HCRH Milepost 26

Next up we're at HCRH Milestone 26, which is located right at Latourell Falls. Specifically at the west side of the Latourell Creek Bridge, by a wide spot in the road that serves as summer overflow parking. There's an old monument to Guy Talbot here -- he was the state park's primary donor-slash-namesake, and nearby is a crosswalk for the park's loop trail, so you could just start the trail from here if you wanted to. The crosswalk doesn't have crosswalk stripes, I think because it didn't have crosswalk stripes in 1916, and traffic safety would not be historically accurate. And the reason there weren't crosswalk stripes here back then was because the trail used to cross the road on a sort of skybridge over the highway, and no crosswalk was needed. If you look closely you can still see a concrete support for the old skybridge on the north side of the road, mostly overtaken by underbrush now.

Going from that to having a mere crosswalk here is kind of suboptimal, since a lot of traffic on the road isn't disposed toward noticing pedestrians. Some of the traffic is going to be cars or motorcycles racing the clock, going for a new personal best Vista-to-Latourell-and-back time. Others are visitors from rectangular corn states, a bit white-knuckled about the twisty drive but also giddy about seeing a waterfall for the first time and maybe not watching for road hazards that closely. A crosswalk signal for the trail crossing seems like overkill, but a crossing guard during the summer might help. Rebuilding the old skybridge like it once was is a non-starter, since modern RVs and shuttle buses would probably struggle to get under it. And going by current trends, the average family SUV will expand to be at least that size in a few years. But do I have an idea for a little adaptive reuse. And this isn't one of my usual dumb ideas, nor is it very expensive, at least not directly. You know how local bike activists are always saying there aren't enough bike trails in the Gorge, even with the HCRH State Trail now mostly complete? My idea helps with that too, a little. So, back during the 2019 Tour de France, someone jumped a BMX bike over the race and made it onto all the daily highlight reels, and maybe the old skybridge piers are a place where regular people could finally give that cool bike trick a try without having to learn French and go overseas and take a bunch of advanced performance-enhancing drugs and so forth. The lack of a bridge also means there won't be a lot of hikers on that particular stretch of trail, at most probably just a few parkour runners, and I think they might legally count as bikes for jumping purposes (Note: I am not a lawyer, so don't cite me as an authority on this.)

After passing through Latourell the older old road crosses the HCRH again, becoming Alex Barr Road (County Road 566 at first, then as CR 648 after the junction w/ Toll Road), and immediately starts climbing again. It's one of two surviving backroads into the Gorge, and two "local access" roads branch off of it: Henderson Road (Road 634) runs above and parallel to the HCRH along the stretch between here and Bridal Veil Falls, and if reopened to hikers and cyclists would open up access to the top of Shepperds Dell Falls, Huerta Falls, and all the other seasonal falls along the way. Further up, a road now called Toll Road (and once known as the Latourell Falls Toll Road, and either way numbered as another part of Road 566) climbs sort-of diagonally uphill to a junction with Brower Rd. near where it crosses Young Creek, and where the old Brower sawmill used to be. The Donohue Creek trail system is nearby, and in theory you can go all sorts of places via roads 458 and 550, the latter climbing up Larch Mountain and ending up somewhere deep in the forbidden Bull Run Watershed. For a while during the area's logging heyday, the road's right of way was shared with a log flume, starting at the mill in Brower and ending at another mill in Latourell. It's not surprising that the flume was either torn out or (more likely) burned many decades ago after the area ran out of loggable trees. I'm not saying I wish it was still there, much less that someone ought to build a new one, but back when I was in third grade my teacher got married over spring break and honeymooned on either Maui or the Big Island, and showed us lots of photos when she was back, and they had gone to... it was either a former log flume or an old irrigation canal or aqueduct, that was either officially repurposed as a waterslide, or at least locals used it as one whenever The Man wasn't looking, and she said it was really fast and scary compared to the ordinary waterslides at the mall, and I thought that sounded really fun and exciting at the time. Whereas now the first thing that comes to mind is all the many reasons -- entirely reasonable reasons -- an authentic log flume waterslide would be shut down or sued out of existence on day 1.

As for the town itself, it still has a number of sorta-historic old houses, but has no hotels or restaurants or antique shops or gas stations or any other businesses these days, and no city hall or public library or any churches, not even a post office. Despite the town's heyday as the entertainment and nightlife capitol of the western Gorge, today there are no nightclubs, no dance halls, no music venues, or anywhere else dedicated to carousing and carrying on into the wee hours. In short there's nothing for you as an outsider to see or do there, and there's no reason to linger around there annoying the locals. They do happen to have a local water utility, the Latourell Falls Township water system, a topic I was curious about after learning about the disgusting medieval water system used by the old company town over at Bridal Veil. That state filing says it's a local government entity, and Townships are a common form of (mostly rural) local government in a lot of other states, largely in the Midwest, where they function as a sort of sub-county, delivering various public services on a smaller scale. And technically the Oregon state constitution does mention "towns" and "townships" a few times, mostly when saying "cities and towns". But there aren't any state laws that spell out exactly how they're created, or how they're run, or who runs them, or what they can and can't do, and and I (possibly naively) assumed that meant we didn't have any townships here. And maybe we don't, and I'm just misreading the scarce factual info I've come across. At one point I was up to around six footnotes of a paragraph or two each, just for this one item, speculating about what might be going on here, and going off on further tangents about special districts and local justice-of-the-peace courts and whatnot, and I realized I would never, ever finish this post if I included all of that stuff. Alhough, apropos of nothing, here's the relevant Oregon state law on organizing and operating a local Weather Modification District, if you're into that sort of thing.

This township stuff did remind me of an old, old post I did about the little town of Greenhorn, OR way back in 2006, which has had an average population in the low single digits for decades now, just enough to keep the state from abolishing the city government due to it being a ghost town. Various sources claim Greenhorn also operates under a "township charter", without explaining what that means any further. I dunno, I guess I'm intrigued by the idea that we might have a whole tier of local government that was vaguely authorized by the 1859 state constitution and promptly forgotten, and it's just been off doing its own thing ever since, a bit like Starfleet's Section 31 except they send you a water bill every month.

HCRH Milepost 25

So here we are at Milepost 25 on the old Columbia River Highway. We're surrounded by an average bit of forest, with no real views to speak of, and no geological marvels or historical curiosities to stop and check out. Instead the highway itself is the main attraction for a bit, since right after the milepost the road begins a series of tight horseshoe switchbacks, usually known as the "Crown Point Loops" or "Figure-Eight Loops". I don't actually own a dashcam, so probably the best way to give you an idea about this part of the road is with a few videos I found on the interwebs:

• Someone drifting the loops a few times in a 1986 Toyota Corolla
• Somebody's dashcam video from a few years back
• A fast descent on a bike, and not even a racing bike.
• Oh, and here's a helmet cam video of someone on a Kawasaki chasing a Harley down to Latourell Falls and back.

There are a few other places like this along the old highway, just east of Hood River then the famous ones at Rowena (as seen in an endless number of car commercials, like these 2012 Infiniti ads), plus Rainier Hill Rd. and the ones that used to exist near Bradley State Park, both along the Lower Columbia stretch of the highway. Then there's the famous Maryhill Loops just across the river (and not far from the local Stonehenge), which are in no way part of the HCRH but served as a kind of prototype for some of the engineering ideas used in it. Here's a short video of someone tackling the Maryhill Hillclimb in an actual race car, doing it in just 1:46 at speeds up to 155mph. And here's GoPro footage from a big longboard and street luge event from fall 2024. You know, street luge, the thing from the 90s Mountain Dew commercials.

The one common bit of trivia you might encounter about this corner of the Gorge is that the surrounding 61.48 acres used to be a separate Crown Point Loops State Park, beginning sometime after November 1935 when Multnomah County donated the land to the state, and ending sometime before 1946, when an official history said it was now part of Guy Talbot State Park next door. Nobody explains why it was a separate park, and nobody explains why they were merged later. Maybe it saved the state a few bucks by not having to put up any "Welcome to Crown Point Loops State Park" signs, I dunno. You might think it's a weird idea to have a state park that's meant to be enjoyed from a moving vehicle, but the state park system includes an official "State Scenic Corridor" category and recognizes fourteen of them around the state ^[1]. This might reflect the system's origin as a side hobby of the state highway commission, one way to convince the public to drive more and pay more gas taxes.

Ok, that isn't the most compelling bit of historical trivia, but I do have a vintage crime story to pass along too. And believe it or not, it's not about someone being nabbed for speeding or reckless driving. You see, back in 1932, and into the 1960s in some places, the old highway was the only highway, and until I-84 opened gawking tourists had to share the road with impatient commuters and even commercial truck traffic, which caused endless traffic jams, which led some trucking companies to move cargo around late at night to avoid paying drivers to sit idle in traffic. But that led to new problems, and in July 1932 the Crown Point Loops were the site of a series of truck robberies.

Two men who had been robbing trucks of The Dalles truck line for several weeks were nursing shotgun wounds somewhere today… More than 40 parcels had disappeared from Dalles-Portland trucks in recent weeks. Last night George Spickerman, one of the owners of the line, hid in one of the trucks with a sawed-off shotgun. As the truck was proceeding slowly up the Crown Point loops at 2:30 this morning two men jumped on the end of the truck and started throwing off sacks of beans. Spickerman ordered them to hold up their hands, but instead they fled. Spickerman fired three shots at them and is confident that a number of bullets took effect.

The more I read that, the more it sounds like a news story from the early 2020s: People met with gunfire for stealing food, the satisfied tone of approval in the local media, the lack of curiosity as to what could possibly motivate someone to steal sacks of beans off a moving truck at 2:30am, as if 1932 was just another normal year for the thriving US economy.

Anyway, after the loops the road approaches the tiny burg of Latourell, which once had its own train station and steamboat landing back in its heyday, but is now down to a few dozen residents at best. On your left, Latourell Road branches off and goes downhill into the town, where there's also more parking for Latourell Falls. Across the highway, on your right, there's a house, and just before the house is a gated dirt road with a "No Trespassing" sign on it. This is the point where the old pre-HCRH road into Latourell continues more or less straight uphill to a junction with Larch Mountain Road. This was called Latourell Hill Road (aka County Road 377) back in the old days, and it's the old highway's even older, narrower, shorter, and steeper predecessor through this area. It isn't quite the very first road here, but it was built way back in 1885, probably to replace earlier road access (via the Rooster Rock Wagon Road) that was being lost to railroad construction.

Instead of 100' curves and 5% grades, and a full traffic lane in each direction, the old road to Latourell was a single lane dirt road with a few steep sections with around 20% grades. That means you gain or lose a foot (or a meter if you prefer) for every five you travel horizontally. That's equivalent to some of the steepest roads they use in the Tour de France and other pro cycling races. There's a famous 1915 birds-eye map that the Oregonian published showing the then-brand-new highway, includes a photo captioned "Thor's Heights and Highway from Point on Old Latourelle Road", another common name for road 377. The map includes the old road and highlights a scenic viewpoint on it labeled "Goat Point", which is potentially where that photo was taken. That name and place have fallen out of living memory over the years, but evidently it was well known enough back then that the Oregonian included it on their map of HCRH highlights, even though the new road was about to bypass the place. Goat Point was also the one serious hairpin corner on Latourell Hill Road, much tighter than anything that would have been allowed along the HCRH.

One curious detail is that it's still legally a county road, or most of it is. If you can find the unmarked intersection with it along Larch Mountain Road, you might notice there's no gate preventing you from turning there and driving down the road toward Goat Point, and the only barrier is your basic common sense. Well, that and there are likely fallen trees blocking the road here and there, since the county considers it a "local access road", meaning they have jurisdiction over it but have no obligation to ever do any maintenance on it. There's a middle section of road, roughly the part nearest the Loops, that was vacated at some point, and LIDAR it looks like there used to be a few structures there, maybe a sawmill or something, though that's strictly a guess on my part. Then the lower section is the part closest to the gate and No Trespassing sign. I gather the property line with the house next door runs down the middle of the road, and the owners don't want people driving on it, and dispute the current legal status of the road. And who knows, maybe they're right, and either way it's been like this for as long as I can remember, and resolving stuff like this is way over my pay grade. I do have some ideas around what to do with this and a few of the other "local access" roads in the area, but I wrote about that stuff at (maybe excessive) length here if anyone's interested.

---

Footnote(s)

[1] Since you asked, the other State Scenic Corridors are:

• Eastern Oregon
  • Unity Forest
  • Ukiah-Dale Forest
  • Wallowa Lake Highway Forest
  • Booth
  • Blue Mountain Forest
  • Battle Mountain Forest
• Oregon Coast
  • Cape Sebastian
  • Samuel H. Boardman
  • Bolon Island Tideways
• Columbia Gorge
  • Crown Point
  • John B. Yeon
  • Sheridan
• Coast Range
  • H.B. Van Duzer
  • Umpqua

HCRH Milepost 24

After curving around the Vista House in the last post, the HCRH heads south a bit and then bends again, avoiding a steep, deep ravine. The creek tumbling down through that ravine turns out to be the same one that forms Palisade Falls , and shortly after we cross that creek we encounter Milepost 24, and for the next couple of miles there is -- officially -- nothing much to see or do until you get to Latourell Falls. Which is technically not true, but it's fair to say this mile of the road wasn't designed with the thought that visitors would want to stop and look around here. Here's what I've got for sights and attractions and whatnot:

• First off, it looks like the milepost has been knocked over since I took these photos, joining what seems to be a trend. A common thread among the ones this has happened to is that they're on the outside of a left-hand curve or bend in the road, so maybe they're getting sideswiped by people trying to drift their large rear wheel drive cars around corners but not being very good at it.
• Second, you might notice a few signs saying "No Trespassing" or "Area Closed" along this stretch of the road, which were posted maybe 15-20 years ago after a high-profile hiking accident, and I don't recall off the top of my head whether it was a fatal accident or just a very technical and expensive rescue operation, but either way it led the state to declare a permanent closure here. I haven't been able to find a map spelling out exactly what area is closed, but at minimum it includes the ravine leading to Palisade Falls, and the narrow ridge on the other side of it. Beyond that it's anyone's guess. That said, that was a long time ago now, possibly even before this humble blog existed, and memories fade and law enforcement priorities shift over time, and I don't know how strictly this is enforced here and now in the mid-2020s, and you may very well see people out on this ridge if you look east from the Vista House on a busy touristy day. So just to be really clear, anything you read or see here on this humble (and risk-averse) blog is strictly informational only, and I am not encouraging you try any of this stuff, and I don't want to be responsible for any consequential life choices you might make. Are we all clear on that? Good.
• After the curve I mentioned above, and just past the straight bit where the milepost is, or was, the highway hangs a right, and the wide spot on the opposite side of the road is a good place to park if you're visiting the Milepost and maybe also if you're peeking down into the ravine. I say that because of a Google Review I ran across that says it's for Palisade Falls, but the pushpin for it marks a spot somewhere down in that ravine. The reviewer called it a small waterfall and said it's only visible from a short trail off one of the turnouts along the road here, and possibly other places, and includes a photo that's clearly not of the same Palisade Falls that we visited that one time. And checking the state LIDAR map there are a few spots that look like possible waterfalls, the tallest of which (here) might be up to 100' high. So yeah, we may be looking at an Upper Palisade Falls down there. And possibly a Middle one below that, and maybe an Uppermost one above it, depending on how you want to split the hairs. At this point I need to point out that I didn't notice any trails like the one she talks about, and I don't even know which turnout is the one she stopped at or exactly where her photos were taken from, and there are a couple of other turnouts further back, at or before the first bend in the road.
• A short distance to the east is the Forbidden Trailhead, and the trail that begins there starts with a steep scramble uphill straight from the highway, and right at the top of the scramble is a big "No Trespassing" sign that continues "Danger - Steep Drop-Off!" As for what's beyond that sign, someone has posted a panoramic photo to Google Maps here, and you can see that the trail ends up on top of a narrow, exposed, treeless, and very picturesque ridge, just wide enough for the trail and a token line of grass on either side of it. There are a lot of places in the Gorge that look like this and aren't closed to all entry. The difference here, I gather, is that it's just too close to the Vista House, and if you're out on the ridge part you can be seen quite easily from there, and merely seeing you will put the idea into the heads of clueless people who have no idea what they're doing, and reckless people who don't care, and then whatever happens to them somehow becomes your fault, depending on what sort of mood the local media is in and whether the idiots' next of kin have good personal injury lawyers, and maybe you can start to see why I include all these tedious disclaimers and also why the Apple license agreement has more pages than a typical fantasy novel, with entire chapters in all caps seemingly at random, and every few pages the EULA denies once again that the product works at all for any particular purpose, and it most definitely cannot do what the manual claims it does, and insists over and over that the product has zero "merchantability", whatever that is. Whatever it is, I'm fairly sure I have even less of it than Apple does, so consider yourselves (and your heirs, assignees, and creditors) hereby duly notified thereof, etc.
• There isn't a lot that I know about the ridge or the Forbidden Trail beyond what I've told you already. It was undoubtedly given a melodramatic sorta-mythological name once, back in the days when they were handing those out, probably by the same people who wanted Crown Point to be called "Thor's Crown". Given the shape of the ridge, they could have reasonably called it something like "Odin's Razor" or "Poseidon's Diving Board", but any name it may have once had has long been forgotten, and that makes it hard to search for. Terms like "ridge east of Crown Point" or "looking east from Vista House" have scared up a few old photos of it, at least. This one from 1932 seems to clearly show the trail out onto the ridge, just short of a century ago. The trail is less obvious in some 1963 snapshots in this Oregonhikers thread but they do show the ridge looking bare and treeless, like today. An undated stereo photo from not long after the road opened in 1916 lets you check it out in 3D. And a more recent photo shows a small group of people hanging out atop the ridge, for scale.
• Continuing east from, er, Odin's Razor, it looks like there's another unnamed creek and ravine on the east side of the blade, and what looks like a 40' waterfall somewhere down in that ravine
.
• and then another ridge beyond that. I don't see a trail or a No Trespassing sign on this one, and I'm not sure if you're visible from the Vista House at all if you wander out on it, and I've never seen or seen photos of people doing that.
• Another source of governmental anxiety about the public wandering around in this area comes to us from Chapter 3 of Multnomah County's 2016 Community Wildfire Protection Plan:
  
  

  September 24th, 2005 Vista House Fire was ignited .5 miles east of the Vista House , just off the Historical Columbia River Highway about 1 mile south of I-84. The exact cause of fire ignition is unknown, but since it started down a non-designated trail the most probable source is a recreationist. The fire grew to be about 10 acres in size, with Corbett RFPD providing initial attack.

  
  
  The really peculiar thing is that I can't seem to find any other references to this fire, other than this anecdote that keeps getting passed around as they update the fire plan every few years. No other references. At all. State wildfire records don't mention it, maybe because 10 acres is very small by wildfire standards. I also haven't found any local news records about it, and this was a bit over a decade past the 1991 fire that threatened the Multnomah Falls Lodge, so you'd think anything that seemed to threaten the Vista House would've been a major headline. And in aerial photos I don't see anything that looks a 10 acre wildfire burn in the area. So yeah, I really don't know what to make of this.
• After those two ravines and two ridges the road just descends gently toward the next milepost, and if there are any further points of interest along the way they're apparently so subtle and obscure that even *I* can't find them.
• Switching briefly to things that only exist on paper, Milestone 24 is also right around the point where the proposed but unbuilt County Road 788 (map) would have joined the present-day HCRH route. 788 was a 1912 proposal for a new road between Crown Point and the town of Latourell, similar to the present-day road in most respects, but different in a couple of places. First, it would have split from Larch Mt. Road several block east of where the HCRH does, skipping Crown Point entirely and heading downhill from a point near Milepost 24, though of course Milepost 24 would have been somewhere else if they'd built this version of the road. Second, at the point where the highway has the famous figure-eight loops, 788 would have headed downhill with no switchbacks at about a 10% grade (which was still a serious upgrade over the then-current road.) And third, the road would have continued downhill and through the middle of Latourell. The reader will not be surprised to learn this proposal was backed by commercial interests in Latourell (including several people named 'Latourelle'), and opposed by backers of the Thor's Heights subdivision atop Crown Point. The Crown Point side of the argument seems to have won out; not only did the eventual highway provide multiple access points to the premium view lots of Thor's Heights, it also bypassed the town of Latourell entirely, such that it's down to a handful of old houses now instead of sprawling along the highway and out to the river like it easily could have done.

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.

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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.