Pics: Klamath Lake

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I was rummaging through old photos a while back, specifically ones from a mini-roadtrip around southern and eastern Oregon back in 2007, and realized there were still a few I hadn't done anything with. For instance I had a handful of photos of (Upper) Klamath Lake, the giant marshy lake just north of Klamath Falls and the California border. I had never been there, but was I was on my way from Crater Lake to Lakeview and was short on time and didn't plan on stopping, so I snapped a few photos while motoring along. Legal says I have to tell you not to do this, and common sense kind of dictates that too. I'm just saying it's what I did at the time, but that was a very long time ago.

I haven't been back since then, and going back isn't right at the top of my todo list, so I figure these photos will have to do for the time being. Although Klamath Falls does have a geothermal-heated brewery that I wouldn't mind revisiting...

SW Shattuck & Vermont

Our next adventure takes us out to the hills of SW Portland, to the busy corner of SW Shattuck & Vermont. A while ago I'd noticed on some map or other that the city owned a ~2.3 acre chunk of undeveloped land at the corner, and I figured it might be another obscure city park or something, so I put it on my seemingly endless todo list. It turns out this is a little wetland area owned by the Bureau of Environmental Services, the agency responsible for both stormwater and sewers. A short stretch of Vermont Creek flows through here, after leaving Gabriel Park. The wetland area is easily visible from Vermont St., but there's nowhere to park nearby on either Vermont or Shattuck. I had the idea I'd turn onto 63rd Ave., which as you can see on the map forms the remaining two sides of the diamond-shaped parcel. It looked like a small quiet street, and I figured I could park there and get a look at the marsh, maybe see a heron or something. It turns out that basically every map you might encounter is inaccurate here; much of the 63rd Ave. right of way was vacated years ago, and the street quickly ends at someone's driveway. The stern "Do Not Enter" sign there sort of indicated I wasn't the first person to be misled by looking at a current map. So I just turned around and got whatever photos I could without parking the car, and that was that.

So what do we know about this place? A BES page lists this spot as a "stream restoration activity", and another lists it among various construction projects they've done here over the years. A BES document about Fanno Creek tributaries mentions that the city's Urban Services Boundary is at Shattuck Rd., such that the creek flows out of the city right here. Maybe this is a last-chance water quality project, so that Beaverton can't sue. Or maybe it's for flood control (a city engineer's drainage plans for a subdivision just across Vermont St. indicate flooding is a problem around here.) Or maybe it's here to compensate for the Alpenrose Dairy just uphill, or it's some sort of mandatory federal wetland mitigation, or it's a water quality project to protect fish downstream in the Fanno Creek watershed. Or some combination of all of these things.

Regardless, I don't think it's really set up for public access. There aren't any "Do Not Enter" signs on the parcel itself, and I didn't see a fence. But there also isn't a "Welcome Birdwatchers! Love, your BES besties." sign or anything else that would welcome visitors. It just sort of looks like a random empty lot with a stream through it, which may explain the occasional illegal mattress dumping issues. So for the time being I wouldn't rank this place very high if I compiled a list of cool secret Portland spots to visit. Oh well.

Portland's Favorite Tree

Recently I wrote about "Freda's Tree", the City Repair intersection project at NE 56th & Stanton, which is sort of a memorial to a beloved, long-vanished neighborhood chestnut tree. During the 1987 Rose Festival, the tree was a finalist in a "Portland's Favorite Tree" contest put on by the Oregonian, but it lost out to a redwood tree (of all things) in the West Hills, near 860 SW Vista Avenue. The contest hasn't been held since, so presumably the redwood tree is still our fair city's reigning favorite tree, in the same way that the USA is the reigning Olympic rugby champion since the sport hasn't been included since 1924.

Long story short, I went to go look for Portland's favorite tree, and here it is. I think. There are actually several redwood trees nearby; I'm assuming the largest and most imposing of them is our favorite. The late 80s were not exactly an era of subtlety and aesthetic restraint, so I'm guessing people went with the biggest tree they could find and automatically called it the best. At least it's a redwood tree, so we can blame the whole thing on Californians.

Forest, McDowell Creek

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Here's a slideshow from Linn County's McDowell Creek Falls County Park, near Sweet Home, OR. The park's waterfalls have appeared here already:

• Majestic Falls
• Royal Terrace Falls
• Crystal Pool Falls
• Lower McDowell Creek Falls

I'm not sure if this area is technically part of the Cascades or not, but the moss-covered trees tell us the park gets a lot of precipitation. It's not quite as rainforesty as the Olympic Peninsula, say, but it still makes for some interesting photos. Or at least I thought they were interesting.

Vanport Wetlands

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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.

lyon arboretum (social media edition)

foster botanical garden (instagram)

Autumn, Beggars-tick Wildlife Refuge

A few photos from Beggars-tick Wildlife Refuge, a Metro-run wetland area out in outer SE Portland. Metro's info page about the place insists you need to visit twice to really appreciate the place -- once in the winter, to get the full wetlands experience, and again in the summer, to experience the wildlife and plants and so forth. So naturally I showed up in autumn instead.

I parked at the south end, next to the Springwater Corridor trail, and wandered in for a look around. I didn't go all that far, actually; the wetland parts weren't completely wet yet, but they were muddy enough to convince me not to go any further. I think there must be another entrance somewhere further north that gives more access to the place. I haven't yet found a detailed map of the place showing trails and so forth, so I'm not 100% sure about that.

Also, it looked as though homeless people might be living in the refuge somewhere, and there weren't any other visitors at the time I was there, which gave me another reason not to wander blithely off into the underbrush.

The rather off-putting name of the place has a very prosaic explanation, as it turns out. A "Beggars-tick" is a type of plant, various species of the genus Bidens. It's considered an invasive weed in many parts of the world, but here it's a native plant. I didn't know what it looked like before I went, and I don't recall seeing anything that looked like it while I was there. So, in short, I don't have any photos of the refuge's eponymous plant. Sorry.

It seems the refuge hasn't been a refuge all that long, roughly 1992-93. Here's an interesting doc about the wetlands restoration project, from the US Fish & Wildlife Service.

All in all, I'm not sure this was my most successful "expedition" ever. I just saw one corner of the place, and took some decent but rather generic fall photos that could be from anywhere. Oh, well. There's always next time, I guess.

Semi-obligatory Kloochy Creek Spruce photos

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By now you've probably heard the sad news. The (locally) famous Klootchy Creek Sitka spruce finally snapped in half during yesterday's windstorm on the coast. For those unfamiliar with the tree (like, if you just, like, moved here from, like, California, for instance), it was (allegedly) the tallest tree in the state, and (allegedly) the tallest Sitka spruce anywhere, as proclaimed by the sort of people who care about those things. Even if neither claim was true, it was still a really huge tree, and a well-known one, being located in a park right next to US 26, on the way to the coast.

After the damage it suffered last winter, everybody knew the thing was sick and on its last legs, or roots, or whatever. Although that can mean anything from months to decades, with a tree of this size. I took these photos back in June during that big mini-roadtrip I went on, because -- believe it or not -- I'd never actually seen the tree before, and I've lived here basically my entire life. So I figured I ought to see it at least once.

I'm not entirely sure why we never stopped when I was a kid. I remember wanting to see it, and I think I asked if we could stop at least once or twice, but the answer was always no. My best guess is that my parents figured anything built around a single tree must be a tourist trap and therefore -- and here's the key thing -- expensive. Sort of like the Trees of Mystery, except singular, and not mysterious.

On the news last night, people were hauling away chunks of the tree as souvenirs. Being a county park and all, I'm not sure that was precisely the legal thing to do, but I can't say I'm surprised. At least none of the pieces have shown up on eBay yet. (I just checked.) Possibly that won't happen until power and phone service is restored out on the coast.



Other photos of the tree (if you're interested) at GoLiNiel, Visit Old Growth Forests, tien mao's little read book, no fish, no nuts, LewisAndClarkTrail.com, and OregonPhotos.com. The latter has a tall stitched vertical panorama from the base of the tree. I wish I'd thought of that. Not that I could've gotten that close anyway. Not safely or legally, at any rate.




If you've ever tried taking photos of a tall tree, you might've noticed that getting it right is harder than you might expect. It's tall, and you're near the base of it. Point the camera up to get the whole tree, and the perspective goes all wonky, so that the tree looks like it's falling over backwards. Ok, I realize that's what eventually happened here, so the falling-over look was merely premature. But the tree wasn't actually leaning noticeably when I took the photos.

If, instead, you hold the camera flat, you just get the base of the tree and a chunk of uninteresting foreground. So that's not desirable either. People generally go with option 1 and call it good, and it's common enough that people have gotten used to how it looks. But it still isn't correct.

Your third option involves spending money for specialized photo gear. Either a tilt shift lens for your SLR, or you can go all out and get a view camera. Here's a photo of some redwoods with some tilt-shift action going on. It's not a perfect example of the genre, but at least the trees aren't all leaning backwards at crazy angles.

If you're using a little compact digicam like I was, you have no option three, and you're out of luck unless you figure out how to fake it in Photoshop or GIMP, and I haven't sat down and puzzled that out just yet. And if I did, and it turned out to be sufficient, that would mean one less specialized widget I'd have a good excuse to buy. So I'm not sure how avidly I want to pursue digital solutions.

pinecone

A few days ago I promised to post some pinecone macro photos, and here they are, for good or ill.

Generally speaking you're supposed to have the lens stopped wayyyy down so you get adequate depth of field this close. But if you do that, you need to compensate by pouring mass quantities of light onto the doodad you're photographing, and I just don't have that kind of lighting gear at my disposal. If you leave the lens at a wider aperture you'll get the dreamy sort of effect you see in the top photo. I really like this effect, actually.

the same damn acorn again

I think I may need a little more variety in my subject matter. I'd really rather be taking photos of flowers, but it's not exactly spring out there, is it? I guess I could go buy some flowers or rob someone's flowerbed or something, but it just wouldn't be the same somehow.

While I'm waiting impatiently for the seasons to run their course, I've been taking some pics of a pinecone I had on my desk at work. I've forgotten where I originally picked it up or why, but it'll be a change from the acorn, I guess.

assorted forays & follies

Or, further adventures in the blogo-doldrums. Today's post is an assortment of pics I took for posts that didn't pan out. Either I didn't have enough material for a post, or I just couldn't get excited enough to do the research, or the universe failed to cooperate. Seems like it's always something these days.

So the first 3 pics are of Wahkeena Falls, out in the Gorge. I suppose these are fine so far as they go, but I was out there because I just bought a new toy and wanted to try it out. My "new" toy is an old film SLR camera from the late 1960s, all-manual, all-mechanical, no handholding of any kind. I need to track down a battery for its light meter (which I understand is a bit rudimentary anyway) so I was using my lil' digital camera to make exposure guesstimates: Set the ISO to match the film you're using, and zoom a little so the field of view is more or less the same as the camera's 50mm lens. Then tinker with aperture & shutter speed until you get a photo that looks ok, and transfer those settings to the old SLR and take the same shot with it. Lather, rinse, repeat. It sounds kind of tedious, but I'm just trying to learn how to use this new toy right now. I don't expect miraculous results, and I don't expect any results quickly.

That last bit is something I've been telling myself a lot lately, because it turns out I hadn't threaded the film properly the first time around. I was doing all that work and not actually taking useful photos. Dammit. I think I've got it figured out now, so I ought to have something to share here sooner or later. I'd intended to post these waterfall pics along with their film versions, and that's obviously not going to happen. Oh, well.

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One recent morning I made a trip up to Smith Lake in North Portland. The lake is part of the Smith & Bybee Lakes wildlife area, a large wetland preserve right in the middle of a heavy industrial part of town, and next door to the former St. Johns Landfill. With neighbors like those, the lakes don't get a lot of public attention, even though they're huge and right on the city's doorstep. So I thought I'd do a post about the place, but I'm convinced you can't properly do that without at least one nice photo of a bird or two, being a wetland area and all.

So as soon as I showed up, all the birds relocated to the far side of the lake. Seriously. I'm not exaggerating.

At least the moon was out. That's something, I guess.





So the photo below is the best bird I came away with, and I'm sure you'll agree it ain't much. This was taken at maximum zoom + max "digital zoom", and then a heavy-duty bit of unsharp mask to make the thing halfway presentable.

Obviously I just didn't show up with the right gear for the job.









Ok, there were a few things here and there I could take closeups of, at least. Nothing too spectacular, just the usual flowers and Raindrops On Stuff, but my little camera does a creditable job of it, at least when the flower isn't whipping back and forth in the wind, which it was.

The path to the lake had this sign up, which might explain why nobody else was there. Jeepers! West Nile virus! I haven't had any flulike symptoms lately, so I'm probably ok, but still. Freakin' West Nile virus! Yow!



Ok, here's the gross part, which I barely managed to avoid stepping on/in. I'm not a zoological CSI type (if such a thing exists) but I'd bet a heron did this. Every time I visit Smith Lake, I run across something like this, something that indicates this place is the real deal. Sometimes it's just various animal prints in the mud. A few years ago I ran across a tree freshly felled by beavers.

I thought about posting these frog pics separately, and titling it something like "'What's Grosser Than Gross?' Edition", but that seemed a little crass and juvenile. Ok, so I still posted the photos, but I didn't make them the main event. That counts for something, right?

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Ok, returning within the bounds of good taste, here are a couple of fall foliage photos from downtown Portland. These are taken from the same spot, one through a pair of cheap sunglasses, and the other with the homemade infrared filter I put together a while back.





I've gone too long without any Tanner Springs photos. So here's one.



And I believe the moon requires no introduction. Had to do a bit of cleanup on this one, but I think it turned out pretty well for a handheld shot at night. In other words, it's due to luck, not skill. Story of my life, or so it seems sometimes.

Metzger Park: Kingdom of the Spiders

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You can always tell it's fall by all the spiders. Huge freakin' spiders, everywhere you look. I ran across these particular huge freakin' spiders down at Metzger Park, near Washington Square. The place has got to be prime habitat for gigantic spiders, at least for the moment.

If my spider field guide is right, these beasties are nothing but common garden spiders. Just inordinately well-fed ones.

Taking photos of spiders is a challenge with my puny little point-n-shoot camera. Its autofocus is arachnophobic, so spiders always end up as blurry blobs in front of nice sharp backgrounds. Manual focus was an afterthought when they designed the camera, and you have to twist a knob and press a couple of buttons to turn it on. Then you get a postage stamp sized region on the LCD that shows you what the camera's focused on, or it does if your target's big enough, and you squint a bit, and you're lucky.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that these are merely intermediate results in my continuing quest to take a decent photo of a spider on a web, similar to the third-rate squirrel photos I post here now and then. Focusing properly is one big issue. Another is that the little bastards just won't hold still for the camera. All you have to do is breathe on the web a little and they run away. I suppose it'd be a lot more worrisome if the spiders didn't run away. If a spider ever stands its ground, itching for a fight, I think I'll be the one running away, thank you very much.

The spiders are only one of the park's many horrors. Ok, maybe I'm overstating that, but they did film part of a stupid horror movie here back in 1992. I've never actually watched Dr. Giggles, but I have it on good authority that it's a truly rank piece of filmmaking, wretched even by filmed-in-Portland standards, and that's really saying something.

The Kingdom of the Spiders bit in the title refers to another cheesy horror movie I haven't seen (yet), this one starring the one, the only, William Shatner. I'm probably harming my bad movie street cred by admitting to two such movies I haven't seen in the same post, but hey.

If you're in the mood for a bad Shatner movie, and you can't quite stomach Star Trek V, may I recommend the Shat's singular work in White Comanche. Ok, not precisely singular, in that he plays twin half-breed Indians, one good (and "civilized"), the other psychotic, peyote-mad, and evil through and through. It's a real hoot. Trust me on this.... But I digress.

I suppose you could count zombies as the park's third horror, since the mall's just a short drive away. C'mon, you've seen 'em too. Waddling from a Suburban to a waiting table at the Fatcake Cheesery, devouring everything in its path. Splattering blood and gore everywhere during a frantic 3% off sale at Nordstrom. Oh, the horror of it all!

So anyway, I'll get to the park itself in a minute, if you're still interested. But first some flowers. Yes, there's more to the place than freakin' humongous spiders and crappy horror movies. Honest.

Before anyone complains, I realize I'm being patently unfair to the place, and I'm sure the park is in reality a perfectly nice and pleasant, if unremarkable, spot. I do realize that. It's just that with the spiders, and the horror movie thing, certain themes begin to suggest themselves. And, y'know, Washington County's extracted a fair chunk of tax money out of me over the years (although not at present), and my taxes went to support the park all that time, and this is the very first bit of enjoyment I've ever gotten from the place. So I think I'm entitled, don't you?

As longtime Gentle Reader(s) of this humble blog must've noticed by now, I have this occasional and rather silly hobby of tracking down local parks, monuments, greenspaces, and so forth, and taking some photos and writing a few words about them here. C'mon, I already admitted it was silly, and I saved it for the end, so you have to admit I still have some sense of perspective. C'mon. Please?

I'd been mildly curious about Metzger County Park for a while, and I happened to be in the area, so I thought I'd take a peek. I don't expect anyone other than me to find this intriguing, but Washington County has exactly two county parks: The huge one out at Hagg Lake, and this one. All other parks on the westside are either city parks, or part of the Tualatin Hills park district. So the place is kind of an anomaly in a bureaucratic sense, but other than that it looks like any other neighborhood park. I suppose it just happened not to be within an incorporated city or the Tualatin Hills district boundaries, so the county ended up with the job somehow. I recall reading some years ago that the county wanted out of the parks business, and wanted either the state or Metro to take over Hagg Lake. I imagine they also wanted to unload Metzger Park on someone else too, but so far they've still got both of them.

I wasn't entirely accurate earlier when I said there were two parks. Technically there's at least one more county park, a place called Rippling Waters Park, located on Gales Creek way out past Forest Grove. If you need another little bit of trivia you'll probably never be able to use, I've got more of the story here, although (as usual) no definitive answers. For what it's worth, that same post also mentions Multnomah County's sole remaining county park, a nano-sized one it kept after handing all the others over to Metro. See? I told you it was a silly hobby. Possibly even a stupid one. Although not as bad as trainspotting, though. Man, those guys are dweebs.

I'm afraid the photos I've got here will give you an unbalanced idea of the place. It's not just forests and flowers and titanic bloodsucking arachnids. There's also a grassy lawn for picnics, some tennis courts, a play structure, and a 60's-era community center building with some roses around it. Nothing here to go out of your way to see, really. Oh, well. Curiosity satisfied. Mission accomplished.

McIver State Park foray

I usually start these out by saying "today's adventure takes us to...", but I probably shouldn't this time. I've gotten the distinct impression that basically everyone in town except me goes to McIver State Park all the time, and has done so for years. Ok, I might be exaggerating a little, and just everyone on the eastside has been going there for years. Here's a map -- the park is the V-shaped green bit just west of Estacada:

So apologies in advance if I'm going on about your home away from home here. I grew up in Aloha, and we didn't head out to Estacada all that often. Basically never, in fact. I vaguely knew there was this large green blob on the map next to the Clackamas River, but I'd never been there and didn't know anything about the place.

Ok, that's not strictly true, I did know the park had hosted the Vortex I hippie festival, I mean, "Biodegradable Festival of Life", back in 1970. Which I know because this city's thick with nostalgic boomer types who can't seem to STFU about the 60's, just like the way their parents go on and on about World War II every chance they get. I swear, if I'm 50 years old and you ever hear me waxing nostalgic about the early 90's, insisting they were the Golden Age of music and culture or whatever, you can just go ahead and slap me silly.

Of course there's a flip side to all of that. The only thing more tedious than people waxing nostalgic about the 60's are those prim bow-tie-wearing cultural-conservative twits on FoxNews whining about how the 60's ruined everything and must be "undone" somehow, at all costs. So don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not one of those people. It's just that poking fun at hippies is fun, easy, and mostly harmless. They probably won't even notice, much less care.

I think knowing about that festival colored my expectations of the park. I really didn't expect it to be scenic at all, I just figured it'd be a large open space where a few hundred thousand stupid hippies could squat in the mud and trip out to an endless procession of cheesy jam bands. I wouldn't have guessed there'd be high cliffs overlooking the Clackamas River. That doesn't seem very hippie-friendly if you ask me. Possibly that was the whole point. As the oldtimers love to remind us, the festival was organized by the state's Republican governor to lure the city's disaffected war-protesting youngsters away and keep 'em "sedated" while the American Legion convention was in town. If a few hippies decided gravity was a bummer, man, and tried to fly away off the cliffs, hey, even better. Oddly the festival seems to have gone off without any reported fatal incidents. Although it's entirely possible some random hippie just wandered off and disappeared and hasn't been missed by anyone for nearly 40 years. It wouldn't surprise me.

I've never been into the whole psychedelic thing, but I did take a couple of cool/weird infrared photos at the park. I think they're probably groovy enough for our present purposes.

A couple of links about Vortex I from out on the interwebs, before we move on:

• "Vortex I or why there was no Vortex II", from someone who was there.
  
• And a brief reminiscence by someone who lived nearby. Her reaction is mostly "ugh".
• The PSU Vanguard's book review of ""The Far Out Story of Vortex 1", a recent book about the festival.
• A recent post on the book's author's MySpace page noting that there's also a Vortex I documentary, and it's showing at the Clinton St. Theater this very evening (9/20/07). I don't believe in fate, but that's a rather amusing coincidence. Although I don't actually plan on attending.

So enough about hippies, dammit. At one overlook above the river there's a plaque honoring Milo McIver, once chairman of the state highway commission, the predecessor of today's ODOT. The plaque was executed by Avard Fairbanks, the same sculptor who did the Campbell Memorial plaque at Portland Firefighters' Park.

As fate would have it (if I believed in fate, that is), I was just down at Powell's Technical a couple of hours ago, and right there in the store's free bin was a book with Mr. McIver's name on it. I figured it was appropriate so I grabbed it, even though 90% of it consists of boring trigonometric tables. If that strikes your fancy, or you simply need to build yourself a standard highway spiral, ODOT has the current 2003 version of the book (or at least part of the book) here [PDF].

Heading up the state highway commission obviously commanded a great deal more honor and respect than it does now. Besides McIver, you might also recognize the name Glenn L. Jackson, as the I-205 bridge in east Portland is named in his honor.

So about the park itself. There's an upper area with the cliffs, a large picnic area, and such, and there's a lower part down by the river. There are actually two ways down to the river but I only checked out one of them; if you haven't noticed yet, this is not really a comprehensive post about the park's amenities. I didn't play any disc golf, or camp, or fish, or look for bats, or go horseback riding, or float down the Clackamas River on an inner tube, carrying a six-pack. Although I saw a few people doing that and it looked like fun. Fashionable Portlanders sneer at the practice, figuring that it's something trailer-trash people out in Clackamas do, so therefore it's bad and couldn't possibly be any fun. I hadn't really given it a lot of thought before, but it was a hot day, and the river was very cold, and I can see the attraction. Haven't actually tried it, I'm not real keen on the whole "getting plastered and falling in the river and drowning" thing, although I understand that's an optional part of the experience.

So basically I just wandered around with a camera for a couple of hours looking for photogenic stuff. I think I've mentioned before that the state parks department has started an annual photo contest, with the winning photos appearing in the next year's Oregon State Parks calendar. So I spent the day looking for material, here and at Bonnie Lure, the other state park near Estacada, with a side trip over to Fearless Brewing (which I mentioned before here). I later discovered my poor little camera doesn't have enough megapixels to qualify, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have used any of these pics even if they'd been eligible. But at least I'm getting a blog post out of the adventure, which I guess is something. And besides, there's always next year.

PS, here's a heron I saw down by the river. Besides loading up on additional megapixels, I think I'll need to look for a telephoto lens with a little more oomph to it. I know I've sung the praises of "digital zoom" before, but it's really no substitute for having a proper long, if rather Freudian-looking, lens at one's disposal.