Highland Butte

Visitors to Portland are generally subjected to a pile of trivia that's meant to show how weird and quirky we are. World's smallest city park, various things that were filmed here, donuts, Shanghai tunnels, quirky food carts. They're told to check out all the breweries, giggle about all the strip clubs, and so forth. The trivia will have a whole section on Local Nature Facts, so you'll hear about the coast and the gorge, and maybe something about Forest Park being the world's largest city park (which is not actually true), and sooner or later the list gets around to volcanoes.

This, admittedly, is not something you'll encounter in most major US cities. But we've been promoting it all wrong for the last century or so. The original claim was that Mt. Tabor was the only volcano within city limits anywhere in the world. Or at least anywhere in the US. Or, at minimum, in the US excluding Alaska and Hawaii. And obviously we're only talking about major cities here, and stipulating that little fun-sized lava domes like Mt. Tabor count as individual volcanoes (and volcanic vents in the West Hills don't). And then City Hall went and moved city limits outward, which brought a few more lava domes into the city, although they obviously don't count due to being east of I-205, or (in the case of Rocky Butte) just barely west of it, and still east of 82nd Avenue. Meanwhile, Gresham and Vancouver and even Lake Oswego expanded to include a few of their own, but any geologist will tell you that suburban volcanoes absolutely do not count, period. And technically most of the Northwest east of the Cascades sits on top of a deep layer of Columbia River flood basalts, but that doesn't count, because reasons, and the hair-splitting just goes on and on. Frankly this all seems like overkill, since the point of all of this is to impress random tourists and conventioneers from the Great State of Corn Rectangle, who have never seen a hill of any kind before.

Another approach is to forget about Mt. Tabor and run with Mt. St. Helens, which is obviously not within city limits but is at least visible from here. The winning move here is to point out the mountain and reassure your audience -- as nonchalantly as you possibly can -- that there's no need to worry, it hasn't erupted at all since way back in 2008, and that one was no big deal, and besides, we're upwind of the mountain and almost never get volcanic ash falling from the sky. This is their cue to look at each other and chuckle nervously, which is the effect you're going for. This will be great fun for a while, but there are a couple of potential downsides. First, your visitors from Corn Rectangle will see this as an opening to tell you about their many white-knuckle tornado encounters. Which is only fair, frankly. Second, it's 2025 now, and sooner or later an impertinent teen in your audience will agree that 2008 was a long, long time ago -- before they were born, in fact -- and so long ago that the mountain is probably extinct by now. And this will not only make you feel old, it might be enough to troll the volcano into erupting again.

And let's be honest here, neither Mt. Tabor or Mt. St. Helens is exactly on brand for us these days. Mt. Tabor is in a ritzy, unaffordable neighborhood and none of its superlatives are actually true, and St. Helens is in a whole other state -- a state with sales tax -- and biking to the top is probably a nightmare. They also have their own Wikipedia articles, and are featured prominently in coffee table books about the region, and just in general are way too mainstream, and thus desperately, terminally uncool.

So with all of that as an intro, it's time to meet Highland Butte, the subject of this post and an obscure local volcano you probably haven't heard of. It's not the tallest volcano in the Boring Lava Field -- Larch Mountain out in the Gorge wins that one by a wide margin -- and I've seen conflicting things on whether it's the southernmost, but it may be the oldest and widest of all of them. A 2009 paper on the Boring Lava Field notes that Highland Butte rocks have been dated to around 2.4-2.6 million years, making it the oldest, or among the oldest of the Boring volcanoes. A lot of other sources say it's around 3 million years old, but I don't know if that's from a different measurement or just someone rounding up to the nearest million. For comparison, Mount Hood is estimated to be no more than 1.3 million years old, Mount Tabor is a bit over 200,000, and Beacon Rock -- the youngest of the bunch -- is only around 57,000 years old.

The summit is a sort of Mt. Tabor-sized dome in a wider rural area known as "Upper Highland", but by the time you see that hill you've already been driving or riding on the volcano for several miles. It's a roughly circular area about 7 miles in diameter centered on the summit and gently sloping away from there, and all streams for miles around drain away from that point. Then there's an extension to the north all the way to Oregon City and the Willamette. I don't know if that's as far as the lava got, or that's where the river cut a path thru later, but it explains the present-day cliffs along the river, and probably the rocks that form Willamette Falls too. I had a vague recollection that I'd read something to the effect that the large rounded boulders here at the main entrance to the Clackamas Community College campus were thought to be volcanic bombs thrown to the campus from the summit, nine miles to the south. I finally located the article where I got that idea from, an April 1986 column about the boulders by the paper's geology columnist. He specifically ruled out the volcanic bomb theory on the grounds that the boulders were too big, and they lacked the distinctive markings rocks take on when they form as blobs of lava hurtling through the air. Instead, he explains, this is just a weathering pattern typical of Boring lava rocks when exposed to the elements, and they just sort of become spherical over time as their exteriors degrade into iron-rich red dirt. Apparently Columbia flood basalts (the other common type of basalt you'll see around here) are denser and darker and they just don't come apart like this.

The summit peak doesn't look all that impressive, but it's still the highest point for miles around, which is why you can visit the place now. First, nobody claimed it as farmland back in pioneer days, or at least nobody successfully claimed it, and the ill-fated Oregon & California Railroad seems to have had no better luck finding a buyer for it, so it was still federal land in the early 20th Century, at which point someone realized it would be a great place for a forest fire lookout.

So here's a 1927 article on the summit's brand new modern Forest Service fire lookout tower. The article explains that while this is the first tower, the summit had been a GLO fire lookout for years before that, in the form of a "peg tree". What you would do is pick out a tall tree near the summit, and hammer wooden pegs into the tree trunk in a spiral pattern, forming a sort of primitive spiral staircase up the tree, like something Ewoks would have in Return of the Jedi. In this case, the stairway used 114 pegs and circled the tree 5 times, taking the fire observer to a point in the treetops, 142' off the ground. Once you were up there, you would just sort of hang out in the top of the tree with a pair of binoculars looking for forest fires and swaying with the breeze. This doesn't sound like a very effective way to keep an eye on the horizon with binoculars, and a great way to get motion sick, but may have been all the GLO could afford. The forest service built a tower, plus a house at the base of the tower for the rest of the lookout crew when they were off shift, plus the road to the summit, and they were even considering putting in a telephone at the base so would-be visitors could call uphill and check if anyone was on the way downhill before trying to drive up.

The article included a photo of the peg tree, so it seems to have been spared when the summit was logged, sometime between 1911 and 1927. I was (and am) kind of curious whether that tree still exists (though I'm pretty sure the pegs either wouldn't be there anymore or wouldn't be climbable). I didn't see any one particular tree that was much bigger than the others, and didn't see one with a spiral of wooden pegs sticking out of it, so it's anybody's guess.

If you want to visit now, the road to the top is gated and locked, but it's simple to park so you aren't blocking the gate and then walk the rest of the way. Or you could come here by bike and ride to the top, though the fresh gravel along the road seemed to be of the especially sharp and tire-puncturey variety. Either way, the road is a bit steep at times, but it's not very long and you only go up a couple of hundred vertical feet from this point. One sort of unfortunate thing is that there isn't much of a view from the top at present due to all the trees in the way. I say "at present" because the land here is designated as part of the O&C Lands, and it's clearly been logged before and most likely will be again, and there will be more of a view from here once they get around to that. So I guess there's that to look forward to.

Over the years the lookout tower existed, Highland Butte was occasionally in the news. Not for erupting or anything earth-shaking like that, but minor news items came up every few years:

• The summit was visited by a Trails Club hike in 1934, so there was presumably still a view at that point.
• There was a small forest fire nearby in 1951. The article doesn't say whether the fire lookout helped or not.
• A field trip by the Geological Society of the Oregon Country visited in 1957
• The summit gained a second tower for a while starting in 1960, a microwave communication tower for an emergency system bypassing Portland in case the city was destroyed in World War III. The new tower would talk to another antenna to the south near Silverton, and one near Mt. Livingston to the north, somewhere out in the back of beyond due north of Camas.
• A full-page photo of this tower with Mt. Hood in the background appeared in AT&T's 1962 corporate annual report, I guess as one of their more photogenic recent technological advancements, if you can avoid thinking about why it was built. Not quite photogenic enough to make the cover of the report, which features a phone operator wearing a headset and smiling while she pages through an enormous phone book.
• The fire tower lasted until the 1962 Columbus Day Storm flattened it, and they never built a replacement, and after that the place languished in even deeper obscurity than before. Then sometime around 2019-2020 the summit got a new tower, this time a shiny new Clackamas County EMS radio tower, built to close some coverage gaps in this hilly, rural area.
• You might have noticed that the BLM got the land back from the Forest Service at some point. I don't know any more details about it than that, but I can see that happening if it wasn't going to be used for a lookout tower anymore. There isn't any other Forest Service land nearby, while there's an actual BLM facility with actual people a few miles SE of here, namely the agency's Walter H. Horning Tree Seed Orchard. The sign at the front gate includes sort of a mission statement, which is readable on Street View: "To produce seed for growing trees of superior quality which will best use the productive capacity of forest lands.", and a few of its Google reviews indicate it also hosts trail rides by local equestrian clubs and even the occasional Civil War reenactment (!). In any event, it was probably just more practical for them to send somebody around to keep an eye on the place now and then instead of having the Forest Service do it.

Beaver Creek Canyon, Troutdale OR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

University Falls

Ok, next up we're back in the Oregon Coast Range again, and this time we're visiting University Falls, a 55' waterfall off Highway 6 in the Tillamook State Forest. Like the rest of the Coast Range (and unlike the Cascades) it doesn't have any high-altitude snowmelt feeding it over the dry summer months, and I happened to visit during the worst time of the year, at least in terms of the sheer volume of water going over it.

Unlike some of the Coast Range waterfalls we've visited before (like Fern Rock and the Bridge Creek duo), this one isn't right on the main road, so you have a couple of ways to get there. A 0.3 mile hike from a trailhead accessed by one-lane gravel logging roads, or an 8.5 mile loop mostly on old historic roads, with parking right off Highway 6. I picked the short hike because it was a mid-afternoon impulse to go check it out, days were getting shorter, and I try not to be out on the trails around sundown (or sunrise for that matter) in big cat country, or driving on unfamiliar logging roads after dark.

If you're more accustomed to visiting state parks and national forests, be aware that state forests are managed a bit... differently. By law their main purpose is still to produce trees for the timber industry, and the parts that aren't currently being logged are often designated for OHVs and motorized recreation in general, plus endless target shooting. That's actually the case here -- the Rogers Camp trailhead where the 8.5 mile loop starts also doubles as an ATV/OHV staging area, for one thing -- and a lot of hike-focused sites take a cautionary tone about this, warning readers that the vehicles are loud and fast, and the people are rough and rowdy and drunk and heavily armed and belligerent 24/7, and you might even see some of those icky red hats, you know the ones. I don't have any statistics about this, and this is just my anecdotal experience here, but in practice it was fine. There are separate trails for the motorized stuff vs. people on foot, and other trails for horses and for bikes, and the only times I saw any OHV people were on the drive in and back out, and -- at least while I was there -- people seemed to be sticking to that arrangement and were busy doing their own thing and not going out of their way to antagonize people in other adjacent fandoms. I'm not saying you should go and try to make friends if you hear banjos duelling in the distance. And my experience is, I'm sure, a function of people seeing a male Caucasian face and not immediately seeing a threat --or deciding to be one -- and the less you resemble that description, the more your mileage may vary. Though driving a foreign-made non-truck probably didn't do me any favors.

• First mention is an 1895 ad for the Wilson River and Tillamook Stage, listing University Falls as one of the scenic highlights of the 10 hour (!) journey from Forest Grove to Tillamook, a 52-mile trip that takes about an hour today. The ad lists a fare of $4, which is about $150 in 2025 dollars. Which is a lot of money for a one-way trip to Tillamook, if you ask me.
• 1968 mazamas hike
• 1983 interview with Elroy & Edmund Gravelle, twin brothers who had grown up in the area and were working to preserve a piece of the old Wilson River Wagon Road, the predecessor to today's Highway 6. Today there's a trail named after them.
• 1984 hike of the historic roads and trails, sponsored by the Washington County Historical Society.

Of these limited sources, nobody has bothered to explain which university they had in mind when naming the falls. I mean, sure, it's possible to enjoy the place without knowing which university they had in mind, but it's the kind of name that sounds like it might have an interesting story attached.

Penstemon Prairie

Next up we're paying a quick visit to Metro's Penstemon Prairie Natural Area, an obscure wetland area that I visited the same day as the nearby and much better-known Chehalem Ridge Nature Park. As I mentioned in that post, the difference between a Nature Park and a Natural Area is huge: Nature Parks get their own web pages and all sorts of visitor facilities -- paved paths, signs, picnic tables, restrooms, maybe some playground equipment, even a few public art installations. Natural Areas (like the one we're visiting now) get a little sign that says "Natural Area", and sometimes not even that. In this particular case, the Chehalem Ridge Master Plan (2020) briefly mentions Penstemon Prairie along with a few surrounding nature areas, I guess to place the upcoming nature park in a broader context:

Both south and west of Fernhill Wetlands, additional bottomlands have been protected by Metro at Carpenter Creek and Penstemon Prairie. These do not offer public access and are often flooded, providing critical habitat for waterfowl and migratory birds.

A recent Tualatin Floodplain Metro doc includes a few vital statistics about the place: the natural area comes to 280 acres, was purchased in 1995, and an ongoing restoration project began in 2015.

So now we get around to the subtle details that make this a special place. The name "Penstemon Prairie" comes from the tall western penstemon (Penstemon hesperius), a rare wildflower that is exceedingly fond of Willamette Valley wetlands. In fact it likes Willamette Valley wetlands almost as much as humans like turning Willamette Valley wetlands into farms and subdivisions, and it stubbornly refuses to thrive in any other circumstances. As a result, the species had not been seen since 1935 and was thought to be extinct until it was rediscovered here in 2008. Since then, increasing the penstemon population has become a major focus of the ongoing wetland restoration work here.

In parallel there's an ongoing effort to get it listed as an endangered species: Here's the original petition, and a doc confirming that it's officially under review as of October 2022. And there's even a status page indicating where it is in the review process. And, inevitably, a lawsuit running in parallel with the formal petition process, because that seems to be an essential part of getting anything onto the list, and federal agencies won't take the proposal seriously unless there are lawyers and judges involved, and often not even then.

The chance rediscovery happened while a researcher was looking for Nelson's checker-mallow (Sidalcea nelsoniana), another rare (and unrelated) species endemic to wetlands in the Willamette Valley and parts of western WA up to about Olympia. This checker-mallow was actually listed as Threatened on the federal Endangered Species list until it was delisted in 2023, after the feds decided it had recovered sufficiently. And the presence of checker-mallows means this area may also be home to Macrorhoptus sidalceae, an obscure and highly specialized type of weevil that only noms on checkermallow seeds, if you can believe that.

The rare streaked horned lark has also been seen here, and is also the subject of a federal lawsuit arguing the bird should be considered Endangered, not just Threatened.)

I did not know any of this at the time I visited, did not know what to look for, and I'm also not that good at identifying wildflowers even when they're common ones, so I (probably) did not get any photos of any rare species when I was there, though I'm not really sure. If you're an expert in identifying Willamette Valley wetland plants and see anything interesting in these photos, feel free to leave a comment down below. I also had a question that popped into my head while reading up on the various rare species here: If you identify one of these checker-mallow plants, and you look closer and see a weevil eating checker-mallow seeds, I am not sure what you're expected to do. Do you smoosh the weevil for the sake of more checker-mallows? Or do you keep walking and leave the circle of life alone, on the theory that any insect that is this absurdly specialized is probably rather uncommon too?

Chinquapin West

Next up we're paying a visit to Metro's obscure Chinquapin West Natural Area, on a weirdly remote stretch of the Sandy River a few miles south of Troutdale. Until a few years ago this was a Nature Conservancy property, and before that it belonged to one of several old-money philanthropists who donated land to prevent it being developed (while still hanging on to their cabins along the river, in some cases). If you know where to find the unmarked trailhead (located along Gordon Creek Rd., as shown on the map above), you can follow a surprisingly well-maintained trail down into the river canyon, and eventually to the trail's one and only trail junction. Which, once again, is unmarked. Turning right eventually takes you to a sunny happy burbling stretch of river -- or at least it was sunny when I was there, your mileage will vary -- where you can don your vintage L.L. Bean gear and do a bit of gentlemanly fly fishing, which I gather was the main reason the original donors felt this stretch of the river was worth preserving.

That area is attractive enough to make the area worth a visit, even if you aren't into catching or eating fish. But the real secret treasure of this place is down the side trail that was off to the left back at the trail junction. After a short distance, a sheer cliff comes into view, covered in moss and ferns, with a small creek tumbling along below it. The trail heads toward the upstream end of this creek, and you soon find yourself in a narrow sheer-sided canyon, with the stream undercutting the cliff in a rather extreme way. At the head of this mini-canyon is a waterfall, and one like you've probably never encountered. The creek falls into a sort of cylindrical hole, slightly open on one side where it faces the canyon, so you can only see the lowest one-third or so of the waterfall. If you've been to the so-called "Pool of the Winds" at Rodney Falls on the Washington side of the Gorge, it's kind of like that but even more so. The cherry on top of all this is that if you're here at just the right time, on a late summer afternoon, the sun shines directly into the mini-canyon and the alcove holding the waterfall, catching the spray from the falls and causing fleeting mini-rainbows. I dunno, this may not be your cup of tea, and as always your mileage may vary, but I thought it was fairly magical.

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A small plaque dating to the Nature Conservancy days proclaims this area to be "Duckering Glen", honoring a late donor who had loved this spot in particular. I don't know whether Metro still considers that name to be in effect, and as far as I know both the creek and the falls have remained nameless since the first Euro-American settlers showed up. And this is the point where I tell you that this spot is -- as the crow flies, at least -- less than twenty miles from downtown Portland. It astonishes me to no end that this place hasn't been loved to death by crowds and ruined, like what happened to Oneonta Gorge before the Eagle Creek fire.

One thing that might be limiting the crowds here is that Multnomah County strictly prohibits parking on the shoulder along much of Gordon Creek Rd., and you sort of have to read between the lines and suss out where you can park just going by the absence of No Parking signs. If you do this and guess wrong, Officer Friendly is only going to ticket you for it, but I'm pretty sure I've seen a tow truck from a notorious predatory towing company scoping out one of the other Sandy River trailheads on at least one occasion, so maybe don't push your luck here.

Chehalem Ridge Nature Park

Here are some photos from a wander around Metro's shiny new Chehalem Ridge Nature Park, in the Chehalem Mountains, the hilly area between the Tualatin and Yamhill Valleys. I probably ought to say up front that although it's generally nice and seems to have a well-designed trail system, outside of a few key viewpoints most of the park does not have those gazillion-dollar views that the name tends to conjure up. And I say that up front because my photos of the place might lead you to believe otherwise, because I liked the scenic viewpoint parts and took lots of photos there.

I gather Metro had wanted to add a regional park somewhere in the Chehalem Mountains area for a very long time, and eventually they came across this former tree farm, and bought it and slowly rehabbed it into a place people might enjoy visiting. It may not have been the absolutely most desirable land in the area, but it had enough acreage, and seemed to have good bones, and it came on the market right when Metro had a pile of cash to spend, so here we are.

The most desirable land was probably not affordable anyway, even for regional governments flush with greenspace bond money. Like areas with views (like along Mountain Top Rd. and Bald Peak Rd, where south-facing McMansions perch above the Yamhill Valley) or quality vineyard land maybe 3+ levels of nested AVAs deep. (For example, the nearby Ribbon Ridge AVA which is inside the larger Chehalem Mountains one, which in turn is one part of the overall Willamette Valley AVA, and in general anything with a designation more specific than "Willamette Valley" is going to cost more, sometimes a lot more.) Note that all of this happened despite local vigilance bordering on paranoia about development proposals -- see, for example, this forum thread from 2010 about a proposed McMansion / hobby farm subdivision somewhere in the Yamhill Valley that was seen as yet another harbinger of Napa-style development doom.

There's an old joke-that-isn't-a-joke among winemakers that the best way to make a small fortune in the wine business is to start with a large fortune. In that spirit, the surest way to afford the very best Chehalem Mountain land is to travel back in time to the 1970s and get a job at Intel in Hillsboro. Claw your way up the corporate ladder from there, and do everything you possibly can to avoid working on anything that isn't an x86 processor. When Intel stock hits $40 in August 2000, cash out your massive pile of stock and stock options, and spend your newfound dot-com gazillions on land before it gets insanely expensive, and somehow outwit all the other time travelers who also read this very blog post and are trying to do the same thing, as well as the others working at cross purposes, like me going back to the same exact spot circa 1800 to hand out vaccines and warn everybody about Lewis and Clark.

Anyway, the Chehalem Ridge Master Plan explains what Metro had in mind when designing the park. One thing I liked here is that the plan added trails to most of the park, which seems like a no-brainer but is not what they did at other recent nature parks, like Newell Creek or Canemah Bluff, where the areas open to visitors are sort of crammed into one corner of the property, making those parks feel weirdly cramped and a bit underwhelming. I am not sure why they do this, since the acquired land is typically not pristine old growth forest full of fragile ecosystems that need to be left untouched. Maybe it's that they can only spend greenspace money on land, and other capital expenditures (and operating costs) come out of the general fund, where they will forever be prioritized a few steps below cute zoo animals.

One grumble I do have about this park, in common with the other places I mentioned, is a feeling that things are a bit... over-curated? I'm still trying to put my finger on it, it's not quite helicopter parenting, exactly, but you'll come across things like trails that are signed as one-way for safety, and lots of railings to be extra sure you stay on the trail. Other trails have themes and plenty of signage, like someone was worried visitors won't get anything out of the experience without it being spoon-fed to them. There's one spot here where a trail is a few steps away from a gravel service road, but they aren't connected, and they even added railings between them, I guess to prevent people from switching themed experiences halfway through. I dunno. I am probably making it sound really bad, but I am not actually mad about what they're doing, exactly; I sort of assume this was all imagineered into being by young idealistic twenty-something staffers, people who landed their dream jobs and are ecstatic about designing new parks and really, really want you to love these places just like they do, and they may go a little overboard about it sometimes.

And if you do find yourself humming It's A Small World involuntarily while visiting a Metro Nature Park, let me suggest visiting one of their Natural Areas instead. These are the other kind of Metro greenspace, and are in many ways the complete opposite of what I just described. You won't find a guidebook or even a simple list of these places anywhere on the Metro website, or -- remarkably -- anywhere else on the internet, although I might create one at some point. For now, your best bet is probably to fire up MetroMap, their GIS system, enable the "Parks and Natural Areas" layer (which is off by default), and then look around for unfamiliar green-shaded areas that don't show up on Google Maps. If you visit one, don't expect any handholding. At all. If you're lucky, there will be a cute little Natural Area sign about the size of a picture postcard welcoming you, or at least confirming you're at the right place. Note that this sign, if there is one, won't always be right at the entrance, however, which can make things a bit interesting when you first arrive. You see, Metro also has this fun policy of leaving any existing signs in place, so if (for example) the previous owner was some sort of crazy-eyed militia nut, you will just have to trust GIS and ignore the previous owner's fake security cameras and hand-painted "Trespassers Will Be Violated" signs and keep going til you see the "Ok, ok, fiiine, you win, welcome to the Natural Area" sign, posted just around the first corner so it can't be seen from the road. Which is pretty hilarious, actually. Though (and I shouldn't have to say this, but I will) it really helps to be absolutely positively sure you're in the right place and haven't mistakenly blundered onto the private property next door, which is still owned by a different crazy-eyed militia nut. Anyway, assuming you pass that initial test, the rest of the Natural Area is pretty much whatever was there before Metro bought it, minus any buildings that could otherwise harbor squatters. Some of the Natural Areas are flat-out amazing, others not so much, your mileage may vary and it's not their problem, there's no implied warranty of merchantability for any particular purpose, etcetera, etcetera. I'm a big Natural Area fan, in case you hadn't noticed. But we'll get around to exploring these places in other posts.

If you look at a Chehalem Ridge trail map, or the doc explaining the trail names, you might notice a very odd detail that they don't explain clearly. The name doc explains that the trail names are a diverse mix: Some are in English, a couple are Spanish, and several are in the local Kalapuya dialect. Which seems like a reasonable and unsurprising thing to do. And then you get to the Mampaɬ Trail and encounter an entirely new letter of the alphabet that you've never seen before. The doc says it's pronounced "muhm-pahl", sort of the way you would with a regular non-curlicued 'L', but doesn't explain the letter any further. (We're also told it's the Tualatin Kalapuya word for 'lakeview', in honor of a nearby former lake that was converted to farmland in the early 20th century). It actually worked really well to just search Google for that single character, which leads directly to the Wikipedia article on "voiceless dental and alveolar lateral fricatives". Evidently this squiggly character is a "voiceless alveolar lateral fricative", and represents a sound that simply doesn't exist in English. And you're seeing it because the present-day convention (at least with Pacific Northwest indigenous languages) is to use International Phonetic Alphabet characters whenever the regular Latin alphabet isn't up to the job, which turns out to be rather often. Another recent example is NE Portland's Kʰunamokwst Park, which is pronounced something like "KAHN-ah-mockst" and is a Chinook wawa word meaning "together".

Of course these pronunciations are meant as "close-enough" approximations for English speakers. If you're wondering how to really pronounce the 'ɬ' -- which would be an essential skill when travelling back to 1800 to warn people, for example -- it turns out that the same sound is also the correct way to pronounce the double-L sound in Welsh, and so there are a few instructional videos on YouTube explaining (in English) how to make this sound. Which I've attempted a few times, and am doing quite poorly at so far. Meanwhile over on Wikipedia we're also told that it's the "Lh" sound in Sindarin (e.g. the River Lhûn), and "Hl" in Quenya, both Elvish languages from LOTR and the Silmarillion.

Little Zigzag Falls

Here are a few photos of Mt. Hood's Little Zigzag Falls, a short distance off Highway 26 on the way to Government Camp. You follow Highway 26 eastbound toward Government Camp, but hang a left here onto a road that's signed as both "Kiwanis Camp Road" and "Road 39". Then you stay on that road for 2.2 miles, past the Kiwanis camp to the trailhead. The road crosses a bridge and looks like it's going to continue past here, but it really doesn't, and it hasn't in decades, and we'll get to why in a bit. From here, a short, easy, and surprisingly flat hike (trail #795C) takes you to the falls, strolling along next to the burbling Little Zigzag River the whole way. It's not the highest waterfall you'll ever see, or the most challenging trail you'll ever tackle, but it's great. At least I thought it was great. Maybe it was the perfect weather, or the season, or the late afternoon light, or the stars and planets lining up in exactly the right way, or who knows. I didn't take any selfies on the way and mercifully have no evidence of this, but it's possible that I had a goofy grin on my face the whole time, thus looking like a complete idiot, and belated apologies if you had to witness that.

The history bit I mentioned is that this old bumpy road is a piece of the original 1925 Mt. Hood Loop Highway, the predecessor of the modern Highway 26 you took to get here, and back in those days Little Zigzag Falls was one of the new highway's big scenic attractions. The old road was modeled on the recent Columbia River Highway and did not assume you were in any great hurry to get where you were going -- or that your car was capable of tackling steep slopes even if you were in a hurry -- so it wandered around the landscape connecting various scenic and historical highlights. After the bridge here, the old highway doubled back and headed uphill to Laurel Hill, where it's abruptly cut in two by the present-day road, and you can't really see where or how the old route passed through because of how thoroughly ODOT reshaped the land with dynamite. To get to the other side, you have a few options. First, if you have superpowers you can jump across or teleport or punch cars out of the way or whatever. Second, if you're a good sprinter and also an idiot, you could try that and see how it goes. Otherwise, the third option is to backtrack to 26, get on heading east, and then pull off at the tiny parking area for the Laurel Hill historical marker. From there, a short trail takes you uphill to the next fragment of 1925 highway and you can resume exploring for a bit. The main attraction along this stretch is a slope of bare rock where the old highway crosses its predecessor, the 1840s Barlow Road. That road was an especially treacherous stretch of the Oregon Trail, and its operators charged, or tried to charge, ruinous tolls for the privilege of using it. The crossing is right at a point where covered wagons were slowly eased down a near-vertical slope with ropes and pulleys. This might have been yet another way of dying in the old Oregon Trail video game, but I'm not sure I ever got to this point in the game. Usually I chose the water route to end the game instead, and generally ended up drowning at The Dalles, or at Cascade Locks if I was having an especially lucky game. Anyway, past the the Barlow Road bit the old abandoned highway continues uphill in a gentle S curve for a while, before it's cut by Highway 26 again. Somewhere along that segment you can find Yocum Falls, another former highlight of the old road, which is now so obscure there isn't even a trail to it anymore.

Which brings us to the historical timeline part of this post, which (as usual) is a bunch of items from the local library's newspaper database. You'll need a Multnomah County library card if you want the links below to work, but (as usual) I tried to summarize the items so everybody else gets a bit of history too.

• A June 1913 account in the Oregon Journal of trying and failing to drive to Government Camp because of excessive snow on the road, at a time when it was 85 degrees back in Portland. The article notes that the normally placid Little Zigzag was close bursting its banks due to melting floodwaters. An adjacent, unrelated article noted that the upcoming Rose Festival would feature a motorcycle parade for the very first time that year.
• Around this time, Portland businessman Henry Wemme bought the old, privately-owned Barlow Road from its previous owners and donated it to the state for free public use. I gather the old road was more of a disused series of wagon ruts than a proper road at this point, and the 1925 road was not really built on top of it, for the most part, so buying it out was probably more to get its owners out of the way early on, before they could really gouge the state for a larger payoff. You might know the name "Wemme" for the sorta-town further west on 26, between Brightwood and Welches, part of the long stretch of highway sprawl that occasionally tries to rebrand as "Mt. Hood Village". Wemme was also the first person in Oregon to own an automobile, a steam-powered 1899 Stanley Locomobile. Wemme died in 1914, and his will left nearly $500k to found "a maternity home or laying-in hospital for unfortunate and wayward girls in the city of Portland, Multnomah County and State of Oregon.", which eventually became the Salvation Army's White Shield Center. This was located in an oddly remote corner of Portland's Forest Park, and was only connected to the outside world by the peculiar Alexandra Avenue Bridge, which is how I know about all this.
  
  The news article mentions that local businessman George W. Joseph was also involved in the Barlow Road deal; Joseph is best known today as the namesake (and donor) of a state park in the Gorge containing Upper Latourell Falls. As the story goes, Joseph actually had a house or cabin on that property at one point, and an early version of today's Latourell Falls trail started out as part of his daily commute, from home to the Latourell train station.
• Oregon Journal December 1920 article about surveyors doing their thing in this part of the forest primeval. Most is about the team looking for good homesites for summer cabins, which would somehow play into the routing of the upcoming Mt. Hood Loop Highway. There's a mention of the river & falls as an attraction along the way to Government Camp, which was bound to help move a lot of real estate. This survey work probably led to a lot of the now-famous and very expensive Steiner Cabins that were built around the wider Mt. Hood region.
• Oregonian bit on the same survey. Mentions what miiiight be today's Pioneer Bridle Trail, which began as an alternative to the block and tackle nonsense down Laurel Hill. This route was built along a ridgeline for better visibility in case of Indian attack, and was later abandoned after that risk diminished due to war and disease.
• December 1928: Exploring the road to Mt. Hood and winter sports via 1928 Oakland Sedan, with an extended stop at Laurel Hill to visit this half-forgotten historic place while they were in the area. The article asserts that "Zigzag" refers to the switchbacks the Barlow Road was eventually retrofitted with, after the first few years of winches and pulleys and price-gouging fees to use them. And that sounds plausible, I guess. The "Little" part is because this is a tributary of the somewhat larger Zigzag River nearby, which flows into the Sandy River a few miles west of here, and the Sandy joins the Columbia at Troutdale, and so forth. I haven't visited any of these, but the NW Waterfall Survey says the [Big] Zigzag River is home to at least three waterfalls: [Upper] Zigzag Falls, way up above the treeline and the PCT on Mt. Hood, and a Middle and Lower falls downstream from there, and my usual LIDAR-based guessing technique says they're about 125', 110', and 60' high, respectively.
• July 1929 public notice about an upcoming Mazamas work party to build a connector between the Little Zigzag Trail and the Hidden Lake Trail. The latter starts just down the road, goes to Hidden Lake, and continues uphill from there, eventually connecting to the Pacific Crest Trail as it circumnavigates Mt. Hood. For variety, the other trail off the same road (the Paradise Park Trail) also connects to the PCT and even continues uphill from there for a while. The official Forest Service page for the present-day Hidden Lake Trail admits the lake is really more of a pond, but "is still a pleasant destination". Meanwhile the Forest Service Interactive Visitor Map does not show a connector trail like the article describes, so either they never finished it, or it was abandoned at some point later on.
• September 1950, Little Zigzag Canyon was mentioned briefly in an article about the multiday loop hike around Mt. Hood, via the Timberline and Skyline Trails. The Skyline Trail was the immediate predecessor to today's Pacific Crest Trail, and the PCT/Timberline loop is still a very popular hike, following more or less the same route.
• A section of highway through here, either the old one or the new one, I'm not sure which, was officially dubbed the "E. Henry Wemme Forest Corridor" in 1955. I have never seen that name used to describe this area, and have never seen it on any maps or road signs, so maybe everyone just sort of forgot.
• Typical mentions of the river and its canyon over the years involve lost climbers and hikers; this and the 'big' Zigzag River in the next canyon clockwise from here seem to be where a lot of lost people have ended up, either by hiking straight downhill and hoping to bump into civilization, or, well, just tumbling into one of those river canyons along the way. A June 1981 article on the subject interviews several exasperated forest rangers and search-and-rescue experts, who rattle off long lists of dumb ways people have gotten hurt on the mountain over the years. Like not knowing how to use their climbing tools, or not trusting what their compass is trying to tell them. The article relates this to 1981 pop culture by comparing the large area west/clockwise from Timberline Lodge the "Mt. Hood triangle", by analogy with the Bermuda Triangle.
• One oddball search result was from August 1987, and the term "little zigzag" described the typical antenna shape of that amazing new modern marvel, the cellular telephone. The phones had launched three years earlier and there were now an estimated 884,000 cellular phone subscribers nationwide, including around 100,000 in just the LA metro area alone. A spokesman for the local cell company hastened to add that the devices were not just for rich and famous celebrities anymore, and they were now becoming popular among busy executives and even "unglamorous" small business owners. Which is not really relevant to our main subject, but it was kind of cute, and most of the photos in this post were taken with a distant descendant of 1987's chonky car phones.

HCRH Milepost 33 • Quarry Haul Road

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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