Waespe Falls

Next up we're visiting Waespe Falls, one of the tall seasonal waterfalls between Multnomah Falls and Oneonta Creek. This is a short distance east from Nesika Falls, its equally obscure neighbor just down the road. Of the two, this one has probably been glimpsed by more people; if you start at the Oneonta trailhead and follow the trail uphill a short distance to the junction with Gorge Trail #400. Just west of there the 400 crosses a small stream. If the creek is flowing, look uphill from there. It's a steep talus slope mixed with trees and vegetation, and includes a bit of old stone wall that -- I think -- was built as a rockslide barrier and isn't part of an abandoned road or trail. Beyond that and higher up, the steep slope becomes a high basalt cliff, and the falls are where the nearby creek tumbles off that cliff. Alternately if the creek is flowing and the forest isn't too overgrown it may be visible on Street View, like here for example.

Like Nesika, the name is of fairly recent origin and either originated or was popularized on the OregonHikers forums. In particular, the oldest references to it by name -- any name -- that I've seen anywhere on the interwebs are a pair of 2011 OregonHikers threads. Which were followed by later ones in 2013 and 2022, and most of these involved someone bushwhacking up to the falls by following the creek straight uphill. Some people reported that the climb was "easy", while others found it impossible, mostly due to all the loose rocks they had to struggle through. One of the posters who made it to the base posted some photos to SmugMug like this one. And those links along with the Northwest Waterfall Survey page linked up above are about the only information there is about it online.

The name is also not official, or really recognized much beyond the Northwest hiking and waterfall hunting corners of the internet. It's derived from Waespe Point, a prominent rock formation next door to the falls. And the point was named in 1983 to honor the late Henry Waespe, a prominent local citizen and president of the Trails Club in the 1950s. I have no idea how to pronounce that name properly, but I think the name of the falls should be pronounced "wispy" even if he didn't say it that way himself, because it just sort of fits that way.

As with Nesika Falls, Waespe Falls is rather tall (when it hasn't run dry for the year), and there are no published numbers on exactly how tall. So let's go back to Oregon's official state LIDAR map and see if we can figure that out. On the state LIDAR map, with both the "Bare Earth Lidar Hillshade" and "Bare Earth Slope (degrees)" enabled, pick two points on the creek that are as close to what appears to be the top and bottom of the falls, without actually being part of any vertical drop. The lowest-slope points you can find on either end, so ideally the top is just before the stream abruptly falls off a cliff, and the bottom point is anywhere on the perfectly flat and calm pool the falls drop into. If you don't try to do this, your results may vary widely depending on exactly which pixel you clicked on this time and exactly how the map converts that into six decimal places of latitude and longitude. I like to try this a couple of times to see whether the numbers are anything close to reproducible. In any case it might be useful to think of this as giving an upper bound, like you probably won't come in short of the actual height unless you're doing it all wrong. So, bearing that in mind, and note that I'm counting what looks like three adjacent tiers together as one big waterfall (and using these top and bottom points), it seems to be around 425' high, roughly the same height as Nesika.

Since I was in the area, so to speak, I did the same thing with a couple of other intermittent streams in the short distance between Waespe Falls and Oneonta Gorge. The first one east of Waespe comes to "just" 240' and may disappear into a talus slope after that. (top, bottom), while the next-east one from there seems to come to around 650' in 4 distinct tiers (top, bottom), and a third immediately east of that (top, bottom) comes in at around 385' in 3 tiers, and it also seems to sink into the ground below the drop. So none of these are going to be very substantial and I don't recall ever seeing any of them flowing in person, either close up or from a distance. I suspect they go beyond "seasonal" into "ephemeral" territory and only flow during and maybe right after a big rainstorm and are otherwise dry year-round. I tend to draw a line there as for what's included in this ongoing project, for the very practical reason that if something only flows during a big storm, it means you have to do a lot of hiking during big storms. And in this part of the world, doing that means spending a lot of additional time being cold and miserable, which I am generally opposed to.

Meanwhile to the west of Waespe, between it and Nesika Falls, is the big talus slope that's home to the "Fire Escape Trail", which we already covered in the Nesika post.

Also (going by the very terse directions) the falls might become an ice climbing spot known (as of 2019) as Unfinished Business; Northwest Oregon Rock (published that year) noted it was about 200' high and up to that point nobody had climbed it past the first 80 feet or so. We haven't had a lot of extended cold snaps since 2019 around here, so that matter may still be unfinished, as far as I know. I can tell you it won't be me who climbs it; I only bought the book because it's kind of a whole alternate geography overlaid on a part of the world I know reasonably well, and because it turns out that some of the best ice climbing spots in the Gorge double as very photogenic (yet very obscure) seasonal waterfalls when they aren't frozen.

I checked the Oregonian database to see if anyone mentioned seeing a waterfall near the Oneonta trailhead before the internet. I don't think I found anything like that, but somehow came away with a bunch of links anyway. As usual, this is the part of the post where it helps to have a Multnomah County library card so that the links below actually take you somewhere useful.

(If I wanted to go off on a very long tangent here, and thought anyone might be interested enough to read it, or I was interested enough to write it anyway, Waespe's family was socially prominent enough that you could assemble a whole biography of him just from newspaper articles. From birth announcement to obit, with society weddings and business and philanthropic stuff in between, and leading a lot of Trails Club hikes over the years. But that would be quite a long tangent and if you're really that curious you're welcome to get out your Multnomah County library card and go write that book (or at least a Wikipedia bio, or something).)

• An October 1934 story on the shiny new Horsetail-Oneonta Loop, just completed by WPA workers. The author describes both creeks in great detail, including a number of side trails that are either lost or abandoned now, like one to what it called "Pathfinder falls", a pair of waterfalls between Triple Falls and the first trail bridge on Oneonta Creek (there's a second bridge above Triple Falls, and maybe more further up.) One of those would have to be Upper Oneonta Falls (or Middle depending on whose naming scheme you use), but I have no idea what the other one would be. The article doesn't mention anything Waespe-like, but at the end he does say there are a lot more sights and side trails beyond those he just told us about.
• A 1939 story about good picnic spots in the Gorge. Says people overlook the trailhead and just think of the Oneonta Gorge itself, which is basically still true, even though it's been closed since 2017 due to the fire. The trailhead itself isn't very photogenic on its own.
• A 1953 story concerning a timber swap between the Forest Service and a timber company that preserved some land along Oneonta Creek, trading for land of equal value somewhere outside the Gorge. A little mixing business with philanthropy: You get positive headlines, and the equal value swap gets you more land and trees. The article suggests the swap would make possible an alarming idea that was making the rounds at the time:
  
  

  Its becoming a part of the public preserve will make more feasible a road up the Oneonta trail, which would cross the Oneonta near a triple falls and approach the upper Horsetail falls before descending again at Ainsworth state park on the old Columbia highway.

• A 1970Leverett Richards article on the Horsetail-Oneonta loop, which he refers to as a "granny trail". Mentions that the trail forks near the end and you should take the right fork to get down to the highway. Doesn't say where the other fork goes, assume it's some predecessor of Trail 400 but it seems a bit early for that.
• In a sign that the 1970s really were an extremely long time ago, a 1971 story about Multnomah County sheriffs deputies setting up a sting to catch car prowlers. Now they just sort of accept that nothing can be done about it, any more than you can affect the weather, and it's probably your fault anyway for having objects (valuable or otherwise) in your car, and really for going outside in the first place when you should be in church or cowering at home watching Fox News.
• November 1979 Roberta Lowe article in the Oregon Journal, laying out a hike starting at the deeply obscure Exit 35 trailhead and ending at the Oneonta trailhead, these points chosen because Trail 400 on either side of those was still unfinished. For people looking for an advanced challenge, this article -- in a major urban daily newspaper -- explains how to find the 'infamous' Mystery Trail, which (almost) nobody on the internet will even give you directions to now because someone might try it and get hurt. You can be sure it's dangerous when even she says not to go beyond the first 3/10 mile on it, though she also insists that initial segment is a "fun side trip". I should note that present-day conventional wisdom holds that this is a down-only trail and taking it uphill would be an ridiculous idea. On the other hand, the newspaper archives show Mazamas hikes doing exactly that on a semi-regular basis back in the 1930s and 1940s, and the instructions don't say anything about bringing a can of spinach to chug for energy, so who knows.
• March 1980, Lowe on the nearly complete Ak-Wanee Trail, an old name for the Multnomah-Oneonta segment of Trail 400. Mentions the Elevator Shaft branch and the abandoned spur trail to Nesika Falls, but nothing about another seasonal falls near the Oneonta trailhead. Does mention the unnamed 'turnout' for the 400 down from Nesika Falls at least
• July 1982, some killjoy editor must have pestered Roberta Lowe to cover some hikes for mere mortals for a change. Her idea of this was setting up a car shuttle and doing the Oneonta Trail as a "lazy, downhill trip" from the top of Larch Mountain. Which, yes, is downhill. For 8 miles. And to spice up the trip without making the hike itself harder, she notes that you can shave 8.5 miles off the car shuttling part of the trip by taking Palmer Mill Road (a steep, narrow gravel road, at times with a sheer dropoff into Bridal Veil Creek) instead of driving all the way west to the ordinary Larch Mtn. Rd. junction west of the Vista House. You can still do the lower part of that to where Palmer is closed to vehicle traffic and then follow Brower Rd. up instead, which saves miles but not as many. Energy crisis was barely in the rear view mirror then, and we have high gas prices and inflation again now, so I'm not telling you not to do this; just saying it's not exactly a luxurious driving experience, and your vehicle is probably larger (and wider) than the average car of 1982.
• It was back to business as usual in August, with a 9.6 mile loop along the Franklin Ridge Trail, and a 10 mile loop that includes a trip up the unofficial and rather steep Rock of Ages Trail. Because when your newspaper is going out of business in another week or two, you might as well swing for the fences.
• Within a couple of years the Oregonian decided the Lowes were ok; here's a 1987 piece on the long-abandonded but newly reopened Bell Creek trail. Bell Creek is an Oneonta Creek tributary that begins on the upper reaches of Larch Mountain, and is remote enough -- and/or lucky enough -- to be home to a grove of genuine old growth trees.

Nesika Falls

Next up we're having a look at Nesika Falls, another very tall but little-known Columbia Gorge waterfall right in the middle of the main tourist corridor, a just a little over a mile east of Multnomah Falls and even closer than that to the Oneonta trailhead. If you're heading east on the old Columbia River Highway, you might notice a small parking lot with some sheer cliffs and mossy boulders behind it, and absolutely no signage of any kind to tell you why there's a parking lot here. Its most common use seems to be as a turn-around spot for tourists trying to score one of those $20 VIP parking spaces at Multnomah Falls Lodge, which may involve a slow crawl thru the tiny lodge parking lot followed by flooring it down the road (or continuing a slow crawl down the road, depending on traffic) to the closest turnaround (i.e. here) and back (i.e. here), and coming back for yet another slow crawl thru the completely full lot. A useful rule of thumb here is that if you find yourself using any driving techniques you learned during holiday shopping, you should accept that you are not currently having fun, will not begin having fun anytime soon, even if a parking spot opens up, and should probably rethink your plans for the day.

The second most common use of this lot is as unofficial (but free) overflow parking for Multnomah Falls. People who park here to use this spot as Multnomah Falls overflow parking tend to just trudge along the road, ignoring all the "No Pedestrian Access" signs along the way, including the ones on the narrow East Viaduct, and trying to duck in time every time an RV with extra-wide side mirrors rolls through. I tried that route once way back in the early 90s (as described here) and absolutely do not recommend it. What you want to do instead is look for trails heading up into the forest, and take the westbound one. There are no signs to tell you this, but this spot is an access point for Gorge Trail No. 400, the still-incomplete trail that might connect Troutdale to Hood River someday. The eastbound trail is easier to find, right at the east end of the parking lot, but it's not the trail you want right now. To find the westbound trail, cross the little road bridge or culvert immediately west of the lot, and look for a trail a few steps beyond there. When you cross the bridge, look down at the little creek it crosses. This is the same stream that forms the falls we're here to look at, so if it's just a trickle or it's dry entirely there's nothing to do but come back another day in a wetter season.

Assuming the creek's flowing, follow the trail uphill a short distance, maybe 50'-100', look uphill, and try to work out the route of that little creek as it comes downhill. If the creek's flowing but you don't see the falls, try going a bit further, or go back a bit, and look for gaps in the trees and underbrush, and keep trying until you see something resembling the photoset above.

Once you see it, look back toward the parking lot and note the large rock formation that completely blocks the view of the falls from the highway. If that wasn't there the waterfall would probably be a bit less obscure than it currently is.

After you've seen the falls from a distance and taken a few photos, continuing westbound on the 400 will take you to Multnomah Falls, specifically to the first switchback past the bridge. So you can either continue uphill to the top and skip most of the crowds, or you can head downhill, elbow your way thru the crowds, and hit the snack bar for a plate of genuine Multnomah Falls nachos, or whatever. Before choosing your adventure, look behind you at the junction. A vintage plaque, low to the ground, announces this is the "Ak-Wanee Trail", though nobody really uses that name anymore. This trail officially opened in 1978, and the name honors a young Yakima tribal member who worked on trail construction here and died in a car accident shortly before the trail opened to the public.

The trail figured in several Roberta Lowe newspaper columns over the next few years, primarily in the Oregon Journal:

• A 1979 Journal column explaining exactly how to find the unofficial and very, very steep Elevator Shaft trail.
• A 1980 Journal column explaining that the new trail had not been properly manicured yet, and was still a bit rough.

• 1984 Oregonian column (after the Journal went under), on hiking the 400 from Multnomah Falls through to the obscure Exit 35 Trailhead east of Ainsworth State Park. (That point marked the end of the trail until the short-lived Warrendale-Dodson segment opened a few years later, and it became the end of the trail again in 1996 after a big chunk of trail was erased by massive landslides a bit east of that trailhead.) The column mentions a dead-end bit of abandoned trail uphill from the present-day trail, built as an abortive attempt to route the trail closer to Nesika and Waespe Falls (another seasonal waterfall we'll visit as soon as I finish that post). They would certainly be less obscure if that had worked out, but we're told that the necessary blasting could have posed a hazard to cars and trains below so they dumped that idea.

  The abortive spur trail seems to still exist, according to the state LIDAR map, with the trail junction located right about here. Though so far I have completely failed to find this trail at ground level. That's one limitation of LIDAR maps, especially in this part of the world: You can make out exactly what the ground is shaped like, but when you go to visit in person that ground may be under an impassable layer of brush, fallen limbs, poison oak, devils club, rusty nails, broken glass, old barbed wire, etc., and there's really no way to be sure until you get there. Another limitation is that LIDAR really just tells you that a potential creekbed intersects a cliff at a given spot and obviously can't tell you if there's any water in the creekbed.

• Also nearby, unofficially, or maybe closer to Waespe Falls next door, is the lower end of the Fire Escape trail, which is marked at the upper end by an ominous sign that reads "Fire Trail - Emergency Only". Peope often confuse it with the very similar Elevator Shaft trail which is a mile or so to the west, closer to Multnomah Falls. Even the OregonHikers Field Guide page about the Elevator Shaft manages to confuse the two. The key thing to know is the Elevator Shaft is supposed to be uphill only, while the Fire Escape is said to be down only, and for the life of me I have no idea why. I suppose it reduces the odds of people having to pass each other on these precarious routes, if nothing else. I have never done either one, but my understanding is that the main difference between the two is that the Elevator Shaft has an actual trail carved into it, with over 100 tight switchbacks, and you can see it on LIDAR and even Google Maps' satellite view, while the Fire Escape is just a talus slope that's known to be descendable in a pinch.

One unsolved mystery I have: If the bridge and maybe the parking lot date back to around 1916, and the trail only arrived in 1978, what was here before that? Was it really just a turnaround spot for heading back to Multnomah Falls all that time? I have no idea.

The name is fairly recent; it's just named after the Trails Club lodge near the creek, way up above the falls. It sort of fits with the existing pattern of real or invented Indian names bestowed on various places by non-Indians, mostly in the early 20th century. Which is not really ideal, but the lodge is about the only named landmark anywhere nearby, so I guess it'll do in a pinch. The other idea that's been proposed is some variation on "Farula Falls" or "Caddisfly Falls", as it's one of a handful of Gorge waterfalls that are home to Farula constricta^[1], one of several rare caddisfly and stonefly species endemic to the Gorge. It's not a terrible name, but the thought of using it makes me sort of anxious, like I can't shake the idea that it'll attract the wrong kind of attention, from the sort of people who would happily wipe out the last survivors of an endangered species just to own the libs.

To summarize uses of either name across the interwebs: We've got two old OregonHikers forum threads in January and May 2011, followed by a 2013 thread about a then-new trails layer in Google Earth. IIRC one of those threads mentions what might be the abandoned spur trail, referring to it as a "convenient game trail". The name also appears on someone's WentHiking page and another photo linked from there. And that's about it, really.

If I'm not mistaken, under the right weather conditions this area becomes a celebrated ice climbing spot known as "New World Amphitheater", as discussed in two threads at Cascade Climbers, and featured in the Gorge ice climbing chapter of Northwest Oregon Rock. Translating their maps and names into non-climber, I thiiiink Nesika Falls freezes into "Black Dagger", while "Brave New World" is either a different route up the falls or it goes up one of several ephemeral streams immediately to the east, I'm not totally sure which. And "Blackjack" corresponds to a creek west of Nesika but I'm not 100% sure which one. I don't think I've seen any of these theoretically rather tall waterfalls actually flowing, so this is kind of a moot point, and it's why I generally don't bother with ephemeral waterfalls in this project: The only reliable way to see them would involve visiting while a major storm is in progress, which in turn means spending lots of time getting drenched and being cold and wet and miserable, which I can't recommend.

As I understand it, to be a great Gorge ice climbing spot, a place needs a couple of things: A fairly low-flow waterfall (ones that dry up in the summer are great for this) so it'll freeze all the way and not be a firehose in the face of anyone climbing it, and it should be one that runs down the face of a cliff instead of projecting outward like a lot of the major ones do, so it'll freeze on the cliff and not just make a big ice stalagmite at the base. This is not the case everywhere, btw; Helmcken Falls in British Columbia is supposed to be the world's ultimate ice climbing spot, and it's on a major river and forms a giant ice cone over the winter. But around here, if those conditions are met, then it's the taller the better. Speaking of which, I haven't seen any numbers on exactly how tall Nesika Falls is, so let's have a look at the state LIDAR map and see if we can work that out ourselves. I usually do this by trying to pick points above and below that clearly aren't part of the falls but as close to it as I can get, and subtract the altitude of one from the other. This tends to give numbers on the high side of the range but hopefully not by much.

First off -- starting at the old highway and proceeding uphill -- LIDAR says there's a small lower falls below the main one, maybe 15'-20' tall and hidden sort of behind the big rock formation here. (top; bottom). I haven't actually seen this one; it must be hidden in the dense brush back there, and you may need a machete to get a better look at it.

Then we have the main falls, which I think is what's shown in all of my photos. Given a top point at ~815', and a bottom one at 395', that gives us a 420' main waterfall. Seriously.

Then we have a number of smaller upper falls that are set back a bit from the main one and I suspect aren't visible from below. These miiight be visitable from above with a bit of bushwhacking, but I haven't tried this myself and this is not a legally binding warranty. Also, most of these drops are fairly short, and short drops on a small creek may not be very impressive in person, and your photos of them may not necessarily bring fame and fortune, just so we're clear on that. With those disclaimers out of the way, here's what LIDAR says is up there:

1. Upper falls #1 (100') (top, bottom)
2. Upper falls #2 (~30') (top, bottom)
3. Upper falls #3 (~20') (top, bottom)
4. Cascades(~50') (top, bottom)
5. Upper falls #4 (~25') (top, bottom)
6. Upper falls #5 (~20'?) top, bottom
7. And another 20' one on a small tributary east of the main creek (top, bottom)

Just west of there, the one on the next sorta-obvious stream to the west (top, bottom) might be the "Blackjack" of the ice climbing world. It seems to drop a whopping ~550', which would be pretty impressive if there was any water at all going over it most of the year. But then, the lack of water means it erodes slower and stays taller longer, so whatever.

Before we wrap this up, let me point out a few other points of interest nearby, two of which are completely gone now, and another that never made it past the proposal stage but is kind of interesting anyway:

• One of these points of interest was right by the parking lot until quite recently. The creek passes under the highway on an original 1914 bridge, or maybe it's just a culvert, and either way it's pretty small and boring. Around 1979, a local Eagle Scout decided this just wouldn't do and did some amateur masonry here as his Eagle Scout community service project, adding an ornamental bridge railing to the existing bridge. Thus reminding people why we don't usually task Eagle Scouts with civil engineering projects. Recreating the HCRH calls it the "Eagle Scout Bridge", and has a photo or two of it in its post-1979 state. There's even a photo of it in the Library of Congress archives. The National Register of Historic Places nomination for the highway labeled it a "non-contributing structure" and had a few brief and opinionated words to say about it:

  Historically, there has been a structure at this crossing of an unnamed creek since the CRH's construction. The present masonry parapet walls on this small span date from the early 1980s, and represent an unsuccessful attempt to "restore" this bridge in the highway's style.

  I started calling it the Monkey Jesus Bridge: In both cases a well-meaning member of the public decides to improve a thing that doesn't need improving, and... doesn't. It's said that for many years afterward, if you hung around nearby at dusk on the right evening, sometimes the ghosts of ancient Roman engineers would appear and poke at it with sticks and make cutting remarks in Latin about the crooked arches and the barbarian tribes that must have built them. It helps to remember that these guys have been guzzling wine from the same ghostly lead flagons for the last 2000 years and have become a bit irritable over the years. But that's all a moot point, because it's gone now. At one point during the pandemic there was an extended closure of the highway due to a combination of winter landslides and trying to clean them up in a full social distancing environment, and ODOT took advantage of that long closure to quietly make the 70s bridge railing vanish without a trace. There was no public outcry; in fact almost nobody noticed it was gone. And the esteemed Romans have switched to haunting the McMansions of Mt. Scott. Imagine something like Poltergeist, but the ghosts are just unreasonably angry about classical orders and the Golden Ratio, and barbarian tribes who don't even know how to build a villa properly.

• There was also an Oneonta train station or platform somewhere right around here in the early 20th century. A 1927 Metsker map has an all-caps "ONEONTA" label right around the turnout location, while the inset bit of map shows the locations of the "McGowan's Cannery", "Columbia Beach", and "Warren's Cannery" train stops, all in the Warrendale-Dodson area east of here. I haven't come across any historic photos of any of these stations, and most likely they were cheap and rustic, just enough platform so people could get on and off the train with a little dignity. The original road survey map for this stretch of the HCRH, aka County Road 754, covers the Multnomah Falls thru Oneonta Gorge area on page 2 of the PDF, and it definitely shows a train station named "Oneonta" that's separate from and some distance west of the "Oneonta Falls" label. It seems awfully strange to me that any train stop would be anywhere except right in front of Oneonta Gorge, or as close to there as is practical. There was never a town here, or farmland, or or any other reason to come here besides the famous wade-to-the-waterfall spot. Even the Oneonta Trail (which accesses the additional falls upstream of the gorge) wasn't built until the 1930s. Also note that although the tracks seem to be right next to the highway here, and it kind of looks like you could drop someone off or pick them up for their train commute into the big city, the space in beween the two is a roughly 100' cliff, and the highway engineers of 1916 neglected to put in a grand staircase to connect them.

• The mystery not-a-trailhead also appears to be the exact spot where the Columbia River Highway would have intersected the never-built eastern half of County Road 625 (map pdf; ordinance pdf), since it was supposed to intersect the highway near the old train platform. This proposed road dates back to the 1890s, and the unbuilt part was a truly absurd idea. The western, built segment of road ran roughly parallel to -- and uphill of -- the Palmer Mill Road that Gorge fans may be more familiar with, which is actually a former railroad grade. The parallel country road might still exist as part of the maze of unmarked trails, tracks, and goat paths up in the Palmer Mill - Angels Rest area. The built segment ended around the location of the long-gone Palmer sawmill and its vanished mill town, and it won't surprise anyone to learn that the Bridal Veil Lumber company was the primary force behind the proposal.

  From the Palmer area, the unbuilt segment would have made its way sort of northeast, descending into Multnomah Basin, albeit by a somewhat different route than the Multnomah Basin Road that was eventually built. Which brings us to the absurd part: From there, starting just east of the top of Multnomah Falls, the road would have dropped toward river level, or at least railroad level, by a series of tight, precipitous switchbacks immediately east of the unofficial Elevator Shaft trail. If you're ever tried that trail or even looked at it up close, it is very difficult to imagine how a usable road could ever be built there or anywhere nearby, especially back in the horse-and-wagon days. That segment ended right around the trailhead here, and then continued east along more or less the present-day route of the old highway as far as Elowah Falls, then home to another sawmill. The Bridal Veil timber company was behind the proposal, and some suspected that the plan wasn't to actually build the road as proposed, but to establish a public right of way across the land of nearby landowners, with the goal of eventually putting an enormous log flume through there. Some neighboring landowners were surprised to find their signatures had been forged on the petition, when they didn't actually support the proposal. One filed an objection noting that the road would be useless to him, as it was too steep for horses to climb while pulling an empty wagon.

So what next? What's the future of this place? The key thing to know is that the land is a piece of Benson State Park (like the lake next to Multnomah Falls) and is not owned by the Forest Service, and the state will probably never have the money to do anything with this place; they may not even know they own it. The lot was recently added to Google Maps as "Parking to hike to Multnomah Falls", and as that idea takes hold it'll start filling up before sunrise like every other place marked as Multnomah Falls parking. If you put up an official sign and drew attention to the place, either as Multnomah Falls economy parking or for the falls here, you would immediately have a parking nightmare on your hands, and I'm not sure where additional parking could possibly go; the other side of the road is a cliff, but (looking at street view from I-84 not quite a sheer cliff, so maybe a few parking spots could go there with a bit of creative cantilevering. And then revive the bit of spur trail so people have somewhere nearby to go instead of it just providing a longer way to either Multnomah Falls or the Oneonta area. And figure out how your signage should break it to midsummer tourists that the falls might have gone dry for the year and they really should have visited back in March while they were still semi-awesome. It would almost certainly accrue a bunch of one-star Yelp and Google reviews from the sort of tourist who doesn't get the whole "nature" thing, and thinks there's a hidden control room somewhere behind the scenes where a bored bureaucrat controls all the valves to turn the waterfalls off and on, while people at the other control panels handle the weather and the animatronic wildlife.

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Footnote(s) 1. Insect stuff

More specifically, the species is known from one male and one female specimen, both collected here in April 1989, along with several collected at Mist Falls around the same time. All of them are now part of the 10 million specimen Entomology Collection at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. The 1992 paper describing F. constricta is here:

Wiggins GB, Wisseman RW. NEW NORTH AMERICAN SPECIES IN THE GENERA NEOTHREMMA AND FARULA, WITH HYPOTHESES ON PHYLOGENY AND BIOGEOGRAPHY (TRICHOPTERA: UENOIDAE). The Canadian Entomologist. 1992;124(6):1063-1074. doi:10.4039/Ent1241063-6

The paper is unfortunately paywalled and I'm not sure I want to shell out $36 just to read it, JSTOR doesn't carry the journal, and unfortunately Sci-Hub has an incomplete copy of that issue, ending before it gets around to the paper in question. So that appears to be a dead end, but that's modern science for ya. Here's the abstract for it, at least:

Three new species are described in the caddisfly family Uenoidae: Neothremma prolata, from Hood River County, Oregon; Neothremma mucronata from Lassen County, California; and Farula constricta from Multnomah County, Oregon. Following examination of the holotypes of several species, misinterpretation of the male genitalia morphology of Farula wigginsi Denning is corrected, leading to the recognition of that name as a junior synonym of F. petersoni Denning. Interpretation of male genitalic morphology in the original description of F. geyseri Denning is revised. Phylogenetic relationships are inferred from male genitalic morphology for the species of Neothremma and Farula. Biogeographic patterns of the species in both genera are highly congruent with the phylogenies.

Let me just point out that coauthor Wiggins had the rare privilege of debunking Farula wigginsi, a proposed new species that someone else had named in his honor.

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.”