Horsetail Creek Railroad Bridge

Next up we've got a few photos of the train bridge at Horsetail Creek, just down the tracks from the Oneonta Creek one we looked at in the last poist, and just downstream from the HCRH Horsetail Creek Bridge, which we visited back in 2018. Federal railroad GIS says this one is like the others we've looked at today in that it carries a single set of tracks and is not a drawbridge or any other kind of moving bridge. Like its neighbor to the west, the ridge type is listed as "Regular Steel Beams/Girder + Misc. Steel bridges", and it has a UniqueID of "W811_OR24818", for whatever that's worth. This one does look different than the Oneonta one and I don't think it's of the exact same design, like it's being held up by multiple smaller steel beams rather than one large girder. Like the others I have no information on how old this bridge might be, and I don't think I could even guess a correct range of a few decades. Regardless of that, the sorta-handrail on this bridge looks like a later addition and may coincide with the advent of modern personal injury law.

I have two mildly interesting and not particularly old items to pass along this time around:

• A 2012 Horsetail Creek floodplain restoration design doc. This project re-engineered the large low-lying area between the old highway and Interstate 84 to make it more friendly to baby salmon, implementing various things from the standard baby salmon playbook, like plenty of woody debris in the water. Regarding that, let me point you at this post from about a year ago -- it's technically about some new-ish salmon-themed art in the South Waterfront area, but while putting the post together I came across various sources indicating we don't actually understand the various needs of baby salmon anywhere near as well as we think we do. Also I think that post is one of my better recent ones, and is probably more entertaining than the one you're reading now. And if you're wondering why I'm mentioning all this stuff, the link to the 2012 plan came up in search results because the bridge here and the one on Oneonta Creek mark part of the boundary of the study area.
• A 2009 Multnomah County planning approval doc for placing power lines underground, explaining how the proposed work complies with all sorts of regulations. A window into what it takes to get anything done when your proposed project is going to take place within both Multnomah County and the federal National Scenic Area. Behold and despair as a maze of agencies endlessly consult and re-consult with each other and struggle to get anything done, even though nobody actually objects to the proposal.

Oneonta Creek Railroad Bridge

So next we've got some photos of the train bridge at Oneonta Creek, continuing east on this little speedrun. We visited the ones at Bridal Veil and Wahkeena Creek in the previous two posts, and saw the one at Multnomah Falls back in 2018, so I guess this one is the logical next step. Federal railroad GIS says this one has a unique ID of "W925_OR24624", if that means anything to you, and lists the bridge design type as "Regular Steel Beams/Girder + Misc. Steel bridges", which I don't think is exactly a technical engineering term. You can see that this one is supported by a steel beam or girder underneath the bridge instead of two on the sides, and you can also see that it has substantially more clearance above the creek than the Bridal Veil one does, so the designers didn't have the same design constraints as the Bridal Veil bridge.

This one also sits just downstream of the two HCRH road bridges, which brings us to the one and only mildly unusual detail I have about this one. Before civil engineers got their hands on it, the Columbia River once ran fairly close to the bluffs at Oneonta Creek, close enough that at one spot just east of the creek the railroad took up all the usable space between the river and the cliff. A few decades later, when the Columbia River Highway got here, the railroad wouldn't budge and highway engineers ended up having to dig the Oneonta Tunnel to continue the road east from there. Eventually the state decided to build a river-level road to replace the winding and twisting old highway, which involved quarrying vast quantities of gravel and filling in some areas along the river where there was no existing flat land available. Once that had happened through here -- on the taxpayer dime -- the railroad was suddenly much more amenable to moving, and in 1948 a sort of switcheroo was arranged: New, rerouted tracks were built, and then the existing bridge was somehow moved sideways to the current bridge location, and train traffic was shifted over to there. Then a new stretch of road was built where the train used to run, complete with a shiny new modern bridge. And when that was finished, they shifted traffic to the new road around the cliff, blocked off the Oneonta Tunnel, and used the original 1914 highway bridge for parking.

That last detail actually resolved another problem with the original alignment, which was that there was nowhere to park if you wanted to stop and wade up Oneonta Gorge. As a 1946 doc explains, the state ended up leasing a bit of railroad land for a parking lot and grandly declared that little area to be a new state park, which then quietly fell off the rolls after the realignment.

The switcheroo details come from February 2000 nomination designating parts of the highway of as a "National Historic Landmark", which I gather is similar to the National Register of Historic Places but with stricter rules on how intact a thing has to be, such that the whole road qualified for the National Register, but only certain parts were good enough to be a Landmark. The doc went on to explain that the 1948 road bridge here was a "non-contributing structure", but its presence was not enough to derail the whole nomination since the original bridge was bypassed and left in place instead of being removed. So that's nice, I guess.

Wahkeena Creek Railroad Bridge

So next up we're looking at the little railroad bridge over Wahkeena Creek, which is the next train bridge east of the one at Bridal Veil that we just looked at. This one sits on top of a girder (either steel or concrete, I'm not sure which) instead of having two of them on the sides, and in general it looks like it might be a recent replacement of an older bridge, but I don't know that either because federal railroad GIS doesn't have that info. What I can tell you is that it has a unique ID of "W1012_OR24759", and a design type of "Unknown". If you had high hopes that this bridge was made with advanced alien technology or something you're likely to be disappointed. I think it just means the data entry intern didn't have that info or couldn't be bothered typing it in.

The one semi-interesting thing about this one is that the rail line also serves as a physical divider between the Wahkeena Falls area (the side I took these photos on), which is a Forest Service day use site, with free parking, and Benson State Park on the far side of the tracks, which has been a pay-to-park fee site as long as I can remember, long before anywhere else nearby was. This is possible because Benson is set up as sort of a walled garden, with no official trails (or, ideally, a railroad-approved skybridge over the tracks) between it and either Wahkeena Falls or Multnomah Falls next door. Otherwise people of the cheapskate persuasion could just park at Wahkeena Falls and haul an inflatable raft over to Benson Lake without paying the state a penny. And now it works both ways: During peak tourist season, the demand for parking at Multnomah Falls far exceeds the available supply, and if visitors could easily use Benson as overflow parking it would probably mess up the whole timed entry ticket scheme they've been using to try to manage crowds over there. And that demand would probably swamp the smaller numbers of people who just want to fish the lake or grill some burgers or whatever else there is to do at Benson itself. And I'm sure these are all very good and responsible reasons for things being how they are, and why they have to stay that way forever, but when you're standing on one side and you can easily see the park on the other side, and there are signs saying you are strictly forbidden from going over there, the whole arrangement just seems incredibly dumb.

Bridal Veil Railroad Bridge

This may surprise some of you, but not every weird project I have a go at turns out to be a winner. Some years ago, I did a series on old historic Columbia River Highway bridges, which was fun because they were all a little different, and the engineers who designed them had gone the extra mile to show off what was possible with modern concrete technology, where "modern" meant roughly 1914-1920. So I eventually ran out of those, or more to the point, I hit the long tail part where the remaining items on the list are either small and not very interesting, or far away and hard to visit, or often both. It occurred to me at some point that instead of driving for hours on end, further and further east out into the desert wastes, there was a whole second set of old bridges through the Gorge, used by the Union Pacific railroad that often ran right next to the old highway, and by and large they're at least as old as the highway ones, and it ought to be fairly straightforward to go see a bunch of them and then share some fair-to-middlin' photos and whatever fun trivia I can dig up. That formula usually works out ok; the problem this time around is that there seems to be precisely one interesting train bridge on the Oregon side of the Gorge, the Tanner Creek Viaduct, the big sorta-Roman-aqueduct structure next to Bonneville Dam, and we already visited it way back in 2014. The others fall into two basic categories: Rivers and larger creeks get a steel through truss bridge, like the one on the Sandy River (visited way back in 2009), and anything smaller gets a simple steel beam or girder design, like the one at Multnomah Falls, but without the vintage sign giving mileages by train to various semi-distant cities.

The bridge you see in the photos above is one of the latter category. This is the old railroad bridge at Bridal Veil, downstream of the falls and the trail and next to the site of the old Bridal Veil Lumber sawmill. What little info I know about it comes from a terse database entry in the Federal Railroad Administration's "Railroad Bridges" ArcGIS layer, which informs us this is a "Steel Through Plate Girder" bridge, it crosses over water, is "fixed - non-moveable" (as in not a drawbridge or something), carries one set of tracks, length is not specified, and has a UniqueID code of "W712_OR24695", whatever that means. And that may be all the info Uncle Sam knows about it. I think the db essentially has whatever info the railroad feels like sharing voluntarily, so no details about stuff like the last time a bridge built sometime around 1907 was inspected for rust and structural soundness and whatnot. And I'll just point you at the Steel Bridge and Portsmouth Cut posts if you want to know how things go when your city depends on railroad-owned critical infrastructure and they don't have to tell you anything if they don't want to. The state government knows how little leverage it has, which explains things like a state Fish & Wildlife map of Fish Passage Barriers, which flags every last tiny creek, stream, and seasonal rivulet as a potential fish barrier where it passes under I-84 or the old highway, but not where it passes under the railroad, like they know they can't do anything about that particular barrier and would rather not poke the bear if they can avoid it.

I did find a railfan page that briefly explains what a "Steel Through Plate Girder" bridge is and how it works. See those railings along the length of the bridge? They aren't a safety feature for derailments, and they aren't a pedestrian feature from the old days when passenger trains stopped here. No, those heavy duty "railings" are actually the main load-bearing structure of the bridge: Each girder has a post on each end that attaches it to the concrete bridge piers, and then the bridge deck is attached to the beams, and then the bridge deck is a relatively thin layer attached to the bases of the two girders. The page notes the main reason you might use this design is if you don't have a lot of clearance between track level and whatever it is your bridge needs to cross, which is certainly the case here. Listed along with that are several limitations: "Easy to damage", "Difficult to replace", and "Limited to one track between girders (two possible with depth increase)".

Those design concerns may also explain why I don't think I've ever seen a regular motor vehicle bridge of this design. For one thing, a road bridge is bound to have the occasional vehicle banging into the railing for any number of reasons, and it sounds like this could be rather consequential, both for the bridge and the driver, since these support girders probably don't have the same degree of give on impact that a regular highway guardrail would. And with a road bridge you can usually get around any clearance issues by just building the bridge higher up and putting a ramp at either end, which you can't really do with trains.

Anyway, those bridge design concerns probably explain why the line is single track over the bridge, but is double track for about a mile immediately east of the bridge, ending somewhere around Old Boneyard Road. This was probably done to accomodate freight trains that used to stop at the lumber mill that used to exist here, and the railroad still keeps Bridal Veil on the books as an official train station. This is per federal GIS data, again, which says the station's unique station ID is "UP06258853437", though before anyone gets excited about this, note there is no actual freight or passenger infrastructure in place. Maybe they do this on the off chance the Columbia Gorge timber industry stages a big comeback, or there's a huge boom in the mailing of wedding invitations from the tiny Bridal Veil post office here, or the Oregon side of the Gorge gets passenger rail service again, or who knows.

Beaver Creek Canyon, Troutdale OR

Next up we're doing the hike around Troutdale's Beaver Creek Canyon. This particular Beaver Creek is a large tributary of the Sandy River that begins somewhere south of Oxbow Park and flows north, roughly parallel to the Sandy River, eventually joining the river at Depot Park in downtown Troutdale. On its way there it flows thru a surprisingly deep and narrow canyon for a couple of miles. Surprising as in one stretch seems to be over 150' deep, so not on the same scale as the Columbia Gorge to the east of here, or the Sandy River Gorge south of here, but it's big enough to make you forget you're still technically in suburbia. Which you can do here because it's a Troutdale city park, and there's a trail through it, or at least part of it.

If you look at a map of the area, like the one above, you'd think this would be a straightforward hike: You'd park at Glenn Otto Park, which borders Beaver Creek for a bit, and the trail would head south from there. But right at the mouth of the canyon are several private landowners, served by a private road with a big "No Trespassing" sign posted. As far as I could tell there isn't an interesting or dramatic backstory to this situation, or if there is the story never made it into a newspaper with searchable archives. Whatever the exact details are, the 50,000 foot version is probably just landowners not wanting to sell, and/or the city not having the money to buy. In any case, the "actual" route is a bit longer but possibly more interesting than the direct route would have been.

So the route we're taking goes a lot like this: Starting at Glenn Otto, cross Beaver Creek on the pedestrian bridge and stroll along the sidewalk heading for downtown Troutdale. After a few blocks you'll see signs for the Harlow House Museum, a house belonging to the city's colorful founder. Behind the house, there's a small landscaped garden, and behind the garden you'll find a trailhead marked something like "Harlow Canyon". Because this initial stretch follows an entirely different creek with its own watershed. The trail heads uphill briefly, crosses the tiny canyon's tiny creek right where it makes a cute little mini-waterfall, and then ends at a trail junction. One option seems to dump you out onto a suburban city street, while the trail on the left continues in a narrow corridor right along the edge of the bluff, a near-sheer drop on one side, and a bunch of backyard fences on the other. There isn't a city parks page for this bit of trail, but it appears to be called the "Strawberry Meadows Greenway", named for the subdivision here. Which in turn (following the usual practice with subdivisions) was named for the strawberry farms that once dominated the area. This part is a fairly popular community walking trail, so you might get waylaid by chatty retirees unless you look like you need to be somewhere on a tight schedule. Eventually this trail ends too, I think right at the subdivision boundary, dumping you out on a regular suburban street, SE Beaver Creek Lane. Luckily this is the kind of suburb that has sidewalks, because that's the next phase of the hike. You're looking for either of two entrances to Beaver Creek Canyon, which start as nondescript paths between houses. There aren't any big signs announcing where they go, either. The first one is across the street from the intersection with Chapman Ave. The second one is across from tiny Weedin Park. Pick either one, and before you know it the concrete path becomes several flights of stairs down into the canyon.

Either entrance puts you on the same sloping trail down into the canyon, which brings you to the park's main trail junction. From here you can turn right and follow the creek south/upstream, or follow the trail as it turns left and follows the creek north/downstream. The exact distance you can go in either direction varies a lot over time, shrinking when a winter flood or landslide rolls through, and expanding when the city finds grant money or volunteers to repair flood and landslide damage, or even (once in a blue moon) to expand the trail network. There will be anywhere between zero and two footbridges over the creek; if the current number is one or more, you may have access to a parallel trail on the east bank of the creek, and -- if it's a good trail year -- that trail might connect to another entrance here. If there's currently a bridge in existence at both bridge sites (which is rarely true), you can do this part of the park as a loop. The southbound trail may also connect to trails in Kiku Park, depending on current landslide/repair conditions, which would be a third way in from the west side. I didn't check on this when I was there and it may have changed since then, and could change again between when I'm writing this and when you're reading it.

Even further south, there's yet another westside entrance here, which apparently goes to a small loop trail disconnected from the rest of the trail network. I didn't visit this area and have no photos of it. It's separated from the rest of the park by the deepest and narrowest stretch of the canyon, so I don't know whether connections to the rest of the park once existed and don't anymore, or whether they never got funding in the first place, or whether it's even physically possible to build a trail through that part. Upstream from there, Beaver Creek passes through a jumble of public land and farmland without trails, and the canyon starts somewhere in that area. Continuing upstream, Beaver Creek flows through a city park that's called either "Bellingham Greenway", "Mountain Vista Greenway", or "CEF Open Space" depending on whose map you're looking at, with an entrance here and another somewhere around here. And on the south side of SW Stark St. is the Mt. Hood Community College campus, which has a ~65 acre Metro wetland area running along either side of the creek, and a small trail system we'll meet in another post. South of the college, the creek runs more or less along the edge of suburbia (as of 2024) for a bit, incuding a few disconnected units of Gresham's Beaver Creek Management Area here, here, and here, the last two possibly with trails connecting them. Then it's just farmland all the way south to where the creek begins, a bit west of Oxbow Park.

The park is like this because of the Great Troutdale Land Rush of the late 1970s. Subdivisions sprouted like invasive weeds all across east Multnomah County generally, and Troutdale in particular. I think it was largely because it's where the large blocks of cheap land and motivated sellers were. The local strawberry industry had been rapidly outcompeted by larger, cheaper, and completely flavorless, styrofoam-like strawberries from California, mostly because their strawberry varieties can survive long bumpy journeys in an 18-wheeler while ours don't, and theirs hold up under being dipped in molten chocolate and then sitting on grocery shelves for weeks. And our strawberries... don't. Long story short, it was a great time to sell around here, and most of the land on either side of Beaver Creek became housing over a few short years, right up to Oregon's mega-recession of the early 1980s. It probably helped too that house hunting is largely a spring and summer phenomenon and prospective buyers wouldn't get to experience what Troutdale winters can be like until it's too late. In any case, the city responded to this wave by being surprisingly forward-looking by Portland suburb standards, and not immediately bowing down to whatever developers wanted. A 1977 Oregonian article, "Wilderness survives amidst housing" explains that the city generally required developers to hand over some land for city parks as part of getting your subdivision approved, and in this part of town that included any land in the canyon. You couldn't build there anyway, for flood control reasons. The city also required that private property along the canyon rim had to be in natural vegetation, to limit the visual impact of subdivisions up above. Which probably also reduced the risk of distracted gardeners taking a big tumble while weeding.

Somehow this actually worked, and the parts of the canyon that are protected now are protected because of adjacent subdivisions. This is not how things usually turn out, to put it mildly. But thanks to the county surveyor's office putting records online we can look at the subdivision plats for Sandee Palisades phases I (1/77), II (2/78), III (12/78), and IV (12/90) on the east side of the creek, and the ones for Corbeth (6/77), Rainbow Ridge (5/76), Kiku Heights (2/77), Beaver Creek Estates (2/78) Weedin Addition (7/77), Mountain Vista (1992), Bellingham Park (5/97) and Strawberry Meadows (4/95) on the west side, each one showing the concessions developers made in exchange for the privilege of building here. Not just donating land that was probably unbuildable anyway, but providing access points into the park.

The 70s were a time of grand plans, and there was indeed a grand plan for Beaver Creek. The hot new idea back then was the "40 Mile Loop", a future regional hike-n-bike trail network encircling the Portland metro area. Eventually someone remembered the "circumference equals Pi times two times radius" formula from high school and realized that encircling the metro area would involve quite a lot more than 40 miles of trails, and a few years ago they rebranded the concept as "The Intertwine". In any case, no version of this loop has never been anywhere near completion, but I would guess that it has a cameo in every last urban planning document produced in the Portland area since the Tom McCall era. I think the idea is to not do anything to preclude a future bit of Intertwine in your project area even though you aren't actively working on it just now. So the working idea has been that Troutdale's part of the loop follows Beaver Creek into town from the south, drops into the canyon at some point, and continues to the Sandy River and then along the Columbia on what eventually becomes the Marine Drive Trail, taking you back toward Portland. Or you could hang a right at Glenn Otto Park, cross the bridge, and follow either the HCRH Trail (i.e. bike in traffic until Elowah Falls) or get on Trail 400 at Lewis & Clark State Park (as soon as they get around to building that initial 5-10 mile stretch of trail) and follow it east to Cascade Locks where it intersects the Pacific Crest Trail, and simply walk to Canada or Mexico from there, as one does.

Which brings us to the usual timeline section of this post, which is basically a list of old news stories and other items I couldn't work into this post any other way. Nothing really earthshaking to share here, but you can see the decades-long pattern of the city scratching its head trying to figure out what to do about the place and how to pay for it.

• 1978, meeting notice that Sandee Palisades III was in the city planning approval phase
• 1982 article about the growing Troutdale park system. Mentions summer maintenance jobs were paid for with CETA grants. (CETA was the "Comprehensive Employment and Training Act of 1973", a late, lamented federal program that would pay for just about anything if you had a good grant writer.)
• A similar 1983 article mentions the park briefly, director said the trails were too steep for bikes
• Another article from around the same time noted the trail was now part of city's comprehensive plan, mentions that planned 40 Mile Loop route at the time was through the canyon.
• Report on a mid-1990s project clearing invasive plants. Which sort of morphed into a restoration effort after the 1995-96 floods. A consultant told the city to move trails away from the creek and get rid of a bridge for causing erosion.
• another project nearby in 1997, maybe in connection with the Strawberry Meadows subdivision going in.
• 2004 city council minutes, discussion of parks master plan, with a member of the public blowing a gasket over another such proposed development deal, as it would be in exchange for low income housing this time. Thinks connecting the north & south chunks of park would cause crime, and if a park happens it should be a human exclusion area
• Parks Master Plan, adopted 2006. The plan of record is to extend the existing trail along the creek in both directions, bypassing the current harlow creek / strawberry route. You could hike from Glenn Otto to MHCC. Discusses maybe obtaining easements for the gap to Glenn Otto vs buying, maybe owners aren't interested in selling or city can't afford
• 2014 study connecting trail south to springwater corridor
• 2020 OregonHikers thread about the park

HCRH Milepost 35

Continuing east, the next HCRH milepost on this weird little project is number 35, which -- conveniently -- is located right at the day use area portion of Ainsworth State Park, which we (as in, this humble blog here and its vast and rapidly growing global audience) last visited wayyy back in 2007. This milepost is unfortunately a bit worse for wear right now, or at least it was when I took the photos, and this one might just be reinforced concrete spalling, and not being sideswiped by some bro in a Hellcat trying to drift through here.

The park itself has an easy half-mile loop nature trail for the whole family, and Trail 400 passes through here too. Via the 400, to the west it's about half a mile to the Horsetail Falls trail and maybe onward to points west. To the east it's about a mile to the little-known, little-used Dodson Trailhead near Exit 35, and from there it isn't far to the rather un-picturesque setting of milepost 36. Not really a highlight of the Gorge, but if you're looking for unusual hike ideas, this is definitely one of them. If nothing else, it's a good trail to keep in mind if outdoor social distancing ever comes back.

If you aren't up for any hiking at all, it's probably a good spot to just hang out and watch the trains go by, if you're into that sort of thing.

For the higher difficulty levels, this is also where you would start if you're doing the legendary slash infamous Mystery Trail, or becoming one of the few people to ever climb St. Peter's Dome, or taking on the Ainsworth Left ice climbing route.

The park also has an overnight camping section, which might be the closest public camping site to Portland, with the sole exception of Oxbow Park. It wasn't always like this; until the late 1970s or early 1980s, there were plenty of others: Lewis & Clark State Park on the Sandy River at Troutdale; Dabney SP a bit further upriver, and Dodge Park even further south and east. Also Rooster Rock; the summit of Larch Mountain; and possibly Wahkeena Falls, though I'm less sure about that one. The powers that be decided this was attracting the wrong sort of person: Young, drunk, and disorderly partiers for one thing, but also people with nowhere else to go, and even people who were in town for the summer doing seasonal farm work, back when East Multnomah County was still largely rural. So now it costs enough to keep the poors out, and time limits ensure it's not a good option for seasonal workers, who instead get to live in whatever lightly-regulated housing a farmer feels like providing, out of sight and mind, and away from polite society.

Another nearby turnout has a roadside drinking fountain, fed by an underground spring. The Ainsworth page at Recreating the Columbia River Highway seems to indicate this is actually a bit older than the park itself, since the park was created in 1933 and the fountain was part of a statewide Highway Commission project in the 1920s. I think the "Sunset Springs" one on US 26 heading to the Coast is another survivor of this project, as was the recently-discontinued one on the HCRH across from Dabney State Park. Unlike those two, this one doesn't seem to have legions of devotees who come regularly to fill their VW Buses with multiple carboys of pure spring water. I'm not sure why not, though all the fancy stonework around might make it difficult to convince yourself you've come across a fountain "that was not made / by the hand of man", as the song goes.

The area is a bit thin on nearby historical events, but here's what I've got this time around:

• For people planning their summer vacations, in June 1953 the Oregonian printed a list of state parks with a brief blurb about each. 46 acres, 37 miles east of Portland. U.S. 30, at the foot of St. Peter’s Dome. Ice-cold spring, footpaths, parking and picnic areas.
• With later additions the park now comes to 171.97 acres. At least that's the number I come up with by adding up everything labeled "Ainsworth State Park" in the State Land Inventory System. That total includes a separate chunk of 25.08 acres along the river, directly north of I-84 Exit 35 and the railroad, which doesn't seem to be accessible, except maybe by boat. ODOT's Right-of-Way map and blueprint for the park shows the original park and the 1963 expansion
• A month later (July 1953), an article about a land acquisition near Oneonta Creek mentioned a plan to somehow run a road up Oneonta Creek to Triple Falls, then cut over to Horsetail Creek to visit Ponytail Falls, rejoining the old highway somewhere near Ainsworth. I may have mentioned this proposal before; I keep coming across it when searching for other things, and it's just such a strange and alarming idea. I feel like I need to point out the bullets that were dodged when I run across them, I guess as a reminder that when a particular place or thing survives, that survival was often not automatic or guaranteed, and as inhabitants of the modern 21st century we are every bit as susceptible to harebrained schemes as our counterparts 50 or 100 years ago, and possibly even more so.
• The state started talking about expanding the park in 1963, with the land to be used as a campground, and the expansion eventually opened in 1968.
• October 1972 dueling pair of letters to the editor about the new campground. The first complains that the camping portion of the park was not natural enough and reminded them of a supermarket parking lot. The second letter, in response, claims to like it that way, insisting it's the nicest and cleanest state park around. I have never actually been to that part and have no personal opinion on the subject. Or, as real professional journalists like to say about everything, Both Sides Do It.
• April 1985 interview with the Portland regional administrator for Oregon State Parks about his big plans for Trail 400, which was (and still kinda-sorta is) supposed to cover the whole distance between Troutdale and Hood River. The segment between Ainsworth and Elowah Falls / Yeon State Park had recently opened, and the next steps he had in mind were 1.) a route around Tooth Rock, between Tanner Creek and Eagle Creek, which was probably going to be expensive. 2.) A four-mile trail between Bridal Veil Falls and Latourell Falls, passing above Shepperds Dell and giving new views of the falls there. This was gated on some key land acquisitions and of course funding. 3.) A trail segment between Portland Womens Forum and Crown Point, which also needed some land acquisitions or easements. Something akin to item 1 happened in the late 1990s as the first segment of the bike-oriented HCRH State Trail. That project made its way around Tooth Rock via a segment of the old highway, rather than dynamiting a new ledge into the rock for the trail to use, while the Trail 400 that was eventually built makes its way from Tanner to Eagle Creek via a different route, with switchbacks on either end to gain/lose altitude, and then a roughly east-west route through the maze of existing Forest Service and BPA access roads in the area between the two creeks.

Lower Archer Falls

Next up we're visiting another obscure waterfall on the Washington side of the Columbia Gorge. These photos are of Lower Archer Falls, a 50' waterfall hiding juuuust out of plain sight near SR14, roughly halfway between the little towns of Prindle and Skamania. The unmarked trailhead is literally right across SR14 from the US Forest Service's St. Cloud Day Use Area. Which is an old historic apple orchard plus a stretch of rocky, muddy, sandy semi-beach along the Columbia, but that's a whole other blog post I need to finish. So the thing you need to do is park at St. Cloud, make sure your Northwest Forest Pass is somewhere where Officer Friendly can see it, then follow the entrance road back to SR14, and wait for a gap in traffic so you can mosey across. I meant to take a photo of what you're looking for here, as it appears from across the road, but I apparently forgot to do that. Just look for an unmarked but visible trail directly across from the St. Cloud entrance road. You can see it on Street View here, if you'd like a better idea of what to look for.

If the "Lower" qualifier made you wonder about the others: Yes, there is an (Upper) Archer Falls, well upstream of here, 218' high, and part of a restricted area that's permanently closed to all public access, to hopefully protect a number of rare species including the Larch Mountain salamander. It was later realized that the salamander not only existed south of the Columbia River but was much more common there, but the closure was already in effect at that point, and there seems to be a general principle in place to never relax closure rules, period, even if the original rationale behind them turns out to be a bit overstated.

Zach Forsyth's waterfall book also lists a "Middle Archer Falls", maybe 10-20' high and a short distance (as the crow flies) upstream from the lower falls. I don't have any photos of it to show you, because first you have to get above the lower falls, which you do via an absurdly narrow stairway seemingly made of piano keys. Once you're above the lower falls the (unofficial, community-maintained) trail turns east and away from Archer Creek for a bit in order to stay on public land as it continues uphill, and you have to bushwhack back to the creek to find the waterfall. And when I put it that way it hardly sounds worthwhile, but I have this nagging suspicion that I may have to go look for it at some point, and at that point I'll try to explain why it was worth all the extra trouble and why you ought to give it a try too. So there's that to look forward to, I guess. The only other mention I've seen of the middle falls is a brief mention on a Ropewiki page, and even they have no photos of it, or details on how to get to it. A recent PacificNW Hiker video about Lower Archer includes a drone shot that rises above the top of the falls, and you can see what -- from that perspective -- just looks like an upper tier to the lower falls, but it might be Forsyth's middle falls.

Before going I looked at Skamania County GIS to double-check that this is all public land, and then check the Forest Service interactive trail map and see if this is an official trail or not. The answers are a.) yes, and b.) no.

So, a thing I like to do before looking for obscure stuff on the Washington side of the Gorge is fire up the local county GIS system (Skamania County in this case) and double-check that the place I'm interested in -- and the trail to it -- really is public property. This isn't just because I like looking at maps; much of the Washington side is kind of a crazy quilt of state, local, federal, and private land. And then in the 2000s and early 2010s there were a lot of people on the internet posting a lot of cool waterfall photos from places they weren't, strictly speaking, allowed to be, and scored serious Valuable Internet Points in the process, but that was then, and the fact that some hipsters got away with it in 2007 doesn't really hold up in court. In this case, fortunately the answer is yes, the Forest Service owns the whole area we're visiting, having bought it off the Burlington Northern railroad back in 1994.

It's also useful sometimes to pull up the Forest Service's interactive trail map, and if it's an official trail save the relevant area as a pdf in case cell reception is no bueno somewhere. Except that although this is Forest Service land, this isn't a Forest Service trail. Apparently there's a group of dedicated local volunteers that maintains trails in the Archer Mountain area, wayyy uphill from here, so this trail might be their doing. It seems to be an unofficial but longstanding Forest Service policy -- locally, at least -- that if you feel a real calling to do trail construction and maintenance in your spare time, they'll go ahead and let you have a go at it, so long as you do a reasonably professional job of it, and are never a source of bad publicity. I'm sure they can't put that in writing, but it generally seems to work here, and it seems to work for a whole network of forest trails around North Bonneville, a few miles east of here, and it seems to have worked for about a century or so with the web of trails back behind Angels Rest on the Oregon side and the trail up Wind Mountain on the Washington side.

A short distance further upstream just past the Middle(?) falls, the USFS land runs out and the creek passes through a parcel owned by someone or something called "The Lightbearers". The property records don't include an address, but I think that refers to a longstanding new-agey group out of Seattle. And if I have that wrong, it might be a similarly-named fundie group out of Tennessee, or even an evangelical landlord company, or someone else entirely. It frankly sounds like a name you'd adopt if you and a few friends took up LARPing as YA fantasy novel wizards. Or (again, just going by the name) possibly they're a cabal of especially creepy Buffy villains, similar to The Gentlemen. In any event the trail swerves east at that point to avoid the whole thing, whatever it is.

Due to the complicated land ownership situation, a lot of places that would be top destinations on the Oregon side were either private property until fairly recently (like Lower Archer was until 1994), or even now are gated off and inaccessible, like nearby Prindle Falls, which is anywhere between 250' and 435' high depending on who you ask. So over the years, whether people visited a given place or not (and whether it showed up in print anywhere) was kind of a function of whether current landowners were friendly, or alternately how emboldened (or you might say entitled) people felt in visiting without asking. I mention all this because I think it's why I had never heard of Lower Archer (or a lot of the other Washington-side falls) until a few years ago. A lot of this info traditionally got around strictly by word-of-mouth, and putting it in print for strangers to read was a great way to infuriate a landowner who had just about tolerated a few rare visitors who were in the know, and I just never happened to know anyone who knew someone, if you know what I mean.

As a data point, I dug out my stack of old Columbia Gorge hiking and waterfall guidebooks from the late 1960s thru the 1980s, and none of them say anything about waterfalls in the Archer Creek area. Or anywhere else on the Washington side, for that matter, apart from the couple of well-known ones along the Hamilton Mountain trail. And at least some of them had to have known about the others. At the very least someone would have told the Lowes about some of the more obscure places, Another curiosity is that despite all the official hikes and expeditions and whatnot setting off in search of (Upper) Archer Falls over the years, not one historical source -- not a single one -- mentions the lower falls here. You'd think someone would have mentioned it in passing at some point, but no dice.

Anyway, here's a timeline of news about the Archer Creek area. As usual, most of the links go to the Multnomah County Library's local newspaper database, and reading them for yourself requires a library card. Which you should already have anyway if you live here. But if you aren't from around here, your local public or university library miiiight have access to the same scanned papers as part of a nationwide database. The links here still won't work, but you may still be able to find the articles by searching on the topic and the given month and year.

Anyway, here goes:

• Our story begins in the summer of 1901, when a local scientific expedition climbed to the very rim of the gorge and explored the high mountaintops of Archer Mountain and Table Mountain. The party included geologists, photographers, an Oregonian reporter, and even a visiting archeologist from Chicago's Field Museum. Transportation was provided by the steamboat Regulator, which even as late as 1901 was still basically the only connection between this corner of the Washington side of the Gorge and the outside world.

  The expedition proposed to determine the truth or falsity of the "Bridge of the Gods Hypothesis". The present-day version of the idea is that debris from a massive landslide on Table Mountain, on the north side of the river, once completely dammed the river, and once that blockage finally failed, there was still a huge amount of debris in the river here for a long time afterward, so much so that for a while you could cross the river by carefully hopping rock to rock without getting your feet wet. The 1901 version was different, and was what you might call the "Maximal 'Bridge of the Gods' Hypothesis": This idea holds that, once upon a time, a natural rock arch spanned the Columbia. And not a minimal span right there in the narrowest stretch of the river, not a stone version of the present-day bridge. Oh no, they liked to think big in those days, and so imagined a truly stupendous majestic arch connecting the 3417' summit of Table Mountain to some TBD mountaintop on the Oregon side, the closest of which is fully 5 miles to the south.

  For a little context, Wikipedia (and their primary source in this case, the Natural Arch and Bridge Society, which exists) inform us the longest known natural arch in existence today is one in China that's about 400 feet long, so the maximal one here would have been around 66 times longer, had it existed. It turns out the world's longest artificial arch bridge is also in China, and the summit-to-summit bridge here would have exceeded it by a mere factor of 14.

  Frankly the only bridge that comes to mind that even approaches this is the fictional one from Tom Swift and his Repelatron Skyway (1963), in which Tom and the gang rescue a troubled foreign aid project in the friendly African nation of Ngombia, building a modern USA-style freeway across the country's vast impassable malarial swamps via the magic of antigravity. When I read this as a kid, as a hand-me-down childrens book, I wondered why anybody would still need freeways if antigravity was a thing that existed, as the book never bothered to explain that pesky detail.

• Anyway, the adventurers' initial trip report put a brave face on it, but the details tell us the expedition was a big mess. On day 1, the group ascended Archer Mountain without too much chaos, other than the expedition's one and only guide bailing out early due to a foot injury. The party spent a good part of the day ransacking the "Indian mounds" on Archer Mountain looking for artifacts, but didn't find anything of value, before continuing to the summit. Where the photographers were disappointed to find that distant Cascade peaks were obscured by forest fire smoke.
• The trip up Table Mountain the next day was what you might call... under-planned, if you were in a charitable mood. Our brave explorers set out without map or guide, and packed for the hike on the assumption there would be plenty of drinkable water to be had along the way and there was no need to bring a lot of it along. You can probably already guess where this is going. They spent most of the day wandering around lost and thirsty, then ran out of daylight, and spent the night somewhere near the summit without blankets, before eventually finding their way home the next day. Afterward, our conquering heroes told everyone who would listen that the real problem was obviously the mountain, which had turned out to be vastly taller and harder to climb than anyone had known previously. Which, of course, was an important scientific discovery in itself. A follow-up article on the climb quotes one of the explorers as estimating Table Mountain at up to 7000 feet high, roughly even with the tree line on Mount Hood, where in reality it's only about half that height. For some reason I was reminded of the classic SNL sketch where Bill Murray plays an aging, out-of-shape Hercules, making various excuses for his inability to lift a nearby boulder.
• To put this adventure in a wider context, 1901 was also right around the start of what historians call the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, the golden age of fearless leaders like Roald Amundsen, Robert Falcon Scott, and Ernest Shackleton, and in fact the latter two were in the early stages of the 1901-1904 Discovery Expedition right around the same time our local heroes were bumbling around the Gorge. So that's more or less the model our bold adventurers were aiming for, I think. Imagine, if you will, the many perils of exploring near the 45th parallel, balanced precariously halfway between the polar wastes of the Arctic and the treacherous tropical jungles along the equator...
• As far as I can tell they never mounted a followup expedition to document the surprisingly rarefied heights of Table Mountain and the mysterious unknown lands beyond, and thus passed the brief Heroic Age of Archer Creek Watershed Exploration. In fact, after the expedition there was a nearly thirty-year gap before Archer Creek or Archer Mountain appeared in the news again, at which point the area was reachable from the outside world by automobile via a very expensive road (present-day SR14) and also by a very expensive railroad line down near river level. This is the same rail line you cross on your way from your car to the trailhead here; it doesn't look very fancy because they spent most of their money on tunnels, and didn't focus so much on general aesthetics. There are a couple of points further east along the line where you might see the same long train threaded through three tunnels in a row, one after the next.
• A November 1901 article titled "How the Indians were Decimated" notes that the wave of disease that swept through the northwest and devastated tribes across the region happened largely before settlers arrived, and the worst of the diseases was apparently something modern science couldn't identify by its symptoms, and in short the whole horrific episode might be Not Our Fault, or at least there was juuust enough doubt about what happened that there was no point in anybody feeling bad over it now. He then goes on to relate various Native stories, anglicized to match readers' expectations. I mention all of this because his article touched on Archer Mountain briefly, stating confidently that the mounds or pits near the top were actually fortifications, and then estimating it would take a large army to staff and defend such a fortress. So apparently this was a common idea at one point. Mostly I figured I should note that the article has problematic contents, before anyone clicks looking for more info on the "Indian fortress" hypothesis. I think I've mentioned this somewhere else before, but my impression is that the fortress idea peaked in popularity (both in academia and with the general public) shortly after World War I, when ideas of vast trenches and fortifications were still fresh in people's minds.
• A January 1928 news item about an upcoming Mazamas hike:
  
  

  A.H. Marshall will lead the Mazamas on a hike next Sunday in the Archer Creek district. Members will leave Portland on the North Bank railroad at 7:30am and will detrain at St. Cloud. From St. Cloud the hikers will follow Cable creek past Big falls to the top of North mountain, then to the head of Archer canyon and down the canyon past Archer falls

  To explain that a bit more, Cable Creek, or Gable Creek, is the next watershed west of Archer Creek, and it has at least one big waterfall too, but nobody is really sure now whether the correct name is "Cable" or "Gable", and there is historical support for both versions. More recently, in an apparent effort to resolve this confusion, the creek was officially renamed as "Good Bear Creek" a few years ago, but unfortunately it's a weird and dumb-sounding name, and a lot of people would argue there's no such thing as a Good Bear, and wherever you stand on that particular topic, most maps haven't been updated, and I've never seen anyone using the new name.

• Notices about organized group hikes along Archer Creek or up Archer Mountain were fairly common from the 1920s and early 1930s, tapering off into the early 1960s. Most of these announcements were fairly brief and to the point, while the post-hike ones could be a bit more entertaining. The route varied a bit: Often it was straight up Archer Creek from SR14 (or the St. Cloud train station, before that) to the main falls and back down, but sometimes they changed it up and hopped over to Gable/Cable Creek for the return leg, checking out the big waterfall over there too. I gather not everyone was aware of the falls on the other creek, since a couple of the more excitable groups came away elated and telling anyone who would listen that they had discovered it. It was almost always the same guy guiding these groups for several decades, so maybe 'stumbling across' the falls on Gable Creek was part of his trail guide schtick, allowing his charges to believe they were great wilderness explorers for a while. I dunno. Anyway, here's a list of a bunch of examples, if you're interested.

  • May 1914
  ;
  • May 1920
  • October 1920
  • March 1923 - this one mentions they would be visiting three points of interest: The waterfall, obviously, a "view from top of bluffs", and "the new falls".
  • April 1923
  • May 1924 - the group claimed to have discovered an unknown 192' waterfall, and promptly named it "Marshall Falls" after the leader of the hike.
  • April 1930
  • April 1931
  • February 1932
  • August 1933
  • November 1937
  • March 1938
  • May 1942
  • March 1944
  • April 1946
  • May 1952
  • April 1956
  • November 1963
• Sometime in 1971, a group of Portland-area hippies decided to go back to the land (because 1971), bought a chunk of then-cheap land near (Upper) Archer Falls and started a commune (because 1971). This went unreported and unnoticed by the local papers at the time, because if you want to live in peace and harmony forever with all your friends, telling The Man about it is probably the last thing you want to do. So you might be wondering how those dreams turned out, and we'll get around to that in a bit. But on the general topic of late-20th Century alternate living arrangements, let me point you at a fascinating 2021 GQ article about some of the stragglers still hanging on to the old ways in Northern California; a Brooklyn Rail piece about the same general time and place; and a 2019 Messy Nessy Chic article about one group that somehow survived to the present day, morphing over time into a sort of hybrid organic farm / yoga retreat / health food store chain. But I digress.
• An April 28th 1970 letter to the editor pointing out that a recent article on the little-known waterfalls of the Washington side of the Gorge neglected to mention the upper Archer Falls, which (he explained) were accessible by a scramble up the creek starting at St. Cloud. He didn't mention the smaller waterfall on the way there, so someone making the trip just going by the info in this letter could easily have turned back at the lower falls thinking it was the main one.
• The Forest Service bought land at Archer Mountain starting in 1987 along with a bunch of other things, though county property records I referenced up above say this wasn't purchased until 1994.
• Trail construction by Friends of the Columbia River Gorge for Earth Day 1991
• The St Cloud area opened to the public in November 1994 along with the Sams-Walker area a mile or two to the east. The article dutifully lists the modest charms of the two places, but makes no mention of Lower Archer Falls.
• 1996 Steve Duin column about an ongoing court battle over High Valley Farm, the very same High Valley Farm we last saw in 1971. As with a lot of these communities, there were a few diehards left at the place, while everyone else had gone their separate ways years ago, and people didn't have much in common anymore except for the big chunk of land they all still co-owned. Some of them wanted to sell the land and split the proceeds and move on, but couldn't unless everyone else agreed, and there were objections, especially by the few remaining residents, and it ended up in court. Evidently some kind of deal was worked out in the end, because that's the same land that's now part of the strict no-entry state nature preserve, and I've seen rumors that some of the holdouts are still living up there as part of the deal, and maybe that's true, and maybe that's the real reason behind the closed area. Or maybe people (myself included) are half-remembering some of the plot points from M. Night Shyamalan's The Village (2004), which I won't explain any further because spoilers.
• A 1998 Terry Richard column asking people to name their favorite Gorge waterfall. One interviewee, a resident of Prindle on the Washington side of the gorge, piped up to explain that the Washington side has waterfalls too, they're just really obscure and hard to get to and you probably haven't heard of them.
• A 2008 Terry Richard column explaining the Gorge scenic highlights you can enjoy while speeding along I-84 and not stopping anywhere. The guide says Archer Mountain is the prominent peak along the north shore around mileposts 33-34.
• A 2011 Oregonian article told the normies about OregonHikers (still called PortlandHikers back then), right around the peak of the site's traffic and interesting content. Or just before the peak, or a year or two after, depending on who you ask, but my money's on post-peak if only because appearing in the Oregonian instantly makes anything a bit too mainstream and uncool. In any case, Archer Mountain/Creek/Falls gets a quick mention as one place the site had drawn a wave of renewed attention to.
• And in 2017, there was a small wildfire on Archer Mountain, started by embers from the Eagle Creek fire being blown across the river. Fortunately this fire didn't take off like the Oregon one did, and was controlled and extinguished fairly quickly.

HCRH Milepost 34

So (continuing our ongoing series) here we are at milepost 34 along the Historic Columbia River Highway. This one is just a few hundred feet or so west of the Oneonta Trailhead (though getting to it is a rather inconvenient walk), so nearby points of interest include the various waterfalls on Oneonta Creek, along with Horsetail and Ponytail Falls next door, obscure Waespe Falls, the (still-closed) Oneonta Gorge, the Oneonta Tunnel and various minor HCRH bridges and railroad bridges (and I realize bridges are kind of a niche interest and it's fine if you don't care about those, although this milepost thing is not exactly a mainstream hobby either, frankly).

If you use the Forest Service's Interactive Visitor Map to plan your trips through the Gorge, you might notice a road numbered 3000-341 that starts across from the Oneonta Trailhead and winds around through some nearby wetlands before connecting to Interstate 84. I am upwards of 99.9% sure that this route does not actually exist, nor does the shorter spur road heading downstream along Horsetail Creek from the Horsetail Falls parking lot (number 3000-426). As far as I know, no such road has ever existed there, and those two road designations are actually for the Oneonta and Horsetail trailhead parking lots.

In a lot of places around the country and around the world, when you see this sort of thing you can safely assume somebody is putting fake roads on the books and embezzling the maintenance budget, and gambling all the money away as fast as they can steal it, and you would be right 100 times out of 100. That's not usually how it works around here, though. I'd love to claim that people are just more honest and upstanding here, but I think it's more that people are world-class busybodies who will gladly rat you out to The Man at the first opportunity and then be insufferably smug about how we don't do that here. So here are some alternate theories about the phantom roads:

1. The next time higher-ups give you a road decommissioning quota that you don't think you can meet, here's a tenth of a mile you can vaporize with a few mouse clicks.
2. Or (assuming the road has a dedicated budget) the extra maintenance money pays for sweeping up broken glass from all the car burglaries. Not quite enough money to hire a security guard, but it might save a few tires at least.
3. Or if not that, some other wholesome activity, like having the ranger district's one-and-only Woodsy Owl costume dry cleaned and disinfected before any of this year's summer interns have to wear it; or a nice office holiday party for once; or a gold watch for that one oldtimer who finally quote-unquote retired after 70+ years with the Forest Service.
4. Or maybe the road is real, but it's enchanted and only Bigfoot can see it. You might be wondering what possible use Bigfoot has for Forest Service roads. Recall that many of the Gorge's resident Sasquatches settled here after retiring from the National Hockey League, as a way to return to the forest (and quit bathing in Nair twice a day) but still be close to all the big city creature comforts they'd become accustomed to as highly paid athletes living among -- and kinda-sorta blending in with -- ordinary humans. So somewhere down this magic road is a parking garage full of Ferraris and Lamborghinis and whatnot, waiting for their owners to shamble down out of the hills and head into town for dinner and a movie, and it's enchanted because, duh, the Gorge is famous for car break-ins.

HCRH Milepost 33 • Quarry Haul Road

In the last HCRH milepost visit we had a look at Milepost 32, the one right at world-famous Multnomah Falls. This time around we're a mile east of there, at Milepost 33, and it could hardly be more different. Instead of a world-famous crowded tourist attraction, we're visiting the scene of an expensive and embarrassing accident from the 1940s that was quickly papered over and forgotten by just about everyone.

It seems nice enough here; there's a rare flat grassy area right next to the highway, and even a small turnout right at the milepost, just big enough to park a small car or two. If you stop here and walk to the other end of the little meadow to where the trees start, you'll notice some old concrete barriers that are somehow not visible from the highway. Continue past them into the trees and suddenly you're on an old gravel road. Not just a trail, an actual road, gently angling up and away from the highway. So today we're going to look at where this road goes, and the dumb idea behind why it was built, and what happened after that.

A bit of background first: The famous Columbia River Highway opened in 1916, and thanks to the magic of induced demand it was quickly swamped by big trucks and other commercial traffic, and drivers of all sorts who just wanted to get to Point B as soon as possible and had zero interest in the road's meandering curves and scenic vistas. Before long the state Highway Commission -- today's ODOT -- started planning a new highway route that would traverse the gorge close to river level and as close to a straight line as was possible while still following the river. The problem with this idea, and the reason why the original road didn't do this, is that in general, the needed freeway-width flat land along the river just didn't exist, and you either had impassable swamps, er, wetlands, or sheer basalt cliffs that dropped straight into the river. The mid-20th Century solution to this problem was to simply dump gravel into the river until you had enough new land, and then build your sleek modern freeway there. (That's probably going to end badly at whatever point Big One -- the 9.0 earthquake they keep telling us is coming -- finally occurs. At which point the whole freeway probably liquefies and slides into the river. But hey, we had a good run.)

Bragging about I-84 has long since gone out of fashion, so I don't know how many million or giga-gazillion tons of gravel were used in this project. And I'm not going to hazard a guess, for the same reason I've never won one of those contests to win a big Mason jar of candy corn by guessing how many candy corns the jar contains. (Also I hate candy corn and would rather not win a big jar of it, thanks.) Obtaining that much gravel seems to have been the gating factor on how quickly they could build the new highway, and then one day someone looked around and realized the gorge is full of steep talus slopes composed of loose rocks, already about 80% of the way toward being the gravel the project needed. In fact there just happened to be a huge talus slope roughly one half-mile east of Multnomah Falls, and if enough of these rocks could just be moved a short distance downhill to the river, and then crushed into proper gravel, it would be a huge time saver. Some members of the general public raised a few questions about this idea, but in December 1939, the Oregonian assured readers that the gravel operation would not be an ongoing eyesore:

At a point a half mile east of Multnomah Falls, where Contractor G.D. Lyon needs 535,000 yards of rock to build a two-mile toe along the river’s edge, a haul road, 1900 feet long, is being built into the great rock slide which will provide material with a minimum of blasting. The natural tree and shrub screen between the present Columbia River highway and the haul road will not be disturbed,except at the point where the latter crosses the former. Plans already are made to augment this screen with additional plantings so that eventually the cut will not be discernible from either the present or the new water highway.

And going by that criterion alone the project was a rousing success. You could drive by this spot every day for years and have no idea the old digging site was here. For a better idea of what they were planning, check out this ODOT project map, dated October 1st 1940 (see page 7), and note that it closely matches the LIDAR image below:

This is what the area looks like on the state LIDAR map. From what I've been able to figure out, the little parking lot next to Milepost 33 is where the old haul road crossed the highway, and the survey map shows that the grassy area was part of a small temporary detour so the haul road could slope downhill right through where the highway normally was. And you can see the road continuing east and downhill to the railroad, right next to present-day I-84.

The other end of the road -- which we were hiking on before that extended tangent -- ends at the big talus slope east of Multnomah Falls. You might see some water trickling out of the base of the talus slope. At this point you're just a few feet downhill from where Trail 400 crosses the talus slope, as well as the start of the the infamous Elevator Shaft trail. If you look closely at the lower left corner of the image, you can even see a part of the trail, which climbs that talus slope in a seemingly endless series of tight switchbacks. I've read there are over 100 of them overall but have never tried counting them myself, either on the map or in person. LIDAR seems to show a couple of additional switchbacks continuing down to the highway, as if there was (or still is) a way to start the ascent from down there somewhere, maybe from a car dropping you off.

But back to our story. Work on the river-level highway paused during WWII and resumed afterward, and so we skip forward to February 1946, when a gigantic landslide covered the old highway and the railroad (and the spot we were just standing at in the last paragraph) in a massive pile of rocks for several hundred feet. (more photos on page 26 of that issue). News updates continued over the next week: A followup article the next day noted that even more debris had come down since the initial article. One photo has the position of the road drawn in as you wouldn't otherwise know where it was. The stream draining the Elevator Shaft watershed had an impressive canyon at that point. Another followup on February 8th notes that roughly another million tons of rock had come down just overnight, and it was the worst landslide the Highway Commission's Gorge operations had ever encountered. A further update on the 11th included another photo of the geological mayhem.

Today there aren't any obvious signs of what happened from the road -- if you got here coming from the west, you passed right through the site of the slide half a mile before Milepost 33, probably without noticing anything out of the ordinary -- and it's also hard to visualize where the slide happened or just how big it was by looking at present-day maps. Historic Aerials imagery from 1953 shows the slide site pretty clearly, as the recently-exposed rocks are visibly lighter than the rest of the talus slope.

I also came across an ODOT engineering drawing from March 8th 1946 -- about a month after the slide -- titled "Map of the SLIDE AREA E. of Multnomah Falls" (caps for emphasis are theirs, not mine) showing the contours of the slope at that point, and some of the early steps to re-stabilize the slope, like a couple of log cribs at the base of the slide area to hopefully keep rocks off the road, and a temporary log bridge on the damaged roadway to enable them to reopen it.

I haven't figured out exactly how long the highway and railroad were closed, but it obviously would have been an extended period of time. Union Pacific was understandably apoplectic about this nonsense, and sued for damages in August 1947. The case was settled in 1950 with terms not disclosed immediately. The suit had alleged the slide was caused by human error:

The slides covered the main line, burying some 250 feet of track to a depth from 20 to 30 feet. The company contended the slides were caused by highway workmen who disturbed the natural repose and natural drainage of a mountain slope a half mile east of Multnomah falls.

So what does that mean? Suppose you are in a place with gravity, and you have a pile of objects. Could be just about anything: Football-to-watermelon-sized basalt rocks (to pick a random example), but also gravel, dry sand, wet sand, snow, coffee beans, ball bearings, Legos, holiday party rum balls, $100 bills, tapioca pudding, skulls of one's enemies, etc. No matter what it's made of, there's always a maximum angle that limits how steep your pile can be, determined largely by object shape and friction between individual objects in the pile. Increase the angle beyond that -- add more things to the top, or remove some from the base -- and now your pile is unstable. At that point things will tend to tumble down the sides of your pile and accumulate there, decreasing its steepness until it's back in equilibrium. Or to put it in fantasy novel terms, the Oregon Highway Commission and its contractors coveted gravel above all else, and in their quest for more of it they delved too greedily and too deep, and instead of awakening the local Balrog (a demon of the ancient world), they awoke the universal laws of gravity, with predictable consequences.

I was about to say something to the effect that everyone learns this early on when playing outside, like the time you and your friends decided the big gravel pile at the construction site down the street was Mt. St. Helens, and kicking rocks away from the base was how you made it do realistic landslides. Eventually it would be time for a full-on eruption, and then you'd just throw gravel at each other until you got bored or someone got hurt. But that was 1980, which I have to admit was a long time ago now. In 2025, any adult who sees you doing this will call the police, and Officer Friendly will come and shoot you, and your parents, and your friends, and their parents. And everyone in the Nextdoor group for your neighborhood will be in smug agreement that you totally had it coming, and you got what you deserved for going outside ever. Playing with gravel in 2035 will have a similar outcome, except it'll all be done with AI drones rather than Officer Friendly shooting you in person, supposedly for force protection reasons but really because it's cheaper and it scales up really well.

Anyway, the story ends the way a lot of stories do that involve corporations and government agencies: There's an undisclosed settlement, the involved parties never speak of it again, the incident goes down the memory hole and is quickly forgotten, and then nobody learns anything from what happened or tries to do better next time. The End. And on that cheery note, we're off to milepost 34.