Iron Mountain

Here's a slideshow from Lake Oswego's Iron Mountain Park. It's been on my list for a while but I'm not often down there with free time on my hands. Then one day, not so long ago really, a reason to go there appeared out of the blue: The Lake Grove CVS was the first one in the Portland area, possibly the whole state, that had the latest Covid boosters right when they became available, and for good measure I also got a flu shot in the other arm to keep things interesting, and afterward I figured I needed something to do to get the ol' blood flow circulating and maybe head off some arm soreness later. Definitely mixed results on that part, but the park was a success at least.

Most of the park is a steep south-facing hillside, just short of being a sheer cliff. This oddly rugged terrain was largely created by the city's brief 19th Century cameo as the Pittsburgh of the West. The raw iron-rich volcanic rock was mined here, then turned into iron ingots down by the Willamette in present-day George Rogers Park, which is why there's a big industrial smokestack in the middle of the park.

I think Lake Oswego has technically owned it for quite a while, but the park's current form is quite recent, opening in early 2021 after several years of design work and then construction.

Because this is Lake Oswego, the park has some unusual neigbhors. For one thing, there is -- improbably -- an actual working winery on the slope up above the park. As in, actually growing grapes on your oversized view lot. It's even named "Iron Mountain" in Italian. I think. Though I don't actually speak the language, and never got around to signing up for Duolingo, and Google Translate gives different results depending on whether you spell it as one word or two and whether it's capitalized or not, so who knows. In any case I don't think you can actually see it from anywhere in the park, so if you came here expecting sun-dappled Tuscan vistas you'll have to look elsewhere, I'm afraid.

Other neighbors include: The LO Hunt Club, a country club (one of several archrival country clubs scattered throughout the city), and the municipal tennis center. Because I am not a rich person, I saw "hunt club" and immediately worried about stray bullets, before realizing it's an equestrian club, for when your kid is crazy about horses and wants to learn show jumping and maybe be in the Olympics someday. Or at least not resent you forever for failing to invest in their dreams. The fun part is that you might also encounter horses along the trails, due to some sort of understanding with the city. It's not the first time I've encountered horses on trail, but the other times have all been way out in the Gorge or up in the Cascades. And just like these other times, it was fine; at least the couple of horses I encountered seemed pretty mellow. It sort of stands to reason that a skittish racing thoroughbred is not the sort of horse you want for jumping over things, even if their their spindly legs could handle the landings, which I doubt.

The view from the trail is primarily of Cook's Butte, the city's own mini-volcano (and a close cousin to Mt. Tabor, Mt. Sylvania, Kelly Butte, Highland Butte, and all the others). Which, seen from this angle (and maybe no other angle) seems to loom over Lake Oswego like the big scary volcano in Dante's Peak

.

Weirdly, however, at no point along any of the trails do you catch a glimpse of semi-fabulous, semi-forbidden Oswego Lake itself, not even a glimpse, even though it's literally just a few blocks south of Iron Mountain Boulevard and the park's own parking lot. It could just be due to the topography; if you have a lakefront house due south of the park, you'll have a commanding view of the lake from atop a high cliff. But it also seems possible that the trail layout deliberately avoids views of the lake, and local homeowners may honestly believe their special magic lake could be spoiled somehow by too many peasants simply gazing at it from afar. Either way, you can't see it from here, and you'll have to go somewhere else to sneak a peek at it. And I hate to burst anyone's bubble, but if you came from afar to see it based on seeing it in that one episode of 24, that version of the lake is completely fictional. For one thing, the real lake looks nothing like that. And furthermore, the real city would never tolerate a black person fishing on their lake, especially if he's the President. Also don't eat the fish; the city's primary sewer main runs right down the the length of the lake, above the lakebed, just deep enough so you can't see it, but it's there. They replaced it a few years ago and the new one is said to be much less leaky than its predecessor, but yeah. Also the lake stagnates and fills up with stinky algae in the summer. But I'm told it's fancy European а̀lgæ, and it's what makes the lake the blue cheese of lakes, a thing only a true conoisseur of lakes can appreciate, which is why the peasants mustn't look at it.

Ok, so I snark and snark about LO, but the park really is quite nice. It was a warm September day and parts of the park reminded me a lot of the eastern Gorge around Hood River or so. Dry rocky terrain with garry oak trees and such. And yes, I get that it's a weird microclimate caused largely by the old mining industry here, probably drier due to groundwater draining out thru the many tunnels.

Yes, I said tunnels. Signs explain that the seemingly-solid hillside contains a swiss cheese labyrinth of tunnels, though we're told they're all blocked up and concealed so nobody can get in and get hurt, or maybe crash thru a tunnel wall and end up in someone's wine cellar or art vault or Y2K doom bunker or luxury bondage dungeon or whatever. Still, it's important that you know about all this, just in case. Suppose (for example) that a weird mustache-twirling Lake Oswegan acquaintance of yours invites you over to sample some of the oldest and finest amontillados in existence, and long story short, you somehow end up behind a brick wall in an old mine tunnel deep underground. Your ungracious host might not be aware of all of these old secret entrances to the catacombs, leaving you free to dig your way out in peace, then make your way down to Iron Mountain Blvd. and hail an Uber or something. I mean, it might work, assuming you can find one of these hidden entrances. At least your odds are better than just sitting there yelling for help like an idiot.

As usual, here are a few selected news items from over the years, this time largely chosen for snark value:

• A September 1932 article on scenic hikes close to the city includes a 7 mile loop hike from downtown Lake Oswego out to Lake Grove and back, which (like most of the listed hikes) is accomplished largely by walking along the shoulder of various busy streets that lack sidewalks. The description of this one is kind of confusing due to changed street names, rerouted roads, and neighborhood names that have fallen out of use, but it describes a trail portion of the route that sounds a lot like the main trail thru the park, as it heads east and ends near the country club. In most places I would put in a little caution here that people are driving much larger vehicles than they did when the article came out, and walking along the road is probably not safe anymore, but in 1932 Lake Oswego you risked being squashed by a variety of classic luxury cars. Cadillacs, Duesenbergs, Packards, Pierce-Arrows, Hispano-Suizas, etc., undoubtedly driven by a prominent businessman, or the spouse or mistress thereof, on the way home from a favorite speakeasy, and a twisty film noir plot ensues. Not that it does you any good, having been squished during the first reel of the film and all.

  Anyway, other suggested hikes in the article include a romantic moonlight hike up and over Kelly Butte (!), and a casual stroll from Linnton (way out in far NW Portland, out past the St. Johns Bridge) out to Orenco (now a trendy part of Hillsboro), which back then involved a 10 mile stroll along rural backroads bracketed by scenic rides on the Linnton and Orenco streetcars.

• A 1958 article recapping a little LO history up to that point, as a local historian had a new book out on the subject. The article includes a couple of then-contemporary photos, and sketches of yesteryear, and it notes briefly that the tunnels extended well beyond the present-day park, including under the adjacent country club.
• The earliest mention of the place as an actual city park in the Oregonian was in 1984, when the city was looking at adding sports fields to existing parks and decided Iron Mountain wasn't a good candidate for one due to poor drainage. So they were probably talking about the small flat area around the parking lot. Either that, or these fields would be set up on the hillside for special LO versions of various sports, where the home team kids play with the field overwhelmingly tilted in their favor, and everyone is supposed to pretend not to notice.
• A 1987 article about the Hunt Club fighting with the Lake Corporation over manure and water quality. ODOT was hauling it away as free compost but learned that a Tualatin company wanted to haul it away for their yard debris recycling program (I am not clear on how that would work, I'm just repeating what the article says). The recycling firm did this exactly once and had second thoughts, saying it was too much work and impractical, which in context might mean it was more disgusting than expected and they couldn't imagine repeating the process every week from here on out. Meanwhile, ODOT found a couple of other equestrian clubs in the area who were quite happy to take over as the state's official manure vendors. And thanks to this misunderstanding, the Hunt Club accumulated a large pile of the stuff -- said to be the size of a barn -- over the next couple of years, and runoff began to get into a nearby creek and then into the lake, at which point lawyers got involved and many billable hours were generated. And in the end it someone finally checked in with ODOT again and it turned out that the state government had a near-infinite demand for the stuff -- even when the legislature wasn't in session -- and they were quite happy to swing by and haul the whole barnload away. Seems the whole debacle could have been avoided with a phone call or a fax or two, but as far as I know everyone lived happily ever after. It would have been a much bigger debacle, but a better story, if the ODOT work crew had arrived with unclear instructions and assumed they were supposed to remove the manure mountain by dynamiting it, like they did with that whale back in 1970.

Rosemont Bluff

Next up we're visiting Portland's obscure and very small Rosemont Bluff Natural Area. It's a triangular bit of hillside, just 2.3 acres in all, in a neighborhood of mid-1950s suburban-type houses. From what I've been able to figure out from county survey data, the subdivision to the east ("Rosemont Addition"), was platted out in 1891, and to the south "Marchmont Addition" was filed back in 1889. A bit to the west was "Parkhurst Addition". But the present-day park was part of a larger parcel that was never subdivided, for whatever reason.

Being a large single parcel may have helped clear the way when Multnomah County needed a site for a new modern "juvenile home". The main advocate for building it had been County Judge Donald E. Long, and it was eventually named after him, and it's still in operation under the same name now. Most of the lot was a flat area at the base of the bluff, and "juvie" was built there, served by an extension of NE 68th avenue that curves along the base of the bluff. I haven't seen any evidence that the county ever had specific plans for the bluff itself. So I think what happened is that it became a sort of unofficial neighborhood park. Maybe it was neighborhood volunteers, maybe teenage inmates next door, that info doesn't seem to have made the papers either way. It did happen around the same time the county divested itself of its chronically underfunded, ok, largely unfunded county park system, and maybe that's what prompted them to spin off Rosemont Bluff to the city too. Possibly local residents pushed for the county to do this, thinking they would get a better park out of it. That's just me speculating, but it seems like a reasonable theory in the absence of actual documentation.

It seems like this was successful for a long time; the park got a well-designed trail that connects the upper and lower ends of the bluff, complete with a couple of switchbacks. It felt like it could be a little corner of Mt. Tabor or Washington Park. It was really nice, and somehow felt much larger than it is. Then COVID hit, and apparently the park became a huge homeless camp for a while, and contributed to the general sense that public order had broken down across the city and police were basically just not doing their jobs anymore. I mean, I have a lot of questions about the supposed post-COVID crime wave, how much of it was real and how much media hype, and what the actual causes and effects were, but we're not going to resolve that today.

The key takeaway right now is that the city appears to have decided to abandon the place permanently and walk away and dropkick it into the nearest memory hole, sort of like what they did with Kelly Butte a few decades ago. The City Parks website used to have a page about the place here, but not anymore. There isn't even a copy of it in the Wayback Machine, which is remarkably thorough by city standards. Maybe this was on the theory that homeless people might hop on a computer at the library and use their advanced research skills to find new places to set up camp, and not mentioning it on the website will somehow prevent this from happening. I have my doubts that it really works this way, personally. And call me a cynic if you want, but I think it's just as likely that some well-connected developer wants the land and they just need the public to forget it's supposed to be a city park. Of course they'll also need to move the juvenile facility somewhere else, so if there's a sudden chorus of local movers and shakers insisting that needs to happen ASAP, you can reasonably assume there's a done deal and the fix is in.

So, here are a few items from around the interwebs, offered as evidence that the park really does exist, because apparently I need to do that. Eppur si muove, there are four lights, and all that.

• The two lots on PortlandMaps, showing that the city does technically still own the place, for the time being.
• One Yelp review
• It appears on the old "efiles list", which given the dates on that list probably means the city was already doing occasional maintenance work on the place while the county still technically owned it.
• The park was first mentioned in the paper in 1997 in a brief item about a volunteer cleanup effort
• Those PortlandMaps pages up above will tell you the park is in the North Tabor neighborhood, in fact the eastern park boundary is also the official boundary between North Tabor and Montavilla. But back in 2008 there was a short-lived movement to officially name the whole neighborhood "Rosemont" (after the park) instead, after residents narrowly rejected "North Tabor" in favor of remaining "Center". Which seems thoroughly, hopelessly nondescript, and possibly inaccurate, but the article notes this was one of the city's very first neighborhood associations, dating back to the early 1970s, and the name was originally "CENTER", an acronym standing for "Citizens Engaged Now Towards Ecological Review". Eventually after enough of these proposals the local citizenry relented and went with "North Tabor", which is clearly the most realtor-friendly option. Maybe it finally passed after enough of the local activist Boomers shuffled off to the great big Woodstock festival in the sky, I dunno.
• For what it's worth, a brief Willamette Week item from May 2017 insists that the geographic center of the city is a dive bar on NE 28th in Laurelhurst, but they just say that without proof. I also don't have proof, but I do have a nagging suspicion this isn't the right place either.
• The park was the subject of a 2013 post at Unauthorized Guide to the Parks of the World
• Was the subject of a No Ivy Day event in October 2015
• And of course a 2020 Urban Adventure League post

Killin Wetlands

Next up we're visiting Killin Wetlands, a Metro Nature park near Banks, on the far west side of the metro area. The park comes to about 590 acres overall, but most of it is a swampy lake, and most of the non-swampy part is leased out as farmland, so public access is limited to a small area in the NW corner of the park. So you might feel a bit underwhelmed with what trails and so forth are available just going by the size of the place. The 2016 master plan for the park, essentially what's there now but with a few things punted off to future phases haven't been built yet. In particular, the plan envisons a boardwalk that juts out into the lake for a bit, which would have helped with the sort of photos I had in mind. I had brought a camera with an infrared filter along, thinking the wetlands would be sort of photogenic in an infrared sort of way on a sunny day, but alas no. Here's one photo that I thought turned out ok, at least ok enough for the 'Gram:

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A 2015 Metro doc about the wetland restoration side of the effort mentions they expect restoring the place back to more or less how it was before Euro-American farmers did a number on it will take roughly the same amount of time it took to get to its current state, so something in the 150-200 year range. And yeah, one possibile future may be what I said in the IG caption, people beaming in from near and far just to vibe with the peat. But that was a few years ago, and extrapolating from current trends here in late 2025, it strikes me that another likely possibility is that in the 2220s we'll be in the early centuries of an extended second Dark Age, and we'll be back to tossing people into the nearest peat bog (i.e. here) for witchcraft, or for saying the Earth is round, or knowing numbers greater than 12 or so. On the bright side, that means the wetlands here will be a huge help to the future archeologists of the mid-4440s as they decipher what happened here, and some of the better-preserved ones will end up in museums and be given cutesy nicknames, like that guy they found frozen in the Alps, and everyone will vow not to let it happen again, and they'll really mean it, and who knows, maybe they'll even be right next time, at least for a while.

Singer Creek Falls

Next up we've visiting yet another waterfall in Oregon City that isn't Willamette Falls. Right next to the city's famous municipal elevator, there's an Art Deco walkway with a few flights of stairs that also connects the city's upper and lower halves, and this walkway also includes a water feature that descends the bluff in around 5 stairsteps. This "water feature" is Singer Creek Falls, another of the Northwest's many Works Progress Administration projects from the mid-1930s. The idea here was that they would start with an existing, 'natural' waterfall at this same location and improve on it, giving it clean, modern lines, and adding the ability to easily light the falls at night. This seems like a bizarre idea now, but 1937 was the year of Bonneville Dam and Timberline Lodge, and Man Improving On Nature was all the rage back then.

For more info about that project, there's a city planning page about the falls, plus a page at Living New Deal (which is a great site for general WPA fandom, btw.). Also see a post at Meandering through the Prologue, and a photo at The (Daily) Rail Photo.

Somehow I didn't notice any of this during previous visits to the elevator, and I had no idea it was here until stumbling across it on Google Maps, I guess based on previous search history. I can only speak for myself here, but it's possible that if your brain is focused on looking for midcentury public elevator stuff, maybe an unexpected Art Deco urban waterfall simply won't register, and vice versa. After visiting for the waterfall this time, I later found out that there's public art at the base of the falls, specifically a Lee Kelly sculpture titled Moontrap (2011), which I completely failed to notice at the time. I wonder if it's named after the low-budget SF movie from 1989 starring Walter Koenig and Bruce Campbell. So if I decide I need photos of it I'll need to make yet another visit to the area, and probably miss out on yet another interesting detail while I'm at it.

The usual waterfall websites have absolutely no info about this one, as traditional waterfall snobs aren't really sure what to do with a place like this. So instead we'll have to figure out the height for ourselves, going by the state LIDAR map. If we take this point as the top and this point as the bottom, the falls could be up to 70' high, though that might be a bit generous; we can at least say the cliff is around 70', and the falls may be a few feet shy of that on either end. Also shows what looks like a second path or stairway coming up diagonally from 9th to right around where the stonework ends up top. No stairs or trail are visible on Street View now, so it evidently was closed or fell out of use at some point.

A news item about the upcoming redesign project explained what was coming in detail:

Designed by City Manager J.L. Franzen, a series of waterfalls will feature the Singer Hill park project which was started last Monday under WPA. These falls, formed by diverting Singer creek into a series of five drops by means of natural stone incased in cement, probably will be lighted and will constitute one of the most beautiful spots in the country, either day or night. The WPA crew which is working under the direction of Mr. Miller, foreman, and which will be augmented Monday with additional workers, will brush out the bluff for approximately two blocks between what would be the extension of the alley between Seventh and Eighth streets to the alley between Ninth and Tenth and between the railroad and Singer Hill highway. Trails along the bluff will also be built. The new course for the water which now plunges down the hillside from the outlet at the head of the stairs at Seventh and Singer hill will be 20 feet wide. It will include four 10-foot drops and the other a 12-foot drop. Water will be picked up where it goes under the stairs, carried over the falls which will be just south of the present stream, then dumped into a pool at the foot of the falls. Stone for the falls and pools will be obtained from the city quarry on Center street.

• November 1896: mention of the creek as one of the many Willamette tributaries flooding at the time
• 1909 Journal : a local furniture co. harnessed the creek to power a little 75hp generator, partially powering their operations
• May 1935: proposed as part of a park along the bluff, along with a second WPA project to upgrade everyone in town to a modern, graded gravel road, at minimum.
• September 1935: WPA approved the sum of $1835 toward the project; mentions flood control
• January 1937 (Journal) : the falls turned to icicles during a cold snap, were still under construction at the time
• January 1938 (Journal) : a roundup of great new things around OC, with a photo of the falls and another of the stairs. The article explains that the city was deeply dysfunctional back in 1925, noting that city council meetings drew large public audiences, not out of people being all civic-minded and public-spirited and whatnot, but because the meetings tended to end in a free boxing match between councilmembers. Now, however, things were swimming right along under the modern council-manager form of city government. It mentions the total project cost for the falls came to around $22,500.
• I've never come across a photo of what the original falls looked like. I'm not saying there aren't any, just that I've never seen one. But I did come across the next best thing in an October 1938 Oregon Journal column. The paper's weekly "In Old Oregon" feature reprinted someone's 1847 sketch of the Oregon City skyline, featuring the town's few scattered buildings at the time, along with the creek tumbling down the bluff. A note along with the feature offered to pay $2.50 for readers' photos from the old days suitable for publication. That's almost $60 in 2025 dollars.
• A rather gross 1959 sewer incident: The city was busy replacing the pipe carrying Singer Creek thru downtown Oregon City from the base of the falls to the Willamette, and city workers kept bumping into old un-mapped, unrecorded sewer pipes, dumping raw sewage straight into the river.
• The falls have been illuminated for the holidays on and off over the years, and (for example) they were brightly lit for Christmas 1964. The linked article claims the falls are 90' high overall, which is more than you get just adding up the drops.
• The city was still busy putting parts of the creek underground in 1967, as part of a larger project to eventually pave part of John Quincy Adams St. The older part of town atop the bluff uses a street naming convention common to US cities of a certain age, where the streets parallel to the Willamette are named for US presidents ordered chronologically extending uphill away from the river, with a slightly odd twist. The order didn't look quite right, so I double-checked a list at the Library of Congress and realized Oregon City had skipped over anyone who became president on the death of his predecessor. And as a result, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, and Andrew Johnson aren't honored with streets of their own, which is probably just as well. It seems there had been a rather vociferous (yet long-forgotten) public debate around whether a Vice President actually becomes President as part of the succession thing, or merely takes over presidential job duties without scoring the upgraded job title, salary, official residence, and so forth, as the constitution was a bit ambiguous on this point. Tyler's presidency overlapped with Oregon City's brief tenure as territorial capitol, so it was a contemporary issue at the time, and locals evidently disagreed with his taking the oath of office and calling himself "President". Once established, they then had to apply the same naming convention as the city expanded away from the river. The naming convention ended with US Grant, sparing the city from having to figure out what to do about presidents with non-consecutive terms (like Grover Cleveland, and that one orange guy), and two Roosevelts, and two Bushes with very similar names, that sort of thing.
• A 1968 article about the same project primly notes that "[p]resently the creek is not as pure as might be desired", but it was hoped that a future project would connect the neighborhood to the city sewer system instead of feeding directly into the creek.
• The city didn't light the falls for the holidays at first in 1970, but a small child wrote a sad letter asking the city to please turn them back on, and they did.
• September 1970, a Journal photo of a city maintenance crew hosing debris out of the falls in preparation for fall
• 1985 experiment stocking the creek with coho salmon. I think the idea was that the falls look a bit like a fish ladder, and maybe a few salmon out there were athletic and ambitious enough to pull it off, eventually leading to a new subspecies of supersalmon that would hopefully also be delicious.
• ...but it later turned out that it wasn't an experiment at all, but an attempt to put the baby salmon in a sort of protective custody, after an unexplained (but suspicious) mass fish kill at a Clackamas Community College facility.
• The current lighting dates to 2012, funded by a $17k Rotary Club grant. The city posted a video of the illuminated falls shortly after they went live. Watching it, I found myself thinking the phrase "vintage YouTube video" about something that was posted 11 years ago.
• another 2012 article relates one of the city's many ghost stories. Ghost is a small redheaded child who died in a 1913 typhoid epidemic, seen around town as an ungentle reminder that drinking untreated water straight from local streams is not safe. At this point the ghost is probably trying to head off to wherever ghosts go when their work here is done, only to be blocked by a local measles epidemic ghost who says "I used to think I was done here too", and they both swear up a storm at the local antivaxxers.
• April 2021 article mentioning the falls; I had never heard of them before despite being right next to the elevator

Grover Cleveland Park • Ka Hoʻoilina Mau Loa

Next up we're visiting downtown Honolulu's Grover Cleveland Park, named after the rather obscure 19th century president.

Cleveland is honored by a park in Hawaii for a rather unusual reason. He took office shortly after the 1893 coup that overthrew Queen Liliʻuokalani. Cleveland strongly opposed the coup and refused to annex the islands, following the scathing Blount Report on what had happened. As it turns out, Honolulu's Thomas Square is named for a similar reason. In that case, a British admiral who reversed an unauthorized seizure of the islands by an ambitious subordinate who did a bit of freelancing while Thomas was out of the area. Cleveland was succeeded in office by Republican William McKinley, who annexed the islands shortly after taking office and who -- controversially -- still has a high school named for him nearby.

Technically it's not really a city park, just a landscaped plaza with a fountain outside the state Attorney General's office and the Department of Labor & Industrial Relations, across the street from the state Supreme Court.

There aren't a lot of other parks and monuments dedicated to the memory of Grover Cleveland around the country, much less the world, but there's a much larger example located in Caldwell, NJ, his hometown.

The fountain in the middle of the plaza is titled Ka Hoʻoilina Mau Loa (The Eternal Legacy), created in 1994 by local artist Donald Harvey, who also did the similar Wave Flight at the airport. A public art walking tour brochure from the nearby Hawaii State Art Museum briefly describes the fountain:

The sculpture symbolizes Kamehameha the Great, Ruth Ke'elikolani, Bernice Pauahi Bishop, and the generous legacy they have left behind to the people of Hawai'i. Both women are suggested in the center form, inspired by the Hawaiian crab claw sail design. The three outer forms are an abstraction of the bows of ancient Hawaiian double-hulled canoes and sails.

And here's a Facebook video of the fountain running since I forgot to take one of my own.

Scotts Mills Falls

Next up we're checking out Scotts Mills Falls, in the small city of Scotts Mills, pop. 419 (2020), located about halfway between Molalla and Silverton and a couple of miles east of Highway 213, the most direct line between the two, if that makes any sense. It's also about five miles (as the crow flies) west of Wilhoit Springs, a once-famous place we visited in a recent post, and six from the epicenter of the 1993 Scotts Mills earthquake. Which is one and only thing the town is semi-famous for here in faraway Portland.

The town's little downtown area is bordered to the east by Butte Creek, a large tributary of the Pudding River (no, really, that's what it's called), which meanders around and eventually joins the Willamette somewhere around Canby. The waterfall is right in town... ok, looking closely at Google Maps it looks like the city limit kind of zigzags through the falls, running right along the brink of the falls for a bit and swerving to avoid most of the decrepit low dam just upstream of it, as well as the Marion County park centered on the falls and the old mill pond. Maybe this is to dodge liability for various things, like the occasional drownings here (like one in 2021 a few weeks before I took these photos), or in case the dam collapses before the proposed dam removal finally happens. (As of February 2025 the removal is on hold due to handwringing at the county level.)

I should pause here briefly to note that there's also a Scotts Mills City Park, a few blocks further downstream along the creek, and visitors seem to endlessly confuse the two. A recent one-star Google review complained about the park being overwhelmed with drugs and crime and drinking and illegal overnight camping, which quickly got an indignant reply from an anonymous city staffer, who said the reviewer must be thinking of the nearby county park, which is not the city's problem, and the reviewer should contact the Marion County sheriff's office in case of trouble way out there (a few blocks away).

And if you're more interested in visiting waterfalls than city parks, there are a couple of others further up Butte Creek, namely Upper and Lower Butte Creek Falls. And this the part where I awkwardly point out that I've been there and have photos of both waterfalls and I have no frickin' idea when I might finish the draft posts about them.

If you go browsing around the waterfall maps attached to those pages, you might notice there's one called Bear Creek Falls in the general vicinity. I haven't been to that one, but I gather it's a bit underwhelming, and (more importantly) it has one fairly ominous-sounding one-star Google review: "Stay away would rather not have new people around". I am probably not alone in noticing that people in deep rural parts of the state seem to be a lot more hostile since the pandemic. I could be wrong here, but as I understand it, city folks and other outsiders were never exactly welcome out in the woods, but at least they were a good traditional source of meat for your family, and no pesky bag limit, either. But then COVID came along, and now the odds are pretty good you might chow down on some vaccinated folks this way and get a belly full of those gosh-dang confernal 5G nanobots for your trouble. It's not hard to see why the locals would be feeling a bit ornery after dealing with all that.

Anyway... the dam is obviously very old, but nobody seems to agree on its exact age. The county Soil & Water Conservation District says it was built by PGE for hydropower in 1917 and then abandoned in 1954 after it was damaged by a flood and judged not worth fixing. A 2019 article about the dam at OurTown Community News (a local news site) says it was built between 1860 and 1870. A 2020 Salem Statesman-Journal article says it's from the 1850s, and an article at SHINE on Salem (a history site about Marion County) notes that a mill was built here in 1846, and the dam was already in place at that point.

So who knows, really. Maybe the dam has always been there. Maybe Bigfoot built it for hydropower, countless millennia ago, back before the Ice Age floods wiped away all other traces of their highly advanced society. Or maybe it's much older than that, even, and it was built by the sentient dinosaurs from that one Voyager episode, but way back in their medieval days, long before they escaped the coming asteroid and headed off to wander the galaxy. And what if the dam was built to imprison some kind of ancient evil deep beneath the mill pond for the last 65 million years, and demolishing the dam would unleash a new plague of zombo-raptors against our unprepared world. And what if the present-day locals know all about this somehow, maybe through some kind of hidden device that still transmits occasional warning dreams of that ancient lost age. Although of course you can't say that in front of the county commissioners, or the state salmon regulators, or any of the other outsiders, people who would just laugh at you, people who have never dozed off after a picnic near the dam on a lazy afternoon and then had The Dream. I mean, I'm just speculating here, but it would certainly explain all the local opposition to removing the dam.

Naturally the city's history page mentions none of that but does relate a curious detail about the town's early days. Starting in 1888, the Oregon Land Development Co. promoted the town as a Quaker-friendly town and persuaded people to move there on that basis, and promised various modern urban amenities that never panned out. The company eventually went under in 1902, bringing financial ruin to a lot of residents. Maybe I'm just a cynic in assuming it was a scam the entire time. Fourteen years is an exceptionally long time to wait for a log con to pan out. On the other hand, if you set out planning to swindle an entire town out of their life savings, it's always safer to swindle a bunch of pacifists.

More history and related news from across the greater Scotts Mills metro area:

• The very first mention of the town in the Oregonian was back in 1877, in connection with a homicide case. In which a witness testified that he had never even heard of Scott's Mills.
  
• On a brighter note, here's a March 1893 blurb on the then-flourishing Quaker colony. We're told they were trying their hand at growing grapes. They were about a century ahead of their time, I guess.
  
• The SHINE page up above mentions that the town's boom times in the early 20th century were due to three pillars of the economy: The mills, obviously, along with prune growing, and "mining speculation". And yes, as a matter of fact I do have a bunch of old news links about what that means, exactly:
  
• July 1907, the Journal breathlessly reported that coal had been discovered somewhere near Scotts Mills, it was of the very finest quality, and the recently-formed Diamond Coal Company would have it on the Portland market soon, undercutting the other available options.
  
• the next month, news came that a branch rail line was coming soon, and this line would haul Scotts Mills coal to market and bring general commerce and progress and whatnot to town, though the actual mining would have to wait for a bit until they could find enough skilled miners, apparently.
  
• in the middle of coal fever, August 1908 saw a failed scam attempt that ended up in court. Seems that one D.C. Forbes tried to interest a couple of local businessmen in his amazing new gold-finding widget, after salting the mine in question with just enough gold to make it demo well. After a couple of days employing the device at the mine, Forbes feigned illness and left. Normally this is the point where a professional swindler would skip town with his jackpot, grow a luxurious handlebar mustache (or shave it off if he currently sports one), and then resurface in Colorado as "A.G. Williamson", inventor of a miracle gold-finding gadget. But Forbes screwed it up: The local marks were at least a little skeptical and only agreed to lease the device for 30 days to test it out properly, saying they'd buy it if they were satisfied at that point. (Note to scammers: Never agree to this, especially if your device doesn't work.) Which meant Forbes had to stick around another 30 days without their money, and somehow string the marks along and keep them thinking the device was working the whole time. Seeding the mine with a month's gold production would've been prohibitively expensive, so I'm not sure how he intended to pull this off. In any event, the unsatisfied customers declined to buy the gizmo. (Note to scammers: This would have been another good point to slink away emptyhanded and try again elsewhere, if you haven't already.) Ah, but Forbes was a very persistent man, and decided to sue his escaped prey, asking the court to make them pay up. He also accused the pair of seeding the mine themselves in order to sell it or attract unwary investors, although he had no actual evidence they had tried doing so.
• Court case had been filed a few days earlier. An article on August 26th covers the claims of the Hydraulic Gravity Separator Co. against the pair

• A longer article dated August 28th summarizing (and snarking about) the case:

  Peculiarly enough the public’s only interest in this mining venture is one of morbid curiosity. The public has no equity in the company’s lands or bonanzas. It is one of the very few cases on record where everybody gets hurt except the dear old public.
  
  ...
  
  Stripping these papers of their superfluous verbiage, the public is able to get an excellent idea of the modus operandi in mining bonanzas of a certain class.

  Apparently Mr. Swift (one of the two local investors) was very eager to start touting mining stock, even though the very existence of any actual gold here was currently being argued in court. Which is another hint that their operation was not exactly above board either.

• A January 1909 item recounts the competing claims in the case.
• A ruling came the next day, essentially tossing everyone out of the courtroom emptyhanded. First, no persuasive evidence had been introduced that anyone had seeded the mine, so the mine's proprietors couldn't collect on that count. And as for the 30 day try-before-u-buy arrangement, Forbes and his firm had never actually gotten this in writing.
• Two years later in June 1909, the Oregonian finally caught wind of the still-imminent coal mine, and reported breathlessly about it. That's the last we hear of the coal scheme in the paper.
• A related gold-mining case was still ongoing in December 1911, however. This time one of the three partners in the Hydraulic Gravity Separator Co. was suing the other two. The judge became fed up with all parties to the dispute and dismissed the case, declaring "he was not sitting in equity for the purpose of dividing spoils among thieves". He then declared that one of the defendants in this civil case really ought to be indicted for forgery and imprisoned, and personally walked over to the DA's office to persuade him to do so. Though I couldn't find any news on how that followup case had gone.
• However there were a few appearances of a Portland-based Diamond Coal Co. in the news in the 1920s and 1930s, but it's not clear whether it was the same company. If so, they got a new delivery truck in 1920, and experienced several failed burglaries starting in 1929.
• A 1948 article related the story of Ted Mandrones, who had been quietly mining coal in the Wilhoit Springs area as a virtual one-man operation for much of the last decade, trying to convince skeptics and find investors for his operation.
• Er, meanwhile, the fish ladder here dates back all the way to 1924, or at least that was the date on the first one, which may or may not be the current one.
• A 1932 Journal article notes Scotts Mills was on the road to Moss Lake, where (we're told) aquatic plants grew in such a thick, dense layer that you could walk on it, and reportedly it could even sustain the weight of an adult bear. This layer was supported in part by swamp gas, such that a lit match would burn briefly like you were lighting a gas stove. Which seems like an unwise thing to do while standing on this aquatic plant layer, unless maybe a bear is chasing you. Google has a location for this natural wonder here, but the only visible lake on the map is here, about a mile to the SE of where Google thinks it is. It seems to fit the description -- steep sides around the lake, floating biomass seemingly on the surface, in the upper Butte Creek watershed, with a nearby road named "Moss Lane" just off Crooked Finger Road. Looks like it's had a few nearby clearcuts in recent decades, and the lake is only maybe 1/4 covered now, versus nearly entirely so in 1932.
• 1967, Clackamas County was given three acres of land constituting 1000' of frontage along Butte Creek, about four miles upstream from Scotts Mills, to be known as the "Fryberger Wayside". Which I don't see any record of on the interwebs, but that wouldn't be the first chunk of Clackamas-owned parkland they've forgotten or lost track of. Can think of a couple along the Sandy River off the top of my head that don't appear on their official list.
• 1988 story, the park was closed temporarily by the county sheriff due to fights between hispanic and anglo residents. The paper interviewed several people with Anglo names relating a variety of lurid incidents they had either seen or heard local rumors about, like people going to the park to wash laundry in the creek. In nearby Silverton the city council had recently voted to deport the town's non-citizen hispanic population, estimated at several hundred people, only to find out there was currently a federal moratorium in place on deporting agricultural workers.
• 2004 Foster Church column, just sort of wandering around Molalla and surrounding towns in the dead of winter, chatting up the locals. He did stop in Scotts Mills for a bit but look at the falls for a bit.

Wilhoit Springs

Our next obscure destination is a bit unusual and requires some background info. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and into the early twentieth, it was widely believed that mineral spring water was something close to a miracle cure for whatever historical ailment was troubling you -- consumption, dropsy, quinsy, lycanthropy, apoplexy, dysentery, ague, gout, scrofula, anemia, neurasthenia, neurosis, halitosis, hysteria, headcrabs, catarrh, clownpox, ennui, lockjaw, jazz hands, and Vidiian phage, just to name a few.

The trick was to find the spring resort that was best aligned with your delicate constitution and many ailments and was also as fashionable as you could afford to be, and go there to take the waters and undergo the latest regimen of fanciful spa treatments while also seeing and being seen for however long the local social season ran. Eventually you would feel better and return to your teeming grey city choked with coal smoke and various miasmas, and soon be in need of further spa treatments. This business model thrived for a couple of centuries but eventually faded out as all medical fads eventually do. Like the Dr. Hasenpfeffer's Patent Tonic your great-grandparents swore by, a harmonious scientific blend of radium and opium, along with 17 secret ingredients, all of which were cocaine. Or the omega-3 'n oat bran açaí breakfast bars everybody pretended to like back in the 2000s; in retrospect it was all downhill after they deleted the carbs and packed them full of coenzyme Q10 and shark cartilage instead. But I digress.

The Pacific Northwest of the 19th century was not immune to the fads of the day, and federal land programs made it easy for ambitious businessmen to pick up promising springs for next to nothing, so for a few decades Western Oregon was awash in spring resorts. Nearly all of them had vanished without a trace by the end of the Great Depression, at the latest, but vestiges of a few of them have survived to the present day, largely by accident. With that intro, you won't be surprised to learn that we're visiting one of those vestiges in this post. Present-day Wilhoit Springs is a small and obscure county park in a remote corner of Clackamas County, but in its heyday it was one of the most popular and renowned mineral spring resorts in the West, or at least the Northwest. Today nothing survives of the old resort except the springs themselves, but a page at Offbeat Oregon has a bunch of vintage photos from the resort era, and if you look around long enough you can sort of visualize how the place was laid out.

I'm not going to to rehash the entire history of the resort since that page covers it pretty well, but a lot of the info I came across about the place falls into a rough timeline, so here's another one of those:

• One thing that really struck me was how early things got going here. I mean, by Pacific Northwest standards. Wilhoit Springs first appeared in Portland newspapers way back in 1870, when a "mineral expert" claimed that the waters closely resembled those at Saratoga Springs, NY. Which at the time was possibly the most prestigious springs district outside of Western Europe. This was less than two decades out from the peak years of the Oregon Trail, and at least some of the spa's guests must have come across that way. There were no railroad links to the outside world just yet, and the main alternative to arriving by covered wagon was still to come by sailing ship around Cape Horn, which would not have been any easier on individuals of a delicate and refined constitution. I dunno, I'm just tickled by the idea that a few of the rugged tough-as-nails pioneers of 1855 eventually figured out that the no-frills, no-fun pioneer life had been somewhat oversold, and that being fussed over by attentive spa staff was actually kind of nice.
• By 1873, Wilhoit soda water could be had, bottled, for $1.50/dozen at E.B. Hill's store at 1st & Yamhill. The ad promises the water will revive one's drooping spirits, and cure whatever general debility one might be experiencing.
• Skipping forward a bit, here's a 1917 report from a local auto dealer raving about the little-known but majestic sights at Silver Falls, described as a short trip over poorly-signed bad roads from the world-famous Wilhoit Springs. Whereas now, a bit over a century later, Wilhoit Springs is an obscure destination, which can accessed from world-famous Silver Falls by a short trip over poorly-signed bad roads.
• "The Landscapes of Hot Springs and Mineral Springs in Western Oregon" a 1973 masters thesis in geography, inventorying the scattered remnants of the taking-the-waters era. Which is more interesting than you might think.
• A 1983 Oregonian article about the place says the county would really like to find some money to revive the long-forgotten park, but it isnt mentioned again in the paper until 2009. And nothing I saw when I visited looked like it was new since 2009, so they have probably not found the money yet.
• Not about Wilhoit, but related: Here's a 2004 USGS report on the many hot springs near Mt. Hood (which is obviously a significant source of heat). One of which is the spring that once served the long-vanished burg of Swim, OR, home of Mt. Hood Mineral Springs Resort, which went under during the Depression and never came back. Apparently the actual springs are fenced off now, supposedly to protect the habitat of a rare dragonfly.
• A couple of 2010s posts from the blogosphere, including a Great Grey Owl sighting and a family hike report
• A 2023 KGW segment profiling the park's longtime caretakers

The county park itself is only around 18 acres, but it's surrounded by a larger chunk of federal BLM land. 136 acres surrounding the park are managed as the Wilhoit Springs ACEC (where ACEC stands for "Area of Critical Environmental Concern"), which in turn is included as part of the 316 acre Wilhoit Springs RMA ("Recreation Management Area"). A 2016 BLM planning doc for Salem District RMAs notes that the ACEC "protects a rare stand of low elevation old growth conifer forest in the foothills of the Cascade Range". It's at least possible that proximity to the springs is what protected the area from being logged in the era when surrounding areas were being rapidly clearcut. So even if there's no medical value to mineral water in itself, this is potentially something good that came of people believing it for a long time.

While putting this post together I also ran across pages about Wilhoit Springs at FindASpring.org and TryWater.club, and realized there's an entire internet subculture of spring water enthusiasts out there that I had no idea about, and they seem to fall along a broad spectrum. With, on one hand, people who just prefer the taste over the commercial bottled stuff or the local tap water, to people who think it has health benefits, and over on the far end are people who are convinced They (you know, aliens and lizard people and Hollywood and Monsanto and Nestle and Disney and the government and George Soros. You know, They.) are working together to poison everyone with fluoride and chlorine and dihydrogen monoxide and whatever, and they're desperate to find pure raw untainted water for their unvaccinated families to drink, which -- as you might expect -- involves a great deal of Doing Your Own Research Online. As a pre-COVID example, here's a 2013 OregonHikers forum thread where a raw water person dropped in with a few questions and a mild culture clash ensued.

Speaking of which, it turns out chlorinated tap water originated in Jersey City, NJ in 1908, and exactly how that came about is kind of an interesting story.

For what it's worth, SoakOregon also has a map covering the state, but that site is more oriented to hot spring enthusiasts, which is an adjacent (but not identical) subculture, and Wilhoit isn't listed since the springs aren't hot.

But enough of that; let's pivot to the question you were impatiently waiting to ask: Did I try the water? And if so, what's it like?

Of course I tried it. I mean, I may come across as a bit overcautious sometimes, and out of this caution I have to say that Legal says not to try the water, because it's possible you won't like it and sue me for mental anguish or something. Or you might slip and fall while filling a water bottle, and I don't want to be liable for that either. But for my part, I filled a couple of 16oz. bottles from the main spring in the park, the one with the little pavilion built around it. I keep reading there's another spring elsewhere in the park but I have no idea where it is. As I was heading to the car, I passed an elderly babushka lady who was carrying several large jugs to the spring I had just left. She didn't say anything but smiled and nodded, like she was pleased to see another person who knew about and appreciated the place.

As for the taste, imagine you've dissolved a couple of Alka-Seltzer tablets (or a generic store brand, it doesn't matter) in a glass of water, and while drinking that you somehow bite your lip and it starts bleeding, and so you taste a combination of those two things. The water is somehow not quite as gross as that sounds, but it's still definitely an acquired taste. I also tried it as a mixer, based on a Reddit thread I saw in which someone else did the same. And honestly it was quite drinkable that way. I mean, it was better than drinking the water by itself, and also better than just downing a straight shot of gin by itself. Think of it as the gin-and-tonic effect, where two ingredients can be a good combo even though neither is very palatable on its own. And to take the paradox a step further, the Wilhoit Springs gin rickey is not as good as a classic G&T, but given the choice I would definitely pick the spring water over an equal-sized glass of straight tonic water. I have no idea how this sensory phenomenon works; it just does, ok?