Johnson Lake expedition

View Larger Map

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vanport Wetlands

[View Larger Map]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vancouver Lake expedition

View Larger Map

Here's a slideshow from Vancouver's Vancouver Lake Park, mostly of the far side of the lake near where the road peters out. I always forget there's a lake this big in the Portland area. Partly because it's up in Vancouver, and partly because it's your basic Pacific Northwest wetland nature area, the same as everywhere else but larger, and with the ongoing water quality issues of a suburban lake. It's not exactly Crater Lake, is what I'm saying. These photos were taken back in 2007, the same "mini-roadtrip" week that I went to Crater Lake, which may be why posting these didn't seem like a high priority. I had actually forgotten I'd ever been to Vancouver Lake until I ran across these photos in an old iPhoto library recently.

Since my visit there wasn't particularly eventful, I think we'll just go ahead and dive into the Oregonian historical database instead. (If there was a database of the Vancouver Columbian newspaper, that would be even better, or at least more comprehensive, but as far as I know it's not available online.) Most of the news items in the database are fairly routine: Hunting and fishing reports, real estate ads, farming news, occasional drownings, that sort of thing. I tried to only include items that stood out from the crowd or seemed relevant to why today's lake is the way it is, so hopefully it's an interesting list, as far as these things go. The pattern that emerges over the last century or so is one of Vancouver looking west, seeing this big lake, and thinking it ought to be useful for something or other. One grand scheme after another was proposed and argued about endlessly, and yet in 2013 much of the lake and the surrounding area still looks like the back of beyond, even though it's right next to the city proper.

For clarity I've broken the news items out into pre-1965, 1965-1983, and post-1983 sections, for reasons that will be come clear after the jump.

Sun Lakes

View Larger Map

Here's a slideshow from Sun Lakes-Dry Falls State Park in Eastern Washington, about 40 miles north of Moses Lake. The state parks description of the place:

Sun Lakes-Dry Falls State Park is a 4,027-acre camping park with 73,640 feet of freshwater shoreline at the foot of Dry Falls. Dry Falls is one of the great geological wonders of North America. Carved by Ice Age floods that long ago disappeared, the former waterfall is now a stark cliff, 400 feet high and 3.5 miles wide. In its heyday, the waterfall was four times the size of Niagara Falls. Today it overlooks a desert oasis filled with lakes and abundant wildlife.

These photos are from the park area "downstream" of Dry Falls. (There's a separate post on the way with photos from the overlook above Dry Falls.) It's hard to comprehend the sheer magnitude of the Missoula Floods, but to my non-geologist eyes the the Sun Lakes area (and similar areas around Washington's Channeled Scablands region) really do look like the result of an enormous flood, with piles of rocky debris, and deep gouges now filled by lakes. This sort of terrain is considered to be the closest terrestrial analogue to outflow channels on Mars, like the one visited by Mars Pathfinder in 1997.

The high freestanding rock formation in a few of these photos is Umatilla Rock. I ran across a blog post about it with a lot of great photos, including some from the top of the rock, at a site devoted solely to Ice Age Floods.

I should point out there's more to the park than gawking at geology. A recent Associated Press story about the area goes on about the recreation options here. Beyond the obvious hiking, boating, and fishing options, apparently there's even a 9 hole golf course somewhere in the state park. It seems like a long way to go just to play golf, if you ask me. But then, crossing the street is a long way to go just to play golf, as far as I'm concerned. The park also has mini-golf (aka fun golf), paddle boats, and even a concession selling water balloons at $2 per bucket, so you can have a water balloon fight without the hassle of filling water balloons first. That actually sounds cool.

McCosh Park, Moses Lake

[View Larger Map]

From a recent trip to Moses Lake, Washington, a few photos of the city's McCosh Park on the shore of the town's eponymous lake. Surprisingly the lake is at least partly natural, even though it's the middle of a desert. And unlike many desert lakes (Mono Lake & Summer Lake, for instance), it isn't just a dead pool of salt and alkali. It actually has fish and everything. The weird geological history of the region may have something to do with this.

The park itself has more amenities than you'd expect for a town of this size: An amphitheater and even a water park, and apparently it also hosts the local farmers market. It probably helps being the largest town for many miles in all directions.

Mono Lake

[View Larger Map]

Some old, scanned photos of Mono Lake, in the California desert east of Yosemite. These were taken in the early 1990s during the height of the court battle over the lake's water. The short version of the story: Since the 1940s, water had been diverted from flowing into the lake, and ended up in swimming pools in L.A. instead. As you might expect, this caused the lake to start drying up. Not everyone was thrilled about that, and -- this being California -- there were ugly, expensive, lawsuits, which went on and on for years as the lake level continued to drop. A couple of years after I was there, the city of Los Angeles lost the case and was forced to put water back into the lake. Wikipedia insists the lake's almost back up to its pre-diversion lake level. In which case some of the the scenery in these photos is now back underwater where it belongs.

Abert Rim

View Larger Map

A couple of old photos of Abert Rim in SE Oregon, a bit north of Lakeview. These are old mini-roadtrip photos from 2007, and I didn't post them at the time because they're really not that great, and I only have two photos total, taken from a moving vehicle since I was on my way to Fort Rock that day and didn't have time to stop.

It doesn't appear there's really much more you can do here without a serious 4wd vehicle and then some serious backpacking gear (neither of which I happen to own), as Abert Rim is a BLM Wilderness Study Area.

For those unfamiliar with the term, "study" in this context means an administrative (rather than legislative) moratorium on development. It basically means the place is being held in reserve in case Congress ever decides to designate it as a full-blown wilderness area someday. So it's been awaiting a favorable political climate since July 1992, in fact, and it's pretty much a given the current chock-full-o-wingnuts Congress isn't going to take up the cause. The possibility of development here isn't an idle notion, either; there have been several proposals to build some sort of "pumped storage" hydroelectric project at adjacent Abert Lake, and the most recent proposal was only abandoned in 2009.

I'm not an anti-development zealot or anything, but it's easy to imagine how things could go very wrong here. It's easy to imagine rows of ugly million-dollar McMansions with million-dollar views lining the top of Abert Rim, the requisite golf course next to the lake, the whole thing fenced off and guarded by Taser-happy security guards to keep the locals and other riffraff out. And, naturally, a backroom deal so that residents don't pay property taxes or otherwise contribute to the local economy in any way. It's not hard to imagine; look what happened to Bend, after all.



In any case, the main reason I'm posting these photos now is because it's late April in Portland, and this endless, grey, chilly spring is dragging on and on, and I'd really rather post something with a bit of blue sky in it. I distinctly recall that it was a warm day when I took these photos. In fact the car windows were up because the AC was on. I vaguely recall what that was like...

From the Archives: Scenery near Crater Lake

I've now got a week's worth of staycation photos to sort through. Nearly 1200, in fact. In the meantime, here are a few from the archives, from 2007's mini-roadtrip. These were taken in Crater Lake National Park, but they aren't of Crater Lake itself, nor are they of the Pumice Desert just north of the lake. So even though they're quite scenic, they didn't make the cut. Until now. Enjoy!

Summer Lake

View Larger Map

A few old photos from Summer Lake, in far SE Oregon. No, really, there's a lake out there somewhere. Unlike many lakes in the area, it doesn't quite dry up in the summer (hence the name, I think), but it does shrink substantially.



The ODFW Summer Lake Wildlife Area attracts birdwatchers in the spring, and hunters in the fall and winter. I happened to drive through in mid-summer, and as you can tell there wasn't much going on. The visitor center wasn't open, and I didn't see anyone else there. Apparently there are access roads that take you closer to the actual lake, but I didn't realize that at the time. Plus I was on my way to Fort Rock right then, so I'm not sure I'd have made the detour anyway. And please note that that almost all of the photos were taken from a moving vehicle.



What I'm trying to say is that I do realize these aren't the most breathtaking photos I've ever posted here. That's probably why I didn't post them back in 2007 when I took them. But I figure it's November in Oregon, and even rather bland and uncomposed photos of desert and blue sky still make for a pleasant change of pace. Well, I though so, at least.

Pics: Diamond Lake

View Larger Map

A few more mini-roadtrip photos from the archives, this time from Diamond Lake in the southern Oregon Cascades, not far from Crater Lake, the day's main destination. I mostly stopped here to pick up food and supplies at Diamond Lake Resort, but I can't exactly not take photos, can I?



The secondary goal with this visit was to peer into the lake a bit and search for the abominable tui chub. The lake's been invaded twice now by this nasty little fish. It's thought that both times it was introduced by someone dumping excess live bait into the lake, as apparently the tui chub is an excellent bait fish when it's not busy conquering the world. So both times the invasion was halted by partially draining the lake and then nuking all life in the remaining part with a few boatloads of Rotenone. Which works, apparently, although it's a bit drastic for some people.

So I peeked into the water briefly and saw no tui chub, or stinky toxic algae mats for that matter (a nasty side effect of tui chub invasions). So I'm going to officially declare Mission Accomplished in the War on Tui Chub, at least until some clueless fool reintroduces them again. Fortunately ODFW plans to keep monitoring Diamond Lake (assuming they have the money), so you don't have to rely solely on me squinting at the lake for 5 minutes once every decade or so and trying to remember what a tui chub looks like. Trust me, this is a good thing.



The snow-capped mountain across the lake is Mt. Bailey, one of the smaller and gentler Cascades. It would count as an enormous mountain in most states, but in Oregon few people have heard of it. More info from the USGS Cascade Volcano Observatory.



For what it's worth, there are no known diamond deposits in the area, and the lake is named after an early pioneer with the surname "Diamond". It's unknown whether he was an ancestor of Neil Diamond, although I'm not sure where I'd look to determine that.