Lower Bridge Creek Falls

In the previous post (that is, the one about Bridge Creek Falls, in the Oregon Coast Range), I forgot to even mention that it has a downstream sibling. Lower Bridge Creek Falls is easier to see in that you don't have to race across busy Highway 6 to see it. The creek drops at least as far as the upper falls, I think, and it drops onto rocks next to the Wilson River -- and it probably goes straight into the river during the wet season.

But snobs and pedants and internet busybodies of all types turn up their noses at it, because the creek travels under Highway 6 in a pipe and you can see the pipe from some angles, and if your really overthink it a bunch it kinda-sorta looks a bit like it might be untreated outflow from some chemical plant going into a river full of endangered species. That isn't what it is, of course, and (as far as I know) the stream is just as pristine as anything else in the Coast Range. It is probably true that no matter how good your photos of it are, nobody will want a print of it on the wall of their outdoor gear store if it shows the creek coming out of a pipe. It's possible nobody will want a print of it on their wall, by the breakfast nook, strictly for aesthetic reasons. But, I mean, stuff like that can be covered up with a bit of Disney landscaping magic if need be, or the culvert and pipe could be replaced with a tiny little mini-bridge so it looks more natural from below, or who knows. Maybe plant some vines to deemphasize the WPA stonework under the bridge next to the falls, and swap out the ugly chainlink fence along the road, above the falls, with just about anything else that still works as a fence. I dunno, that probably wouldn't help. To misquote Upton Sinclair, there's just no pleasing people whose livelihoods depend on rage clicks.

On the other hand, the internet being internet-level mad about this one means there isn't much about it on the interwebs, and I can point you at all of it, or at least everything that Google thinks is worth indexing -- which seems to be less and less original human-created content as time goes on. Pages at Waterfalls West, My Wild Adventure, and Exploring My Life, and a cameo in an OregonHikers trip report. Also a couple of stock photos on Alamy, and a clip of stock video footage on something called Pond5, and a brief YouTube video from 2013. And that last one I only found thru DDG, even though Google and YouTube are parts of the same vast, lumbering monolith and you'd think its search tentacle would do an excellent job of indexing its video tentacle, wouldn't you? But no, or at least not anymore.

Bridge Creek Falls

Next we're paying a quick visit to Bridge Creek Falls, in the Oregon Coast Range right off Highway 6, at the Tillamook State Forest's "Footbridge Day Use Area and Trailhead". Like most of the recreation spots along Highway 6, the turnoff is a bit awkward and you'll miss it entirely if you blink at the wrong time.

Getting to the falls from the parking lot is not difficult if you know what you're doing. The one exciting part is that the falls are on the other side of the highway, so you have to walk back up to the road, look for the trail on the other side of the highway, and sprint across when nobody's coming. Be patient and wait as long as you need to, or come back a different day when the road isn't packed with seniors in RVs and angry business dudes in BMWs who desperately want to pass the RVs. Or more precisely, they paid good money for that M5, and Highway 6 would be an ideal road for doing M5 stuff except for that one stupid RV chugging along at 20mph. Now if there was just a good place to whip around those geezers and really floor it the way its Bavarian creators intended... which in practice means you get to catch up to the next RV that much faster. And somehow there's always another RV up there chugging away. Passing one RV is easy. Passing another one every 10 minutes is annoying but doable. But somehow, passing all of them is a whole different sort of problem, and might involve some variation on Zeno's paradox.

Assuming you don't get M5'd while crossing the street, there's an old sign for the trail. It's the only sign, for the only trail, you can't miss it. The first thing you'll notice are stairs. And not just any stairs, created with dirt and boards and maybe some chicken wire. No, these are carved stone stairs, made by people who knew what they were doing, and they don't look recent. What you're looking at is a vestige of the 1930s WPA project that created Highway 6 in more or less its current form. Modernizing the old Wilson River Road became urgent after summer 1933, when the northern Coast Range was devastated by the first of the Tillamook Burn series of forest fires. At one point the new road was planned to open by December 1936, per this map, but that goal slipped due to funding and construction difficulties. Over the course of the year, the project was repeatedly funded and canceled, and authorities quarreled over things they should have worked out before starting, like who was paying for what, and whether the road could legally charge tolls.

Things continued along that way for a few more years, and eventually 1941 rolled around and the road was finally almost ready to open. So they announced a grand opening gala for August 19th, but quickly canceled that, blaming it on a typo. Then the September 19 date was rained out, and the new road finally opened without fanfare in October 1941. The state planned to treat this as a sort of soft opening and still have the planned grand opening gala in the following spring. I couldn't find any indication that this ever actually happened. I imagine that, like a lot of big plans, it just sort of fell by the wayside after Pearl Harbor.

During all that news about the roadwork, there wasn't anything in the paper about their plans for the Bridge Creek area specifically, or a list of places that were be brought up to WPA standards. The latter would be interesting in case there are other examples of their design work along the way, but forgotten out there in the forest somewhere. And maybe there are still records of a master plan on file somewhere, though I'm not sure who gets those after the responsible federal agency is abolished, like the WPA was. Maybe the National Archives would have that? In any case, Oregon newspapers did not mention Bridge Creek Falls by name until the 2020s: First a March 2020 roundup of scenic Coast Range waterfalls worth visiting, and again in October 2021 as one of the highlights of the Wilson River Trail.

Some links from around the interwebs, mostly concerning the falls, the river, the footbridge over the river, and the various trails radiating out from the far side of the bridge.

• OregonWaterfalls
• Waterfall Record
• PNW Photo Blog
• Aaron's Waterfall World
• The Outdoor Project
• The Hiking Project
• Trail Run Project
• Oregon Discovery
• The Narrative Image
• Day by Day - Rock Climbing & Life
• Wandering Yuncks
• my morning moxie
• Paul's Bizarre Website

Oh, and there's also

another Bridge Creek Falls in Oregon, in Deschutes County, upstream of famous Tumalo Falls. That waterfall was even mentioned once in the Oregonian a few years before the coastal one, in a 2017 article about things to do in the Bend area.

The Wave

I was out at the coast recently and stopped in Cannon Beach, and happened to park at a municipal lot a block or so off the main drag. The lot has a couple of public restrooms, and a small but very shiny and sparkly sculpture nearby that seems to get leaned on a lot by people waiting for someone in the restrooms. I took a couple of photos when it (the art) wasn't in use, so here they are. One thing I didn't see was a nameplate or any kind of indication who made it or what it was called, but I correctly assumed the city or local tourism office or someone was bound to have a public art page covering Cannon Beach, aand I was right again. So thanks to that, I can report that this is called The Wave, and it was made by Northwest artist Sharon Warman Agnor, and a local news site in Vancouver (WA) interviewed her back in 2017. I don't know the exact year it was made or when it arrived at the beach, but apparently Cannon Beach has a program similar to Lake Oswego where the city puts art on display for a year and then asks the public to vote on which one (if any) to buy and add to the permanent collection. The walking tour guides say The Wave won the voting after its trial year in town, but doesn't say what year that was. I really thought this detail was important I could probably just start calling or emailing people; it's a small town and it seems like everyone who actually lives there knows each other to some degree, so someone is bound to remember.

lee kelly sculpture at salishan

Ok, so here's another post that's been lurking in my Drafts folder for ages. During a summer 2014 trip to the Oregon Coast, I stayed at the groovy 60s hotel at Salishan for a few days, and (though I hadn't planned it this way) got a couple of blog posts out of it. The latter post was about a print on the wall in my hotel room, and in it I mentioned something about the hotel's developer being a big patron of the arts, both at the hotel & elsewhere. Among other things, he was responsible for the ginormous Lee Kelly sculpture along the Willamette river in the Johns Landing area, plus the 60s & 70s-era art all over the hotel grounds. Which brings us to the above photo. The sculpture pictured is in a courtyard outside the hotel's conference center, and as soon as I saw it I thought, hey, wait, I think I know who made that, and (for good or ill) I've tracked down a lot of his stuff over the lifetime of this humble blog. Unfortunately the courtyard was taped off for an event and I couldn't get any closer to it, and ended up with just the one photo.

I figured that would be fine, and I could just Google/Bing/Yahoo/Lycos it when I got home & flesh out the post from there. So I tried that, and... not so much. I found a 1981 Oregonian article about the hotel, which confirmed the thing is a Kelly, and said it went in around 1977... but it didn't mention what it's called. The usual procedure here is that I need to know a name, otherwise I don't have a blog post title, and untitled posts are stuck in Drafts limbo until that little problem gets sorted. But as far as I can tell that one little factoid doesn't exist anywhere on the interwebs. I tried again just now and all I found was someone else's photo of it, from a better angle but again without a name. I suppose I could have just called or emailed the hotel and asked them, like some sort of wild and crazy extrovert (who doesn't mind coming off as a weirdo), but I've come this far in the blog (non-)industry without resorting to, y'know, interacting with people, so why start now? Especially since there's a very good chance it's just called "Untitled" anyway. So this post has sat around in Drafts for close to four years now, which is a bit much. So I'm going to go ahead and declare a statute of limitations on unsolved minor mysteries that nobody else cares about, and post this anyway.

And hey, if you happen to know the answer, the comments are open. I actually just re-enabled anonymous comments as a goodwill gesture for the GDPR era. The new regulations don't actually require that, but I just wanted to emphasize that while Google/Blogspot and Flickr might do tracking stuff with cookies (and I have no control over that), I don't have access to that data and I personally don't track anything or anyone, and have zero interest in doing so. I also don't have or want anyone's email address, phone number, pager, fax, telex, etc., and wouldn't use them if I somehow had them (even if it would help with a blog post title). Hell, I've been known to repeatedly forget the names of coworkers I've worked with for years. I mention all this because my Blogspot dashboard was badgering me to do or say something official about GDPR compliance, so here you go.

NW 18th St. Plaza, Lincoln City

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Lincoln City, on the Oregon Coast, is a long, sprawling affair along US 101, with no particular city center to it. Today's city only formed in 1965 after a handful of adjacent beach towns consolidated, so it does have several small commercial districts here and there along the highway. The Oceanlake district is the closest the town has to a downtown, with a few blocks of one and two story midcentury retail buildings. Many of these storefronts are antique shops today, with a few restaurants and used book stores mixed in. It's not quite the trendy chi-chi area the city would prefer it to be, so in recent years they've put together an urban renewal plan for the neighborhood, to figure out how to make it a more attractive destination.

The city's glossy 2013 urban renewal guide describes the various projects they've undertaken to brighten up the area, including the subject of today's post, a little pedestrian plaza at NW 18th St. and US 101:

NW 18th Street was a “T” intersection with Highway 101 and presented access problems for drivers from the residential area. It also created problems when cars stopped in the highway waiting to make a left turn onto NW 18th.

The street was closed at the highway and a small public plaza was constructed. Paver stones were included the walking surface, benches were installed, electric power was provided and local merchants bought decorative flags to display periodically.

The location was a natural site for a public art piece and the Lincoln City Art Committee commissioned a local metal artist to create a four-panel piece set into a concrete bench, celebrating our views of Cascade Head.

The screen was created by local artist Don Wisener in 2008. I source I ran across once, but can't locate now, claimed the screen design was chosen so the art would double as a windbreak. I can't prove it because I can't find the original link anymore, but it would certainly be a sensible thing to do in this part of the world.

Above and Below

So I went out to the coast for a couple of days recently, and stayed at the hotel at Salishan, just south of Lincoln City. The hotel dates to 1965 and still has a swanky 60s feel to it, due in part to all the then-contemporary art scattered around the complex. The developer behind Salishan was John Gray, who also developed Sunriver south of Bend, Skamania Lodge in the Gorge, and parts of the Johns Landing area just south of downtown Portland. When not developing resorts, Gray was president of Omark Industries, a forest products equipment maker, and was also an avid patron of the arts, focusing exclusively on local artists. Hence the giant Lee Kelly sculpture outside the old Omark headquarters building on Macadam.

Now that you're up to speed on the background of the place: I'm sitting on the sofa in my hotel room, and I look up at the art on the wall right over me. It's a linocut print with a sort of circus theme, and I notice it's signed by Manuel Izquierdo. Izquierdo is best known as a sculptor (or at least he is to me), and I'm rather fond of his work, so I've tracked down a fair number of his creations around town. I'm not sure I'd ever seen one of his prints before, though, so I figured I ought to snap a couple of photos and, um, create a blog post around it. So this print is titled Above and Below, and is dated 1976. The Portland Art Museum has a copy as well, donated by the artist's estate in 2010, but it's not currently on view.

This post probably involved the least effort ever, on the photo end. All I had to do was roll over and get my phone and take a few photos, without ever getting off the sofa.

Salishan Beach

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Here are a few photos from a deserted Oregon beach in mid-August. That doesn't sound possible, does it? To understand what's going on here, I have to give a little background first. Oregon's famous Beach Bill reserves all beaches along the Oregon Coast as a public right-of-way; in fact beaches are legally a state highway, though obviously they don't function as one. (This legal quirk is why it fell to the state highway commission to famously dynamite a beached whale back in 1970.) The right of way only extends up to the normal high tide mark, so while the beach itself is public, access to it is a whole other story. Particularly since the coast is also full of gated communities, and casual interlopers typically aren't really their thing.

The Salishan Resort sits on Siletz Bay, a few miles south of Lincoln City. Parts of it date back to the early 1960s, just before modern environmental laws really got going. The resort includes a hotel as well as a big gated community of funky 1970s and 1980s vacation homes, and the whole complex is built around a golf course. A small shopping area and spa along US 101 were added later. The gated community fronts on several miles of public beach, including a stretch of houses that runs much of the length of sandy Salishan Spit. Those houses probably wouldn't stand up under a tsunami or a really serious storm, and you certainly wouldn't get environmental approval to build them today, but it must have seemed like a great idea back in the 1970s. Anyway, you have a situation where the long stretch of beach here is publicly owned, but the road to the beach is gated and mere mortals aren't allowed through it.

It turns out that the beach here isn't entirely inaccessible, if you know the secret. And don't worry if you don't know the secret, because I'm about to tell you. There's a short, easy trail to the beach that begins right next to the Salishan shopping center, between it and the spa complex. The trailhead is unmarked other than a "No through traffic" sign, and looks like a service road or something. I don't know if the developers were legally obligated to provide a trail, or they did it on their own to ward off a lawsuit, or precisely what terms the trail was constructed under, but they clearly weren't obligated to advertise the existence of a trail, and they don't. I only know about it because I was staying at the hotel; the front desk there will explain how to get to the beach, but you have to ask.

If you find the trail and follow it, you quickly come to a fork in the path: Golf carts straight ahead, "Nature Trail" to the right. You want to take the nature trail here. It runs along a hedge-topped levee between the golf course and Siletz Bay, which also serves as a windbreak for the golf course. Part of the way it feels like you're walking along in a tunnel inside the hedge. Continue along the trail and you get to a forested section, and eventually you come to a clearing next to Salishan Dr., the main road through the subdivision. Just off to the left, there's an intersection with Sea Dunes Rd., a brief bit of road that takes you to the beach access point. Take the walkway over the dunes and you're at the beach, and it's quite possible nobody else will be there. I'm sure it helped that it was 58 and foggy the day I visited, and the shopping center had closed for the day, but I doubt the beach ever gets very busy. From here you can walk south toward the Gleneden Beach area, or north to the tip of the spit. At that point it's a stone's throw across a narrow channel to Lincoln City. The channel is the entrance to Siletz Bay, though, so I suspect trying to swim across would be a deeply unwise choice.

Ft. George Garden, Astoria

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I was rummaging through an old iPhoto library a while back and noticed I had a few photos of of the Ft. George Garden in Astoria, an overgrown rose garden surrounded by an ornate iron fence, on Exchange St. behind the Fort George Brewery. These photos were taken several years ago, shortly before the brewery opened. Apparently they've employed a gardener to look after the place, so it may not be as overgrown as it was the last time I was there.

The garden sits next to a small city park marking the site of Fort Astoria, a fur trading post founded in 1811, which happened to be the first American settlement on the Pacific coast. After only two years in business, the fort was sorta-captured by the British during the War of 1812, and spent the next 33 years as Fort George (as in King George the 3rd), an outpost of the Hudson's Bay Company. The post was later abandoned as the Hudson's Bay Company moved its main operations inland to Fort Vancouver. I don't know whether the garden itself has any particular historical significance. Based on the fencing I'm going to guess the garden (or at least the fence) dates to the late 19th or early 20th century, or later if someone was aiming for a retro look.

Haystack Rock, Cannon Beach

From the archives, a few circa-2007 photos of Haystack Rock at Cannon Beach, OR. Not to be confused with the other Haystack Rock further south at Pacific City. Or, according to Wikipedia, a third Haystack Rock far to the south in Coos County. Curiously, Wikipedia mentions zero Haystack Rocks outside of Oregon, so apparently we're alone in using agricultural metaphors to describe large-scale seaside geology. I have no explanation for why that might be, so feel free to grab that hypothesis and run with it for your dissertation, assuming you can prove it and you think it'll help.

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Munson Creek Falls

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Today's adventure takes us to Munson Creek Falls, a few miles south of Tillamook where the Coast Range meets dairyland. It's a surprising place to find a 319 foot waterfall, at least if you're accustomed to Columbia Gorge waterfalls.



The falls are a state park, so there's a fairly large and visible sign for the turn off US 101 (which is a left turn if you're heading south from Tillamook). But the road you'll turn onto doesn't look like a road to somewhere you'd want to go. It's paved, at first, but it's quite narrow and is in very poor condition, with ginormous potholes all over the place. There are houses on either side of the road, and as far as you can tell you're just driving around on some random rural road out in dairy country.

(Technically the place is a "state natural site" rather than a "state park". I'm not sure what that's supposed to indicate, but my gut feeling is that it means they aren't going to spend any state money improving the road anytime soon.)



Once you're past the last houses the road turns to gravel, and it looks like you've wandered onto a random Forest Service road in timber country. It's not any wider than the paved portion, and there are a few big potholes here and there, including one in the middle of a bridge (!), but for the most part the gravel part of the road is in better condition than the paved portion. It's effectively a one lane road most of the way, so you need to watch for oncoming traffic. I didn't encounter any log trucks, but it definitely looks like a road where log trucks are a serious possibility, so pay attention.



There are also a couple of intersections to keep an eye out for. The route to the falls is clearly marked (so long as nobody monkeys with the signs), at least. There's no cell service out here to distract you while you're driving (at least if you're a T-Mobile customer like me), so you'd have to work at it a bit to get lost, unless you planned on using Google Maps for directions. If you do manage to get lost somehow, I have no idea where you might end up if you take the wrong turn.



It's a short drive, at least, and pretty soon you'll end up at the parking lot for the falls. From the lot it's an easy 1/4 mile walk to the falls viewpoint. The trail itself is well maintained, in much better shape than the road, and almost as wide. You still won't be right next to the falls at the viewpoint, and there's a railing with a sign saying it's super dangerous, prohibiting you from taking a step further. In practice you can go a bit further ahead without heroic efforts, but the view of the falls is actually better back at the viewpoint. And if you're carrying a mini-tripod like I was, the "none shall pass" fence at the viewpoint is a good place to set up and start taking longer exposures of the falls (which is what you do to get the classic silky water effect people often do with waterfalls).



Speaking of photos, the main problem I ran into was that, on a sunny day, the foliage in the foreground was bright, while the falls remained in shadow in the background. I expect this happens a lot in this location, so getting exposure and colors right can present a challenge. A cloudy day might be an asset in this case, which is nice since the coast has no shortage of cloudy days.

evening fog, lincoln city

Time Capsule, Lincoln City

For reasons I've been unable to determine, back in 2001 Lincoln City planted a time capsule right in the middle of the local outlet mall, to be opened in 2051. I've also been unable to find out why it's leaning like this, or what's inside, or really any other info at all beyond what's on the plaque here.

I can't help but wonder what the surrounding outlet mall will look like in 2051. Like all strip malls, the place doesn't really have an air of permanence about it. It's far enough uphill that it should be safe from any rise in ocean levels (and I should probably avoid the whole subject, for fear of attracting creepy conservative trolls). A Blade Runner-type dystopia seems like another possibility, although Blade Runner is set in 2019, not 2051, so we have just nine years to develop all that cool futuristic technology and then let it all rust and go to seed on us. I'm not really seeing that, which leaves either a.) the Rapture, followed by Armageddon, six headed goats of Babylon, etc., which I don't believe in, or b.) the actual end of everything on January 19th, 2038 when the time_t's roll over.

In short, we're all doomed well before 2051, and we'll never learn what treasures lie within this mysterious structure. Well, unless tweakers break into it in the middle of the night, which is quite possible, being the coast and all.

crab attack!

Ok, technically these crabs aren't attacking. They're basically just sitting there watching the aquarium tourists wander by. But nobody's going to click on post titled "crabs not doing much", are they?




If you search YouTube for "crab attack", I'd guess rougly 90% of the results are actually crabs trying to look threatening as they run away, chased by camera-wielding divers. If you're going to do that and insist the crab's really attacking you and not the other way around, you might as well go all the way and accuse the crab of hiding WMDs before you chase it. Just sayin'.

Wilson River Bridge, Tillamook

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A few photos of the bridge over the Wilson River at Tillamook, just south of the famous cheese factory. Although it looks a bit worse for wear, it still seems like an absurdly grand and out-of-scale bridge for the location. The Wilson River isn't very big, and the site of the bridge is in the midst of flat muddy farm country. Maybe the location is more challenging to build on than it looks. The wikipedia article (above) indicates that this was a very early bridge of its type, so possibly the state prototyped the design here before using it where it was really needed. Dunno.

As one commenter notes below, this is a Conde McCullough bridge (like many bridges along US 101), so it does have historical significance to Oregon. It's not anywhere as big or showy as its better-known siblings in Newport, Florence, Coos Bay, etc.. You can see a distinct family resemblance to other smaller McCullough bridges, though, like the bridge in Oregon City even though the latter is a through arch design.



I should probably point out that these were taken from a moving vehicle, and we didn't stop to take a closer look at the bridge, much less walk across it. I don't think I've made this clear before, but the whole walking across thing is strictly a Portland-area project. Elsewhere it's strictly optional, especially when the area smells heavily of dairy cows.


Btw, this post is getting tons of hits from some somewhere on Facebook. Not sure what that's all about. Anyone want to enlighten me? Thx. Mgmt.

Updated 8/31/10: Aha. We have linkage from the Tillamook Headlight-Herald group on Facebook. One commenter whines about me mentioning the odor, and implies that we city folk don't know where cheese comes from. I guess on the theory that if you love sausage, you ought to love everything about sausage factories too.

I was around cows a lot as a kid, actually. My uncle had a few dozen at least; it seemed like hundreds at the time. I helped out with the cows now and then. I was hauled out of bed in the middle of the night more than once to come watch a calf being born, I guess because it was supposed to be educational or something. And I gotta say, I didn't like the smell of cows then, and I don't much care for it now either. And I do like cheese, and I'm not going to apologize for that. Stop me if you can.

camas flowers

Some camas flowers, taken at the Oregon Coast Aquarium. Camas roots (along with the unrelated wapato) were traditional dietary staples for many Native American tribes of the region. It surprises me a little that, despite the whole foodie/locavore thing that's been so popular of late, I've never heard of anyone trying to put either tuber back on local plates. It probably doesn't help that they're both marsh plants, so cultivation's going to take a bit more work and commitment than, say, heirloom tomatoes would. On the demand side, I'm not sure how many people have heard of either plant or know there's a long tradition of eating them. Despite the whole "eating locally" thing, it doesn't seem like the question of what's actually indigenous to the area comes up very often, except for salmon obviously.



For my part, I don't know where one might obtain camas or wapato roots, and I've never tasted either one, so I can't really give any practical advice here. But I thought I'd toss the idea out there, in the event some ambitious and creative local chef stumbles across this humblest of humble blogs. Or hey, why should chefs have all the fun -- as tubers, they're full of starch and thus (one would assume) fermentable, and distillable. Camas root vodka, anyone?

sea anemone

A big sea anemone at the Oregon Coast Aquarium. I don't recall the signage explaining what species of anemone it is, but I'm guessing it's probably a Giant Green Anemone (Anthopleura xanthogrammica), since it looks about right.

As a kid, and like many kids, I thought it was really cool to stick a finger in these guys and watch them fold up. As an adult, it surprises me a little that people still let their kids do this in these safety-paranoid times. I mean, when the anemone sticks to you and starts folding up, it's attempting to sting you and haul you in as lunch, it's just that (like most but not all anemones) it's unable to sting through human skin.



I have a gut feeling we're just waiting for someone's kid to get stung in a paper cut and have a one-in-a-million anaphylactic reaction to a sea anemone. Then there'll be a big media frenzy, and Important Safety Tips, and accusations of bad parenting, and that'll be that for playing in tidepools, yet another item on the ever-lengthening list of things people just shouldn't do anymore. Although I suppose the long-harrassed anemones and other tidepool fauna would breathe a sigh of relief -- if only they had actual brains or central nervous systems of any kind, or gills or lungs to breathe with, for that matter.



So -- generally speaking -- there's no real-world harm in letting a giant green anemone try to nibble on your finger, except maybe bad karma if you believe in that sort of thing (i.e. in some future life, it will be the human, and you the anemone, and you're minding your own business, just waiting for something tasty to wander by. Then it comes along, sticks its finger in you, then rips it away, and laughs cruelly at your attempt to eat it.) In any case, in other parts of the world it may not be such a fun idea to wander around teasing anemones. I haven't come across a single comprehensive list of anemones to avoid, but I've seen a few mentions of something called a "Hell's Fire Anemone" (Actinodendron plumosum) which is apparently bad news. Can't say too I'm disappointed those beasties live in the tropics and not here. There are undoubtedly others you're better off avoiding, too. This page has some general first aid tips on anemone stings if it comes to that.

A couple of pages about giant green anemones at Exploring Rocky Shores of Southern Oregon Coast and orange county nature. The latter points out that California has rather strict laws about never, ever touching any living organism on the coast. So while the anemone itself can't sting you, Officer Friendly's taser just might. The first link suggests that, rather than sticking your finger in the anemone, you bring along some raw fish or shrimp and actually feed the anemones instead of teasing them. I suppose if you really wanted to watch sea anemones in action (and traumatize your kids in the process) you could take it a step further and bring a bag of live feeder goldfish for them to sting and reel in. Not sure that would be legal, though, and there would undoubtedly be plenty of bad karma in it, if you believe in that sort of thing.

infrared, lincoln city

ultraviolet, lincoln city

Doughboy Monument, Astoria

A few old (2007-ish) photos of the "Doughboy Monument", the slightly odd World War I memorial out in Astoria, at the corner of Marine Drive & Columbia Avenue, just east of the Astoria-Megler Bridge. The slightly odd bit is the low building that forms the base of the statue. It doesn't seem to have any obvious purpose, but it does. Any guesses? No? Why, it's a public restroom, of course. Really, it is. It dates back to the 1920's, when there seems to have been a mania for adding public restrooms to various improbable things, like the Oregon City Bridge for instance. I've never seen a good explanation for this. Did people just drink a lot more water than they do today? Beats me.

Astoria, Oregon Daily Photo has a nice post about the monument, including the various inscriptions around it. Which is nice, since they're are too small to see in my photos. The author expands on that in "Astoria's Doughboy Monument: Finding an angle", in which she tries to figure out a good angle to shoot it from. Busy backgrounds in most directions, and wayyy too many overhead wires. I remember running into this problem too when I took the photos in this post, and thanks in advance for pretending you hadn't noticed.

Portland Public Art covers the doughboy here, calling it "dull and mechanical". Also a mention of it (and the sculptor's many similar works) at ~westr. (Scroll down to the "Soldier's Monument" bit.)

The statue on top is titled "Over the top at Cantigny", by the sculptor John Paulding. Cantigny is a small town in France, and the site of the first WWI battle involving US soldiers. The town now features a large memorial to US troops, and another smaller one outside of town. Among those who served at Cantigny was Col. Robert McCormick, later the right-wing owner of the Chicago Tribune. I mention this because he had a 500 acre estate outside Chicago (now a park), which he named "Cantigny". The battle also lent its name to an Army transport ship of the 1920's.