trailhead east of Ainsworth State Park. (That point marked the end of the trail until the short-lived Warrendale-Dodson segment opened a few years later, and it became the end of the trail again in 1996 after a big chunk of trail was erased by massive landslides a bit east of that trailhead.) The column mentions a dead-end bit of abandoned trail uphill from the present-day trail, built as an abortive attempt to route the trail closer to Nesika and Waespe Falls (another seasonal waterfall we'll visit as soon as I finish that post). They would certainly be less obscure if that had worked out, but we're told that the necessary blasting could have posed a hazard to cars and trains below so they dumped that idea.

  The abortive spur trail seems to still exist, according to the state LIDAR map, with the trail junction located right about here. Though so far I have completely failed to find this trail at ground level. That's one limitation of LIDAR maps, especially in this part of the world: You can make out exactly what the ground is shaped like, but when you go to visit in person that ground may be under an impassable layer of brush, fallen limbs, poison oak, devils club, rusty nails, broken glass, old barbed wire, etc., and there's really no way to be sure until you get there. Another limitation is that LIDAR really just tells you that a potential creekbed intersects a cliff at a given spot and obviously can't tell you if there's any water in the creekbed.

• Also nearby, unofficially, or maybe closer to Waespe Falls next door, is the lower end of the Fire Escape trail, which is marked at the upper end by an ominous sign that reads "Fire Trail - Emergency Only". Peope often confuse it with the very similar Elevator Shaft trail which is a mile or so to the west, closer to Multnomah Falls. Even the OregonHikers Field Guide page about the Elevator Shaft manages to confuse the two. The key thing to know is the Elevator Shaft is supposed to be uphill only, while the Fire Escape is said to be down only, and for the life of me I have no idea why. I suppose it reduces the odds of people having to pass each other on these precarious routes, if nothing else. I have never done either one, but my understanding is that the main difference between the two is that the Elevator Shaft has an actual trail carved into it, with over 100 tight switchbacks, and you can see it on LIDAR and even Google Maps' satellite view, while the Fire Escape is just a talus slope that's known to be descendable in a pinch.

One unsolved mystery I have: If the bridge and maybe the parking lot date back to around 1916, and the trail only arrived in 1978, what was here before that? Was it really just a turnaround spot for heading back to Multnomah Falls all that time? I have no idea.

The name is fairly recent; it's just named after the Trails Club lodge near the creek, way up above the falls. It sort of fits with the existing pattern of real or invented Indian names bestowed on various places by non-Indians, mostly in the early 20th century. Which is not really ideal, but the lodge is about the only named landmark anywhere nearby, so I guess it'll do in a pinch. The other idea that's been proposed is some variation on "Farula Falls" or "Caddisfly Falls", as it's one of a handful of Gorge waterfalls that are home to Farula constricta^[1], one of several rare caddisfly and stonefly species endemic to the Gorge. It's not a terrible name, but the thought of using it makes me sort of anxious, like I can't shake the idea that it'll attract the wrong kind of attention, from the sort of people who would happily wipe out the last survivors of an endangered species just to own the libs.

To summarize uses of either name across the interwebs: We've got two old OregonHikers forum threads in January and May 2011, followed by a 2013 thread about a then-new trails layer in Google Earth. IIRC one of those threads mentions what might be the abandoned spur trail, referring to it as a "convenient game trail". The name also appears on someone's WentHiking page and another photo linked from there. And that's about it, really.

If I'm not mistaken, under the right weather conditions this area becomes a celebrated ice climbing spot known as "New World Amphitheater", as discussed in two threads at Cascade Climbers, and featured in the Gorge ice climbing chapter of Northwest Oregon Rock. Translating their maps and names into non-climber, I thiiiink Nesika Falls freezes into "Black Dagger", while "Brave New World" is either a different route up the falls or it goes up one of several ephemeral streams immediately to the east, I'm not totally sure which. And "Blackjack" corresponds to a creek west of Nesika but I'm not 100% sure which one. I don't think I've seen any of these theoretically rather tall waterfalls actually flowing, so this is kind of a moot point, and it's why I generally don't bother with ephemeral waterfalls in this project: The only reliable way to see them would involve visiting while a major storm is in progress, which in turn means spending lots of time getting drenched and being cold and wet and miserable, which I can't recommend.

As I understand it, to be a great Gorge ice climbing spot, a place needs a couple of things: A fairly low-flow waterfall (ones that dry up in the summer are great for this) so it'll freeze all the way and not be a firehose in the face of anyone climbing it, and it should be one that runs down the face of a cliff instead of projecting outward like a lot of the major ones do, so it'll freeze on the cliff and not just make a big ice stalagmite at the base. This is not the case everywhere, btw; Helmcken Falls in British Columbia is supposed to be the world's ultimate ice climbing spot, and it's on a major river and forms a giant ice cone over the winter. But around here, if those conditions are met, then it's the taller the better. Speaking of which, I haven't seen any numbers on exactly how tall Nesika Falls is, so let's have a look at the state LIDAR map and see if we can work that out ourselves. I usually do this by trying to pick points above and below that clearly aren't part of the falls but as close to it as I can get, and subtract the altitude of one from the other. This tends to give numbers on the high side of the range but hopefully not by much.

First off -- starting at the old highway and proceeding uphill -- LIDAR says there's a small lower falls below the main one, maybe 15'-20' tall and hidden sort of behind the big rock formation here. (top; bottom). I haven't actually seen this one; it must be hidden in the dense brush back there, and you may need a machete to get a better look at it.

Then we have the main falls, which I think is what's shown in all of my photos. Given a top point at ~815', and a bottom one at 395', that gives us a 420' main waterfall. Seriously.

Then we have a number of smaller upper falls that are set back a bit from the main one and I suspect aren't visible from below. These miiight be visitable from above with a bit of bushwhacking, but I haven't tried this myself and this is not a legally binding warranty. Also, most of these drops are fairly short, and short drops on a small creek may not be very impressive in person, and your photos of them may not necessarily bring fame and fortune, just so we're clear on that. With those disclaimers out of the way, here's what LIDAR says is up there:

1. Upper falls #1 (100') (top, bottom)
2. Upper falls #2 (~30') (top, bottom)
3. Upper falls #3 (~20') (top, bottom)
4. Cascades(~50') (top, bottom)
5. Upper falls #4 (~25') (top, bottom)
6. Upper falls #5 (~20'?) top, bottom
7. And another 20' one on a small tributary east of the main creek (top, bottom)

Just west of there, the one on the next sorta-obvious stream to the west (top, bottom) might be the "Blackjack" of the ice climbing world. It seems to drop a whopping ~550', which would be pretty impressive if there was any water at all going over it most of the year. But then, the lack of water means it erodes slower and stays taller longer, so whatever.

Before we wrap this up, let me point out a few other points of interest nearby, two of which are completely gone now, and another that never made it past the proposal stage but is kind of interesting anyway:

• One of these points of interest was right by the parking lot until quite recently. The creek passes under the highway on an original 1914 bridge, or maybe it's just a culvert, and either way it's pretty small and boring. Around 1979, a local Eagle Scout decided this just wouldn't do and did some amateur masonry here as his Eagle Scout community service project, adding an ornamental bridge railing to the existing bridge. Thus reminding people why we don't usually task Eagle Scouts with civil engineering projects. Recreating the HCRH calls it the "Eagle Scout Bridge", and has a photo or two of it in its post-1979 state. There's even a photo of it in the Library of Congress archives. The National Register of Historic Places nomination for the highway labeled it a "non-contributing structure" and had a few brief and opinionated words to say about it:

  Historically, there has been a structure at this crossing of an unnamed creek since the CRH's construction. The present masonry parapet walls on this small span date from the early 1980s, and represent an unsuccessful attempt to "restore" this bridge in the highway's style.

  I started calling it the Monkey Jesus Bridge: In both cases a well-meaning member of the public decides to improve a thing that doesn't need improving, and... doesn't. It's said that for many years afterward, if you hung around nearby at dusk on the right evening, sometimes the ghosts of ancient Roman engineers would appear and poke at it with sticks and make cutting remarks in Latin about the crooked arches and the barbarian tribes that must have built them. It helps to remember that these guys have been guzzling wine from the same ghostly lead flagons for the last 2000 years and have become a bit irritable over the years. But that's all a moot point, because it's gone now. At one point during the pandemic there was an extended closure of the highway due to a combination of winter landslides and trying to clean them up in a full social distancing environment, and ODOT took advantage of that long closure to quietly make the 70s bridge railing vanish without a trace. There was no public outcry; in fact almost nobody noticed it was gone. And the esteemed Romans have switched to haunting the McMansions of Mt. Scott. Imagine something like Poltergeist, but the ghosts are just unreasonably angry about classical orders and the Golden Ratio, and barbarian tribes who don't even know how to build a villa properly.

• There was also an Oneonta train station or platform somewhere right around here in the early 20th century. A 1927 Metsker map has an all-caps "ONEONTA" label right around the turnout location, while the inset bit of map shows the locations of the "McGowan's Cannery", "Columbia Beach", and "Warren's Cannery" train stops, all in the Warrendale-Dodson area east of here. I haven't come across any historic photos of any of these stations, and most likely they were cheap and rustic, just enough platform so people could get on and off the train with a little dignity. The original road survey map for this stretch of the HCRH, aka County Road 754, covers the Multnomah Falls thru Oneonta Gorge area on page 2 of the PDF, and it definitely shows a train station named "Oneonta" that's separate from and some distance west of the "Oneonta Falls" label. It seems awfully strange to me that any train stop would be anywhere except right in front of Oneonta Gorge, or as close to there as is practical. There was never a town here, or farmland, or or any other reason to come here besides the famous wade-to-the-waterfall spot. Even the Oneonta Trail (which accesses the additional falls upstream of the gorge) wasn't built until the 1930s. Also note that although the tracks seem to be right next to the highway here, and it kind of looks like you could drop someone off or pick them up for their train commute into the big city, the space in beween the two is a roughly 100' cliff, and the highway engineers of 1916 neglected to put in a grand staircase to connect them.

• The mystery not-a-trailhead also appears to be the exact spot where the Columbia River Highway would have intersected the never-built eastern half of County Road 625 (map pdf; ordinance pdf), since it was supposed to intersect the highway near the old train platform. This proposed road dates back to the 1890s, and the unbuilt part was a truly absurd idea. The western, built segment of road ran roughly parallel to -- and uphill of -- the Palmer Mill Road that Gorge fans may be more familiar with, which is actually a former railroad grade. The parallel country road might still exist as part of the maze of unmarked trails, tracks, and goat paths up in the Palmer Mill - Angels Rest area. The built segment ended around the location of the long-gone Palmer sawmill and its vanished mill town, and it won't surprise anyone to learn that the Bridal Veil Lumber company was the primary force behind the proposal.

  From the Palmer area, the unbuilt segment would have made its way sort of northeast, descending into Multnomah Basin, albeit by a somewhat different route than the Multnomah Basin Road that was eventually built. Which brings us to the absurd part: From there, starting just east of the top of Multnomah Falls, the road would have dropped toward river level, or at least railroad level, by a series of tight, precipitous switchbacks immediately east of the unofficial Elevator Shaft trail. If you're ever tried that trail or even looked at it up close, it is very difficult to imagine how a usable road could ever be built there or anywhere nearby, especially back in the horse-and-wagon days. That segment ended right around the trailhead here, and then continued east along more or less the present-day route of the old highway as far as Elowah Falls, then home to another sawmill. The Bridal Veil timber company was behind the proposal, and some suspected that the plan wasn't to actually build the road as proposed, but to establish a public right of way across the land of nearby landowners, with the goal of eventually putting an enormous log flume through there. Some neighboring landowners were surprised to find their signatures had been forged on the petition, when they didn't actually support the proposal. One filed an objection noting that the road would be useless to him, as it was too steep for horses to climb while pulling an empty wagon.

So what next? What's the future of this place? The key thing to know is that the land is a piece of Benson State Park (like the lake next to Multnomah Falls) and is not owned by the Forest Service, and the state will probably never have the money to do anything with this place; they may not even know they own it. The lot was recently added to Google Maps as "Parking to hike to Multnomah Falls", and as that idea takes hold it'll start filling up before sunrise like every other place marked as Multnomah Falls parking. If you put up an official sign and drew attention to the place, either as Multnomah Falls economy parking or for the falls here, you would immediately have a parking nightmare on your hands, and I'm not sure where additional parking could possibly go; the other side of the road is a cliff, but (looking at street view from I-84 not quite a sheer cliff, so maybe a few parking spots could go there with a bit of creative cantilevering. And then revive the bit of spur trail so people have somewhere nearby to go instead of it just providing a longer way to either Multnomah Falls or the Oneonta area. And figure out how your signage should break it to midsummer tourists that the falls might have gone dry for the year and they really should have visited back in March while they were still semi-awesome. It would almost certainly accrue a bunch of one-star Yelp and Google reviews from the sort of tourist who doesn't get the whole "nature" thing, and thinks there's a hidden control room somewhere behind the scenes where a bored bureaucrat controls all the valves to turn the waterfalls off and on, while people at the other control panels handle the weather and the animatronic wildlife.

---

Footnote(s) 1. Insect stuff

More specifically, the species is known from one male and one female specimen, both collected here in April 1989, along with several collected at Mist Falls around the same time. All of them are now part of the 10 million specimen Entomology Collection at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. The 1992 paper describing F. constricta is here:

Wiggins GB, Wisseman RW. NEW NORTH AMERICAN SPECIES IN THE GENERA NEOTHREMMA AND FARULA, WITH HYPOTHESES ON PHYLOGENY AND BIOGEOGRAPHY (TRICHOPTERA: UENOIDAE). The Canadian Entomologist. 1992;124(6):1063-1074. doi:10.4039/Ent1241063-6

The paper is unfortunately paywalled and I'm not sure I want to shell out $36 just to read it, JSTOR doesn't carry the journal, and unfortunately Sci-Hub has an incomplete copy of that issue, ending before it gets around to the paper in question. So that appears to be a dead end, but that's modern science for ya. Here's the abstract for it, at least:

Three new species are described in the caddisfly family Uenoidae: Neothremma prolata, from Hood River County, Oregon; Neothremma mucronata from Lassen County, California; and Farula constricta from Multnomah County, Oregon. Following examination of the holotypes of several species, misinterpretation of the male genitalia morphology of Farula wigginsi Denning is corrected, leading to the recognition of that name as a junior synonym of F. petersoni Denning. Interpretation of male genitalic morphology in the original description of F. geyseri Denning is revised. Phylogenetic relationships are inferred from male genitalic morphology for the species of Neothremma and Farula. Biogeographic patterns of the species in both genera are highly congruent with the phylogenies.

Let me just point out that coauthor Wiggins had the rare privilege of debunking Farula wigginsi, a proposed new species that someone else had named in his honor.

Tanner Creek Bridge

Next up we're looking at the Tanner Creek Bridge an old Columbia River Highway bridge that I somehow skipped over back when I was doing posts about a lot of the others. ODOT's 2013 guide to historic highway bridges has an entry for it, with a brief description:

Bypassed and no longer in use, the Tanner Creek Bridge is a reinforced concrete deck girder, 60 feet in length. The bridge is located near the Interstate 84 entrance to the Bonneville Dam and is now owned by the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission. Completed in 1915, the bridge was constructed by the State Highway Department. Charles H. Purcell was the state bridge engineer, and Samuel Lancaster was the engineer for the Columbia River Highway.

Honestly this is not one of the major scenic or engineering highlights of the old highway. As a general rule of thumb, just because I went out of my way to go see something doesn't mean it's worth seeing. Especially when it costs $5 to park at Wahclella Falls, which has the nearest parking spaces to the bridge. (Although it looks like a lot of visitors park on the road just outside the lot to avoid paying.) This bridge wasn't considered a "contributing structure" when the old highway was added to the National Register of Historic Places, per the nomination paperwork. Which is unlike its closest neighbors, the arch bridges at Moffett Creek to the west and Eagle Creek to the east. I just realized I've never actually done the stretch between Tanner Creek and Moffett Creek on either the HCRH Trail or Trail 400 (the long but incomplete trail that was -- and maybe still is -- supposed to connect Troutdale to Hood River someday), and making a short loop out of the two looks pretty straightforward. I may have to try that at some point. And possibly try to find the first waterfall up Moffett Creek while I'm in the neighborhood, since that seems to be the most interesting sight along the way. It looks like you get a good look at the Tanner Creek railroad viaduct from the HCRH Trail, if you're into bridge stuff, which I gather most people aren't. Plus there's the unofficial Munra Point Trail, which I've never done, but I keep hearing it's sketchy with lots of exposure, and it's also usually packed with influencers doing dumb risky shit for TikTok or the 'Gram, and I'd really rather not watch anybody fall in person. Second only to not falling myself, of course.

As usual for HCRH bridges, there are pages about this bridge at Recreating the HCRH, Columbia River Images and BridgeHunter, though you might notice the last two are Wayback Machine links, as both sites have gone offline since the last time I did one of these posts (and Recreating the HCRH was down for a long while a few years ago). I'm saddened to report that both sites went down for very final reasons: The retired lady who ran Columbia River Images passed away in 2022, and the guy behind BridgeHunter died in a 2020 hiking accident.

Both sites were one-person operations with (I assume) occasional hosting and domain name bills that needed paying, and occasional admin tasks that needed administrating, and any of these things could be the thing that takes a website offline permanently. Not to make this about myself, and not to be morbid, but the humble blog you're currently reading is a one-person operation too, and the fate of two longtime resources I've relied on for years got me thinking about what will become of this place in the end. As a Blogspot site, I don't have regular hosting bills that need to be paid or else the site goes down. I do pay for Flickr, though, so photos will stop working whenever charging my card stops working, or I guess if Flickr goes away someday. And then there's Google's new policy on inactive accounts, where your stuff gets deleted if you haven't logged in for three years or so. I don't know whether that just means your bulging folder of never-to-be-read emails gets deleted, or blogs go away too, or what exactly. So this site could also go away due to a current or future inactive account policy, or Google could just decide Blogger as a whole is not profitable enough to keep around anymore (which is probably true already, quite honestly) and kill off the whole thing, and then this humble lil' blog will go the way of Google Reader, Google Groups, and Google+. Or, in theory, Google could go out of business entirely, or a giant meteor gets us, or yeah.

For reasons I don't recall now, I poked the Wayback Machine really early on and it's been taking occasional snapshots of this humble blog since sometime in 2006. So at least offsite backups are happening, archived by an idealistic nonprofit that aspires to keep and share every last bit of the interwebs forever. Which is cool as far as that goes, but the record industry is currently trying to sue them out of existence, and their password database was breached by Russian hackers a few days ago. And even if they survive the current BS, chances are the internet wouldn't survive a Big Rip, or a false vacuum decay event. So it's anybody's guess what "forever" really means in this context.

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.