Falls Creek Falls, Skamania County

Next up we're visiting another highlight of SW Washington's Gifford Pinchot National Forest: A stupendous 335' waterfall that's been saddled with the unimaginative name "Falls Creek Falls". This is located on Forest Service land in the Wind River country north of Carson, WA, the same general area as Panther Creek Falls, which we visited about a year ago. If you've been to that one in person, imagine it with even more water and over twice as tall, and you'll have an inkling of what Skamania County's Falls Creek Falls is like. Naturally there's an OregonHikers page about the easy trail to the falls, as do GaiaGPS, and Friends of the Gorge.

AllTrails has one for that trail, and the longer route you'll need to use in the winter due to seasonal road closures, plus a longer loop that also takes you to another viewpoint above the falls.

In addition to those, there are a couple of other trailheads off the gravel road to the falls, about a mile shy of the falls trailhead. These just access a couple of extremely easy short loop trails you can stop and explore on your way, but I would encourage people to stop and have a look around at least once if you're in the area, since they're something you don't encounter very often: A pair of ongoing forestry science experiments begun by the Forest Service's nearby Wind River Experimental Forest around a century ago. Apparently this area near the falls had been clearcut a few years before that (which is probably also when the road was built), so the area was seen as sort of a blank slate, where you could plant trees per your hypothesis and then check back every few few years or decades to see how they're doing, without interference from other existing trees. One experiment aimed to determine how far apart you should space your Douglas Fir saplings when replanting after a clearcut, while the other planted a plot with seedlings all of the same spruce species, but grown from seeds taken from all across the tree's natural range to compare how they fared here. If you want to know how either of these experiments turned out, you'll want to take the trail to its far end where a vintage sign will explain what they've learned so far, though the spacing study one that I looked at appears to have been last updated sometime in the early 1960s.

If you're looking for a longer hike, Alltrails also documents a 23 mile out-and-back route that continues up Falls Creek past the falls to an equestrian campground. My impression has been that a lot of trails around the Gifford Pinchot seem to be horse-friendly. I'm not sure it's a majority of trails, but it seems to be pretty common. And yet, on the other hand, I can't remember the last time I encountered a horse out on the trail. (Ok, other than this one city park in Lake Oswego that sits next to an upscale riding club stable) I don't know what to make of that -- is owning a horse less popular than it used to be? Or maybe it's just trail riding out in nature that's less popular than it was decades ago? Did they overbuild during a brief horse fad, like they did with waterski facilities? (And on the other hand, fear of overbuilding is one reason cities were so reluctant to build skate parks at first, until teen skaters grew up and a few of them became city park officials or city council members. I don't know, but I can tell you, based on things I've heard from multiple horse-owning friends, that owning a horse in 2024 is rather expensive and time consuming, sort of like owning a highly flatulent sailboat.

I started this post assuming there would be a bunch of old news articles to pass along about the place, with vintage group photos of hikers in uncomfortable 1890s hiking gear posing in front of the falls, and colorful stories in the motoring section about setting out to prove you can indeed make it to the falls in style in a swanky new Pierce-Arrow sedan. I was surprised to find there was almost none of that in the papers, and unless I've missed something the first time this specific waterfall was mentioned by name in a Portland-area newspaper was actually a Roberta Lowe column in the Oregon Journal, 1982. Which is very strange, given the size and volume and (relative) proximity to Portland.

After getting a bit more creative with search terms I located a 1921 Oregonian article that mentions the falls. It seems the Forest Service was gearing up to sell lots for summer cabins near Government Mineral Springs -- similar to what they were doing along US 26 on the way to Mount Hood -- and heading a list of points of interest in the surrounding countryside is "the 700-foot falls on Falls Creek". As inaccurate as that number is, there aren't any other reasonable candidates for what place they had in mind.

It's almost like they were avoiding the name. My personal theory is that a newspaper editor or two objected to it, on the grounds that "Falls Creek Falls" (and its "Fall Creek Falls" variant, for that matter) cannot possibly be a serious legal name, for chicken-and-egg reasons, and forbade anyone from using that abomination of a name in print. I can't prove this is what happened, but it's exactly the sort of curmudgeonly thing that newspaper editors live for, if their city doesn't have its own masked crimefighting superhero for the editor to obsess over.

Longtime readers might have come into this expecting me to go on about the name in roughly the same way, but without the 8am gin shots and constant cigar chomping and periodic screaming, and somehow even more pedantic about it. And ok, that was one potential direction I could have gone with this post. But then I ran across something a lot more interesting to share with you instead.

A few years ago there was a very large study of US regional dialects, with a lot of emphasis on mapping out which of various common terms people used for a particular thing. The two that seemingly everyone knows about are 1.) the generic term for a carbonated beverage being "coke" across the South, "pop" across most of the midwest, and "soda" in New England, the West Coast, and right-thinking people everywhere. And 2.) the bewildering variety of terms for an oblong sandwich usually made with deli meats and cheeses, where the country defaults to "sub" wherever there isn't a local term for the same thing (hoagie/grinder/po'boy/etc.).

So it turns out there's a clear geographic divide in the use of "Falls Creek" vs "Fall Creek", both as a creek name and as a waterfall name, with Washington State strongly preferring "Falls", and Oregon siding with "Fall". Here's a table with numbers from the World Waterfall Database and the USGS Board on Geographic Names.

----

Area	NWWS: 'Falls Creek Falls'	NWWS: 'Fall Creek Falls'	USGS: 'Falls Creek Falls'	USGS: 'Fall Creek Falls'	USGS: 'Falls Creek'	USGS: 'Fall Creek'
Ore.	4	16	0	3	7	62
Wash.	16	1	2	0	26	13
Idaho	2	4	0	1	15	29
Calif.	0	1	0	0	16	8
Alaska		-	0	0	23	9
Mont.		-	0	0	2	20
Wyo.		-	0	0	6	9
Colo.		-	0	0	5	16
World	82	110
USA			5	2	142	234

And here are a couple of maps (based on nationwide USGS search results) to help visualize the situation. The blue dots are instances of "Falls Creek", while red dots represent "Fall Creek", picked because those are the queries that return the most data points.

As you can hopefully see here, "Falls" is preferred across WA, northern Idaho, and the mountainous parts of Montana, plus Alaska. "Fall" is strongly preferred in OR, and used (I think) exclusively south of a line somewhere around Salem. That line might actually be the 45th parallel or something close to it, or we could make it a geology dad joke and just call it the "Fall" Line. In any case, south of Salem there isn't another "Falls Creek" anything until southern California. There aren't enough of either variant in the Southwest or Midwest (and apparently all of Canada for that matter) for any discernable pattern to emerge. Then along the East Coast "Fall" is more prevalent south of the Virginia-West Virginia border and "Falls" is more common north of there.

A few other scattered name variants exist: Oregon has one "Fall River Falls" and one "Falls City Falls" (and I have a still-unfinished draft post about the latter), while Washingon has one "Falls Camp Falls", one "Falls Lake Falls" and a "Falls View Falls". There are also a few variants only found outside the Pacific Northwest that track regional synonyms for "creek": "Fall(s) Branch Falls" in southern Appalachia, with one outlier in Texas; "Fall(s) Brook Falls" in mountainous parts of the Northeast, roughly Pennsylvania thru Maine; a "Fall Hollow Falls" in Tennessee; a "Fall Kill Falls" in New York; a few "Fall River Falls" with no discernable pattern across the country; and a couple of "Fall Run Falls" in PA. "Waterfall Creek Falls" is only used in a handful of places in the US, but dozens of them exist across Australia and New Zealand.

I can think of at least one other vastly overused name with at least two common variants: "Rocky Creek" is common across Southern states, while everyone else goes with "Rock Creek". Relatedly, "Rocky Branch" sounds like the pure mountain stream your grandpa (allegedly!) used for his legendary moonshine, always two steps ahead of the confounded revenuers, while "Rock Branch" just sounds fake, a name the revenuers might use in a failed sting operation.

I don't have an obvious explanation for this difference. To make a place name official, the proposal typically goes through a state-level agency or designated authority first before the USGS gets a look at it -- the Oregon Historical Society handles vetting proposed names here, for example -- and whoever it is might standardize on using one variant or the other, hopefully based on existing local usage, but possibly just the opinion of one old guy with a bowtie who thinks one or the other feels "more grammatical" somehow, but can't explain why exactly. Whatever the reason, this is bound to magnify existing patterns over time, or create them if there isn't already a pattern. And now from looking at those maps you might think everyone has a strongly held opinion about this like they do about exactly what to call a sandwich and exactly what goes on it. Where honestly I don't think anybody cares that much, myself included. The mysterious part is just that the Columbia River is usually not a linguistic divide, and I don't know why it would be one in this case.

I could just blame the whole mess on unimaginative and barely-literate pioneers again, but let's suppose it's something else entirely. Let's suppose that the name -- in either variant -- is a literal translation of the original (and very common) Sasquatch place name, which is unpronounceable with human vocal cords. The Columbia River would have been a natural linguistic barrier back in their heyday, as Sasquatches were never strong swimmers and never discovered the art of boatbuilding, and so the Northern and Southern dialects of their language would have slowly diverged over time after the original Bridge of the Gods collapsed and eroded away. I'm not saying this is exactly what happened; I'm just saying that it's the only theory I've got that fits the available evidence.

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.

Forest Road NF-20, Larch Mountain

Ok, so the last Columbia Gorge Forest Service road we looked at (NF-1500-150) was a tad underwhelming. Hopefully this next one is a bit more interesting. We're still poking around on the south side of Larch Mountain Road, this time at the crossroads where Larch Mountain Road meets (gated) Palmer Mill Road, around milepost 10. The seasonal snow gate goes up here in the winter. Today we're exploring Forest Road NF-20, which is sort of a continuation of Palmer Mill that continues south, curving around the side of Larch Mountain and continuing on toward points unknown deep within the forbidden Bull Run Watershed. So far this probably sounds a lot like Forest Road NF-1509, and it is, with a couple of differences.

Like NF-1509 and the upper portion of Palmer Mill (aka NF-1520), NF-20 was gated off sometime in the late 90s due to undesirable uses of the area. Then in 2010 the Forest Service went a step further and decommissioned NF-20, evidently with a great deal of enthusiasm and an unusually big budget. Which means they daylight every culvert under the road, grind up any asphalt that might be there and cart some of it away, then go through with an excavator and dig a sort of tank trap pit every so often, to make the road impassable by any sort of vehicle, and by people on foot if possible, then remove it from all maps, never speak of it again, and deny it ever existed, under penalty of I'm not sure what exactly. As you'll see in the photoset here, returning the forest to something resembling a pre-road natural state was not a goal, so the finished state is a long line of little hills and pits with a lot of clumps of old asphalt lying around. On the other hand, I suspect this treatment would work really well against the tanks of an invading army, should we ever need that.

I turned around and went back at a multiway intersection of Forest Service roads, which is close to the Bull Run boundary, and I seem to recall that all but the rightmost of the available roads continue into the Forbidden Zone, so those are out. The remaining road takes you to the big powerline corridor, and after a short distance strolling under the buzzing wires you can connect to NF-1509 and make a loop of it. The main problem with this loop is that getting back to your vehicle (assuming you brought a vehicle) will involve a stroll along Larch Mountain Road, which has a lot of fast drivers who aren't expecting to see pedestrians through here. A bike would help for this part, but it would be kind of useless now on the NF-20 part of the loop. I dunno, I have no useful advice here, but I'm sure you'll figure something out if you decide to try it.

The only other intersection or trail crossing or what-have-you that you'll encounter is closer to the start of the road. NF-20 crosses a small stream and intersects a trail that runs parallel to the stream, heading steeply uphill without switchbacks. There are no signs to explain this, but I'm fairly sure the trail is actually County Road 550, which was once the main road up Larch Mountain from 1891-ish until 1937 when the current road opened. The county never actually vacated it after the big rerouting happened, and the unused old road just sort of faded away into the forest over time. But it still legally exists on paper, as the county never officially abandoned it. (You can see the county's collection of these on this ArcGIS layer. It's a map of "local access roads", the county's term for roads it owns but feels it has no legal obligation to maintain.)

I think I've found one end of Road 550 over near the Donahue Creek Trail, or technically a bit of County Road 458 heading to the long-abandoned town of Brower, where the 550 branches off, in theory. On paper the old road heads due east and straight uphill, crossing Larch Mountain Road (though I can't find any surviving traces of that intersection) and vaguely tracking along the section line a mile north of the Stark St. survey baseline. After crossing NF-20, instead of climbing to the very top of Larch Mountain it turns south and curves around the side of the mountain instead, running roughly parallel with NF-20 and a bit uphill of it. Eventually it, too, enters the Bull Run zone, and probably once connected some godforsaken logging camps to the outside world, so long as it hadn't rained recently. Evidently when it came time to build the scenic viewpoint on top of the mountain, and a modern paved road with two normal-width lanes to get you there, the powers that be decided to just ditch the existing road and start over from scratch. I may try to check out the 550 at some point since I'm curious how much of it still exists, though my expectations are pretty low and I wouldn't say it's a top priority.

Anyway, regarding the NF-20 and what happened to it, 2010 doc from Zigzag Ranger District about that year's round of road decommissioning explains further, and makes it clear they knew Putin-proofing the road would be a bit disruptive for the slow trickle of visitors who used it, but went ahead and did it anyway:

page 70:

The Gordon Creek area is located on the western flanks of popular and scenic Larch Mountain. It is the watershed for the town of Corbett. Forest Road 15 takes recreationists to nearly the summit of Larch Mountain ending at Sherrard Point Picnic Area with views of five Cascade peaks. The road system south west of the road to the summit, Roads 20 and 1509 were blocked with gates more than ten years ago due to illegal target shooting, dumping and other inappropriate uses that could adversely affect the Corbett Watershed. The loop roads behind the gates are used by dispersed recreationists for mountain bike riding, horseback riding, hiking, hunting, and special forest product collection. Gating the area has greatly reduced the previous dumping and target shooting problems.

page 73:

Alternative 2 would decommission Forest Road 20 and several spur roads in the area effectively eliminating the “Road 1509-Road 20 loop” used by hikers and mountain bikers. It is possible hikers may still be able to access the loop, but mountain bikes may be displaced.

Which brings us to the main reason anyone still ventures down the former road. In the Northwest, "special forest products" typically means mushroom picking, which is big business around these parts. In the eastern US it can mean wild ginseng ( https://www.fs.usda.gov/wildflowers/Native_Plant_Materials/americanginseng/index.shtml ), while in Oregon state forests the list includes "Truffles, Mushrooms, Alder or Corral poles, Beargrass, Ferns, Huckleberry, Manzanita, Rock, Salal". If you're curious how this works in practice, here's a 2019 Zach Urness article at the Salem Statesman-Journal about obtaining and using a permit for collecting sword ferns.

In any case, a Mt. Hood National Forest map of legal mushroom-picking zones includes a corridor along either side of the road formerly known as NF-20, despite the road no longer existing from a legal standpoint. In practice, the gravel roller coaster ride they made is still the only useful access into the picking area. This is one of the few parts of the whole National Forest where this is allowed -- the only other one north of the Bull Run watershed is a bit of the Bonneville powerline corridor along Tanner Creek, outside of both the National Scenic Area and Bull Run. Inside the National Scenic Area it's currently not legal anywhere and evidently not a high priority for them. The linked page explains that, by law and in theory, they could allow mushroom hunting, but even now they're still a very new unit of the National Forest system (established in 1986, which is almost yesterday by federal bureaucracy standards) and they've had higher priorities and just haven't had time or money to perform the full environmental analysis they would have to do first.

Which is not to say there hasn't been any research done. Here are a couple of Forest Service docs: "Handbook to Strategy 1 Fungal Species in the Northwest Forest Plan" and "Handbook to Additional Fungal Species of Special Concern in the Northwest Forest Plan", both part of a survey of fungi known to be present in Northern Spotted Owl habitat. It's not that owls eat mushrooms directly; as I understand it, the idea is that they indicate general forest health, and you never know if one might be a key part of the spotted owl food web, especially if the number and distribution of species is poorly known. Plus it's basic research fieldwork that generally doesn't get funded on its own.

Speaking of mushrooms, and the variability that comes with eating things that some rando found in the forest, a recent food poisoning case out of Bozeman, Montana was linked to either morel mushrooms (which are generally recognized as edible), or possibly false morels, which are quite bad for you. Evidently the toxic component in this event was a chemical called hydrazine (or maybe a precursor chemical that turns into hydrazine when eaten), which is often used as a spacecraft propellant because it's simple to ignite, meaning it spontaneously combusts on contact with all sorts of things. In fact NASA and the US Air Force are working on a 'green' alternative fuel to replace hydrazine because it's is so dangerous (and therefore expensive) to work with. 2013 Proton rocket launch accident, to give you some idea.

And since we're off topic already, it turns out that hydrazine is also the stuff of myth and legend in the drag racing community, spoken of in hushed tones, comment sections full of stern warnings from surviving oldtimers:

• Dragzine: "Flashback Friday: The Story of the Lethal Fuel called Hydrazine"
• Motor Trend: "What is Nitromethane, anyway?"
• DragList:
• Nitromater: "What can you tell me about hydrazine and drag racing?"
• BangShift: "This 1966 NASA Film is all about hydrazine, how bad it is, and how it is properly handled"
• Dover Dragstrip: "Hydrazine: Doomsday Fuel of the 60s"
• Euclid's Bridge: "Drag Racing Pioneers or Suicidal Nutjobs?"

And I can't really go off on a tangent like this without recommending John Drury Clark's 1972 book Ignition!, concerning the early days of liquid fuel rocket research. Here, the author reminisces about chlorine trifluoride, another rather alarming substance:

“It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.”

Little Jack Falls

Next up we're visiting another obscure waterfall along the lower Columbia River. Little Jack Falls is a short distance from Jack Falls, on an abandoned stretch of the old Lower Columbia River Highway, outside of tiny Prescott, OR, where the old Trojan nuclear plant used to be. The state still owns the old stretch of road, and it's still largely passable with one big exception we'll get to shortly (or you'll just see in the photoset here).

Getting to the falls involves simply walking along the old road for a bit, and you can start at either the bottom or the top. I've only been there via the lower sorta-trailhead so far, and that route involves parking somewhere near the US 30 intersection with Graham Road, then crossing 30 when it's safe, and looking for a trail starting around where concrete barriers turn into metal guardrails. From there, follow the old highway uphill until you get to Jack Falls, first. Have a look at the falls, and the cute little historic bridge that the creek goes over, then keep going uphill until you get to Little Jack Falls. You can't miss it, or I hope you can't, because sadly the original LCRH bridge that was here is completely gone now, and absentmindedly falling into the gap would mean a long tumble down a steep slope to the edge of the present-day highway.

If the way here, and especially the area right around the falls, look a bit less natural and magical than similar spots in the Gorge, it might be the invasive ivy currently overrunning the vicinity. The airquote-fun detail about this situation is that it was intentional, at first. A 1915 Oregonian article concerning a long drive from Portland to Astoria in a shiny new Reo automobile mentions that the original landscaping around the base of Little Jack Falls included decorative plantings of ivy, for a complete dumbass reason. A 1920 state highway report includes some photos of the ongoing roadwork along this stretch of the highway, then under construction, and the whole area had obviously been clearcut shortly before the road went in. So to make it look less bare and desolate here, they planted one of the rare few things that isn't an improvement over bare dirt.

The ivy situation really complicates things here, if the state ever decides to renovate this stretch of the old highway. The ivy isn't just a nasty invasive plant, it's also an important part of the historical context and built landscape around here, and that would make it illegal, verging on sacreligious, to ever tear it out or let goats nibble on it, or otherwise prevent it from spreading as it sees fit. So that ought to be an especially fun series of angry public meetings.

Also, Little Jack Falls is almost certainly haunted, if you believe in that sort of thing. As noted in the Jack Falls post, there used to be a collection of abandoned buildings either here or at the other waterfall, depending on which oral history you believe, and that spot became a hideout for a gang of outlaws, but they all died in a shootout and their loot has never been found (and is presumably still around here somewhere). Couple of additional strange incidents happened here, decades later, which makes me think Little Jack is the waterfall with the outlaw ghosts and the hidden treasure: In August 1922, an intercity bus was driving along through here when a man randomly shot two fellow passengers just as they passed Little Jack Falls, killing one of them. Then in 1947 a duck hunter parked at the falls, intending to go hunting in the nearby marshes (close where the nuclear plant would be decades later), and was never seen again. Ok, that or he turned up uneventfully after the media lost interest and lived happily ever after, possibly under a new name. Most likely it was one of those things or the other, at any rate. If a lost hunter from 1947 somehow encountered sci-fi atomic radiation from 1997 and became a kaiju-sized ravenous man-duck hybrid, you'd think someone would have noticed by now. Unless maybe he's not ready to burst forth from underground yet, in which case he'll probably show up in 2047 after marinating in bad swamp mojo for a century, and comic-book radiation for the second half of that century. But it wouldn't hurt to keep a closer eye on the area in 2027 and 2037 in case I got the math wrong somehow.

On a more cheerful note, I think you said earlier that you wanted to know where the name came from. And to that end we have a 1915 Oregon Journal article that explains the falls are named for the young son of District Engineer Thompson. The article does not explain whether Jack Falls is also named after the kid and the "Little" describes the falls, or maybe the kid was "Little Jack" and Jack Falls is named after his dad. Some future historian with access to more sources will have to figure that one out for us.

One feature of the upper route (and thus not pictured here) is the old Prescott Point Viaduct, which was considered an engineering marvel of its day (though bridge pedants would like to point out that it's technically just a half-viaduct). Some photos on that page show another reason why they used this route and not the current one, namely that the present-day route was either part of the river, or a river-adjacent swamp, back then, and the route only became buildable after levees went in, around 1938-39. The half-viaduct here and another elsewhere cost $5k in 1918 dollars.

Unlike Jack Falls down the road, the creek is apparently not part of anyone's water supply. The eponymous Little Jack Falls Water System -- the local utility for a handful of area residents -- draws from a nearby spring and not the creek itself. I know this thanks to their 2001 state licensing form (if you're curious what one of those looks like), which also tells us the current operators (as of 2001) had owned & run it since 1976. This factoid is not really relevant to much of anything; it's mostly that while researching a different waterfall post I realized that small water utilities were effectively unregulated in Oregon until the early 1980s, and what came out of your tap could be a real crapshoot, scatological pun intended. And yes, that was a transparent attempt to get visitors to go read a second post here, even though I don't make a penny off this weird little blog either way.

Jack Falls

A while back we paid a visit to Beaver Falls, a now-obscure waterfall that used to be a scenic highlight of the old Lower Columbia River Highway. Which was the predecessor of today's US 30 between Portland and Astoria, and the continuation of the famous Columbia River Highway that meanders through the Gorge. It's not widely known anymore that there's anything worth stopping to see along the road to Astoria, but in this post we're going to visit another one.

This time we're near the small city of Prescott (pop. 55), which is on the Columbia River just downstream from the former Trojan nuclear power plant, the inspiration for The Simpsons' Springfield Nuclear Plant. I mention that just because nobody knows where Prescott is. I honestly didn't either until I went looking for waterfalls nearby. The town (and plant site) are on a rocky area that was probably an island once, now connected to the "mainland" by a large swampy wetland area, bordered by east-facing steep bluffs. Present-day US 30 runs along the base of the bluffs near Prescott and then climbs a steep grade to the community of Lindbergh and the city of Rainier a short distance past there.

There were two basic obstacles to using the present-day route, When the old road first went in, the average 1920s passenger car could not have handled the steeper parts of the present-day highway, and instead the road used to climb the hill on a gentle continuous grade from the intersection with Graham Road (the main road to Prescott) up to the top of the hill over the course of about a mile. There was no obvious way to expand this route to four lanes, so the after the current route opened the old way uphill was simply abandoned to the forest. And it's remained that way ever since, surprisingly intact in most places, beneath a protective layer of moss and decades of fallen leaves. It's going to be our trail today.

Abandoned along with the old road was any official access to two waterfalls that until then had been scenic highlights of the road to the coast. Jack Falls (here) and Little Jack Falls (just down the road) were either a.) both named for a child of an engineering manager on the construction project, or b.) one is named after the kid and the other after his dad, and they were never renamed with native-sounding names of dubious origin like they did throughout the Gorge. In this post we're looking at Jack Falls, since it's the one you encounter first if you're coming from below, i.e. the Prescott end of the road. The link above goes to the companion post about the other waterfall.

But first you have to find the old road that takes you to them. A 2017 OregonWaterfalls post explains how to get there: Turn off US 30 at Graham Road and park in a turnout near the intersection. The road is on a levee between two wetland areas, and any other vehicles parked here will most likely be birdwatchers. Rather than joining them, go back to the US30 intersection, wait for a gap in traffic, and carefully cross the highway. You'll need to hop over a guardrail on the other side, ideally near where the metal guardrail turns into concrete barriers. Initially you're looking for a plain old unmarked trail heading into the forest. When I was there, there were several fallen trees and assorted other debris right when you walked into the forest, and it would be easy to conclude you were going the wrong way. If you keep going, pretty soon it opens up and it looks like, well, a leaf-covered road with the occasional fallen tree across it, and patches of ivy here and there. If you clear away the debris layer, you'll find there's still a mostly-intact asphalt road down there, and traces of painted lane markings are still visible in parts. Ok, there are occasional hidden cracks in the pavement that you could easily wedge a foot into, which would be a fun way to break an ankle if you aren't paying attention, and if anything trips you, you might fall onto devil's club or maybe poison oak. But generally you can just follow an existing boot path through the ivy for decent footing and ways around whatever debris is on the road. In a couple of spots some anonymous volunteer has obviously sawed up a lot of the debris to remove blockages. So any masked individuals with chainsaws you might encounter along this stretch of abandoned road are most likely friendly and benevolent local community members.

Anyway, now that you've found the road, finding the waterfall should be easy enough. Look to your left and uphill. If you see a waterfall, you're there. If you don't, but it's late summer and you're standing on an old HCRH-style stone/concrete bridge over a dry creekbed, you're also there, most likely. Otherwise continue walking forward and do this check again in a few minutes. Check your GPS coordinates against the map above. Seriously, I found it with no trouble and so can you. Once there, you can do some advanced influencer yoga poses for the 'Gram (watch out for gravel), or dance a jig for TikTok, or go off on a spittle-flecked conspiracy rant for X (formerly Twitter), or whatever your content creation routine happens to be in the year 2024 AD. And after that you can either turn around and go home, or keep going to Little Jack Falls. Which is a whole other blog post, because of a rule I made up years ago. If you hit a point where parts of the road have fallen away and it narrows to roughly trail width for a short distance, you've gone too far and wandered into the other blog post, and if the road fades out entirely and beyond it is nothing but dragons, it means I haven't hit 'Publish' on that other post yet.

But you're still here, so: Congratulations, you're at Jack Falls, and the odds are pretty good that you don't know jack about it. But that's about to change, thanks to this brief but inevitable dump of facts about it:

• It's about 75' tall by most estimates, a whopping 5 feet taller than Little Jack Falls just up the road.
• Except that the little in the name isn't about which is taller, but because the construction manager for this stretch of highway had a young son who went by "Little Jack", which I think means Jack Falls is named after his dad. I'm not sure, though; the old Oregon Journal article I got this factoid from doesn't mention Jack Falls at all and doesn't address how that name came about.
• In fact, as far as I can determine no Portland periodical has ever printed a single word about Jack Falls. The only news items I've ever seen about it were in the Saint Helens Mist, a long-vanished periodical of the early 20th century:
  
  • An October 1916 issue of the St. Helens Mist - county appropriated money to build present-day Graham Rd. to connect to the old highway, which was there first apparently. so the road into town is where it is because of the abandoned old highway
  • A July 1917 issue of the same paper seems to indicate there was a local road here before the full highway, which would have been some kind of narrow gravel road. That sounds a little too exciting, if you ask me.
  • And regarding the general perception that the old highway was a bit... unsafe, an October 1922 personal injury court case relating to a car crash on the stretch of road past little jack falls on the way to rainier.
• Oh, and before anyone asks, as sketchy as it may look, we are doing this 100% legally. The state hung onto the right-of-way for the old highway route after closing it to traffic; they seem to do this a lot in rural or natural areas, I guess to keep all their future options open. On top of that, Columbia County GIS says the City of Prescott owns the falls, which they'd originally bought as a sort of miniature Bull Run watershed, as I understand it, though they aren't currently using it for that.
• A circa-2018 mention of Jack Falls on reddit, OP was looking for hikes near St. Helens, one reply mentions the falls and notes someone had rigged up a hose & ball valve to it for some reason. I didn't see any amenities like that when visiting, so it may be long gone by now. Unless maybe someone's very determined that Jack Falls needs a hose, for secret reasons, and clandestinely installs new ones as needed. Either way, there either is or isn't a hose and/or ball valve like this right now, and it may or may not be there at whatever time you visit.
• The Google Maps entry for includes seven photos, mostly of the right waterfall, while elsewhere on the interwebs I came across six Flickr photos, three Instagram posts, and one mention (with a photo) at Recreating the HCRH.
• Also we've got two dueling oral histories to consider, both interviews with local oldtimers. This one was recorded in 1961 and mostly recounts the history of sawmills at Prescott; the town's brief heyday as a cosmopolitan seaport, exporting products overseas directly from the local mill; the town's contribution to the war effort in WWII, etc., and we're told in passing that there was a school somewhere around Little Jack Falls really early on, before the present-day town really got going. A competing history relays the facts differently:
  

  Ed: Before Prescott there was a town and a mill up by Jack Falls. It had a school and some vacant buildings. A gang of crooks were supposed to be holed up there and were killed in a shootout. The money was never found.

  
  Ok, that's more like it. If you're a gang of crooks, and you're holed up near a waterfall, odds are you aren't doing it for the scenery or the relaxing white noise. No, the only reason you're likely to do this is if you're hiding something behind the waterfall. Could be the legendary lost treasure that "Ed" mentioned, could be an escape tunnel for avoiding shootouts, could be lots of things. It's just that nobody knows anymore which falls this happened at. My money's on Little Jack since it just looks better for concealing things, though the main drop of Jack Falls up toward the top of the bluff might be viable too. Either way, any henchmen who died in the shootout (not having been told about any secret escape tunnels) are probably still there as angry ghosts skulking around haunting whichever falls is the right one.

Naturally there's another, larger Jack Falls in Oregon, located along the Umpqua River east of Roseburg. And even more naturally there's a Fall(s) Creek Falls relatively close to both falls named Jack Falls , because you're never very far from a Fall(s) Creek in the wet parts of the Northwest. Thanks again, unimaginative pioneers!

The Fall Creek Falls in Columbia County is right in Clatskanie just off OR 47, behind the park with the baseball diamonds. It's very much privately owned, and the current owner is trying to make a go of it as an event venue and does not welcome visitors outside My personal preference is always going to be that scenic places ought to be public places, open to all and sundry with little or no red tape. But given the small population of the county, and the usual rural Oregon aversion to paying taxes for anything, this may be the best realistic outcome. I mean, Columbia County has had at least three waterfalls on the books as county parks (Beaver Falls, Lava Creek Falls, Carcus Creek Falls) for over a century now without doing much of anything with them, so if they came into possession of another one now it would probably just end up last in line behind the others. And if the county doesn't have the money, chances are the city of Clatskanie doesn't either. I'm telling you all this now because the only way I'm likely to end up with photos of Clatskanie's Fall Creek Falls (and thus the only way you get a post about those falls) is if someone out there needs a junior assistant wedding photographer and you don't really care whether my photos of your most cherished moments are any good -- which is a legitimate possibility since I've never actually done wedding photos before. And you also don't care that I shoo everyone out of frame a few times so I can just get undisturbed photos of the falls and nothing else. If asked by curious guests, I would just say that my creative process requires it, and not elaborate further. That's usually enough to end conversations and not become a distraction on your special day. So yeah, if you want to see a "Fall Creek Falls (Clatskanie)" post here someday, and you're up for helping make that happen, all you need to do is find your soulmate and get together, choose this specific place as your venue, invite me (as explained above) and somehow convince me the invite isn't some kind of weird scam or kidnapping attempt or timeshare presentation, and afterward remind me a few times so the post doesn't get lost in Drafts for ages.

And while we're talking about potential future events: The thing that really struck me on this trip was the old highway and its current conditions. I am just barely old enough to remember that long stretches of the old Columbia River Highway in the Gorge used to look just like this, back before present-day restoration efforts got going. You don't have to be a TED-talking, outside-the-boxing think-o-brain visionary to wonder if the same thing would work here too. The Portland bike community is forever making noise about needing at least one less-unsafe route between the city and the coast; maybe a "Historic Lower Columbia Highway State Trail" is the way to make this happen. It would inevitably be a bike-centric trail (vs a hiking one), even more so than the HCRH trail. The scenic highlights are usually separated by long stretches of just farm country and no nature to speak of. A lot of the work is just putting up signs marking the original route, and sharing the road on still-in-use rural backroads, and probably redesigning some intersections with present-day US30 since the meandering original route crosses back and forth over the current route quite a few times. ODOT could turn a few four-way stops into freeway intersections, which they're pretty good at and are always up for. Also throw some money at local scenic and natural attractions and hopefully persuade a few people to stop off along the way and spend some money in Saint Helens, Rainier, Clatskanie, and the other old river towns along the way. So that's in general; for the segment of road we just visited, that would be restored like some old HCRH parts: Reopened just to bikes & pedestrians, maybe with a safer way for people to get across Highway 30 at both both ends, and more parking at the lower end of the route. Maybe a crosswalk, maybe a skybridge, depending on how likely you think drivers will be to stop at the new signal. Maybe combine the old existing right-of-way with Prescott's old watershed area and declare it a new state park. If possible include the other nearby road segments to the logical east/physical south. Replace the Little Jack Falls bridge, maybe not an exact replica of the one that failed, seems like they built it too close to the falls for effect.

Anyway, that's Jack Falls. Stay tuned (or keep walking) for the Little Jack installment of this exciting adventure...

Mead Creek Falls

Ok, next up we're taking a peek at another very, very obscure Columbia Gorge waterfall. Mead Creek Falls is nearly 200' high, and it's a short stroll from one of the busiest trailheads in the Gorge and maybe the entire Northwest, but nobody's seen or heard of it, and we're going to go see why.

If you're on the old Columbia River Highway, heading east from Bridal Veil Falls, it's about half a mile to the intesection with Palmer Mill Road, a lightly-used, steep, narrow, sketchy gravel road that follows Bridal Veil Creek up into the hills. The intersection is paved, though, and officially doubles as overflow parking for the incredibly popular Angels Rest Trail. Shortly before you get to the intersection, looking to your right, you might notice a small stream that's flowing partly in an ugly semi-corroded steel pipe. To your left, the creek continues downhill a bit and then vanishes underground. From there it flows in a pipe under the old Bridal Veil sawmill site and then I-84, and joins the Columbia in that undignified state. Seems pretty unpromising at first glance, but I was looking at a couple of state GIS maps recently (as one does) and noticed a couple of things. First, the state LIDAR map (which I reference a lot here) showed the creek going over a 180'-200' sheer cliff a short distance upstream of Palmer Mill Road. And second, the state map of fish migration barriers had an entry for the ODOT-owned culvert carrying the creek under the old highway, and that map item said the creek was called "Mead Creek". It's not a USGS-approved official name, but at least one state agency has a name for the thing, and that's official-ish enough as far as I'm concerned. So with those two bits of information in hand, it was time to go look for the mysterious Mead Creek Falls and take a picture or two to prove it exists.

So I hit the road on New Years Day. It was a surprisingly slow day at Angels Rest, so I was able to find a parking space in the overflow lot. From there, I walked up Palmer Mill Road for maybe 100' or so to the creek. I only saw the one creek, so it wasn't hard to find. Turning and facing upstream, there's a short side street or former driveway branching off just to the left (east) of the creek. (I think this was actually for the old mill town's primitive and disgusting drinking water system.) I started walking that direction and soon noticed a boot path to the right, heading uphill and back toward the creek. So I followed that, but it sort of peters out before long when the route gets steeper, and after that it's just bushwhacking uphill folowing the creek, and hopping across it as needed, and trying to avoid blundering into thickets of devil's club if you can help it. After maybe 1000' of this (and 300 vertical feet, much of it on loosely-piled river rocks) I eventually came across an RV-sized boulder a short distance from the base of the falls, and didn't see an obvious way to get around it while staying safe and dry, and I figured the boulder was close enough for now, so I took another batch of photos and turned around.

I'd love to say the falls are a hidden gem, but I was frankly a bit underwhelmed. They're as tall as I expected, and the setting feels like a near-twin of Lautourell Falls, lichen-covered cliffs and all, and it would be a spectacular crown jewel of the Gorge, if only there was more water going over the falls. But as it is, it looks a bit dwarfed by its surroundings. The asterisk here is that I've only been there once so far, and I have no idea whether this is a typical rate of flow or not. The winter of 2023-24 had been unusually warm and dry up to that point, and maybe potential visitors just need to wait for the next big winter storm, or hold off and wait to visit in a non-El Niño winter. Or maybe invent a time machine and travel back a few centuries to when the upper creek was fed by dense old growth forests and global CO2 levels were more reasonable.

Or who knows -- I haven't really explored the sorta-plateau above the falls at all, but it's said to be a confusing labyrinth of old logging roads and unofficial trails, full of random items that random people have lost or dumped or built up there over the last century or two. (See for example a 2013 OregonHikers thread, "More Lost Trails in the Gorge".) As I understand it, presently there are abandoned cabins in varying states of collapse; a bullet-riddled 1941 Chrysler and parts of other discarded vehicles; a few surviving train parts from the logging railroad era; at least one vintage Jet Ski, supposedly; remains of abandoned pre-legalization weed farms, and it's anybody's guess what else. There's probably one of everything up there. Every last lost sock, an entire Sasquatch subdivision (complete with HOA), Jimmy Hoffa's discreet-but-luxurious witness protection villa, it's anyone's guess really. Maybe a cleverly concealed dam is still diverting most of the creek over to the Hoffa compound's vast Jacuzzi complex. Maybe all it would take to fix the falls would be an earnest Eagle Scout and a few helpers with big cans of WD-40. I mean, after the 111-year-old Hoffa finally kicks the bucket, obviously. I would personally not bet money in favor of this explanation, seeing as I just dreamed it up for this blog post, but stranger things have happened.

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Footnote(s)

1. fish barrier map

At some point the state transportation department either named the creek or recorded a name that locals were using, back when there was a company town built right around here. I don't know why, or when, or who it's named after, but I was poking around looking at the state's official Oregon Fish Habitat Distribution and Barriers map when I ran across it, and I'm pretty sure that's official enough for my purposes.

That map draws from a variety of sources and tries to catalog anything and everything that might impede, discourage, disempower, confound, bewilder, or annoy a migrating salmon on its way to or from the Pacific Ocean. Hydroelectric dams are on this list, obviously, plus things like waterfalls that are too tall for a salmon to leap over (which is about 5-6 feet), down to really mundane things like storm drains and culverts under streets, since it turns out salmon don't really like swimming through underground pipes. So the waterfall we're visiting is not on that map, but the creek passes under the old scenic highway in a long corrugated steel pipe that probably dates back to the old sawmill days, located here, and that's where I noticed the name. (I suppose the falls aren't on the map on the idea that any salmon foolish enough to try running the series of tubes is not going to make it far enough for the falls to matter.)

That data probably originated with the Oregon Department of Transportation since they're in charge of things like culverts under state highways, and sure enough, the name appears in ODOT's TransGIS system, and specifically in the department's "DFMS Culverts (Advanced Inspection)" map layer in ArcGIS.

There's also a pipe under Palmer Mill Road, but it's a county road and for the equivalent info for it you'll need the county's ArcGIS and select the "Culverts_Transportation_View" layer. It doesn't list the creek name or tell us anything new, but since I went to all the trouble of finding the map I figured I'd include a link to it anyway.

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2. LIDAR stuff

I quickly realized Mead Creek corresponded to a place I'd noticed before here on the state LIDAR map: An obvious streambed intersecting a nearly 200', near-vertical rock wall, in the classic curved amphitheater shape that often indicates a major waterfall. And I have sort of a rule of thumb that if there's a creek or river or what have you named X, and there's one waterfall on it, and it doesn't already have a name, and you need to call it something, you don't need anyone's permission to call it X Falls. Two waterfalls? Upper X and Lower X Falls. Three? Upper, Middle, and Lower. And so far I haven't needed a default naming scheme for four or more. So at this point all that was left to do was to go test the "Mead Creek Falls" hypothesis and take a few photos to prove it's real. Same basic idea as Sasquatch hunting, really.

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3. Bridal Veil Water Works

While researching this post, I did learn one more fun fact about the little creek here. From the beginning of the mill and town in 1886 right up until April 1982, Mead Creek was the Bridal Veil area's sorry excuse for a drinking water supply. In April 1982 the US EPA finally got around to testing all of the local water systems across Portland-area counties, and immediately issued a boil water notice for the Bridal Veil system, to remain in effect until the company got its act together and complied with federal clean water standards. That Oregonian article primly blamed this on "elevated bacterial levels", while the Oregon Journal story about the situation explained matters without the Oregonian's squeamish tiptoeing around:

Bridal Veil takes its water from a surface water source and normally does not treat the water in any way...
…
EPA environmental engineer Jean Knight said evidence of fecal material was found in the water supply at Bridal Veil, which only has a “pipe coming out of a stream” for its water supply, to which chlorine is occasionally added.

“Some people said they’d been ill, but most hadn’t gone to a physician to have it confirmed,” she said.

The Journal piece didn't quite connect all the dots either, namely that the town's raw sewage went back into the same creek the water was drawn from, and they figured this was fine because the water intake was uphill from all the sewage stuff.

Recall that this came about midway through Ronald Reagan's first term, during the height of deregulation mania. Reagan wanted to abolish the whole agency and repeal the laws it enforced, and he packed it with ideologues who did everything they could to sabotage the agency's work. Their refusal to enforce rules and regulations and basic laws of the land led to repeated national scandals. So the fact that they had their hair on fire about the Bridal Veil water system really ought to tell you something.

There had been a few clues that the system was not exactly a paragon of modern 20th century sanitation. Way back in June 1960, the Multnomah County health department issued a temporary no-swimming order for the lagoon at Rooster Rock due to high levels of sewage germs detected there. One sample tested at nearly three times the level considered dangerous. Multnomah County's Health Officer offered a shifting set of explanations for this situation; first he claimed it was just natural seasonal variation in the river's normal bacteria levels, nothing to see here, folks. The Oregon Journal noted, however, that water samples taken further upstream at Bonneville Dam did not show the same elevated levels.

Investigators had even observed untreated raw sewage flowing into the Columbia a mile and a half upstream and already knew its origin, and they suggested that it might be part of the problem. But no, the county health guy now insisted the Vista House restrooms were the real source. Asked to explain the elevated microbe counts found at the river beaches at Rooster Rock, he explained that he didn't put a lot of stock in microbe counts and preferred to rely on his own personal intuition as to what the real problem was, thank you very much. It was pretty obvious at that point that he was never going to point any fingers at Bridal Veil, no matter what. Oddly enough, this episode happened just a couple of weeks after the Kraft corporation announced the impending closure of the mill. A health officer with better political instincts would have just said he's studying the problem, and then taken credit for the drop in bacteria after the mill closed.

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4. 1990 study

Jumping forward to the post-sawmill era, the creek and the water supply problem came up briefly in a couple of studies. First up is an April 1990 "preliminary" study on the current state of the mill site, due to the impending sale to the Trust for Public Land. The Mead Creek cameo is on page 9 of the study:

At the time of the Site Examination no olfactory evidence was observed which indicated that the woodlands are currently contaminated with hazardous materials. A visual inspection revealed fifteen to twenty empty one gallon bleach containers near an empty water tank (refer to Figure 1 for location). According to Pat McEllreath, current mill site manager, prior to the installation of a water well in 1982 the town water supply required treatment. It is likely that these bleach containers are left over from the water treatment process.

Figure 1 is on page 14 of the linked doc, and shows little squares labeled "water tank" and "well and pumphouse" along Palmer Mill Road. I assume these were removed during the 90s sometime along with the old mill and associated mill houses. Most likely the well site was chosen so they could plug it into the existing water system with the least effort. The pile of discarded bleach bottles tells me the local public works guy was all about least-effort approaches.

An obscure Forest Service map that covers a lot of land ownership details has a bit more info on the old mill site. If I'm reading things right, the Trust continues to hang onto a pre-existing easement for the water system dating back to April 1937 (the year the mill was sold and reopened to make Kraft cheese boxes). The description of it makes it sound very elaborate, though a lot of it probably never made it past the wishful thinking phase.

Easement for the use of a water system in favor of adjacent property owners. Consists of flumes, tanks and pipelines for domestic water use, a dam and diversion point for water power, and flumes, tanks and pipelines for fire protection.

The 1990 study was labeled preliminary because nobody had looked around yet for contaminated soil, and there was no way to estimate even a rough ballpark figure for any future plans without first knowing what shape the local dirt was in. So they recommended doing that as the next logical step. As far as I know this still hasn't happened, because looking for problems you can't afford to fix is always a tough sell, in any kind of organization.

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5. 1992 historic structure inventory

After the sale, it became clear there was an imminent nature vs historic preservation fight. The new owners commissioned a study involving several local architects and historians, basically explaining that the surviving buildings in town were not significant individually, and as a group they weren't a good example of a company mill town, and either way just about everything was in extremely poor condition and there was literally nothing worth saving about the place. A map of the town on page 16 shows all the structures in town, including the water tower and well pumphouse, but the study didn't discuss them any further. The most interesting part is that the study includes photos of the exteriors and in many cases interiors of these buildings, and a lot of these houses were kind of cute. And I know you can't judge the condition of an old building just from photos, but a lot of them looked fixable. This study came just a few years before everybody decided Craftsman bungalows were cool again, and who knows, maybe the preservation battle would have played out differently if that had happened a little sooner. However this was also happening right in the middle of the spotted owl wars, and removing all traces of the timber industry may have felt like a moral imperative at that point.

Around the same time, another consultant produced a 287-page report concerning the history of the mill and the town. I've only skimmed it so far but it seems a bit more evenhanded than that architecture study.

Also in 1992, management of the still-brand-new National Scenic Area issued the unit's first Management Plan, and at that point the vision for the Bridal Veil area was meant to be about historic preservation, which obviously is not how it turned out in the end.

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6. 2002 study

In 2002 a group was paid to do another round of quick preliminary work, this time they had a couple of months to dream up a preliminary restoration plan for the site. In it, we learn that the proposed followup work in the 1990 doc had not yet happened, and future planning of the kind they were tasked with was fairly stymied due to still not knowing basic stuff like how much topsoil you might need to dispose of as part of any cleanup effort. And this isn't even considered a high risk site for toxic chemicals, seeing as cutting a large tree up into 2x4s does not actually involve a lot of chemicals. (Unless you're making the pressure-treated stuff, obviously.) The Mead Creek cameo doesn't mention the creek by name:

The natural course of the small stream on the east end of the property appears to have been altered. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) topographic contour maps indicate a westerly course for the stream. This is supported by the site analysis. The stream above Palmer Mill Road south of the site appears to follow a historic bed, but below the road it is channeled in a metal trough. At the point where the stream crosses the Historic Columbia River Highway, it enters an enclosed culvert. It reemerges on the north side of this road where it drops several feet to a stream bed that does not follow the natural topographic contours. Evidence of activities to control and maintain this bed can be found along an unpaved road, in the southern slopes of the site.

Maybe this diversion is why the ugly pipe was left in place, to make sure the creek doesn't revert to its original course without permission. Later on, the study suggests daylighting the creek through the old mill site, if it turns out to be feasible, so imagine they'd get rid of the remaining piping at that point too. That was one of the study's few concrete suggestions, along with putting in an official trail or two connecting the Angels Rest and Bridal Veil trailheads, and adding ADA-compliant access to Bridal Veil Falls. The study didn't propose doing anything with Mead Creek Falls; it's quite possible the authors didn't realize it existed.

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7. 2015 master plan for state parks in the Gorge.

Part 1 is mostly an inventory of the current park portfolio and the highlights and ongoing maintenance needs of each, and results from a public opinion survey. Eventually they get around to summarizing the suggestions they got from the general public. Including some variants on finally building out Trail 400 from Troutdale out to the current "mile 0" where the Angels Rest trail starts. Some oldtimer or amateur historian suggested "George Joseph and Larch Mountain", which was a doable hike a century ago. You would start by doing the trail to Upper Latourell Falls, then taking a now-lost route that went to the top of those falls and then continued upstream beside Latourell Creek. Eventually you'd exit the state park and follow the creek through farm country for a couple of miles and then end up on Pepper Mountain. You could turn around there, which was the usual practice, or go down the other side of Pepper Mountain and find County Roads 458 and 550, which would get you within bushwhacking distance of the summit of Larch Mountain. And from there, the Larch Mountain Trail would get you back downhill to Multnomah Falls, or you could just go back the way you came. I just sort of assume that any hike that involves traipsing across private farm or timberland is a nonstarter in 2024. I have not actually gone around ringing doorbells and asking residents if it's ok, but I suspect even that wouldn't go over very well these days.

Part 2 discusses some proposals for the future. One, on page 182, is a new twist on the long-proposed trail between Angels Rest & Bridal Veil Falls, which ought to be a no-brainer but somehow nobody can figure out how to make it happen. Instead of taking a direct, short, level route from one to the other, and maybe reusing one of the old roadbeds in the area, it would follow Bridal Veil Creek upstream a bit and then head uphill, apparently crossing Mead Creek somewhere upstream of the falls, and joining the Angels Rest Trail partway up. Looking more closely, I think the main driving factor of that particular route is that it stays on Oregon State Parks land the whole way, even though one of the main bullet points on the idea was "Requires partnership with USFS" (which kind of reads like they weren't looking forward to that part, for whatever reason. Or maybe I'm reading too much into that.) This reads like a scaled-back version of the 2012 proposal for a Bridal Veil Canyon Trail, which would create public access to rarely-seen Middle and Upper Bridal Veil Falls and cut over Angels Rest after that, making for a longer route.

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8. Mead who? Mead what?

Other than the ODOT connection I mentioned earlier, there are exactly zero search engine or Oregonian database results for the creek name. Closest possibility (but still a real stretch) that I ran across dates to September 1985 and the filming of Short Circuit. Apparently the stretch of HCRH between Bridal Veil and Crown Point was a filming location, and the robot star of the film was designed by the legendary Syd Mead. He's probably best known for his work on Blade Runner, and for designing V'Ger for Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). It's a fun theory but I wouldn't bet any money on it. Another possibility is that it's not a surname at all; maybe someone was trying to explain what color the creek was, downstream of the gentle townsfolk of Bridal Veil back in the day. And if so: Ewwwwww!!!