Foxglove Falls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Old Boneyard Road

Our next Columbia Gorge adventure takes us back to the former mill town of Bridal Veil, or what's left of it. This time around we aren't visiting the falls, or the bridge above the falls, or the Angels Rest Trail, or Dalton Point, or any of the other usual sights; this time we're wandering down an old gravel Forest Service road at the edge of town, a place the agency calls "Old Boneyard Road". Who am I kidding, I saw the name and had to check it out. Knowing, as I do, how this always turns out in the movies -- "Blair witch, you say? Let's make a documentary!" -- I still had to check it out. So I did, and was underwhelmed, and I also couldn't find any interesting stuff to share about the place, so once again I'm resorting to the usual mix of guesswork, wild tangents, and unbelievable stories I just made up, and hopefully readers can tell which is which. I figured the name might work as a little clickbait, at least; I even held off finishing this post until late October, on the theory it might drive more clicks now than it would if posted in April, say. To be honest I mostly stopped caring about metrics years ago and will probably forget to ever check whether this theory of mine panned out. But never mind all that; we're here now, and I'll see if I can make the place seem at least a little spooky while I'm at it.

The usual embedded Google map up top isn't very helpful this time around, and on Street View it looks like the first couple of photos in my photoset but even less artsy, so here's a US Forest Service road map to give a better idea of where the road is at and where it goes. (That link goes to an interactive version of the USFS map, since I can't seem to embed the real thing here.)

Finding the road in real life takes a keen eye. The spot where it branches off the historic highway is marked only by an easy-to-miss Forest Service road sign noting this is road number 3000-297, and an unusually wide bit of shoulder on the other side of the highway. Surprisingly the road's not actually gated off, so in theory you could drive down it and maybe get past the muddy parts that way, but I wouldn't recommend it; your best bet is to just park in that shoulder area and walk the rest of the way, and turn around if it's too muddy since you aren't really missing anything. Past the sign, the road heads downhill into a narrow, triangular bit of land wedged between the old highway and the Union Pacific railroad, fording Dalton Creek on the way. As it nears the railroad, the road splits: A bit heading east peters out into a small meadow almost immediately, with impassable brush east of there. (A 1927 Metsker map showed the road continuing east from there and rejoining the old highway, but it was gone as of the 1944 edition of the same map.) The main road does a hairpin bend and heads west, but soon turns into impassable mud where it recrosses Dalton Creek. Maps show the road continuing west for a bit after that before dead-ending near the property line with the ODOT's rock quarry next door. Overall it gives the impression it was once an access road for something that used to be here, but gives no hints about what that was, unless maybe the name is a hint.

I first saw the name in a pair of Forest Service road studies, the 2003 original and its 2015 update. They're large (since they cover all USFS roads within the National Scenic Area) and quite dry to read, so let me summarize briefly. The 2003 report said the road was "needed by state government", while posing a "high" risk to aquatic life. The 2015 update said the need for the road was now "low" (and was merely a "low" risk to aquatic life), and proposed downgrading it from maintenance level 2 (suitable for high clearance vehicles) down to level 1 (gated off, with minimal maintenance), commenting "Consider decommissioning. This road has two stream crossings and flooding is occurring on the lower section of the road." So, reading between the lines here, whatever the state was doing here back in 2003 was causing the water quality trouble, and things got better after they stopped, but now the road's redundant. Maybe it used to be a backup quarry entrance, and dump trucks used to roll through the mud here, I dunno. Meanwhile a map titled 'Road Risk/Benefit Assessment', also from September 2015, labeled the road in green as 'Likely Needed for Future Use', so I gather the report's proposal was not a unanimous opinion. In any case the agency defaulted to not changing anything back then, and it still hasn't.

None of which explains the spooky name, which is annoying since the spooky name is the one and only reason we're here. And maybe it's not even a spooky name at all. I'm reasonably sure -- like 75% positive, ok, 51% -- that it's not actually about skeletons, at least not of the Halloween persuasion. Or at least the official old Bridal Veil town cemetery is elsewhere, due west of here over near the Bridal Veil freeway exit. The convent near Coopey Falls has its own cemetery on the convent grounds, so it's not that either; interestingly it -- according to the county surveyor's office -- is legally a "subdivision" named "Transitus". As in "sic transit gloria mundi", I suppose, which in a way follows the long tradition of naming subdivisions after things they replaced. It's said -- and never ask me how I heard about this -- that many Transitus residents return from the Other Side on the last night of each waning crescent moon for the monthly HOA meeting, which -- I'm told -- is conducted entirely in Latin and can get surprisingly heated at times, especially if they think the new groundskeeper has been edging their plots all wrong, or showing favoritism in who gets the most graveside flowers. Some propose a resolution to haunt the new guy until he quits, others remind the residents they've now done this to the last three groundskeepers, and word is starting to get out in the regional groundskeeping community that this is a bad gig, and it's lowering their property values somehow, and the phantasmagorical bickering continues for hours. But after the meeting finally wraps up, the ghostly nuns relax and play bridge til daybreak and then dematerialize back to... wherever they spend the rest of their time. Nobody really knows for sure where they go or how they get there, and it remains a deep mystery of nature (or supernature), along the lines of Atlantic eel migration. But I digress.

Anyway, my guess is that this was some sort of machine boneyard at one point, packed with mechanical bits located somewhere along the "useless junk" <==> "critical spare parts" continuum, like a larger version of my dad's garage. But what kind of machines? There's essentially nothing left now that might give us any clues about that, but I think parts for the old sawmill would be the obvious (albeit evidence-free) guess. So I can't prove it, but searching the interwebs for various logging keywords plus the word "boneyard" led me off on an interesting tangent, so I'll explain that instead for a bit. So if you don't like interesting tangents, just scroll down until you see a paragraph starting with the word "Anyway", and resume reading at that point. Which means there's only one paragraph starting with "Anyway" in the remainder of this post, believe it or not. (And yes, I added an "anyway" to this paragraph later, for ironic effect or whatever. Don't count it while scrolling down, otherwise you're liable to be here for a long while.)

This tangent takes us to a different sawmill down in the mid-Willamette Valley. The Hull-Oakes Lumber Co. operates a very traditional-minded mill near the tiny town of Bellfountain, a few miles west of the small town of Monroe. The mill ran entirely on steam power as recently as 2013, and still uses a lot of early and mid-20th century machinery, on the theory of not fixing it if it ain't broke. They even have an intact old wigwam burner, though it's strictly decorative now since Oregon banned them decades ago. Articles I've seen about the mill include a recent piece in Popular Mechanics, and an older one at OPB, plus others in trade publications like Timber West Magazine, Sawmill Magazine, and This Is Carpentry. One of the articles mentions that finding spare parts can be a big problem, so they watch auctions around the region for gear they might need someday, and sometimes end up bidding against museums. When they win an auction, the parts go to the mill's boneyard until they're needed, which is the reason I bumped into articles about the place.

At one point a few decades ago the mill helped create a unique picnic table for the nearby Bellfountain County Park, 85 feet long and cut from a single piece of wood. Some (including the county parks website) suggest it's the world's longest picnic table, or at least the longest in the "cut from a single piece of wood" category. A state historical record merely claims it "has been referred to as" the longest in that category within the US. (By contrast, the old Bridal Veil mill was best known for manufacturing the little wood boxes that Kraft Cheese used to come in.) Benton County also claims Bellfountain Park is the county's oldest park, founded way back in 1851. Although the county's only run it since 1965, and before that it was a privately-run religious campground used for revival meetings, which is not really a park in the ordinary sense.

Bellfountain's other claim to fame (besides the mill, and the park and its various amenities) is having won the overall state high school basketball championship back in 1937. If you're familiar with the movie Hoosiers or the 1954 true story it was based on, that's essentially what happened here, once upon a time. Like most states, Oregon puts schools in multiple 'divisions', organized more or less by school size and program budget, with a separate championship for each division. There were five divisions when I was in high school, and a sixth was added sometime since then, but back in 1937 there were just two. Class A for big schools, and class B for small schools. But, uniquely, if you won the class B championship in a sport, you had the right to challenge the class A champion for their trophy. Which is how a tiny K-12 school with 27 students once came to play -- and defeat -- Portland's Lincoln High School.

While we're briefly on the subject of high school sports -- briefly, I promise -- in 2020 the town of Monroe had a small cameo role in the state's endless culure wars over high school team names. It seems that they're one of several schools around the state that go by "the Dragons", including the much larger high school in the city of Dallas, OR, and in many cases the name dates back to the early 20th Century. The problematic part here is that there's a longstanding story/legend/rumor that "Dragons" is a sly reference to dragons of the "Grand Dragon" variety, and to Oregon's long history as a Ku Klux Klan hotbed, which peaked back in the 1920s (though I'm cynical enough about this state to consider adding a "so far" here). That suspicion is not helped by both Dallas and Monroe having long reputations as sundown towns. A local website in Dallas insists the stories about the name are untrue, at least in their particular case, and "Dragons" was chosen for a.) alliteration, and b.) because nobody's scared of playing a team that calls itself the "Prune Pickers", the school's previous mascot. Which, maybe. Though I'll just point out that Bellfountain proudly played as the Bells the whole time, and let the name of the town do all the intimidating.

(deep breath)

Anyway, back at Bridal Veil, the place we're actually visiting right now could've been a railroad boneyard instead, since it's right along a major (and very old) Union Pacific rail line, right where the line goes to double track through the old townsite. And I think it's also close to where the mill's old logging railroad once connected to the main line. So this place could've been for old trains and train parts, albeit on a fairly small scale. A quick search came up with examples in remote corners of Maine, New Jersey, Bolivia, and even Ukraine's Chernobyl exclusion zone, all of which are much larger than whatever could have fit here. For the same reason, I think we can rule out "aircraft boneyard" as a possibility since that requires even more space, ideally a large chunk of empty desert like the famous ones in California and Arizona.

Or maybe this area used to be parts storage for ODOT's remarkably well-disguised Coopey Quarry next door. This is the source of at least some of the gravel used to constanly patch up I-84 and the old highway, and an endless need for gravel kind of implies an endless need for spare parts, especially given the agency's legendary reckless enthusiasm for dynamite. In fact the state's 2014 LIDAR map of the area (the source of the graphic above) shows some near-vertical slopes next to the highway that to me don't look entirely natural, but do look a lot like the quarry next door. So maybe some quarrying happened here at one point too. But (as with most of this post) I have zero documentation to prove that; it's just me looking at a map and guessing wildly.

PortlandMaps says the bulk of the area was last sold in 1989, so the feds haven't actually owned the place all that long. I don't know if the deals were connected at all, but 1989 was the same year that the Trust for Public Land bought the ramshackle sawmill and what was left of its company town, and after a long nature vs. historic preservation battle all remaining structures were demolished and erased. Except for the local post office, which continues to do a brisk business in novelty wedding announcement postmarks. Before the 1989 sale, much of the town (and possibly the boneyard site here) had been owned since 1964 by an eccentric ">local NASCAR driver, who (I gather) just sort of liked the idea of owning his own town. But that's a whole separate blog post I'll get around to sooner or later.

I was really hoping there would be something left over from the place's working days, I dunno, rusty old boxcar wheels or steam engine bits or something, giant sawmill blades, sized for trees it isn't legal to cut anymore, etc, but no luck. Or at least I had no luck; maybe if you're a metal detecting expert (and have the appropriate special permit), or you just have better powers of observation than I do, you might be in for a treat. I mean, I think I would have noticed if there'd been, I dunno, an intact vintage locomotive there, hidden under a big blue tarp but fully fueled and ready to joyride, and with the model number visible so you can find the right "How To Drive This Thing" video on Youtube. I didn't see anything like that, so don't get your hopes up too much. In fact the only remaining maybe-artifacts I noticed were a couple of large concrete boxes that I couldn't identify. Maybe they were the only objects that were too heavy to remove, I dunno. I took a few photos (see photoset above) in case they ring a bell for anyone.

Or maybe I've gotten it all wrong. Suppose these concrete mystery boxes are the reason for the "Old Boneyard" name, and it's all about creepy skeletons after all. Suppose a couple of late 19th century vampires were making their way west by train to Portland, nomming on unaware locals as they went, having heard the stories of other vampires living the high life in Portland's North End (present-day Old Town). A place where people constantly vanished, never to be seen or heard from again, generally without anyone noticing or caring. And on the off chance a missing person was actually missed and questions were raised, it could always be explained away as yet another Shanghai-ing, which the public just sort of accepted as a fact of life. But what if a few people here knew the awful truth of the matter; what if the vamps were ambushed when they hopped off the train for a quick midnight snack, just before they could escape into the city and the unmapped tunnels beneath it. Perhaps the townsfolk here got a hot tip about the unwanted visitors via the newfangled telegraph; it might have even been from from a rival vampire in Portland who didn't want the competition, or had a centuries-old score to settle. Bridal Veil lacked many of the traditional anti-vamp tools (garlic, rice, Catholic priests, etc. -- the nearby convent has only been here since the 1980s), but there were plenty of wooden stakes to be had, or at least cheese boxes that could be quickly broken up into stakes. But these were vampires of the type that are merely immobilized when staked, not the exploding Buffy variety, so a little quick thinking led to entombing them in concrete -- made with 0% Transylvanian soil -- while still staked, and that's where they've stayed ever since, the name being a clue to locals to leave those boxes the hell alone. But then the mill and its town went away, and the residents dispersed to all points of the compass, and certain key details about this place were lost to current generations, and sooner or later someone's going to jackhammer the things open in the interest of making the area more natural. Whoever does this will be in for a big (but brief) surprise, and yet another ancient horror will be unleashed on the world. In fact, this will most likely occur within the next few years, because that's just how the 2020s have been going so far.

Backstrand Road, and a small mystery

As I think I've mentioned once or twice now, one of my coping strategies during the ongoing pandemic has been to get outside when I can, while encountering as few other people as possible, ideally nobody at all. It's not just about avoiding getting sick; I've had all my shots, and will get my booster when it's available, and I've seen all the (pre-Delta) studies that say the odds of catching Covid outdoors is very low, especially if you're just passing someone on a trail for a few seconds. But people still stress me out, even knowing all of that. I also figure that even if I'm overreacting -- and I probably am, even with the Delta variant on the loose -- it's still an excuse to spend way too much time staring at maps and looking for the most obscure, least visited places I can come up with, which is a big part of the fun.

So a while back I ran across the US Forest Service Interactive Visitor Map and started poking around the Columbia Gorge on it, as one does. The key thing here is that this map shows Forest Service roads as well as trails, and a lot of these roads are either gated and closed to motor vehicles, or get so little traffic that they effectively count as trails. The downside is that they often don't go anywhere interesting, and just end in the middle of the forest at the site of an old 1960s clear cut, or power lines, or a cell tower, that sort of thing.

While staring at that map I noticed a couple of short forest roads branching right off the old Columbia River Highway just east of Bridal Veil, smack dab in the middle of the main tourist corridor, and I'd never heard of either of them. So those obviously went on the big TODO list, and now you're reading a post about one of them.

So right around the pushpin on the map above, roughly halfway between the Angels Rest trailhead and Wahkeena Falls, there's a small turnout off the eastbound side of the old highway, with a closed and dented gate and no obvious signage visible from the street. If you're like most people, you probably won't notice it at all, and if you do you'll probably assume it's private property of some sort, since that's exactly what it looks like. It sure doesn't look like a trailhead, at any rate. But this gate belongs to you, the federal taxpayer, and behind it is an old road the Forest Service calls "Backstrand Road", aka road number 3000-303. Past the gate, the road heads steeply uphill for a bit -- a back-of-the-envelope calculation and some guesswork says it's a 10% grade, within a few orders of magnitude or so -- and it then turns right/west at a corner with some old decorative rockwork, then widens and levels out for a short stretch, before petering out into dense underbrush.

At the corner where the road levels out, you can clearly see where the road once continued east as well, and a current county assessor's map shows that bit of road heading back down to the highway at a more reasonable angle. But that road has also been thoroughly consumed by the forest and you can't make any progress on foot in that direction either. So that's about all there is to do here. I didn't see any obvious side trails or other attractions. Glimpses through the trees suggest there'd be a decent view from the top of the trail if it wasn't for all the trees, but there are zero breaks in the trees so that's kind of a moot point.

So given all of that it's not surprising that a 2003 Forest Service roads assesment and its 2015 update both labeled the road as "low value" and recommended it as a high priority for decommissioning. But the reports also noted that the road wasn't a significant risk to anything or anyone if it was just left the way it is now. Which is probably why they still haven't gotten around to ripping it up in 2021. But why was the road here in the first place?

To me the road really doesn't look like your ordinary Forest Service logging road, even in its now-overgrown state. It just seemed like someone spent more money on it than the USFS likes to spend on logging roads. So I did a little digging and apparently this was private property with a house on it just twenty years ago. I know this because of four data points:

• The PortlandMaps entry for 49666 (!) E. Historic Columbia River Highway (the honest-to-goodness street address of the lot containing the road) has a last-sale date of 2001, and the assessor history shows that property taxes were being paid on the land before that sale, which tells us it was private property just 20 years ago. The entry also says the 27.36 acre lot is still technically zoned as residential.
• The road appears in 1961 and 1995 county survey records, the latter looking much like the current road layout. A comment on the 1995 survey refers to the road as a "driveway".
• The Multnomah County surveyor site also has a neat feature with aerial imagery taken periodically since 1998, which unfortunately I don't see a way to link to directly. The 1998 and 2002 image sets show a structure at the west end of the flat bit of road, while the 2004 edition shows fresh dirt where that structure was, and the latest edition shows nothing as the forest canopy has now grown in by a lot.
• I also managed to find some info about the former building, thanks to whoever had the brain-genius idea to auto-generate a "real estate listing" page for every street address in every dataset they could lay hands on, including obsolete stuff. The resulting pages are just search result-clogging SEO spam upwards of 99% of the time, but the listing for this place tells us the long-gone house was 974 square feet, built in 1958, with one bedroom, one fireplace, and baseboard heat.

I unfortunately couldn't find any news stories about the sale here. I suppose there either wasn't a press release at the time, or there was but nobody deemed it newsworthy.

That's not a very interesting story by itself, but there's a bit more history around here, and for that we have to zoom out a little. The state LIDAR map shows what kind of looks like a faint trail or service road or something heading west from where the house used to be, heading toward Dalton Creek.

Now, Dalton Creek was the subject of several OregonHikers forum threads, mostly in the late 2000s and early 2010s, several of them trip reports from people trying to sort out the "which waterfall is Dalton Falls" controversy (see my old Dalton Falls posts for more on that) and looking for additional falls on a few creeks immediately east of Angels Rest:

• April 2007: "Hidden in plain sight: a waterfall at Angels Rest!"
• February 2008: "Foxglove Falls 2-9-08"
• Early December 2010: "Foxglove Creek"
• Mid-December 2010: "Dalton Falls to Mist Falls Loop 12/19/10"
• Late December 2010: "Dalton - Foxglove Conundrum"
• Later December 2010: "Mesachie Creek"
• Mid-December 2013: "No Waterfalls on Devils Rest 11-Dec-2013"
• Late December 2013: "Angel's Rest (Nostalgia) Trip! (Dec 27)"
• December 2018: "Palmer Mill Rd/Primrose Path - Dec 7, 2018"

There were a couple of mentions of bushwhacking along Dalton Creek up from the old highway and sometimes climing all the way to Angels Rest from there, so apparently nobody realized there was a simpler and less thorny way to do the initial approach, a way that also skips traipsing along right past someone's house.

Dalton Creek is also the property line betwen the Backstrand Road property and a pair of small lots with diagonal property lines that together form a rough diamond shape totaling about 10 acres. Those property records show the Forest Service has only owned them since May 2002, and whoever owned them before was exempt from paying taxes on the land, so either another government body or some nonprofit group. I'm not positive I've found any news about that sale either, but I did find an April 2002 article that briefly mentions a possible upcoming land deal somewhere in the Bridal Veil area. It says the sale would cover 77 acres & could enable an ADA-compatible trail to Bridal Veil Falls someday, so it may be about a completely different land deal, or it might have covered the lots here and others elsewhere. The timing seems right, but there just aren't enough details to be sure.

Which brings us to the small mystery from the title of this post. A 1962 zoning map and an earlier 1950s tax assessor's map both label the diamond-shaped area as "YMCA". That got my attention, and before long I thought I had it all figured out: An April 1919 Oregonian story explained that local farmer George Shepperd (famous as the donor behind Shepperds Dell State Park) had also donated a house and land somewhere in the Bridal Veil area for a new YMCA camp. A WyeastBlog post about the nearby Bridal Veil Cemetery gives some backstory on Shepperd, his YMCA donation, and a series of strange and melancholy events in the years after he donated the falls. The trouble was that I couldn't find any subsequent news stories about the camp -- no grand tour when it opened, no vintage photos of kids doing crafts, nothing -- and a 1927 Metsker map doesn't show a YMCA camp here, or even any property lines corresponding to the camp we saw on the 1950s & 60s maps. Instead, it shows that roughly the entire area beyond the old mill town was then owned by a "Columbia Highlands Co.", including the Backstrand Road property, the future YMCA diamond, and points east all the way to Wahkeena Falls.

(Incidentally the other (and the oldest) ownership map I ran across was from 1889, and shows the whole area owned by a W. Dalton, who we met but learned nothing about in one of my old Dalton Falls posts, or maybe the Dalton Point one. He or she also doesn't figure into the present story any further, other than being the namesake of the creek here.)

Anyway, the Columbia Highlands company was incorporated in July 1915, and a brief business item the day after the big announcement noted it was capitalized at $400k and would be "a general brokerage firm dealing in real estate". Another item the following month finally explained what the company had in mind:

The Columbia Highlands Company was given permission last week by the state corporation department to plat and sell approximately 1760 acres of land along the Columbia River Highway, about 30 miles from Portland, and to construct a scenic road, clubhouse, and hotels. The company is capitalized for about $400,000, and its officers are Portlanders.

A similar Oregon Journal item also explained that the company is a consolidation of the interests of the Gordon Falls company, Charles Coopey, and Minnie Franklin.

Those names got my attention, and let me try to explain why briefly. "Gordon Falls" is an old name for Wahkeena Falls, Coopey was one of that company's founders (and namesake of Coopey Falls along the Angels Rest trail), and Franklin was the future Mrs. Charles Coopey, and the full story of the company is a whole other half-finished draft blog post I need to finish, but the short version is that the company proposed to build a woolen mill somewhere near Wahkeena Falls, to by powered by damming the creek above the falls. The mill would of course have its own company town nearby, to be named "Gordon Falls City", whose water supply would come from diverting Dalton Creek right here. It turned out the plan was not to build a new mill from scratch; instead the new mill would be a relocation of the famous woolen mill at Pendleton (which still exists today), disassembled and shipped west piece by piece. The whole scheme sounds outlandish, and it came to nothing when locals in Pendleton passed the hat and outbid the Gordon Falls investors, and found someone in town who was willing to take over the recently-closed mill. Which may have been the real plan the entire time, and the Gordon Falls City scheme was just a ruse to scare Pendleton into paying up. In any event, the company's stock was instantly worthless, and Portland-area investors who lost everything were outraged, and the whole mess ended up in court for years and years afterward.

The company's only real asset was all the land it had accumulated between Bridal Veil and Wahkeena Falls. Under modern bankruptcy law that land would go to pay off Gordon Falls creditors, but back then it just sort of quietly rolled over into the new Columbia Highlands company, just in time to try to cash in on the brand-new Columbia River highway next door. A May 1916 story announced the new business plan was to subdivide the company's holdings for summer homes and general development. The company's land extended way up into the hills and canyons above Bridal Veil, and in some alternate timeline where this plan panned out there are endless historic preservation battles around a cluster of fabulous but decaying Gatsby-like Art Deco mansions atop Angels Rest, which have proved to be prohibitively expensive to own and maintain. In our timeline, a pair of Journal stories from July 1916 note that part of the company's now-1700 acres had been surveyed and platted as residential property, and they had already sold a pair of lots totalling 2.5 acres with a prime view of (newly renamed) Wahkeena Falls, with home construction to begin shortly. Typically an item like this would be the kickoff for a long stretch of weekly or even daily real estate ads touting the area and reminding the reader that the area will be sold out soon and this may be their last chance to own a piece of the Gorge. But I couldn't find any sign that they had ever advertised Columbia Highlands, unless maybe the ads neglected to use the key phrase "Columbia Highlands", or the words were in an overly ornate Deco font that the newspaper database's OCR system couldn't parse. And what's more the Multnomah County Surveyor's Office GIS map has no trace of any of this alleged subdividing and platting ever being filed with the county, so it's anyone's guess what was really going on here. In any event, the next mention I found of the scheme was an August 1918 news item suggesting the company had changed plans again:

Following the annual meeting of the Columbia Highlands Company, held yesterday, it is announced that the directors have decided to carry forward a plan of development of their property through which the Columbia River Highway runs for nearly three miles. Trails will be developed to various scenic points, including the hanging gardens on Dalton Creek and numerous grottoes of exceptional scenic beauty. Attention will be given to lands adjacent to the highway, and steps will be taken to protect the shrubs, trees, and forest from the vandalism of thoughtless visitors.

A similar Oregon Journal article explained that the company was now just going to develop land along the highway, with the balance reserved as a privately-run tourist attraction. Hiking trails would come first, followed eventually by longer trips up into the mountains by burro or pack mule, I suppose along the lines of what you can still do at the Grand Canyon. The new board of directors listed a local judge as president of the firm, the other seats filled by familiar names, including Coopey as secretary, and Coopey's wife as treasurer. I'm reading between the lines here, but I wonder whether Coopey's presence on the board and long bitter memories of the woolen mill scheme were a hindrance to the Columbia Highlands operation, and they brought in a respectable outsider to be the public face of the struggling project going forward.

There is almost no further news about the company after that. A1922 public notice from the Secretary of State's office listed it among a large number of companies that had not maintained a current business license, or paid any fees, or made any required filings with the state over the past two years and were hereby officially dissolved. After that, the very last we see or hear of the company is a 1933 business item simply listing it under "dissolutions", with no indication of what happened during the intervening eleven years, other than the company name being all over that 1927 map. Did the 1922 notice finally get the attention of the company's lazy lawyers, who went back through the company's unopened mail pile and found the relevant "final notice" letters and somehow got back in the state's good graces? Did the dissolution order get tied up in an endless court case for a decade and change, without making the newspapers at any point? Or did various authorities just neglect to follow up on the 1922 order for all that time? July 1933 would've been during the initial burst of New Deal legislation, as it was becoming abundantly clear that 1920s laissez-faire business was on its way to the dustbin of history; maybe the state or the county figured it was time to tidy up some zombie corporations and other loose ends, before the feds did it for them. I do wish the company had at least managed to build a few of those trails before cratering, since (per the OregonHikers threads above) there still isn't a reasonable way for ordinary hikers to visit the "hanging gardens" along Dalton Creek.

That 1933 item is followed by another eleven-year gap, as we jump forward to the next historical map I could find. The 1944 Metsker map of the area is essentially identical to the 1927 one, but with the former Columbia Highlands properties now owned by a Catherine B. Fairchild, about whom I can find almost no information. The 1927 map showed the name "Fairchild" on a small lot along the highway. And if you look closely at the 1944 map you can see where someone applied whiteout in a few spots, replacing "Columbia Highlands" with the name of the new owner, suggesting this was either a recent development, or the news was slow in reaching the Seattle offices of "Metsker the Map Man"

Other than names on maps, the only news item I could find with a matching name or initials was a 1926 traffic item noted that a Mrs. C.B. Fairchild, of Aberdeen, WA, had broken a few ribs when her car flipped on a gravel road along the Washington Coast. This was part of a long list of traffic accidents and injuries around the region, so if somehow you're ever sent back in time by a century or so you might want to make a note to avoid driving or riding in cars if you can, because it sounds quite dangerous. This item was just below a group photo of the new state Republican committee, which (quite unlike the present day) had 8 female members out of 18 total. You can still tell it's the GOP, though, because the photo is 100% white, and everyone in it is scowling at the camera. Below all the traffic gore and mayhem, another item concerned a lobbying campaign to have a Three Sisters National Monument declared, which still hasn't occurred nearly a century later. The area does get National Park-level visitorship, but still doesn't have a budget or protection level to match. Or at least not yet.

But back to our story, specifically a 1952 front page story. It seems the Fairchild estate had been foreclosed upon a few years earlier for unpaid back taxes, with the land going to Multnomah County. The controversial part was that the county had then sold off large tracts of the land to private buyers -- including 600 acres in the general area we're visiting right now -- without first asking the state parks department whether they wanted any portion of the land. The county seems to have been caught flat-footed by the controversy; the head of the county land office explained that notifying the state wasn't his job, and in general the county preferred to get land back into private hands and back on the tax rolls, and besides they might have mentioned the Gorge land in passing while talking to the state about something else, so it was really the state's fault for dropping the ball. That didn't go over very well, and he ended up promising to notify the state first if any more Gorge properties ended up in county hands. Meanwhile the new owners in the area -- a Mr. & Mrs. Calvin C. Helfrich, an elderly couple who had picked up the property back in 1949 -- had already logged much of their acreage, and were talking about building summer cabins in the area, and had applied for water rights on Dalton Creek, echoing a few parts of the earlier Highlands and woolen mill efforts.

Later in October 1952, the Helfriches -- possibly stung by the recent public outcry and bad press -- donated 30 acres of the property to the YMCA to be used as an Indian Guide camp to be known as "Camp Helfrich". They also gave an adjacent half-mile of highway frontage to one of their sons, but the article doesn't specify in which direction so I don't know whether that included the Backstrand Road property or not. The article notes that both properties were still timbered, unlike much of the surrounding area. So the earlier Shepperd donation turns out to have been a total red herring, and I have no idea what happened to the land from that donation or even where it was, exactly.

Now that I had an actual name for the camp, I figured I could just put "Camp Helfrich" into Google and the library's newspaper database and the rest would be easy, just with a start date of 1952 instead of 1919. And once again I was surprised by how few results came back. First off, we have a 1953 fundraising campaign for the new camp, with a cringey photo of beaming white kids in pretend-Indian garb. And not long afterward, a 1954 classified ad offering the remaining 550 acres for sale at $40/acre. Which sounds like a good deal until you realize the 1949 foreclosure sale had privatized the land at just $8/acre. The ad may have had the desired effect though; it only ran once, and the State Parks department bought most of the land in 1955. 403 acres changed hands this time, including Mist Falls and Angels Rest, but not the land right around the new summer camp. The article doesn't mention what the state ended up paying per acre.

In 1959, a different donor gave $10k to the local Indian Guide program. A YMCA spokesman said they might use some of the money for a new longhouse building. Which, however, would be located at Camp Collins, their much better-known youth camp next to Oxbow Park, and not their supposedly dedicated Indian Guide camp further east, which wasn't mentioned anywhere in the article.

Two small Oregon Journal news items in 1958 and 1963 alerted parents about upcoming summer day camps at Camp Helfrich, along with a whole galaxy of other summer camp options. The 1958 notice said swimming was on the agenda, though it beats the heck out of me where you could put a swimming pool or a pond, or really any part of a summer camp for that matter, in this kind of terrain. Maybe it just wasn't a very good site for a summer camp, I dunno. The 1963 mention is the last newspaper item I could find about the camp, and that's where the historical record (or that portion of it that I can find on the internet for free) just sort of ends. Inconveniently none of the news items about the camp included a map of it or even gave a street address, so I don't even know how people got there from the highway, whether Backstrand Road once doubled as the camp entrance, or if the entrance was somewhere else and it's just been erased so well that there's no trace of it on the LIDAR map anymore.

The really puzzling thing about all of this is the complete lack of Google search results about the camp. That honestly surprised me a lot more than the lack of news items. I figured there would at least be a handmade web page from 2001 about a the place, or an Angelfire or Tripod site, with Boomers waxing nostalgic and swapping memories of their summer camp days, maybe even with a few teen crushes finally hooking up half a century later. But no dice. Then I checked the Wayback Machine in case those pages had been on Geocities or some other long-deleted location; I even checked Facebook in case there's a private FB group out there for camp alumni or former counselors, or just somone posting a photo or mentioning the place in any way, and I don't even like Facebook and trying to do a useful search there is even harder than getting straight answers out of 2021 Google. If nobody's nostalgic about an old summer camp, did the place ever really exist? I'm only mostly joking here. If you just tell everyone that signups are already closed, and the waiting list's full, whenever anyone tries to register their kid or to volunteer, you could probably keep a phantom summer camp on the books for a fair number of years before anyone caught on, or you got bored of the charade. I'm not sure why somebody might do this, maybe as part of an elaborate tax dodge, or as a cover story for a secret CIA sasquatch lab, that sort of thing.

Another more disturbing possibility is that the camp was 100% real, but was home to history's most successful summer camp slasher, just like in the movies but worse, and it all got covered up, and even now the few survivors are still being threatened or bribed to stay quiet. Call me a former 80s teenager if you like, but when I see an abandoned summer camp and a mysterious house in the forest next door with "666" in the street address, I can't help but draw a cinema-based conclusion or two. I mean, it doesn't strike me as the most likely real-life explanation; the camp was probably just surplus to requirements after the postwar baby boom subsided. It's just that it's hard to explain how an entire summer camp has been completely forgotten, poof, when it ought to still be within living, non-suppressed, memory of at least a few people out there.

So that's your writing prompt, o Gentle Reader(s): If you once attended Camp Helfrich and have fond (or otherwise) memories of it, feel free to leave a note below. Or if you didn't, but heard tales of what happened to the kids who did, feel free to drop that into the comments too. Or if you've been on the run from the secret CIA sasquatch lab since 1962 and want to finally tell your strange but 100% true story, I'm all ears. And while I'm lobbing questions out there, if you have any idea why the road's called "Backstrand Road", I'd be really curious about that too, since I found absolutely no info on the subject, and the name appears nowhere in any of the maps or news stories I've seen about the area.

Thx,
  mgmt.