The Copper Mountain Property

Next up we're visiting Portland's Copper Mountain Property, another really obscure city park that you probably haven't heard of. The name alone inspires thoughts of rugged wilderness adventures, doesn't it? It caught my eye on PortlandMaps or maybe MetroMap and figured I should check it out. So I packed up the Adventuremobile X-9000 with the essentials (dogsled, salt pork, hardtack, flamethrower, rocket boots, etc.) and set off to see what destiny had in store...

Ok, who am I kidding? The name sure sounds exciting, but it turns out that's just the name of the investment firm that owns the adjacent property to the east. There is no mountain to see here; it's just two skinny (and completely flat) lots just off Airport Way in industrial NE Portland, and I only burned any time on visiting because I was already in the area making a necessary Costco run.

There is also no copper here; if there had been, it would have been stolen as scrap metal years ago by the area's vast homeless population. In theory this narrow strip is home to a trail that connects this stretch of Airport Way to the Columbia Slough Trail, and that might have made it a potentially scenic and interesting place in the not-so-distant past. But not right now, and probably not in the immediate future, and I have literally no idea what to do about it, and I also don't want to devote a whole blog post to the subject, especially since I don't have any actual policy ideas to kick around.

For what it's worth, there's another similar bit of city land maybe 1/4 mile to the east, also connecting the slough to airport way, but without a trail, or (as far as I can tell) a name, and it isn't labeled as greenspace in PortlandMaps, but I think it's the same basic idea other than those details. I have no idea why the two places are treated differently, but I have a hunch that the reasons are not very interesting.

The normies at Google have no additional info about this place, and will try to steer you to Metro's Cooper Mountain Nature Park instead, because there's no possible way you could really want to come here (which I guess is fair this time around); or if you can persuade Google you really did mean "Copper" and not "Cooper" it'll push you toward a different Copper Mountain with vastly more mainstream appeal, a ski resort town in Colorado. Which, again, is fair this time around. Come to think of it, every other place on Earth that has a vaguely similar name seems to be better and more appealing, and this isn't the first time that's happened. And now I remember why I sort of lost interest in doing "obscure city park you probably haven't heard of" posts like this: There may still be a few hidden gems out there, but by and large the others are obscure for good reason and probably ought to stay that way.

Unseen Worlds

Next up we're back in industrial North Portland for another installment in the ongoing public art series. This time^[1] we're taking a look at Unseen Worlds (2002) by artist Fernanda d'Agostino (whose work has appeared here a lot). This comes to us via Portland's Bureau of Environmental Services, specifically their Columbia Blvd. Wastewater Treatment Plant, which is one reason the mainstream guides for tourists don't tell you this is a must-see. (C'mon, stop snickering for a minute and let's pretend we're all serious people having a serious chat about capital-A Art for a minute.) Here's the official RACC description, which is repeated across several pages covering different sub-categories of the art here:

The artworks along this path depict various aspects of the wetlands and reparian environments of the site. You’ll find images of microorganisms and macro invertebrates used to test water quality. The paving inlays hint at the tidal nature of the slough. The “Dendritic Bridge” frames a view of the intersection of industrial and natural landscapes and you’ll find a bird list for the site beneath your feet. Birdhouses provide bird habitat and the perches reference feathers, beaks and some of the tools used in the sewer treatment plant. Looking through the three holes in the “Periscope Stone” you’ll see the favorite perch for Bald Eagles that frequent the park in early spring, the composter at the treatment plant, and the biggest snag (favorite all round habitat) on the site.

So why is this here? The art's located along a side branch of the Columbia Slough Trail skirts around the east side of the plant. On the south end, it almost[2] connects you to the Peninsula Crossing Trail, Evidently either the trail, or the Inverness bridge, or the Big Pipe, or some other capital project here generated enough Percent for Art money to fund some art and, I guess, give trail users something less sewer-y to look at and think about on their way through the area. Which I guess is nice if you're a squeamish grownup with delicate sensibilities, which covers just about everyone here. I mean, the agency's name -- "Bureau of Environmental Services" -- is a euphemism, and they would apparently be thrilled if the public saw them as the agency that's somehow in charge of herons and salmon and rain, and their engineers spend their days working on the city's mystical bond with same. Or something along those lines anyway.

But that's just one way to approach the problem. Next time BES has a major capital project here -- and there's bound to be another one sooner or later -- I hereby propose we put the city's eight year olds in charge of the whole public art program. I mean, grade school kids generally, but especially the eight year olds. And instead of no-fun grownups guiding them toward another batch of the same old tasteful nature art that everyone's supposed to like -- instead of doing that we really lean into whatever the eight year olds come up with, just this once. Obviously in general this is no way to run a city, and calling them "subject matter experts" is kind of a stretch, but they at least spend a lot of time giggling about the topic.

Also it's not like this would be unprecedented in the wider art world, although most of the examples that come back in a quick interweb search seem to be unintentional.

• The, ah, tightly coiled new W Hotel in Edinburgh, Scotland. I mean, it's Scotland -- even if people thought it looked like a local walnut-chocolate snack, or a "haute couture blindfold", rather than a big pile of poo, they wouldn't admit to it.
• Meanwhile in Philadelphia (possibly America's answer to Scotland), the local art museum acquired one of those giant Claes Oldenburg sculptures in 2011. Paint Torch is a 51' high tilted paintbrush, with a nearby blob of red paint, celebrating the art of painting. And that's all it was until one day in 2015 when artist Kid Hazo happened along and attached a grinning mouth and two big googly eyes to the paint blob, which was instantly and utterly transformed. In an age of omni-surveillance and zero tolerance everything, this is the only kind of art intervention that works: It can be undone in seconds, but can't be unseen no matter how much time elapses.
• Meanwhile in Boston, in 2023 the city welcomed The Embrace, the city's weird but official new MLK memorial. Said to be inspired by a photo of MLK hugging Corretta Scott King shortly after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the $10M giant-sized art tries and fails to show just the hug in a sorta-minimalist way by depicting a tangled nightmare of disembodied arms and general biology, inspiring scatological thoughts over on Reddit.
• San Jose, California's 1994 statue of the feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl depicts him coiled like a rattlesnake, and seen from a certain distance bystanders tend to just see the coiled shape and draw conclusions. General consensus seems to be that even if it was a poo emoji statue, it's still an upgrade over the statue it replaced, a pioneer so odious he was canceled way back in 1988.
• In Chicago, an artist made a fountain depicting a semi-realistic pile of the stuff, even labeling it "SHIT FOUNTAIN" to remove any lingering doubt. Seems he created it to criticize his neighbors for not cleaning up after their dogs.
• Meanwhile in Rotterdam, back in 2018, a local art museum hosted a Vienna-based art collective and their giant photorealistic logs of poo. They may have realized, late in the process, that this might not be quite enough to get a rise out of jaded Dutch museum-goers, and added another conceptual bit to the mix:
  

  Now, the sculptures rest on Persian rugs and are stared at by visitors wearing naked suits featuring various shapes and sizes of male and female sexual parts.
  
  For Gantner, the naked suits are “a gift to visitors” that enhance the exhibition and their own experience of it.
  
  “You step into the costume and you immediately transform into another being. People don’t know anymore what your job is, if you’re rich, poor, male or female, so you forget a little bit about all these rules.”

• Which brings us to Orlando, Florida, where we meet the most crass one of all, a giant walk-in inflatable poo emoji that was in town temporarily to promote some sort of deodorizer spray.

Since I'm way too old to submit ideas to the contest I just suggested, and I'm also not an official artist and ineligible if they did a boring regular art proposal process, let me just tell you my idea. You know how grand entrances to important buildings are often flanked by art of guardian animals, right? Things like sculptures of lions sitting outside library entrances. Imagine a pair of giant stainless steel poo emojis, grinning as they flank the main entrance to the plant. Coiling in opposite directions to maintain classical symmetry, and bidding the visitor welcome to where the magic happens.

---

Footnotes

[1]. About this post

You might have noticed that the photos in this post are a bit subpar and few in number. If you look closer you might notice they were taken wayyy back in 2014. This is another one of those posts that lingered around in drafts for ages because I couldn't figure out what it was called, and without a name I don't even have a title for the post, and the rest of the research gets pretty difficult, too, and I'd basically given up on this one but never got around to deleting it. Then a few days ago I was poking around on the revamped RACC website again and noticed entries for the art next to the sewer plant, and I will swear up and down and three times sideways that these database entries didn't exist until quite recently. So this time I couldn't move forward because the website that's supposed to be the single source of truth about these things just sort of neglected to mention the art here, for unknown reasons.

Catkin Marsh

Here are a couple of photos from Portland's Catkin Marsh Natural Area, an obscure city park in industrial NE Portland on a branch of the Columbia Slough, east of NE 33rd and west of the airport. The park consists of a 53 acre wetland area -- surrounded on three sides by the now-defunct Broadmoor golf course, and the fourth by warehouses -- plus a long skinny strip of land along the south side of the slough connecting out to 33rd, which is the only part shown in the photos. I took these while stopped briefly along 33rd after taking the car through DEQ at the test station nearby. I didn't actually turn the car off, much less get out for a closer look, so the photoset is somewhat less than comprehensive this time around.

The city bought the land fairly recently, in December 2012 -- it was part of the golf course before that, maybe serving as a natural water hazard. It was included in the city's Natural Areas Restoration Plan when it was updated in 2015, which rated it in 'Fair' health and as a high priority for restoration, though without any specifics on what they might do about it. They did remove a couple of culverts blocking this section of slough in 2017, at least. And with that, we've covered just about everything the city's said publicly about the place.

I gather the longer-term plan is for an extension of the Columbia Slough Trail to run through here someday, which I imagine is gated on both money and acquiring land or easements further east so the trail doesn't just dead-end on an abandoned golf course or at the airport security fence. The new owners of the Broadmoor site want to build warehouse space there, so making a deal for the unbuildable wetland parts of the course seems doable, in theory.

For anyone feeling really impatient to go visit the rest of the park for some reason, on the map above you can see an unofficial boot path through this strip along the slough, and conceivably you could get there that way, on an unofficial basis. But note the chest-high tall grass in the photos, and remember it's growing on top of a muddy, slippery bank that you won't be able to see because grass. So you stand a really good chance of going for a swim, which I cannot recommend here. As a data point, the city advises not eating fish from the slough more than once a month, due to PCBs and other contaminants, and discarding most of the fish even then. The slough as a whole is not considered a Superfund site, on unspecified technical grounds, but I still think this would be a bad place to take a mud bath or see what the water tastes like. Ewww. Just ewwww.

ripples, airport way bridge, columbia slough

Since it's cold and icy outside right now, I thought I'd dig out something a little more summery to post. Here are a couple of Vine videos from the Columbia Slough Natural Area. At one point along the trail, a concrete bridge carries NE Airport Way over the Columbia Slough, and the trail goes underneath it. When the sun's at the right angle, ripples on the placid slough are reflected up onto the underside of the bridge, and voila.

Columbia Slough Natural Area

Our next adventure takes us back to the Columbia Slough again, but this time to a spot much further east. Portland's Columbia Slough Natural Area is a fairly new city park, located along Airport Way in a light industrial area about 3 miles east of I-205 and the airport.

This area was previously called the "Big Four Corners Natural Area", but the name was apparently changed quite recently, within in the last couple of years, such that a number of signs around the park still use the old name. In some ways the former name was better, in that it referred to this specific location and not the slough in general. But it also sounds like somewhere that desperadoes would rob a stagecoach, probably by heading it off at the pass, whatever that means.

This section of the slough is complex of ponds and intersecting channels, hence the "Big Four Corners" name. (There's also a "Little Four Corners" further west, just east of I-205, next to the Inverness Jail. I haven't been there.) The channel complex forms the largest (extant) wetland area along the slough other than Smith & Bybee Lakes in North Portland, and provides important habitat for birds (note the heron flying in the first photo), native turtles, salamanders and other wildlife. Some of the ponds here are particularly important as habitat for baby turtles, as they aren't directly connected to the slough, and not exposed to invasive carp. It seems that carp stir up sediment and eat the same aquatic plants that turtles rely on, and bodies of water without carp are quite rare, so protecting these ponds has become a priority.

The park also has a variety of recreational features, including a dock for launching canoes and kayaks. This dock is a popular launch point for the annual Columbia Slough Regatta, which is not a race, but a boating event aimed at raising awareness about the slough. The regatta celebrated its 20th edition in 2014.

The park also has a few trails. A segment of the Columbia Slough Trail (which doesn't yet link to its western counterpart) follows the north shore of one of the slough channels. This channel heads north to a pump station where the slough once connected to the Columbia River, and the trail connects to the east end of the Marine Drive Trail at that point. The park also includes a Columbia Slough South Shore Trail somewhere around here, but I couldn't find it and I'm not sure where it goes.

South of Airport Way is a (relatively) remote part of the park known as the Mason Flats Wetlands, which was only recently restored and is not currently open to the public. Apparently there's also an even more (relatively) remote "Alice Springs" area somewhere south of the slough, although I doubt it's anywhere near as wild and exotic as its Australian namesake.

Vanport Bridge

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The next Columbia Slough bridge on our little tour is the newest, other than the recently replaced Vancouver Ave. bridge. The Vanport Bridge is the long elevated structure right next to the Denver Ave. bridge that carries the MAX Yellow Line over the slough, Columbia Boulevard, the Union Pacific rail line, and a long stretch of industrial land north of the slough. Altogether it's nearly 4000 feet long. It's a fairly utilitarian-looking structure, so TriMet has tried a few things to, I guess, humanize it a little. First, they had the public vote on names for the bridge back in 2003, before the line opened, and "Vanport Bridge" was the overwhelming winner of that contest. (Not to be confused with an entirely different Vanport Bridge in Pennsylvania, which carries Interstate 376 over the Ohio River somewhere near Pittsburgh.)

TriMet also spent a decent chunk of the MAX line's One Percent for Art money on public art to decorate the bridge. From TriMet's Yellow Line art guide:

Spencer T. Houser and Chris Rizzo present two approaches to the nearly 4,000-foot light rail bridge.

• Ninety flaming comets inspired by the car culture of the '50s blaze northward from Kenton.
• Blue metal panels on the north end of the bridge allude to the Columbia River.

Despite the art it hasn't yet become a beloved local landmark, so there isn't a lot of stuff about it out on the net. I did find a few mentions of it from TriMet and various engineering firms that had a hand in its construction:

• It's mentioned in TriMet's "DBE & Workforce Story" (where "DBE" stands for "disadvantaged business enterprise") explaining how the MAX line construction benefited minority workers & businesses.
• The engineering firm responsible for design of this segment of the MAX line includes it in a PDF of their recent or high profile bridge projects.
• The FE Ward engineering firm both designed and built the bridge.
• Info from another engineering firm that had a hand in the project.

Denver Ave. Bridge

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The next Columbia Slough bridge on our little tour is the one that carries N. Denver Ave. over the slough. Like the MLK and N. Portland Road bridges, this is an ODOT-owned bridge, since this stretch of Denver Ave. doubles as a chunk of highway OR 99W. At one time, 99W (a.k.a. the "West Side Highway") continued through downtown Portland, from SW Barbur to Front Avenue, then along Harbor Drive to the Steel Bridge, then up Interstate Avenue to Kenton, where it jogged over to become Denver Avenue, and then headed across the Columbia Slough north to the Interstate Bridge. Most of that stretch is no longer a state highway, but the stretch of Denver Ave. north of Argyle St. still is for some reason.

The Portland stretch of 99W was a late addition to the state highway system. At the time the Interstate Bridge went in, there was a great deal of infighting about which street would be the main approach to the bridge: Union Avenue (now MLK) or Vancouver Avenue, which Union Ave. finally won after a few years of rival booster clubs duking it out. Interstate (then known as Patton Avenue) wasn't in the running, because a steep bluff at the south end meant it didn't actually connect directly to downtown back then. It was a major local street, and was platted out as a wide street in case it became a major arterial later (which was a huge help when the MAX Yellow Line went in), but in 1916 it dead ended somewhere around today's Overlook Park. So a small wooden bridge was built, giving local traffic access to the Interstate Bridge.

A decade later, a major roadcut project finally connected Patton Avenue to the Steel Bridge and downtown Portland, and the widened street was rededicated as Interstate Avenue in September 1928, though a lot of references I've seen give 1929 as the actual project completion date. The bridge over the Columbia Slough was reconstructed at that point to handle the additional traffic. The Oregonian's "Year in Review" article on Jan 1. 1930 portrayed the Interstate Ave. project as one of the year's major news stories. A 1947 aerial photo shows the bridge here, along with an area of commercial development along the Kenton stretch of Interstate, but you can see that parts of the surrounding area were still semi-rural even then. A couple of interesting Cafe Unknown posts have more about the history of Interstate Avenue, with all its ups and downs, from potholed neighborhood street to neon wonderland, to blighted backwater after I-5 opened, and now to a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood with its own MAX line.

ODOT's 2012 bridge condition report says the slough bridge dates to 1916, while the adjacent viaduct over Columbia Blvd and the Union Pacific railroad is circa 1929. So it's possible there was a surface level intersection and railroad crossing here until the bridge upgrade project, in which case the original slough bridge was probably lower than the current one. That's my guess, anyway.

The 2013 state historic bridge inventory describes the bridge and viaduct:

In the late 1920s, increased traffic on the West Side Highway led to a major revision in how the highway approached the Interstate Bridge, then the only Portland area crossing into Washington State. Prior to this redesignation, the West Side Highway ended at downtown Portland, with only the Pacific Highway continuing over the bridge. These new bridges were designed to match those on the Pacific Highway, and continued to be a major part of the approach until the construction of I-5. They both feature a unique baluster railing, which is now mostly hidden behind protective wooden paneling.

Unfortunately I don't think you can see the unique bridge railing very well in any of these photos. The inventory PDF has a better photo, showing it really doesn't look all that different from other ODOT bridges of that era. The inventory goes on to mention that the slough bridge consists of "Three 78-ft steel girder and floorbeam system spans with reinforced concrete deck girder approach spans", while the viaduct is "Thirteen 71-ft reinforced concrete girder and floorbeam system spans with curved haunches.. ODOT researched the history of the Denver Ave viaduct over the railroad for the MAX Yellow Line project. The study determined it was ineligible for the National Register of Historic Places, and mentioned the slough bridge as similarly utilitarian & ineligible. The city's historical research for the Vancouver Ave. bridge replacement also mentions the Denver Ave. bridge briefly, but doesn't have much to say about it.

No discussion I've seen of the bridge mentions who designed it, and they usually do if a bridge is by someone well-known or historically important. The Union Ave./MLK, N. Portland Road, BNSF railroad, and (original) Vancouver Ave. bridges turned out to be minor designs by rather famous bridge engineers, but as far as I can tell that's not the case here. Perhaps as a result, it doesn't have a BridgeHunter or Structurae page of its own, but it does at least have an UglyBriges.com entry. That page tells us the bridge has an ODOT sufficiency rating of 51.7 out of 100 (as of April 2013), and it's described as being in "fair" condition and "functionally obsolete". It received an underwater inspection in 2011, which noted that the underwater portion of the bridge pilings are not entirely steel and concrete, which is a little surprising: "The part of this structure across the slough consists of 3 steel girder spans of 78 ft. each. Each pier is supported on two concrete columns with a webwall in between, that are supported by two individual concrete footings founded on untreated timber piling."

An upcoming ODOT project will redesign the intersection of Denver Ave. & Schmeer Road, directly north of the bridge. At present the north end of the bridge crosses an underpass that routes southbound traffic onto Schmeer Rd. The redesign will move the intersection north, and turn the underpass into a stretch of the Columbia Slough Trail instead. In Spring 2015 they'll also start work on the bridge and viaduct, resurfacing them and replacing the current bridge railings and adding crash barriers. Schematics of the new design indicate there will be a crash barrier separating the sidewalk from street traffic, and the redesigned bridge will include separate bike lanes, which it doesn't currently have. It will still only have a sidewalk on one side of the bridge, I suppose because extending the bridge out to add one on the other side would be too expensive. Still, it seems like a positive step, in an area that's only going to have more bike and pedestrian traffic as the Columbia Slough Trail keeps being extended.

Columbia Slough Trail

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Here's a slideshow from Portland's Columbia Slough Trail, which runs along the north shore levee of the Columbia Slough between N. Portland Road and Vancouver Avenue. I walked the length of the trail (minus a bit at the west end) one summer day, primarily as a way to get photos of a lot of the bridges over the slough, as well as the two islands in the middle of the slough that are technically Portland city parks (albeit inaccessible ones). After taking the trail I figured it merited a post of its own too. It's not precisely a nature trail, though; as it follows along the slough the trail passes the Heron Lakes golf course, Portland International Raceway, Portland Meadows (Oregon's sole surviving horse racing venue), and assorted industrial stuff. I dunno, I thought that was kind of interesting, or at least unusual. Your mileage may vary, obviously. (For what it's worth, it turns out that it's considered bad form to heckle the golfers, no matter how terrible they are, or how ugly their golf clothes look. You learn something every day, I guess.)

The stretch of trail between Portland Road & Denver Ave. is the original stretch of the trail, completed back in 2001, and planned back in the late 1990s. It connects with the north-south Peninsula Crossing Trail at the Inverness Force Main Bridge, the pedestrian bridge that's actually a bridge for a cleverly concealed giant sewer main. The original stretch of trail hasn't gotten proper upkeep in recent years and has developed potholes, which is probably not something you want on the top of your levee. More recently, the mile-long stretch between Denver & Vancouver Avenues just opened in January 2014, so it's in great shape, and the shiny new Vancouver Ave. bridge is designed to be bike friendly, for a change. Maybe the rest of the trail will get more attention now that it's becoming a through bike route and not just a weird disconnected stretch of trail in the middle of nowhere.

The bit between the old and new segments at Denver Ave. isn't so great right now. It's a busy street and your best bet is to take the Schmeer Rd. underpass under the street, and even then there isn't a sidewalk or bike lane, and you have to walk on the shoulder and look around for trouble. The city and ODOT want to redesign the intersection in the near-ish future, since the current intersection isn't great for cars and trucks either. The plan is to move the Schmeer Rd. intersection further north, with the current underpass becoming part of the trail.

The long term plan (or sorta-plan) is to eventually have a trail along the entire length of the slough, from Kelley Point Park all the way out to roughly Troutdale. I'm not sure about the eastern portion, but the stretch between the Willamette and the Peninsula Drainage Canal (near NE 33rd) should be doable, since it would involve building on top of existing levees, which are already publicly owned. Publicly owned & operated by the county's four obscure and seriously underfunded drainage districts, to be exact. But that's a whole other story.

Inverness Force Main Bridge

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The next Columbia Slough bridge on our mini-tour is the newest, other than the rebuilt Vancouver Ave. bridge. The Peninsula Crossing Trail continues north after the Portsmouth Cut area, and crosses the Columbia Slough on a new-ish bike/pedestrian bridge, just east of the city's ginormous Columbia Wastewater Treatment Plant. Several sources (including the Google map above) insist the bridge and the bit of trail south of it are part of the Columbia Slough Trail, which intersects the Peninsula Crossing Trail just north of the bridge. The Intertwine trail map says it is, a Metro map about the ongoing Columbia Slough Trail project says it isn't. The slough trail is an east-west trail along the north bank of the slough, running a few miles through N/NE Portland, while the crossing trail is a roughly north-south route that vaguely parallels the BNSF railroad across the N. Portland peninsula. The bridge is clearly part of the latter route, not that that's going to stop anyone from making new wrong maps in the future. The map error is out there now, and map errors tend to be strongly self-propagating once they're out in the wild.

Anyway, when I walked across the bridge, I thought it seemed a lot more solid and heavy duty than was strictly needed for a bike and pedestrian bridge. I assumed that was so the occasional maintenance or emergency vehicle could use it too. Then I bumped into an old planning document from 1996 that explained the bridge's hidden secret. It turns out that in the early 90s the city's Bureau of Environmental Services wanted to build a bridge over the slough for the Inverness Force Main, a shiny new sewer pipeline (though maybe "shiny" is the wrong word here), and they figured they might as well put a bike/pedestrian walkway on top, concealing the pipe while they were at it. (Though it seems like they continued calling it the Inverness Force Main bridge instead of naming it after either of the trails.) It's not just any old sewer pipe, either, but a 30 inch main carrying pressurized raw sewage. As you might imagine, it was kind of a bad deal when the pipe under bridge sprang a leak back in February 2014. The public was advised to avoid contact with the slough, which generally speaking is what people do anyway.

I-5 Columbia Slough Bridge

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The next Columbia Slough bridge on our mini-tour is the I-5 Columbia Slough Bridge. When highway traffic reports use the dreaded phrase "northbound traffic backed up past the slough bridge", this is the bridge they're talking about. I haven't actually paid attention to traffic reports in a while, since I live in downtown Portland and walk to work. It's possible this phrase is less common than it once was; the bridge was widened in 2008-2010 as part of ODOT's I-5 Delta Park project. The project removed a notorious traffic bottleneck for Clark County commuters by widening this stretch of freeway from two lanes to three in each direction. Somehow they managed to do this without shaving off parts of the adjacent Columbian Cemetery just south of the bridge. The project's final "Revised Environmental Assessment and Finding of No Significant Impact" included a few provisions for coexisting with the cemetery, such as not running pile drivers during funerals.

Even the widened freeway is still puny by the standards of nearly any other city. The Oregon side of the metro area has a general policy of freeways having no more than three traffic lanes per direction, so this is as big as I-5 is likely to get barring an unlikely tectonic shift in local attitudes toward cars. As predicted, the traffic bottleneck simply shifted south to another section of two lane freeway around the Rose Quarter / convention center area. There have been suggestions about widening the freeway there too, and potentially capping it and putting parks or buildings on top. That would probably just push the bottleneck somewhere else again. But I do generally like the idea of capping freeways and hiding the ugliness away underground, so maybe there would be an upside to the idea. My understanding is that the widening was also supposed to be a prerequisite to the now-abandoned Columbia River Crossing, which would have been a ginormous replacement for the current Interstate Bridge.

Anyway, these photos were taken from the new stretch of Columbia Slough Trail that opened in early 2014, so you can see what the bridge looks like from the side and underneath, in case you were curious. It's sort of a utilitarian, unmemorable bridge, but it's interesting that they blended the expansion with the existing bridge so it isn't immediately obvious that it was widened. If you look closely at the bridge supports you can see a line between older & newer concrete where the outside lanes were added.

The library's Oregonian database indicates that ODOT proposed the bridge in May 1962, as part of what was then called the "Minnesota Freeway" project. (I-5 south of downtown was called the "Baldock Freeway" and I-405 was sometimes the "West Hills Freeway" and other times the "Foothills Freeway". All of these names have long since fallen out of use.) A photo spread in March 1964 shows the bridge under construction, and another photo in July of that year shows the bridge nearing completion. By 1981 (when the bridge was only 17 years old), Multnomah County and ODOT were already wringing their hands about it, but at the time they couldn't afford to do anything about it. It was already over capacity in 1981, but they went around in circles for another 25 years before figuring out how to make it happen. I suppose impatient people don't last long in the civil engineering business.

Union Pacific Columbia Slough Bridge

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The next Columbia Slough bridge on our mini-tour is the Union Pacific railroad bridge, which crosses the slough and Wright Island just east of the new pedestrian bridge. I can't find much in the way of information to share about this one: How old it is, who designed it, the usual factoids. That's annoying but not uncommon with obscure railroad bridges. Looking at it, you can see the stubs of old pilings underneath the bridge, suggesting the current one replaced an earlier wooden trestle-type bridge. Not sure I would hazard a guess as to how old the current bridge is; a 2003 ODOT study on improving local rail access suggested replacing it with a new, higher bridge, but I don't know whether this was ever implemented. It looks older than 2003, though, or at least the portion south of the island does. The northern side looks like it might be newer, but it's hard to tell, and (as I said) I have no concrete information to pass along.

In lieu of that, all we've got are a few Panoramio photos, and photos on railfan sites (and they're mostly interested in bridges as places to photograph trains.) One such site points out that this train line is just north of a major rail junction, as well as the Union Pacific tunnel under North Portland, so apparently this area is kind of a big deal if you're into trains.

N. Portland Road Bridge

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Our next Columbia Slough bridge is the one carrying N. Portland Road; in the photos above, it's the bridge hidden behind the BNSF railroad bridge. I could have gotten closer to take better photos, but neither it nor the railroad bridge looked very interesting so I didn't make the detour. In retrospect I probably ought to have made the trip, since it does have a degree of historical significance. N. Portland Road is actually a state highway, OR 120, although people don't realize this because the state's never gotten around to putting up highway signs. It was built back in the 1930s to connect North Portland to the long-gone stockyards and meatpacking district. One alternate name for the road that's occasionally been used is "Swift Highway", named not for the speed limit, but for the old Swift Meat Packing Company, which built the stockyards and ran Kenton as a company town in the early 20th Century.

As a state highway, the state was responsible for building bridges on it, and for much of the 1930s tha was Conde McCullough's job. He's best known as the designer of fancy bridges along US 101 on the Oregon Coast, but as the state's chief bridge engineer even the most mundane bridges were part of his bailiwick. Obviously he wasn't the state's only bridge engineer, but he tends to get credit for anything the state built during his tenure, similar to Steve Jobs getting sole credit for various Apple products. In this case, McCullough at least invented the type of bridge used here; the department ended up building 158 bridges of this type around the state, so presumably the implementation work for each was farmed out to the department's junior engineers. The wood/concrete composite design was intended to be an affordable way to build smaller bridges, with the important side benefit of throwing some business to the state's struggling timber industry during the Depression. A historical review of the similar (and since-replaced) Vancouver Ave. bridge has a blurb about this one:

The N Portland Road bridge (formerly “Swift secondary highway”), was constructed prior to the subject bridge in 1934 using a similar composite type (Myers 1935:4). The concrete pile bent design varied slightly from the subject bridge by incorporating pointed Gothic-style arch openings. The Swift Highway connected North Portland to the Portland Union stockyards. The bridge retains less integrity than the subject bridge. Many of the understructure wood piles have steel column replacements and the handrail’s wood intermediate posts were removed and replaced by an adjacent modern rail.

Some of the replacement work happened in 2007. The bridge is a major trucking route, so it makes sense that 1930s wood beams would wear out after bearing decades of modern semi trucks. The state transferred much of the highway to city jurisdiction in 2005; from the included map in the transfer deal, it appears the deal transferred everything except the bridge (which it refers to as "Columbia Slough Bridge No. 01726"), with the agreement specifying "Said bridge shall be transferred at such time that said bridge is replaced with a bridge meeting AASHTO bridge design standards", AASHTO being the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. In other words, everyone agrees the bridge needs replacing, and the city prefers that to be the state's problem, paid for from the state's budget.

Vancouver Ave. Bridge

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The next Columbia Slough bridge on our little tour is the one that carries N. Vancouver Ave. over the slough. The current bridge only dates to 2011, but it's the third bridge at this location, with history going back nearly a century.

As planning for the Interstate Bridge heated up in the early 1910s, local boosters argued over which street would be Portland's main approach to the bridge. The thinking was that winning this prize would lead to a bonanza of traffic and shoppers and general Progress. The two leading candidates were Vancouver Avenue, and Union Avenue (now MLK) a bit further east. The Union Avenue boosters won out, and the street got a bridge over the Columbia Slough in the style of the main Interstate Bridge. Vancouver Ave. had some sort of temporary connection to the bridge construction site, which was supposed to be demolished after the bridge opened, but the city threw a bone to local business interests and let them keep it for another two years on a trial basis. Which encouraged Vancouver Ave. boosters to lobby for a permanent slough bridge.

I'm not sure what happened to that original temporary span, but as far as I can tell there wasn't a bridge here by the mid-1920s. In 1927 there was a proposal to reuse a discarded old span from the Broadway Bridge here, similar to what happened with old Burnside Bridge parts being reused at the Sellwood, Lusted Rd., and Bull Run River bridges. Unfortunately Portland's city engineer concluded the old span was much too heavy for the site, and it would be cheaper to build an entirely new bridge than to build all the heavy supports needed for the Broadway span.

By 1929, local boosters were once again lobbying for a Vancouver Ave. extension, slough bridge, & connection with Union Ave. This time the idea got traction, although the powers that be decided to do it on the cheap; in August 1931, it was decided the new bridge would be a wooden structure, with only the parts the general motoring public would see done in concrete. A historical assessment done for the city in 2009 explains that this is actually a Conde McCullough design, believe it or not. As the state bridge engineer, he was responsible for mundane bridges as well as crown jewels along the coast, and this type of bridge was designed to be an affordable small bridge, with better aesthetics than a plain old all-wood bridge.

In June 1932, the county applied for Corps of Engineers permission to build the bridge. Permitting dragged out for a while, as the slough was then used by fishing boats and a bit of shipping traffic, as hard as that is to imagine today. Objections were eventually sorted out, and a May 1935 construction photo shows the bridge 50% complete. I didn't run across a story about the actual completion of the bridge. You'd think Vancouver Avenue would have hosted a big ribbon-cutting party, after all the lobbying that went into getting it built.

In May and June 1948, floodwaters from the Columbia and Willamette inundated the Vanport area and other large tracts of the city. To try to control the flooding, engineers built an emergency dam around the Vancouver Ave. bridge. It seems that a log raft somewhere upriver had broken during the flooding and a large number of logs had jammed up against the bridge anyway, so they decided to just dump rocks and gravel on top of the log debris until they'd blocked off the slough. Construction photos look messy and chaotic but apparently the dam did actually work as designed, preventing more flooding across North Portland.

In 2008, the wooden bridge supports were damaged by a brush fire that began in a transient camp under the bridge. It closed to vehicle traffic after the fire and was deemed unrepairable, but it remained open for bikes while the city figured out what to do next, and Vancouver Ave. boosters once again had to lobby for a new bridge. The old bridge was fully closed for demolition in April 2010, and its award-winning (and less flammable) replacement finally opened in May 2011. The new bridge features wide bike lanes and a variety of artistic touches, I suppose on the theory that whenever you replace a McCullough bridge, even a minor one, you have to make it a little fancier than you otherwise would. Maybe if you don't he appears as an angry ghost and makes fun of your third rate engineering skills or something. I haven't seen any reliable reports of that actually happening, but (I suppose) why risk it if you don't have to?

BNSF Columbia Slough Bridge

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The next Columbia Slough bridge on the agenda is the one carrying the BNSF railroad. This is the same rail line that crosses the Columbia on the Vancouver & Oregon Slough railroad bridges, and continues on through the Portsmouth Cut (beneath a set of railroad-owned road bridges), and then across the Willamette on Bridge 5.1. Like all of the aforementioned bridges, the one over the slough was designed by Ralph Modjeski (who also designed downtown Portland's Broadway Bridge).

This is the smallest and undoubtedly the least interesting of the BNSF Modjeski bridges. Frankly there's nothing interesting about it other than who designed it, and it's hard to imagine that he actually spent a lot of time on this one. There wasn't even anything in the Oregonian database about it, as far as I can tell. But one of the constant guiding principles at this humble blog is that some things are worth doing just for the sake of completeness, and this bridge completes the set of Portland Modjeski bridges. As far as I know. One upside of this sake-of-completeness thing is that I end up having a top search ranking for all sorts of curious and obscure things. Which would be great, if anyone was ever bored enough to actually Google them.

MLK Columbia Slough Bridge

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For several years now, one of this humble blog's ongoing projects has involved bridges. I started out with Portland-area Willamette River bridges, and once I'd done posts about those I ended up doing bridges on the Columbia, Clackamas, and Sandy Rivers too. I've also done bridges in the Columbia Gorge (and there may still be a few of those that I've missed), as well as a bunch of bridges in Cleveland from a trip there a few years ago. I also recently found some lists of Portland-area bridges that local governments believe are historically significant, so I've covered a couple of those too. A few months ago it occurred to me that there were a decent number of bridges on the Columbia Slough, in N/NE Portland, and I could visit a lot of them just by walking the Columbia Slough Trail. None of them are really visually stunning, but some at least have a bit of historical significance. Case in point, the bridge shown above, which carries MLK (a.k.a. state highway OR-99E) over the Columbia Slough. Its Bridgehunter page describes it:

The Columbia Slough Bridge on OR 99E was constructed in 1916 as part of the Interstate Bridge project. The bridge features built-up steel plate girder main spans and the same decorative steel railing found on the 1917 Interstate Bridge over the Columbia River. The bridge was likely designed by consulting firm of Waddell and Harrington just like the Interstate Bridge located just a short distance to the north.

The 304-foot original portion of the bridge features four steel plate girder spans with two main spans of 77.3-feet and two side spans of 76.2-feet. In 1951 the original 44-foot wide structure was widened to 58-feet by the Oregon State Highway Department to accommodate another traffic lane. The new portion of the bridge has a different span layout featuring two 140-foot plate girder mains spans and reinforced concrete approach spans at each end of the structure. The total length of the widened portion of the bridge is 362.5-feet.

In other words, this bridge was a minor project by a very famous bridge design firm. They were the same company behind the Interstate Bridge (obviously), as well as the Hawthorne and Steel Bridges in downtown Portland, the Union St. Bridge in Salem, and the Columbia River Highway bridge over the Sandy River in Troutdale. Oh, and the 12th Ave. Viaduct over Sullivan's Gulch / I-84, near Lloyd Center, which counts as another minor project.

A July 1916 Oregonian article on the near-complete Interstate Bridge mentions the slough span briefly as a remaining to-do item, due to problems with the initial construction done there:

When the water falls sufficiently, a pier will be erected in Columbia Slough to replace the one destroyed by the shifting of the bottom of the slough on account of the tremendous pressure of the big fill at that point. Not until this pier is built can the girder spans across Columbia Slough be placed.

Other than a few traffic accidents, the bridge apparently hasn't been newsworthy since its construction. I suppose if they ever get around to replacing the current Interstate Bridge, this little bridge would be left around as the last surviving piece of the original project. At that point the bridge might come be seen as an interesting historic artifact. But given the recent cancellation of the Columbia River Crossing project, that day isn't likely to come anytime soon.

Moore Island

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Our next adventure takes us to the Columbia Slough's Moore Island, separated from Wright Island by a muddy channel, surrounded by mudflats, and not even accessible by an illegal scramble across a busy train bridge. Like Wright Island, the whole thing is city owned, and it's managed as a nature reserve, with salmon-friendly "Large Woody Debris structures" (i.e. old logs, anchored in place) coming to its shores in the next few years. Long story short, I have basically nothing interesting to pass along about the place, and what little I do have already showed up in the Wright Island post.

Portland's Moore Island is not to be confused with West Linn's Moore's Island at Willamette Falls, bordering the old locks. Moore's Island is entirely industrial, and there are "catacombs" carved in the rocks beneath the old paper mill, patrolled by giant nutrias. That sounds like a more interesting place than Portland's muddy slough island, although sadly I don't know the right people or have the right lockpicking skills to get a look at it in person.

Wright Island expedition

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Today's adventure takes us to what's likely one of the less-touristed spots in the Portland city park system. Wright Island, is an island in the middle of the Columbia Slough, south of PIR and the Heron Lakes municipal golf course, entirely surrounded by mudflats, and reached only by a Union Pacific railroad bridge. You might need a hovercraft to get to the island, or a kayak, hip waders, luck, and a phone to call 911 when you get stuck. Or you could try to scramble out onto the train bridge, avoiding trains and railroad cops, and rappel down to the island, hopefully leaving a rope in place so you aren't stuck there forever. Or I suppose you could go by helicopter if you have one, or know someone who does. I'm afraid I played it safe (as usual) and just took photos of the island from across the slough. So I've never actually been to Wright Island, but I've seen it and taken photos of it, which is probably sufficient for internet purposes. The city's 2009 vegetation unit survey for the island mentions that it had recently been home to an extensive homeless camp, so there's obviously got to be some way to get there, if you're sufficiently motivated.

The city owns it primarily as a nature reserve, not a visitor attraction. Recent plans indicate they want to anchor logs ("Large Woody Debris structures", the city calls them) around the island, and around Moore Island, just east of here, to enhance baby salmon habitat.

Technically only the east half of the island is officially a city park. Railroad right-of-way runs down the middle, and the western portion is primarily Bureau of Environmental Services, with a smaller bit owned by the City Auditor's office. In practice the ownership situation is probably not a very important detail, but it was the only interesting detail I saw on PortlandMaps. And I'm resorting to PortlandMaps at all because, as far as I can determine, Wright Island hasn't been mentioned in the Oregonian even once since the paper's founding back in the 1860s. So I don't know when the city acquired it, or why, or any fun historical anecdotes. It's possible the city inherited it from Vanport City after that town was lost to the 1948 Vanport Flood, but I don't have anything concrete to back that up.

Note that Portland's Wright Island is not to be confused with the much larger (and equally inaccessible) Wright Island off the coast of Antarctica. If I had to choose between the two, I'd probably pick the Antarctica one as a Bond villain lair, mostly because the Portland one is just too small for a proper evil base. Although on the other hand Portland's island offers a (somewhat) better climate, and is close to the Hayden Meadows/Jantzen Beach area for when one needs to stock up on lair supplies, and one's henchmen will have an easy commute down from the 'Couve. So there are advantages and disadvantages either way, I suppose.

Johnson Lake expedition

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Today's adventure takes us to another obscure city park along the Columbia Slough. If you take MAX to the Portland Airport (or I-205, I guess), you'll see a big ugly factory a bit north of the Parkrose-Sumner station, and a lake directly north of the factory, right next to the freeway. This is Johnson Lake, home to the city's "Johnson Lake Property", which covers roughly the eastern third of the lake plus some shoreline on the north shore. When I say today's adventure takes us there, I mean in a very broad sense; these photos were taken from a moving MAX train, and I'm not sure what if any public access there is to the lake. The word "Property" in the park's name is usually a clue that it isn't really set up to welcome visitors. (See also the Jefferson St. & Munger Properties in the West Hills, for example.)

As with other places of the "Property" variety, the city's list of park amenities is just the boilerplate "Includes natural area". Unlike the others, though, the page continues with a rather extensive history section. As the story goes, a century ago Johnson Lake was a popular local recreation spot, with swimming, boating, and even a dance hall (although the dance hall burned sometime in the 1940s). I don't have any colorful stories of the era to pass along because the Oregonian database doesn't mention Johnson Lake until the 1980s or so, I suppose because it was too far out of town for the paper to care. Longtime residents remember those days fondly, though. But then, in the 1950s, a giant Owens-Illinois glass plant moved in on the south shore of the lake and began discharging some sort of sludge or goop into the water. And because this was the Good Old Days, there was nothing anyone could do about it. Understandably, recreational use of the lake declined after that.

State environmental testing revealed elevated PCB levels in the area, as well as various other fun substances. A "Projects & Programs" pdf from the Columbia Slough Watershed Council describes various remediation projects that have taken place over the last decade, including a 2008 "pollution reduction facility" on the south side of the lake, built jointly by the Bureau of Environmental Services and the glass company; native turtle population studies beginning in 1999; and a 2012 sediment cap to isolate contaminated lake sediments, which supposedly fixed the lake, at least to the state DEQ's satisfaction. A 2012 Draft Feasibility Study for cleaning up the Portland Harbor Superfund Site cited the earlier and much smaller Johnson Lake cleanup as a precedent on how to handle a couple of technical details. I'm not a biologist, nor am I an EPA regulation expert, so don't ask me to explain what that's all about.

Before we all shake our fists at the horrible glass plant, it's worth pointing out this isn't just any old glass plant, it's a beer bottle plant. It's said to produce a million bottles a day, and the odds are pretty good that your local microbrew bottle came from here, and was made from recycled glass. And for that we have Oregon's Bottle Bill to thank, in part, because it results in a high quality supply of used glass, separated out from plastic and other recylables. Back in the 1950s this plant probably made bottles for your grandpa's beloved Blitz Weinhard or Lucky Lager. So two of our regional obsessions, local beer and saving the world, are sort of in collision here.

Various other environmental items popped up while searching for info about Johnson Lake:

• The lake is mentioned in a study on freshwater mussels of the Columbia Slough. One of the studied sites was Whitaker Slough, a side branch of the Columbia Slough that drains Johnson Lake and flows into Whitaker Ponds. The study found that freshwater mussels in Whitaker Slough tended to be older than in other parts of the Columbia Slough, and they hypothesized that recruitment of juvenile mussels might be a problem here, or might have been a problem until recently.
• A study on native turtles of the Portland area found very few at Johnson Lake. The authors don't have a definite explanation as to why, but they speculate that the poor aquatic conditions can't be helping.
• The sycamore maple trees around the lake are an invasive species, apparently.
• The lake lies within the Columbia South Shore Well Field, Portland's backup drinking water supply when Bull Run is offline or can't meet demand. Here's a Mercury article about a bike tour of the well field. I should point out the city draws underground aquifer water, not surface water, and icky stuff on the surface doesn't necessarily mean icky stuff at well depth. It still seems kind of ooky though. The city does have a program to protect wellhead water quality, but it seems to be focused more on septic tanks and new accidental spills versus existing, persistent contaminants like the ones here.
• Surprisingly, fishing is technically legal here, so long as you don't eat the fish. Boating is off limits, however, since much of the lake is still privately owned. The notion of swimming in the lake didn't even come up in that discussion thread, but I'd imagine you aren't supposed to do that either.

Despite all of this, Johnson Lake is a neighborhood park in an area that doesn't have many parks, and the local neighborhood association's trying to make the best of it. Their website calls it a "hidden gem", and they've organized volunteer cleanup efforts focusing on trash and so forth. Which is great, but I'm not sure what's really doable with the place beyond general habitat restoration. It's a park centered around a lake, but visitors probably shouldn't touch the lake, and the surroundings are mostly industrial and not very scenic. This sort of limits the possibilities. So maybe a nature trail would work here, maybe a birdwatching spot or two, assuming the lake attracts birds. I found one report of a possible "American x Eurasian hybrid widgeon" sighting there, but generally it doesn't seem to be a popular spot right now. And no, I don't know what a hybrid widgeon is; I'm going to assume it's caused by the fun lake chemicals, sort of like Blinky, the three-eyed fish on the Simpsons. Hey, it's a theory.

Vanport Wetlands

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Here's a slideshow from the Vanport Wetlands natural area, just south of the Portland Expo Center. I'd ridden MAX to the end of the line to get some photos of the Oregon Slough Railroad Bridge (as one does) and I had some time to burn while waiting for the train back. So I figured I'd go take a look at the nearby lake. At first glance it looks like your standard run-of-the-mill wetland area near the Columbia, like Smith & Bybee Lakes, Whitaker Ponds, and many others. While that's basically true, there's an interesting story behind this place and how it got this way.

The first thing to know is that this isn't a regular city park, or even a Metro natural area. Instead, the Port of Portland owns and maintains it. Which is strange because their main business is running the Portland Airport and various shipping terminals, not creating duck habitat. It seems they needed to fill in about 14 acres of wetlands at the airport, so they had to create wetlands elsewhere as mitigation, and thus Vanport Wetlands was born. This is how the US Army Corps of Engineers wetland process works, more or less: They'll generally give you a permit to fill and build on wetlands, so long as you create or maintain some other wetlands elsewhere. The theory is that the new wetlands are supposed to be at least as good as the old ones. I suspect that's often not the reality; certainly the little fenced mitigation areas next to suburban minimalls don't look anything like real wetlands, for instance. I'm not a wetland biologist and I can't speak to how good of a job the Port did here, but at 90 acres the Vanport Wetlands are at least larger than the filled area they're supposed to replace.

Back in 2002, toward the end of the Port's restoration effort, they decided to embrace modern technology and they put up a website about the area, its history, and its future, rather than installing the usual interpretive signs at the lake itself. That website has unfortunately been defunct for several years now, but it turns out that the (usually) trusty Wayback Machine has a copy. So I can fill in a few details about the place's unusual history.

Prior to the wetland restoration project, this site had been home to KGW radio towers since the mid-1920s. A pair of 625' towers stood near the center of today's lake. A nearby creepy-looking multistory transmitter building apparently dated to before the 1948 Vanport Flood, which devastated the once-populated surrounding area. The rest of the tower site was a forest of guywires supporting the two antennas. Less visibly, the towers were connected to a grid of buried copper grounding wires, I suppose in case of thunderstorms or something. All of this had to be removed as part of the restoration project, so it wasn't just a matter of taking down the towers and flooding the place. The towers were toppled in December 2000. It's a shame the one online video clip of the toppling is a pre-YouTube, postage-stamp-sized Windows Media file, but that was the state of the art back then. Frankly, I have no idea how we got by in those days.

I couldn't get very far during my brief visit because the Vanport Wetlands are surrounded by a chain link fence topped with barbed wire, and the only gate is closed and locked. The old website explains that this is intentional:

Until 2001, access to the site was restricted to a gate on the eastern boundary of the property off N. Expo Road. Following mitigation construction, a second gate, along the northern boundary of the property, was installed. Due to the conservation restrictions placed on the property, there is presently no public access to the site.

A chain-link fence now surrounds the site, with the only vehicle entrance being a gate at the northern end of North Expo Road. Visitors must receive Port of Portland permission to enter the property due to the sensitivity of the wetlands restoration effort underway there. Once native wetland vegetation is firmly established, the Port anticipates some public use of the property for passive recreation and educational activities.

To my untrained eye the wetlands certainly look established at this point, but clearly this maybe-someday public access hasn't come to pass yet. I can see it not being a high priority for the Port; It's not exactly their core business, after all. They do operate a couple of other public parks, though, although none of them are nature areas: McCarthy Park on Swan Island, and the Stanley Park Blocks and much of the Marine Drive Trail near the airport.

The closure may not be that big of a deal, though, since (as far as the general public goes) the Vanport Wetlands are mostly of interest to birdwatchers. If you're serious about birding, you presumably already have gear for observing from a distance -- binoculars, monster telephoto lenses, etc., and I suppose the fence isn't that big of a deal in that case, so long as you can get an unobstructed view over it from somewhere.

The water comes right up to the property line (at least on the east side of the lake), so it's not like they could put in an extensive trail system here, and I think the lake's too shallow for canoes most of the year, but I imagine a boardwalk or observation deck would be doable at some point.

For what it's worth, there seems to be a minor geographic dispute about just what the lake is called. The Port's old website says it's called "Force Lake", but Google and the Friends of Force Lake say the real Force Lake is just northwest of here, on the other side of Force Avenue. Which I think would make this lake Not The Lake You're Looking For. I'm sorry, that was lame and I apologize.