Next up we're visiting Portland's Copper Mountain Property, another really obscure city park that you probably haven't heard of. The name alone inspires thoughts of rugged wilderness adventures, doesn't it? It caught my eye on PortlandMaps or maybe MetroMap and figured I should check it out. So I packed up the Adventuremobile X-9000 with the essentials (dogsled, salt pork, hardtack, flamethrower, rocket boots, etc.) and set off to see what destiny had in store...
Ok, who am I kidding? The name sure sounds exciting, but it turns out that's just the name of the investment firm that owns the adjacent property to the east. There is no mountain to see here; it's just two skinny (and completely flat) lots just off Airport Way in industrial NE Portland, and I only burned any time on visiting because I was already in the area making a necessary Costco run.
There is also no copper here; if there had been, it would have been stolen as scrap metal years ago by the area's vast homeless population. In theory this narrow strip is home to a trail that connects this stretch of Airport Way to the Columbia Slough Trail, and that might have made it a potentially scenic and interesting place in the not-so-distant past. But not right now, and probably not in the immediate future, and I have literally no idea what to do about it, and I also don't want to devote a whole blog post to the subject, especially since I don't have any actual policy ideas to kick around.
For what it's worth, there's another similar bit of city land maybe 1/4 mile to the east, also connecting the slough to airport way, but without a trail, or (as far as I can tell) a name, and it isn't labeled as greenspace in PortlandMaps, but I think it's the same basic idea other than those details. I have no idea why the two places are treated differently, but I have a hunch that the reasons are not very interesting.
The normies at Google have no additional info about this place, and will try to steer you to Metro's Cooper Mountain Nature Park instead, because there's no possible way you could really want to come here (which I guess is fair this time around); or if you can persuade Google you really did mean "Copper" and not "Cooper" it'll push you toward a different Copper Mountain with vastly more mainstream appeal, a skiresorttown in Colorado. Which, again, is fair this time around. Come to think of it, every other place on Earth that has a vaguely similar name seems to be better and more appealing, and this isn't the first time that's happened. And now I remember why I sort of lost interest in doing "obscure city park you probably haven't heard of" posts like this: There may still be a few hidden gems out there, but by and large the others are obscure for good reason and probably ought to stay that way.
Next up we're visiting downtown Portland's "South Terminus", the little park/plaza at the south end of the downtown transit mall, where the MAX Green Line turns around and the Yellow Line becomes the Orange Line (and vice versa). The most notable feature of the place, from a distance, is a tall curved steel structure seen in most of the photos above, which exists to hide (and keep people out of) an electrical substation. The inner workings of it are further concealed by a fence and something called "coil drapery", and (most importantly) the south-facing side of the structure is covered in solar panels, which contribute a purely symbolic amount of electricity toward running the train.
North of all that, there's the actual turnaround area, which takes up most of the block and is just utilitarian train tracks and gravel. And because MAX trains have the turning radius of, well, trains, there was a crescent of land left over inside the loop, which became a small brick plaza and landscaped garden.
All of this was originally built in 2009 for the Green Line, and then "completed" in 2012, and reworked a bit in 2015 for the Orange Line, and further redesigned in 2017 for reasons we'll get to in a moment. If you're familiar with my ongoing projects and occasional obsessions here, you'd think I would have had a post up about it the day it opened, but no. I didn't even pay very close attention as it changed repeatedly over time.
One of the selling points behind their design was, we're told, that "the solar panels identify both Portland and TriMet as leaders in sustainability". Solar project finally opened in 2012 and proved to be a bit controversial. Different articles tell us it either produces around 65,000 kilowatt-hours per year, or 67,000 kilowatts per year, depending on who's reporting and how much they know about electricity. Which is not a lot of power given what they paid for the system (although it cost less than half the original projections thanks to price drops for solar gear). Projections at the time were that the system would pay for itself in about 65 years, though a TriMet spokesman insisted it would be more like 22.5 years, which would mean it's over halfway paid for at this point, which is nice, I guess.
The original plan here was a bit more ambitious and would have augmented the trickle of solar power with a trickle of wind power from 22 little fun-sized wind turbines atop the power poles. Unfortunately(?) the startup that was chosen to build these Little Windmills That Could couldn't get the job done and the whole firm cratered shortly afterward. At that point the idea was quietly dropped.
At one point there was a bench somewhere in the park/plaza area with a builtin LED display so visitors could monitor the system's power output as electricity dribbled out of it. I vaguely remember seeing it, but it's not there now. I can only guess at the timeline but I imagine it was damaged beyond repair by bored vandals shortly after it went in, and then quietly removed during the next renovation, since that's what always happens around here. Or at least it's what always happens in public spaces when you don't give "normies" any reason to spend time there.
I do have a proposal here: At whatever point they redesign the park again, my suggestion would be to divert some of the plaza's solar bounty to power a wireless charging station. To me, charging your phone from those solar panels right over there makes for a much better demonstration than just watching LED numbers tick over in electrical units almost nobody really has a feel for. You might ask why, if that's really such a great idea, why didn't they build it that way in the first place? That's actually an easy one: The project was designed prior to 2009, and wireless charging was still a wacky sci-fi idea back then, shelved next to flying cars and atomic jetpacks. By early 2012 the technology had advanced from "works in the lab" to "getting hyped at CES", but a lot of ideas get hyped at trade shows but never ship in volume, much less catch on with the public. The first phones supporting the new Qi power standard finally shipped in September of that year.
There was also an online version of that power meter, so you could watch your tax dollars at work without getting off your couch, if you were so inclined. The site continued on for years, long after its brick-and-mortar version was hauled away. But it's gone now, because if you were designing a hip, fancy, cutting-edge website in 2009-2012, chances are you built it in Adobe Flash, the powerful full-featured programming language of the future. Over time that consensus shifted to "Flash is insecure and unfixable", and it was officially discontinued in all major browsers on New Years Eve 2021, thus breaking the site. Maybe somebody who cares enough will go back fix it at some point, but I wouldn't bet money on that. Old websites that survive in the long term usually do so by being very low maintenance, like the Space Jam and Mars Pathfinder sites, both from 1996.
All in all, the solar thing was exactly the sort of project Republicans have in mind when they sneer at people for "virtue signaling". But that's a bit unfair in this case; the idea is not to radiate civic virtue directly, but to persuade rich Californians to invest in luxury real estate here, thus boosting the local tax base and (in theory) paying for future civic virtue that way.
There was also a small piece of land left over that they couldn't use for turning around, as it was inside the minimum turning radius of any MAX car, so it became sort of a public mini-garden. also I could swear there used to be public access into the landscaped area. A page at Kavanagh Transit Photos confirms my memory of this, showing what the place looked like in 2009 when it was new. No fence around the place then.
We get a hint of the issues facing the park in a September 2013 nuisance complaint, which asserted the plaza was full of tall grass and weeds and animal feces at that point, which seems accurate if memory serves.
Like a lot of people who take up gardening as a hobby, after a few years of it TriMet evidently realized it couldn't keep up with the watering and weeding and in 2017 hired another landscaping firm to rework the design into something a bit more low-maintenance. Their page says, diplomatically, that nearby construction killed a lot of the original plants here. The page says something about designing a fence to keep people out during construction, maybe it became permanent at that point. The signs around the area say "Limited Access" rather than the usual "No Trespassing" or "No Public Access". I'm not really sure what "Limited Access" means here. It's an unfamiliar bit of officialese and I'm not sure how to interpret it. Maybe it's still officially open and there just aren't any entrances anymore. Maybe you're only allowed in on group tours, which are offered once every other decade.
Oh, and before all of this, there was a circa-1900 house here. It wasn't on the National Register of Historic Places, but was on the city's historic inventory as of 2002 (mentioned in some of the paperwork around moving the Simon Benson House, a National Register property) A little searching came back with a photo of that house, from an interesting Rose City Transit page about what various MAX stations looked like before they were MAX stations.
Next up we're visiting another Portland city park, this time in SW Portland a bit off Barbur. It's your basic ballfields-and-playground arrangement; I usually don't bother with these, and to be honest with you we're only visiting this one because of its name. Or rather, the lack of a name. The official city parks website just calls it "A Park". Until December 2020 the park was known as "Custer Park" after the infamous general, but then outgoing city commissioner Amanda Fritz removed the embarrassing name by executive order.
Now, naming or renaming things in Portland is a long and complex process involving public hearings and consulting everyone who could possibly count as a stakeholder. But thanks to a quirk in city ordinances it's apparently quite trivial to un-name things. The city commissioner with Parks & Recreation in their portfolio simply announces that a name has been yoinked away, and poof, it's gone. Of course the risk with doing this on your way out the door is that the next Parks Commissioner won't necessarily put the same priority on doing the harder part, coming up with a new name for the place. Thus the park has gone without any official name for the last two years.
This naturally showed up on the park's (non-renamed) Yelp page, and a Reddit r/Portland thread, with a few examples of the usual conservative shrieking, though this may have been more subdued than usual due to Custer's earlier work in ending the Confederacy. Still, it may please them to know Custer still has lots of stuff named after him, including a very imposing 2nd place participation trophy at the Little Bighorn battlefield itself.
Closer to home, a street nearby still goes by SW Custer Drive, and there are bits and pieces of street named SW Custer St. stretching from the river all the way west to city limits, though never more than a few blocks at a time due to the hilly terrain. None of those have been renamed yet, though the name has been preemptively removed from a future MAX station planned for the Hillsdale area, on the theory that the street will likely be renamed too before the new line opens. The first newspaper mention I found of streets named Custer was small item from 1897 about Fulton Park, so it already existed at that point. This was a brief mention in a list of recent city council actions, and the next item concerned legalizing fireworks within city limits for a couple of weeks in January for Chinese New Year. That sounds unusually progressive for 1897 Portland, so I imagine the non-Chinese population just saw it as another chance to be reckless and irresponsible with fireworks, which is always a winner here.
The lack of a name doesn't mean the city's neglecting the place, by the way; there's a proposal to give it a naturepatch, one of the new commissioner's pet projects. There's also a proposed stormwater facility that would be near or possibly conflicting with the nature patch, which might explain why the stormwater project was on hold last time I checked.
So here we are at the end of 2022, and the park still doesn't have a name. Around the time of the de-naming there was a change.org petition with a specific new name in mind, but I'm reasonably sure Portland (like most major cities) has a blanket policy of not responding to change.org petitions. Although it will get you signed up for endless fundraising emails until the heat death of the universe, so there's that to consider.
I should point out that renaming things in Portland isn't always this hard. Around the same time this park was de-Custer-ified, a park in outer SE Portland was renamed from renamed from "Lynchview Park" to "Verdell Burdine Rutherford Park" without the park going nameless for years first. And it's not as if the park was ever actually a place to come and view lynchings; if I remember right, it was just named for some unremarkable midcentury developer or landowner named Lynch. But still, the name doesn't exactly sound good to contemporary ears. And before anyone goes on a rant about 21st century people being so oversensitive, there's a local precedent. Back in 1966, the city was about to get a couple of new city parks as part of the South Auditorium urban renewal project, and it was decided to name them after early pioneers who had staked out the original settler land claims in what's now downtown Portland. There were three of these guys: Asa Lovejoy, Francis Pettygrove, and Stephen Coffin. Let's see if you can guess which of the three isn't honored with a city park or anything else being named after him. Not because he was a notably bad person, but because "Coffin Park" just really, really doesn't sound good.
In any case, the very latest in the naming situation came back in August of ths year, when the city
asked the public for suggestions, explaining that the kinds of names they were looking for should:
• reflect and inspire the community
• honor Native and Indigenous communities
• are symbolic or significant
• create a sense of community and inclusion
• are future facing and imagine a Portland for all
So it's possible there's already a new name in the works and they just haven't announced it yet. Or maybe voters approving a complete revamp of how city government works threw a wrench into the works, since city bureaus won't be under individual commissioners anymore. Maybe it seemed better to leave the renaming until after the revamp happens. Or maybe they just didn't get any good suggestions and aren't sure where to go from here.
Before they announced that process, I had taken a look at old county survey records to see if there were any interesting (and non-murdery) historical names associated with the area that might at least be inoffensive enough to make it through . There were a couple that might work, but nothing really stood out, and none of those would really "honor Native and Indigenous communities", and I really like that idea. So I kicked that research down to a footnote in case they do rename the streets someday, or maybe if the neighborhood gets a second park someday and it needs a name.
Or, I dunno, if the city can't come up with a good, appropriate name, maybe we should just leave it as "A Park" forever, like the old genericbrand items stores used to carry in the 1970s and 1980s, the ones with the white label and black letters that just said "Lima Beans" or "Beer" or whatever was inside. (Apparently this practice still exists in Canada, except the labels are yellow, metric, and bilingual.) I mean, if it works for lima beans, why can't it work for a whole city park?
So that's about all I've got on the name front, but I did run across a few news items and historical odds and ends along the way, so there they are mostly-chronologically:
1959: the city decided it maybe ought to rent some port-a-potties for this and a few other parks for Little League games, so people wouldn't have to go find a bush during the 7th inning stretch. It must have been an exceedingly slow news day. This is the first mention of the park in the newspaper, though it had existed for five years at that point.
1962: the city must have installed actual restrooms shortly afterward, as local residents were annoyed, though, as in the immediate wake of the Columbus Day Storm the restrooms had power restored before their houses did.
A couple of sorta-vintage photos of the park from 1963 and 1975, looking about the same as now but with smaller trees and vintage cars.
Things got pretty exciting here in July 1969, when the park hosted a city-sponsored "Flower Children Carnival". The blurb describes it: "Featured will be booths, rides, and tennis golf, a game created by Park Bureau staffer Neil Owens.". I can't tell if it was aimed at kids or hippies, reading that.
Your city has not forgotten you, flower children. Wednesday from 1 to 5 pm your very own “Flower Children Carnival” is scheduled at Custer Park, SW 21st Ave. and Capitol Hill Road. It will be sponsored by the City of Portland Bureau of Parks and Public Recreation.
See, you ARE loved, after all!
They’ll have booths to test your skill, to go fishing, and many others. Amusement rides will be bountiful… such as the caterpillar-covered merry-go-round, the slide tunnel and others.
There will even be a putt-putt for those who get their jollies from tennis golf (a game created by Neil Owens of the Park Bureau staff).
So, as the park folks say in their announcement, “all beautiful people gather and come to Custer Park” Wednesday. (Don’t take that “beautiful” part too literally — you’re all invited.)
June 1973, in another city-sponsored event, the park hosted a performance by a traveling mime troupe, which would include their original adaptation of "The Red Balloon". Because 1973. I got to see the original in grade school a couple of times, I guess on the theory that kids love anything containing balloons. Watching it in 2022 as an adult, it just makes me think of all the marine life harmed by eating balloons that drifted out to sea and deflated, and the planet rapidly running out of helium.
A 1976 letter to the editor, in which a visitor from Madras, OR complained about people not cleaning up after their dogs in the park.
A late 1990s neighborhood conflict over a longtime unofficial right-of-way into the park from the north. It seems residents thought it was public property, but it wasn't, and the new owner closed it as part of a renovation project. A followup said he'd had a change of heart & wanted to work with the neighborhood association on restoring some sort of access, though a 2000 subdivision plat for that spot doesn't show an easement, and I didn't see a path on Street View or by walking past where I imagine it would have been if it still existed. So who knows.
A while back I took a look at county survey records to see if maybe there were any historical names -- of the non-murdery variety this time -- associated with the area that might work as a replacement. So the first attempted subdivision of the area was in 1891, when the land around the park was platted as "Ma Belle Park". Evidently that didn't take off, and it was vacated piece by piece starting around 1916. Still, it has "Park" right there in the name, so "Ma Belle Park" might work. The same area was later re-subdivided as "Raz Hill" starting in March 1927, expanded in December 1945 mostly south and east of the park, with a smaller "RazEstates" to the north.
Next to Raz Estates an "Alpine View" was platted in 1957. Portland doesn't have have an "Alpine View Park" so that might work too, though it sounds a bit generic, and someone ought to check on a sunny day and verify there's still is an alpine view from the park, as that could have changed in the last 65 years. "Raz Park" would make sense too; not only were they the previous landowners before suburbia got here, but were later involved in the creation of nearby Stephens Creek Nature Park. Though in general I think we're better served by not naming anything after people for a while. The oldest regular land survey I see for the area is from 1871, just the 10th survey registered with Multnomah County. It's just a brief handwritten note though, adn the handwriting is fairly illegible, so no luck there. A 1920 road survey, in which today's Capitol Hill Road was surveyed as County Road #876, called the area due south of here "Latourette", centered roughly on where the Barbur Safeway stands now. That may have just been the name for a streetcar stop and not a neighborhood; either way it was probably someone's name and again, name moratorium.
Several more survey records in connection with building the new subdivision in the early 1950s. The first, in 1952, calls the area the "Raz tract", while a
1954 revision vacated a few of the roads proposed earlier, and
another tweak a few months later shows a "Proposed Park", half the size of the current park. After that, my guess would be someone realized that a park just big enough for a Little League diamond is going to result in a lot of errant fly balls through windows and made the park bigger.
A few recent photos from Portland's Tanner Springs Park, a sort of pseudo-natural nature park righ in the middle of the Pearl District. This place was a regular staple here for a number of years, starting in 2006 and tapering off in 2014 for no particular reason. I happened to be in the area last month and wasn't in a hurry so I stopped in and ended up with a few wildflower photos, so here they are.
(I think it's fine to call them wildflowers, even if someone technically planted them here as part of a planned garden. I'm using the term in the sense of "local native species of flowering plant" and not by how "wild" an individual plant appears to be. Just tossing that out there in case any angry internet flower pedants stumble across this post. I have never actually met an angry internet flower pedant, mind you, but generally speaking if a thing exists, someone is mad about it on the internet. So it just sort of stands to reason.)
Here are a couple of photos from Portland's Catkin Marsh Natural Area, an obscure city park in industrial NE Portland on a branch of the Columbia Slough, east of NE 33rd and west of the airport. The park consists of a 53 acre wetland area -- surrounded on three sides by the now-defunct Broadmoor golf course, and the fourth by warehouses -- plus a long skinny strip of land along the south side of the slough connecting out to 33rd, which is the only part shown in the photos. I took these while stopped briefly along 33rd after taking the car through DEQ at the test station nearby. I didn't actually turn the car off, much less get out for a closer look, so the photoset is somewhat less than comprehensive this time around.
The city bought the land fairly recently, in December 2012 -- it was part of the golf course before that, maybe serving as a natural water hazard. It was included in the city's Natural Areas Restoration Plan when it was updated in 2015, which rated it in 'Fair' health and as a high priority for restoration, though without any specifics on what they might do about it. They did remove a couple of culverts blocking this section of slough in 2017, at least. And with that, we've covered just about everything the city's said publicly about the place.
I gather the longer-term plan is for an extension of the Columbia Slough Trail to run through here someday, which I imagine is gated on both money and acquiring land or easements further east so the trail doesn't just dead-end on an abandoned golf course or at the airport security fence. The new owners of the Broadmoor site want to build warehouse space there, so making a deal for the unbuildable wetland parts of the course seems doable, in theory.
For anyone feeling really impatient to go visit the rest of the park for some reason, on the map above you can see an unofficial boot path through this strip along the slough, and conceivably you could get there that way, on an unofficial basis. But note the chest-high tall grass in the photos, and remember it's growing on top of a muddy, slippery bank that you won't be able to see because grass. So you stand a really good chance of going for a swim, which I cannot recommend here. As a data point, the city advises not eating fish from the slough more than once a month, due to PCBs and other contaminants, and discarding most of the fish even then. The slough as a whole is not considered a Superfund site, on unspecified technical grounds, but I still think this would be a bad place to take a mud bath or see what the water tastes like. Ewww. Just ewwww.
Next up on this humble blog's ongoing public art thing is a statue of Hawaii's King David KalÄkaua, located in the half-acre King KalÄkaua Park at the intersection of Kalakaua & Kuhio Avenues in WaikÄ«kÄ« (so it's kind of a city park post too). Visiting was pretty unremarkable, so this post is basically a big messy brain dump of all the random stuff I could find about the park and statue across the interwebs.
First some vital stats and such. The statue here was created by Hawaii artist Sean K.L. Browne, commissioned in 1985, and installed somewhere around 1989-91. Browne also did Lahui in Kaka'ako, and the Kresser Memorial in downtown Honolulu, and a few other things around Oahu, and I mention those two in particular because I also have draft posts about them that I've been meaning to finish for a while. A plaque on the base of the statue proclaims it a gift from a local nonprofit on behalf of the state's Japanese-American community, as a token of thanks for inviting their ancestors to emigrate to Hawaii. Of course (jumping ahead to the fine print) the invite wasn't motivated by pure altruism; the islands' native population was rapidly dwindling at the time due to various then-untreatable Western diseases, and the resulting labor shortage was a serious inconvenience for the all-powerful sugar industry. So the king went to work recruiting replacement workers/subjects from around the globe, because the spicesugarmustflow[1].
For whatever reason the state's public art website (and related interactive map) have no references to the statue, while the city only has a few passing mentions of it: It appears briefly on page 61 of an art inventory doc, including a dead link to a photo of it. It also gets a quick mention in a 2007 survey for the city's troubled, still-incomplete light rail system, as a cultural object that might be affeted if they ever get around to building out the whole rail system they had in mind back then. A much-shorter initial phase of the project is allegedly supposed to enter service in April 2022, a few short months from now, though this effort is already $8B over budget and 11 years behind schedule, so I'm not exactly holding my breath. As of right now there are no longer any firm plans to ever extend it into Waikiki, partly to save money and partly so it doesn't look like it's being built just for tourists.
I thought I'd found a Smithsonian art inventory page for the statue, at least, but it turned out to refer to a different, seated statue by different artists over in Hilo. At one point in this post's long existence as a draft post, I had found a page from a cleaning product company bragging about their "aqueous ozone" product being used to clean the statue in 2015; this post sat around in drafts long enough for the original to disappear, but the Wayback Machine had a copy, if you'd like to read more about cleaning products.
As for the surrounding park, the city parks department has nothing much to say about it; they have a pushpin for it on their comprehensive (?) Google map of all (?) parks on the island, but no further information is available from there. Meanwhile the state government has a 1991 environmental assessment around re-landscaping the park, because no project in the state is too small to require one. Apparently after the statue went in they decided the park needed to be redesigned, for whatever reason. The doc's only a couple of pages since the state quickly decided there was no nature or history there that needed preserving, and concluded that the re-landscaping was desirable and in the public interest. It does have a paragraph about what the park was like at that point:
The park site is almost level. Current landscaping improvements include a lawn, 14 coconut palms, 8 rainbow shower trees, and several hibiscus and mock orange hedges. Structural improvements include tile pavers along KalÄkaua Avenue, a concrete sidewalk along Kuhio Avenue, a King KalÄkaua Statue mounted on a circular concrete pad, and a concrete walkway and plaza enclosed by a low rock wall. (See Figure 3) The rainbow shower trees surround and shade the plaza. Within the center of the plaza there is a simulated volcano: Red bougainvillea within a gently sloping, circular rock mound.
I haven't been able to find any photos of this long-gone simulated volcano, unfortunately. Going by the description above it could've been anything from a clever bit of tasteful landscaping to full-on midcentury tiki cheese. It certainly wouldn't have measured up to the then-brand-spanking-new, all-singing, all-dancing volcano at the Mirage in Las Vegas. Which a lot of locals would have seen, Vegas being the "ninth island" and all. I did run across a 1971 photo of the intersection showing buildings where the park is now, and a comment on that page says the visible building was a rock club/bar in a former 1930s ice cream hut, and out of frame there was a local market in a former Piggly Wiggly building, all of which were demolished to make room for the park within a few years of the photo. (The county GIS system gives dates in the 1973-1978 range for the acquisition & bulldozing work.) And yes, there was an environmental assessment for the original park work too, though the only thing about it I can find is a September 1977 summary. I dunno, I actually kind of enjoy reading those things, and I realize I may be the only person who does.
Another photo from ~1965 shows a midcentury Japanese teahouse that once stood across the street from the park, which was demolished around 1991 to make room for a sleeker, more upscale... Japanese teahouse. Which went out of business a few years later, and the building has sat empty ever since, though I understand the parking garage is still open. I haven't found any old news articles to prove this but it sure looks like was a concerted (and largely unsuccessful) effort in the 90s to take this whole area of Waikiki upscale. Another big example of this is right on the other side of the park's once-eponymous hotel, where you'll find the long-vacant King KalÄkaua Plaza building, a four-story upscale retail plaza that opened in 1998, anchored by Niketown and Banana Republic flagship stores and an Official All-Star Cafe. The latter was one of those inexplicable 90s theme restaurant chains, a genre that no longer exists outside of the Las Vegas Strip, Times Square, and the more cartoonish parts of Florida. The retailers all cratered within a few years, and the fourth floor office space was never occupied at all, and despite an endless series of grandplans for the site it's remained empty ever since. Though like the teahouse the parking garage remains open for business. Though I'm not sure how underground parking even works when your building is just 5-7 feet above -- and a few blocks north of -- sea level.
The park also got a brief mention in someone's 2002 masters thesis about 3D visualization in highway planning. It seems that the city wanted to spruce up the intersection back in 2000 and built some kind of early VR model of the area to help imagine what the proposed sprucing might look like. Confusingly the thesis says this work was for the intersection of Kalakaua and Kapiolani. Which is a completely different intersection over by the Convention Center, across the Ala Wai canal from Waikiki proper. Where (as you can see on Street View) there's a distinct lack of anything that looks remotely like a park. So either the paper got a minor fact wrong and nobody noticed until now, or there's a second "Waikiki Gateway Park" out there that only exists in virtual reality. Which -- if nothing else -- is bound to cut down on maintenance costs. Either way, it would be kind of funny to see what either intersection looks like in vintage 90s VRML, but this was long before source control became cool, so if a copy still exists it's probably moldering away on a forgotten Zip disk in someone's office junk drawer. Oh well.
Ok, so at this point I have to pivot awkwardly back to the statue, because there's one other detail I was saving for the end. There's another plaque on the base of the statue, this one noting it (as in, the base and pedestal) had been laid by local Masons, as the king had been an active andhigh ranking member for many years, as had several of his predecessors. As a result the local organization owns a lot of historical artifacts and occasionally lends some of them out for display, including a royal Knights Templar sword (whatever that is) that somehow ended up at Sotheby's in New York in 2003. As far as I know there are no magical powers associated with the sword, or any sort of curse or prophesy or anything, and finding it in a D&D campaign would likely be a big disappointment, and the whole business seems rather silly. But say what you will, you never get stories like this coming out of rectangular corn states, so there's that at least.
Based on the statue's highly visible location, and the plaque's subject matter, and the usual inclinations of the 21st century internet, search results about it quickly descend into tinfoilhatterritory after the first few pages of search results, because internet. Note that those links all go to recent Wayback Machine captures and not the sites themselves, since I'm mentioning them here strictly for entertainment purposes and not to send them traffic or spread their ideas. So instead of spending any more time on that, please enjoy that one semi-related song from that one show:
By way of contrast, here's what it looks like when actual Masons have a go at the same song, after a drink or two, or three, or so.
footnote(s)
[1] The combo of sugar money and an ambitious king did lead to an interesting historical episode in 1886-87. It's not really relevant to the rest of this post but hey. KalÄkaua had big plans for his country despite the ongoing medical tragedy; word had reached him of a civil war erupting in Samoa, with the opposing factions backed by competing Western colonial powers (the UK, USA, and Germany, in this case) contending for influence in the South Pacific as they'd previously done elsewhere around the world. This was an unwelcome development as Hawaii was in a similar position, trying to avoid being gobbled up by one Western country or another. KalÄkaua had ambitions beyond his own shores, though, imagining an ocean-spanning Polynesian Confederation powerful enough to keep the region from being sliced and diced into a bunch of crown colonies and overseas territories and whatnot. With, naturally, himself as the overall head of state of this far-flung new nation. So the Hawaiian Royal Navy's first (and as it turned out, only) modern navy ship was dispatched to Samoa for a little gunboat diplomacy, and actually got as far as signing a confederation treaty with the kingdom's preferred local ruler, while almost going to war with Germany in the process. Meanwhile back home in Hawaii the sugar oligarchs decided KalÄkaua had gotten too big for his britches and staged a coup, forcing the king to sign a new "BayonetConstitution" that strictly limited his authority. This was sold to the world as introducing a modern constitutional monarchy, but the new constitution also altered voting rules such that rich foreigners could now vote, but at least 2/3 of local residents could not, thus ensuring a majority white male legislature for the remainder of the kingdom's existence. As a result of all this, the Samoa expedition was called home, and the ship was quickly sold and the navy disbanded. So yeah, the king's brief attempt at a more assertive foreign policy didn't really play out the way he'd hoped. Or at least not in our timeline. An alternate history forum thread I ran across explores some of the inevitable "What If?" and "If So, How?" questions.
Switching gears again, next up we're visiting Honolulu's MauŹ»umae Nature Park, uphill from the Kaimuki business district & the Kahala Mall, and below the MauŹ»umae/LanipÅ Trail we checked out a few months ago. This was supposed to be another hiking post; I saw "Nature Park" on a map, and a few scattered references to a loop trail. But not a lot of references, so it was probably uncrowded. So I figured I'd go check it out. The park totals 33 acres, separated by Koko Drive into a 4 acre lower section, partly developed as a regular neighborhood park, and a 29 acre undeveloped section where the loop trail is supposed to be. I say "supposed to be" because I completely failed to find it. There wasn't a sign with arrows pointing at it, and I walked back and forth along Koko Dr. a couple of times without seeing anything that looked like the start of a trail. So I ended up settling for some photos of the view from Koko Drive, which looks out at Kaimuki and the back side of Diamond Head. It's undeniably a nice view but not really why I was there, so I chalked this up as a loss. Still, I had photos of the place, so I created a draft blog post about the place but didn't feel especially motivated to do anything with it. I also never quite deleted the thing, because I kept wondering why there was a nature park here, specifically, and what the deal was with the missing trail.
Couple of caveats first: One, I don't currently have an OŹ»ahu library card, so there are some gaps in what I've been able to figure out that would likely be filled by old newspaper stories if only I could get to them. Two, these photos are from 2016, and your mileage may vary if you go there right now. (I remember being especially annoyed at not finding the trail since I was trying to take my mind off the horrifying Republican national convention that was happening that week.) So with that in mind, I have reason to believe the trail really does exist, and it's not just a scheme to milk City Hall for grant money or whatever. First, there's a GPS track of it on Alltrails, which actually predates me visiting by several years. Second, plugging those trailhead coordinates into Street View shows what looks like a couple of rough stone steps leading to, well, shorter grass than the surrounding grass and brush, which might be the start of a trail if you squint at it just right. And that imagery is from 2019. So my unsuccessful visit is bracketed by the evidence, unless maybe the trail phases in and out of existence according to the season or the phase of the moon. Or, more likely, you can find it if (and only if) you already know exactly where to look, and a motivated neighborhood volunteer who owns a weed trimmer has been there recently. If you do manage to find the trail, there's a geocache hidden somewhere along the trail, for extra credit. The description on that geocache explains "When I was a kid living about 130 yards from where this cache is, we knew this area as the gulch and was left undeveloped because it was needed as a watershed area. It later became the MauŹ»umae Nature Park." Which turns out to be a key clue.
And sure enough, in the lower section of the park, right next to the landscaped play area, there's a fenced-off area with the usual imperious "Government Property - Keep Out" signs. These signs never explain which part of the government owns it or why, but the county GIS system says this area belongs to the Honolulu Board of Water Supply, and is home to that agency's Waialae West Well. This well opened in 1998 on the site of an older well named "Waialae Shaft" that operated from 1937 to around 1984. A 1938 book explains that it began construction in 1935 and was built at a 30 degree angle into the hillside for some reason. The book includes a couple of photos of sketchy-looking pump equipment at the bottom of the well, which I suppose must have been state-of-the-art back then. As for the present-day well, here's the federal Environmental Assessment back from when it was proposed, if you like reading that sort of thing as much as I do. (And no, I'm not being facetious about that.) One weird detail about it is that the 225' well is actually drawing in fresh water from below sea level. I am probably not the only person who finds this a bit surprising, even alarming, as the doc explains the science [1] behind this (and the linked footnote goes into more depth if you're really curious):
The Waialaie West Aquifer system provides the most common type of groundwater available on Oahu, consisting of a layer of infiltrated rainfall floating as a lens-shaped body over salt water. Fresh water floats on the heavier salt water, both of which permeate the subsurface rock. The density ration between fresh water and salt water is such that theoretically, for each foot that the fresh water lens stands above sea level, the lens extends 40 feet below sea level to a midpoint where salinity is half sea water. A transition zone of mixture grades upward to fresh water and downward to sea water. The presence of the fresh water head is due to relatively impermeable caprock, located along the coastline, which retards outward flow to the ocean.
It seems that right around the same time the original well was built, developers were planning to build a subdivision called "Kahala Heights" here, covering the entire hillside where the park is now. Somehow the state ended up owning the center of the proposed subdivision instead, though I don't know whether that was a straight business deal, or the Depression or WWII also figured into it. In any case, the state held the land as a buffer around the well, but I gather they did nothing else with the place during the decades they owned it, much to the frustration of the surrounding neighborhood. I don't know whether the whole park was actually fenced off or not, but it very well could have been.
A June 2000 Star-Bulletin article explains that the state had handed the land over to the city in 1991 -- several years after the original well had gone out of service -- and residents had big plans for the place. Volunteers had already built the elusive loop trail by the time of the article, and had been planting native plants starting around 1994. A couple of years later the city approved an official master plan for the park, finalized in July 2002 (see also a 2003 environmental assessment for the plan). That doesn't tell us very much about the nature area unfortunately, since the master plan for that part was to just leave it alone other than the existing nature trail. While the lower part of the park was slated to get some neighborhood park-type improvements, only some of which have actually happened so far. Among the things dropped from the finalized plan was a proposed Zen archery range, which would have replaced an existing one somewhere in Kapiolani Park. Strictly speaking it wasn't completely dropped, just moved to a timetable-less "Phase IV" of the comprehensive park plan, which is much more polite and non-confrontational than a simple 'no' would have been. Volunteer enthusiasm naturally ebbs and flows over time, and after that initial burst of urban planning excitement, there's a decade gap in easily-found news items until 2013, when residents were campaigning to close the park at night as it -- specifically the viewpoint part -- had become a late-night party spot. The park closes at 10pm now, so the campaigners may have gotten their rule change. Whether the city actually enforces the closure is, as always, anyone's guess.
For a little alternate history, here's the undated overall map for the proposed Kahala Heights subdivision. When I said this was roughly contemporary to the well, I was going by the earliest date stamps on someplatmaps for various pieces of the development. These maps were updated and re-stamped every time anything about the map changed up into the mid-1980s or so when presumably everything was digitized. The future "natural area" portion of the park is shown filled with houses and crossed by a couple of never-built roads labeled simply "Road F" and "Road I", with a bunch of proposed and then canceled parcel numbers X'ed out. The maps also contain a bunch of hyphenated numbers that look like dates, specifically March 3rd of consecutive years from 3-3-13 thru 3-3-22. Those are actually "TMK numbers [2]", part of the state's unique property ID system, and I have to say I'm quite glad I figured that out before posting a whole paragraph trying to guess what was so special about March 3rd, which is something I had in an early draft of this post. The docs show the park as owned by the state, which was true past the point where the county stopped relying on paper maps. I suppose that after statehood in 1959, some poor junior surveyor must have drawn the short straw and had to go through every single map in the office with a pen and a jug of whiteout, manually updating anything that said "Territory of Hawaii" on it.
I did find a handful of random historical items by searching for "Kahala Heights", as that name was once used for the general neighborhood but largely fell out of use several decades ago, at least going by the stuff I can find on the internet easily. As a result, search results are (unusually) not completely swamped by real estate listings. In the present day the neighborhood generally goes by "Wilhelmina Rise", and becomes "Maunalani Heights" a short distance further uphill, per a 2017 Honolulu Magazine piece that explains the difference and drops in a little history of both. Anyway, I can't come up with much of a storyline linking these random historical items together, so I'm going to go with an oldest-to-newest bullet point list and call it even:
The neighborhood is mentioned briefly in a biography of John Henry Wilson, whose Wikipedia bio describes him as "a civil engineer, insurgent, co-founder of the Democratic Party of Hawaii, and Mayor of Honolulu, Hawaii three times: from 1920 to 1927, from 1929 to 1931, and from 1946 to 1954." It seems the neighborhood had a small cameo role in the 1928 mayoral election. I don't know the whole story, because it's not included in the free Google Books excerpt of the book, but I gather there was an ongoing controversy about a stone crushing operation somewhere vaguely near Kahala Heights, and local Republicans were trying to make an election issue of it, arguing Wilson wasn't protecting neighborhood children and the local school properly. It turned out that the rock crushing operation was over half a mile from the school, and the people pulling the strings behind this astroturf campaign were snobby rich people in the beachfront Kahala neighborhood, because some things never change, and Wilson ended up regaining the mayor's office that year.
Skipping forward to December 7th 1941, a 2016 Star-Advertiser story related a reminiscence from a longtime resident who was 11 when it happened. Confusing news reports were saying that something bad was happening across town at the navy base, so he and some friends hiked uphill somewhere in the the Kahala Heights area to get a better view, and just then a Japanese Zero flew by at about eye level. Not understanding what was going on, the kids waved at the pilot, and he saw them and waved back. A 2013 Orange County Register story related another Zero pilot story from someone else who was from Kahala Heights but saw the plane over in Aiea, much closer to the attack.
Brief reference to a 1961 study on doing some urban renewal in the Kaimuki, Maunalani, and Kahala Heights neighborhoods. In a 1962 issue of "Housing and Planning References", a sort of quarterly bibliography of recent studies and publications relating to urban renewal topics nationwide and around the world. This might be what eventually led to the large public housing projects in Palolo Valley next door, which have about the same reputation as midcentury public housing does everywhere else.
So yeah. In summary MauŹ»umae Nature Park is a land of contrasts. Still wish I could find that dumb trail, though.
The science behind this aquifer stuff is something called "Ghyben-Herzbergtheory", dating back to work by a couple of German engineers in the late 19th Century, building on ancient Greek discoveries about density and buoyancy from thousands of years ago, just swapping out the bathtub and gold crown with fresh water and salt water inside semi-porous solid rock. And a bit of assuming one of those legendary spherical cows physicists keep going on about, as this 19th century model just gives you a general idea of what the state of your aquifer is at a given point in time and how much fresh and fresh-ish water there is. It doesn't tell you how much water it's safe to remove from the system without drawing saltwater in from the ocean and ruining your aquifer. For that you need to understand how much freshwater is naturally entering and exiting the system and how quickly saltwater can move in if the equilibrium shifts. I gather the aquifer here is a relatively simple example of this kind of system, as there were computer simulations of it as early as 1985. This 1985 paper explains that the Waialae West aquifer is separated from adjacent aquifers by dense, non-permeable volcanic dikes underground, and separated from the ocean by dense coastal marine sediments, so the above-sea-level groundwater doesn't just leak out to sea immediately (which makes it a good place to dig a well), and it isn't flowing sideways deep underground to a significant degree, which makes it easier to model. In fact it's a literal textbook example, in Seawater Intrusion in Coastal Aquifers: Concepts, Methods and Practices (1999, pp. 234-237), which looks at how closely a couple of models (the original Ghyben-Herzberg one, and a newer one called SHARP) model the actual behavior of the well, going by a nearly four decade dataset (1937-1975) from the well, and rainfall data from the same period. If I understand correctly, the classic model doesn't fit exactly because rainfall varies a lot between years and by season, and then the rainwater takes a while to make its way down into the aquifer.
A weird data point on how long it takes for rain to become aquifer water here comes from a 1973 study measuring tritium levels in water around Oahu. Tritium being a radioactive isotope of hydrogen with a half-life of about 12 years. It occurs naturally in very low levels, but at the time of the study the bulk of it in the environment was residue from above-ground nuclear tests. Among other things, this provided a unique way to date the groundwater, or in this case set a lower bound on it, since they found essentially zero tritium in well water from here, which they took to mean that tritium-enriched water had not yet filtered down into the aquifer in significant quantities since 1954, when the stuff would have begun entering the environment in detectable quantities. (They don't explain the 1954 date, but I imagine it relates to hydrogen bomb tests, or maybe ordinary non-fusion nuclear tests conducted in the open ocean.) I imagine this study would be unusually difficult to replicate in 2021, as you'd probably have to develop your own nukes first to supply the needed tritium, and most university IRBs tend to frown on that sort of thing these days.
Of course the hardest part of all is that even if you're figured out the natural rates of inflow and outflow and such down to all the decimal places you'll ever need, that rarely stops people from getting greedy and trying to push the envelope even further. There's the classic tragedy of the commons with everyone overdraws the aquifer a little and nobody feels responsible, and the modern plague of professional contrarian experts who will happily tell you you can draw 27% more water than you're doing now and it'll be fine according to these PowerPoint slides, just do it and be legends, etc. Or developers come to town touting a multi-billion-dollar scheme that unfortunately involves cutting through those coastal sediments and pulling the cork out of the bottom of the local groundwater supply, and (this being Hawaii) it gets approved quietly by an anonymous city bureaucrat in exchange for a suitcase of cash, steady no-attendance jobs for various no-good relatives, VIP trips to Vegas, and the other usual inducements.
TMK ("tax map key") numbers, which Hawaii uses instead of the township-range-section-lot arrangement used across much of the mainland. Here's a local realtor's blog post explaining this unusual system, as he explains it better than I can. A number like "3-3-15" says this is zone 3, section 3, plats 15, and that combined with the parcel numbers on an individual lot gives you the TMK. The full TMK for these lots would all have a leading '1', which is the island number for everything on OŹ»ahu, but in common use those are typically left off as implied. Linked from that post, here's a map of Oahu showing the zone & section layout of the island. The striking thing about that is that those boundaries correspond very closely to traditional moku and ahupua'aboundaries, which date back to many centuries before the first European visitors showed up, and in turn are largely based on natural watershed boundaries. Lots of other things follow the same lines to varying degrees, despite having nothing to do with watersheds or land tenure, like city, state, & federal legeslative districts, zip code boundaries, zones of the city park system, and so on.
Last week I got my second COVID-19 shot, vaccinating me against a disease that virtually no one understood a year ago, one that didn't even exist in humans a year and a half ago. I'm sure I don't have to describe what the last year-and-change has been like. And now with a tiny light at the end of the tunnel, this month we all had to relive how it began, a month of strange, difficult, and sometimes tragic one-year anniversaries. For my part, the day I keep thinking back to is March 9th 2020, which stuck in my mind as the last normal day of the Before Times, before all of this happened.
In truth it really wasn't a normal day at all. I was on vacation, a long-planned trip to O'ahu after a stressful work project had finally wrapped up. I needed time away from that and from a bunch of serious family medical things and related drama, so despite the reports of a strange disease popping up in a remote corner of China I rolled the dice and got on a plane, and then spent most of the trip holed up my condo anxiously reading coronavirus news as things rapidly went from bad to worse across the globe. One morning I decided to try to have at least one normal vacation day before heading home, figuring then I'd lie low for a few weeks after that until the virus situation was over. So I hopped on a city bus and made my way over to Kailua, a suburban beach town on the windward side of the island. The plan for the day was not ambitious: just go walk down the town's famous beach to see what it was like, take a few photos for the humble blog, and then maybe check out a new brewpub/taproom that had recently opened along the town's main drag. My notes from a year ago say I had a mask with me on the trip, but I have no recollection of whether I wore it on the bus or in the pub or on the flight home.
It was dim and grey out and it drizzled on and off all day, and I passed several people on the beach wearing sweatshirts and huddling up for warmth, just like Oregonians do at the coast; imagine that but 20 degrees warmer. It's tempting to laugh at people acting that way in 72 degree weather, but you don't have to be there long before any hint of temperatures below the low 80s registers as cold. Especially when all the other weather cues that register as "Pacific winter storm" are present, and other people are acting like it's cold outside, and the local restaurants are running winter specials heavy on the hearty soups and stews and whatnot.
I figured I'd start at the Kailuana end of the beach and walk south til I got to Kailua Beach Park, not because different parts of the beach are significantly different from each other, but that if I just went there to sit on the beach and shiver in 72 degree weather, I would inevitably end up staring at my phone and looking at virus news instead of having a proper vacation day. So step one was just to find the beach access. I had read conflicting things about where it was, and ended up wandering through a subdivision where all the street names are "Kailuana"-something, looking for the Kailuana beach access. I even saw what looked like a beach access, but it was gated off, and eventually I ended up back out on Kalaheo Avenue -- the main drag through the area -- and eventually sighted the actual beach trail just a couple of doors down from the subdivision. It turned out to be a long, neglected-looking alleyway between swanky houses, marked by a heavily vandalized city park sign.
It turns out that my initial guess was not totally off the mark, though. The black gate I saw, with the red letters spelling out "Private Property No Trespassing" really is a beach access spot, but it's a members-onlygate for the local HOA. Now, the subdivision itself isn't gated, and its streets are public, and people can and regularly do park on the street and take the slighly roundabout path to the beach from there, often with surfboards in tow. And the beach on the far side of the gate is a public beach, by state law, and royal proclamation before that, and by local tradition going back endless centuries. But thanks to a little platting-and-deeding magic the subdivision got an exclusive beach path for themselves, in exchange for also putting in a beach alley nearby for the peasants. Which is one of the more tremendously petty things I've seen in a long time. It also tells you who has the power within the HOA: If your house isn't right on the beach, and you're the sort of person who frets about outsiders disturbing your genteel peace and quiet and so forth, you may actually have more people walking past your house to get to the beach the roundabout way than you would if the gate was just open to everybody. For some residents this also means outsiders walking down an alley that backs up to your backyard.
Of course the nature of rich people is that beyond every velvet rope is another velvet rope: The 0.1 percenters will need to wall themselves off from the mere one-percenters, and the 0.01 percenters can't bear to live among the smelly 0.1 percenters, and so on. So it won't surprise you that at the far end of the neighborhood I wandered through is a second gate, and residents' beach keys don't fit this gate. Beyond it, Kailuana Place continues out onto a narrow spit of land between the ocean and the Kawainui Canal, inhabited by the next-most-exclusive tier of rich person. One of the houses out there repeatedly served as the "winterWhiteHouse" during the Obama administration, and the president could only afford it as a vacation rental.
So I ran into a cul-de-sac at this point, not a literal subdivision-type one, but a dead end while puttng this post together; I had a few more links radiating out from this land use situation that I couldn't quite mash into a good storyline, and that in turn was blocking me from finishing this post, and I ended up stuck at this point for several weeks, and here I am after dark on March 31st trying to finish a one-year-ago-this-month post about the previous March before it stops being the following March. So here are a few of the links I had that I didn't quite want to just toss out: A couple about the securityzone that was set up here during the Obama era, and I was going to toss in a gratuitous link to a post here from a few months back snarking at Mar-a-Lago. Was also going to veer off on a tangent about a similar controversy over on Kaua'i where a commenter referenced the situation here, and another tangent about beach access in Oregon that I'd already kicked off to a footnote. And a couple of links explaining that bikeaccess is a problem here too.
So moving right along, I made it to the beach and walked along for a while and took the photos here, ending up at crowded Kailua Beach Park; evidently it was a great day for kiteboarding, and colorful kites filled the grey sky. Although I somehow neglected to take any photos whatsoever of any of this, and I have no idea why not. From snippets of conversation I overheard, several of the people there were quite well-known within the sport, though I didn't catch any names and would not have recognized them if I had. Also I'm terrible at names and faces and would not have linked the name to the right person, and long story short, I am the world's worst papparazzo and if you came here looking for stale year-old kiteboard celebrity news, I'm afraid this is not your lucky day. If you continue down the beach at this point you'll end up at Lanikai Beach and near the popular end of the Lanikai Pillbox Trail, which I didn't do since I've already been there and done that, on a much sunnier and dryer day.
Besides, I was already focusing on goal number two for the day, tracking down the new-ish OlomanaBrewingtaproom, in an older building along the main drag through town. Had a couple of beers and chatted a bit with the owner and some of the other patrons there; as of press time this is still the last time I've had a beer in the presence of other human beings. Turns out there were a couple of other people from Portland there, which happens a lot; I suppose Portlanders visiting breweries while traveling is sort of a busman's holiday thing, pursuing Portland-y interests as best we can elsewhere, while the puzzled locals look at you like you're some kind of obsessive weirdo. In my defense, I'm almost positive I've never quizzed anyone about IBUs or mashing times or canning vs. bottling while on vacation, since it's a life goal of mine to never be That Guy. But I have had people volunteer these details and more, completely unasked, after hearing the word "Portland".
At least hiking is a popular local thing on O'ahu and nobody looks at you funny about that. As a matter of fact, the brewery is named after a local cartoonishly-steep peak that looms over the Kailua area. Olomana is widely thought to be one of the scariest and most dangerous hiking trails on O'ahu, home to a long list of fatal accidents over the years. I have never attempted it, and it's not really high on my todo list, as roughly the entire route is along a razor-sharp narrow ridge with tons of exposure, which I admit I am no big fan of. Narrow, as in nearly two-dimensional narrow, and you're hiking along the edge of where a third dimension ought to be and isn't. And calling it hiking is a stretch as I gather you spend much of the route relying on ropes of unknown age and provenance for help getting up and down slopes of up to and beyond vertical. And there's mud everywhere, and the mud doesn't provide any more traction than it does anywhere else on the island, and it's wet and muddy a lot more here than most parts of the island, thanks to being an isolated peak just windward of the windward side of the Ko'olaus. At this point I'd sort of like to point you at UH Manoa's interactive rainfall map to demonstrate just how much wetter it is than the surrounding parts of the windward side... but it's a small microclimate and the university doesn't have a weather sensor on top of any of the peaks, as this would involve climing the peaks a lot in all weather conditions. So Olomana is essentially invisible on that map. But since the point of this sensor network is to extrapolate conditions across the whole island from a limited sensor network, your model may be more accurate overall without a few mountaintop sensors sending in wacky outlier numbers all the time. You'd never guess that the highest point tops out at just 1644'.
As I was leaving the pub I mentioned I was heading back to the mainland in a few days but would be back after the virus thing was sorted out. Which I'm choosing to think of as a somewhat delayed but still-pending todo item, since both they and I seem to have survived this recent unpleasantness. Maybe in a few more months, depending on how things go from here.
If you've paged through the photoset you might have noticed a couple of photos of a rooster. While I was waiting for the bus home, he strolled by on the sidewalk, ignoring everyone standing there, and all the traffic on the adjacent four-lane road, and everything else except for a fellow rooster on the far side of the road. The two kept yelling at each other over what I imagine was some sort of property dispute; you'd think the busy road would appear as a reasonable and fair natural boundary, but no, the rooster from our side had to dart across the street, oblivious to traffic, to press the battle in the distant land of Other Rooster. I'm fairly sure there's a vintage George W. Bush or Dick Cheney quote explaining why preemptive invasions are an essential part of self-defense, but I can't be bothered to look it up at the moment. Anyway, he made it across and they chased each other out of sight, and may still be fighting it out, given how that sort of conflict tends to go, especially if either of the roosters has somehow discovered oil.
Once I got home it was back to virus news stories, and a couple of days later was the day Tom Hanks caught the virus and the NBA season was canceled and the rest was history, and a few days after that I made it back to Portland while trying not to breathe too much on a 5 hour flight, just in time for a family memorial service that ended up being canceled, and then stores began running out of everything, and certain presidents insisted it was all just a big hoax, and, well, you know the rest.
In honor of spending the last year indoors messing around on the internet instead of going places, I put together a little YouTube playlist of island music, which is the sort of goofy sentimental thing you do when a place you're fond of suddenly becomes infinitely far away for the foreseeable future. I can't quite figure out whether the shots walking down an alley in the first video are from the beach access thing I mentioned earlier, but it looked a lot like that, anyway. I'll probably think this is vaguely embarrassing when I look at it a few Marches from now, but here goes:
So the weird Oregon beach access thing that I wanted to tell you about at one point is about Little Whale Cove, a small inlet on the coast near Depoe Bay, home to an upscale gated community and best known for a notorious 1980s court case. Oregonians of a certain age will go on and on about the famous Beach Bill, a 1970s law that guaranteed public access to the state's beaches and limited development of tideland areas. They won't tell you it was based on an earlier law in (gasp!) Texas, or that the legal trick that made coastal protections possible here was declaring the state's beaches an official state highway. Which is why the state highway department ended up in charge of dynamiting a beached whale in 1970. Anyway, sometime in the 80s developers noticed this one cove near Depoe Bay had a little geological quirk where at low tide the cove became a pond detached from the ocean by some rocks or a sandbar or I'm not sure what exactly. Some fancy lawyers figured out that if you read the beach bill just the right way, the cove was maybe not part of the ocean and the beach wasn't covered by the law and you could fence it off and keep the peasants out and have a proper California-style gated community, and best of all it was the only one of its kind that was possible anywhere on the Oregon coast. So they went ahead with the project, and fought the inevitable court case all the way to the state Supreme Court, and won. But given the unique geology it turned out not to be the statewide apocalypse that some predicted at the time, so they've just sort of been there since then quietly keeping to themselves and doing whatever it is that rich people do at the coast.
Except that it turns out one of those rich person things involves keeping the public away from nearby, non-little WhaleCove as well. You might think that would be tough, since there's no geological loophole there, and the beach is actually part of an official state park. Ah, but if you can manage to buy up the land people would have to cross to get to said beach, and donate it to the nearby National Wildlife Refuge that's absolutely closed to all public access forever, that protects your precious privacy in a way nobody can criticize without seeming like some kind of earth-hating SUV monster. So that's where things stand right now. And at whatever point the largely-theoretical Oregon Coast Trail becomes more of a thing that exists along the central coast, this whole area is going to be a big barrier they'll have to work around somehow.
The inability to go to either cove and take photos is why this situation is relegated to a footnote in a Hawaii post instead of getting a proper post of its own. FWIW.
Since I'm in a rare playlist-sharing mood at the moment, I figured I'd drop in a bonus one. This time it's some music from the (ex-Soviet) Republic of Georgia, a place I've been intrigued by since college but have never visited. According to the interwebs, life there seems to revolve around wine and feasts and singing and dancing (with swords) and related extrovert things that I would not actually do in real life, but which seem endlessly compelling on cold winter days when you literally have not encountered a single live human being in person in weeks, and you'd recoil from them anxiously if you did. Anyway, here:
