Beaver Creek Canyon, Troutdale OR

Next up we're doing the hike around Troutdale's Beaver Creek Canyon. This particular Beaver Creek is a large tributary of the Sandy River that begins somewhere south of Oxbow Park and flows north, roughly parallel to the Sandy River, eventually joining the river at Depot Park in downtown Troutdale. On its way there it flows thru a surprisingly deep and narrow canyon for a couple of miles. Surprising as in one stretch seems to be over 150' deep, so not on the same scale as the Columbia Gorge to the east of here, or the Sandy River Gorge south of here, but it's big enough to make you forget you're still technically in suburbia. Which you can do here because it's a Troutdale city park, and there's a trail through it, or at least part of it.

If you look at a map of the area, like the one above, you'd think this would be a straightforward hike: You'd park at Glenn Otto Park, which borders Beaver Creek for a bit, and the trail would head south from there. But right at the mouth of the canyon are several private landowners, served by a private road with a big "No Trespassing" sign posted. As far as I could tell there isn't an interesting or dramatic backstory to this situation, or if there is the story never made it into a newspaper with searchable archives. Whatever the exact details are, the 50,000 foot version is probably just landowners not wanting to sell, and/or the city not having the money to buy. In any case, the "actual" route is a bit longer but possibly more interesting than the direct route would have been.

So the route we're taking goes a lot like this: Starting at Glenn Otto, cross Beaver Creek on the pedestrian bridge and stroll along the sidewalk heading for downtown Troutdale. After a few blocks you'll see signs for the Harlow House Museum, a house belonging to the city's colorful founder. Behind the house, there's a small landscaped garden, and behind the garden you'll find a trailhead marked something like "Harlow Canyon". Because this initial stretch follows an entirely different creek with its own watershed. The trail heads uphill briefly, crosses the tiny canyon's tiny creek right where it makes a cute little mini-waterfall, and then ends at a trail junction. One option seems to dump you out onto a suburban city street, while the trail on the left continues in a narrow corridor right along the edge of the bluff, a near-sheer drop on one side, and a bunch of backyard fences on the other. There isn't a city parks page for this bit of trail, but it appears to be called the "Strawberry Meadows Greenway", named for the subdivision here. Which in turn (following the usual practice with subdivisions) was named for the strawberry farms that once dominated the area. This part is a fairly popular community walking trail, so you might get waylaid by chatty retirees unless you look like you need to be somewhere on a tight schedule. Eventually this trail ends too, I think right at the subdivision boundary, dumping you out on a regular suburban street, SE Beaver Creek Lane. Luckily this is the kind of suburb that has sidewalks, because that's the next phase of the hike. You're looking for either of two entrances to Beaver Creek Canyon, which start as nondescript paths between houses. There aren't any big signs announcing where they go, either. The first one is across the street from the intersection with Chapman Ave. The second one is across from tiny Weedin Park. Pick either one, and before you know it the concrete path becomes several flights of stairs down into the canyon.

Either entrance puts you on the same sloping trail down into the canyon, which brings you to the park's main trail junction. From here you can turn right and follow the creek south/upstream, or follow the trail as it turns left and follows the creek north/downstream. The exact distance you can go in either direction varies a lot over time, shrinking when a winter flood or landslide rolls through, and expanding when the city finds grant money or volunteers to repair flood and landslide damage, or even (once in a blue moon) to expand the trail network. There will be anywhere between zero and two footbridges over the creek; if the current number is one or more, you may have access to a parallel trail on the east bank of the creek, and -- if it's a good trail year -- that trail might connect to another entrance here. If there's currently a bridge in existence at both bridge sites (which is rarely true), you can do this part of the park as a loop. The southbound trail may also connect to trails in Kiku Park, depending on current landslide/repair conditions, which would be a third way in from the west side. I didn't check on this when I was there and it may have changed since then, and could change again between when I'm writing this and when you're reading it.

Even further south, there's yet another westside entrance here, which apparently goes to a small loop trail disconnected from the rest of the trail network. I didn't visit this area and have no photos of it. It's separated from the rest of the park by the deepest and narrowest stretch of the canyon, so I don't know whether connections to the rest of the park once existed and don't anymore, or whether they never got funding in the first place, or whether it's even physically possible to build a trail through that part. Upstream from there, Beaver Creek passes through a jumble of public land and farmland without trails, and the canyon starts somewhere in that area. Continuing upstream, Beaver Creek flows through a city park that's called either "Bellingham Greenway", "Mountain Vista Greenway", or "CEF Open Space" depending on whose map you're looking at, with an entrance here and another somewhere around here. And on the south side of SW Stark St. is the Mt. Hood Community College campus, which has a ~65 acre Metro wetland area running along either side of the creek, and a small trail system we'll meet in another post. South of the college, the creek runs more or less along the edge of suburbia (as of 2024) for a bit, incuding a few disconnected units of Gresham's Beaver Creek Management Area here, here, and here, the last two possibly with trails connecting them. Then it's just farmland all the way south to where the creek begins, a bit west of Oxbow Park.

The park is like this because of the Great Troutdale Land Rush of the late 1970s. Subdivisions sprouted like invasive weeds all across east Multnomah County generally, and Troutdale in particular. I think it was largely because it's where the large blocks of cheap land and motivated sellers were. The local strawberry industry had been rapidly outcompeted by larger, cheaper, and completely flavorless, styrofoam-like strawberries from California, mostly because their strawberry varieties can survive long bumpy journeys in an 18-wheeler while ours don't, and theirs hold up under being dipped in molten chocolate and then sitting on grocery shelves for weeks. And our strawberries... don't. Long story short, it was a great time to sell around here, and most of the land on either side of Beaver Creek became housing over a few short years, right up to Oregon's mega-recession of the early 1980s. It probably helped too that house hunting is largely a spring and summer phenomenon and prospective buyers wouldn't get to experience what Troutdale winters can be like until it's too late. In any case, the city responded to this wave by being surprisingly forward-looking by Portland suburb standards, and not immediately bowing down to whatever developers wanted. A 1977 Oregonian article, "Wilderness survives amidst housing" explains that the city generally required developers to hand over some land for city parks as part of getting your subdivision approved, and in this part of town that included any land in the canyon. You couldn't build there anyway, for flood control reasons. The city also required that private property along the canyon rim had to be in natural vegetation, to limit the visual impact of subdivisions up above. Which probably also reduced the risk of distracted gardeners taking a big tumble while weeding.

Somehow this actually worked, and the parts of the canyon that are protected now are protected because of adjacent subdivisions. This is not how things usually turn out, to put it mildly. But thanks to the county surveyor's office putting records online we can look at the subdivision plats for Sandee Palisades phases I (1/77), II (2/78), III (12/78), and IV (12/90) on the east side of the creek, and the ones for Corbeth (6/77), Rainbow Ridge (5/76), Kiku Heights (2/77), Beaver Creek Estates (2/78) Weedin Addition (7/77), Mountain Vista (1992), Bellingham Park (5/97) and Strawberry Meadows (4/95) on the west side, each one showing the concessions developers made in exchange for the privilege of building here. Not just donating land that was probably unbuildable anyway, but providing access points into the park.

The 70s were a time of grand plans, and there was indeed a grand plan for Beaver Creek. The hot new idea back then was the "40 Mile Loop", a future regional hike-n-bike trail network encircling the Portland metro area. Eventually someone remembered the "circumference equals Pi times two times radius" formula from high school and realized that encircling the metro area would involve quite a lot more than 40 miles of trails, and a few years ago they rebranded the concept as "The Intertwine". In any case, no version of this loop has never been anywhere near completion, but I would guess that it has a cameo in every last urban planning document produced in the Portland area since the Tom McCall era. I think the idea is to not do anything to preclude a future bit of Intertwine in your project area even though you aren't actively working on it just now. So the working idea has been that Troutdale's part of the loop follows Beaver Creek into town from the south, drops into the canyon at some point, and continues to the Sandy River and then along the Columbia on what eventually becomes the Marine Drive Trail, taking you back toward Portland. Or you could hang a right at Glenn Otto Park, cross the bridge, and follow either the HCRH Trail (i.e. bike in traffic until Elowah Falls) or get on Trail 400 at Lewis & Clark State Park (as soon as they get around to building that initial 5-10 mile stretch of trail) and follow it east to Cascade Locks where it intersects the Pacific Crest Trail, and simply walk to Canada or Mexico from there, as one does.

Which brings us to the usual timeline section of this post, which is basically a list of old news stories and other items I couldn't work into this post any other way. Nothing really earthshaking to share here, but you can see the decades-long pattern of the city scratching its head trying to figure out what to do about the place and how to pay for it.

• 1978, meeting notice that Sandee Palisades III was in the city planning approval phase
• 1982 article about the growing Troutdale park system. Mentions summer maintenance jobs were paid for with CETA grants. (CETA was the "Comprehensive Employment and Training Act of 1973", a late, lamented federal program that would pay for just about anything if you had a good grant writer.)
• A similar 1983 article mentions the park briefly, director said the trails were too steep for bikes
• Another article from around the same time noted the trail was now part of city's comprehensive plan, mentions that planned 40 Mile Loop route at the time was through the canyon.
• Report on a mid-1990s project clearing invasive plants. Which sort of morphed into a restoration effort after the 1995-96 floods. A consultant told the city to move trails away from the creek and get rid of a bridge for causing erosion.
• another project nearby in 1997, maybe in connection with the Strawberry Meadows subdivision going in.
• 2004 city council minutes, discussion of parks master plan, with a member of the public blowing a gasket over another such proposed development deal, as it would be in exchange for low income housing this time. Thinks connecting the north & south chunks of park would cause crime, and if a park happens it should be a human exclusion area
• Parks Master Plan, adopted 2006. The plan of record is to extend the existing trail along the creek in both directions, bypassing the current harlow creek / strawberry route. You could hike from Glenn Otto to MHCC. Discusses maybe obtaining easements for the gap to Glenn Otto vs buying, maybe owners aren't interested in selling or city can't afford
• 2014 study connecting trail south to springwater corridor
• 2020 OregonHikers thread about the park

Chinquapin West

Next up we're paying a visit to Metro's obscure Chinquapin West Natural Area, on a weirdly remote stretch of the Sandy River a few miles south of Troutdale. Until a few years ago this was a Nature Conservancy property, and before that it belonged to one of several old-money philanthropists who donated land to prevent it being developed (while still hanging on to their cabins along the river, in some cases). If you know where to find the unmarked trailhead (located along Gordon Creek Rd., as shown on the map above), you can follow a surprisingly well-maintained trail down into the river canyon, and eventually to the trail's one and only trail junction. Which, once again, is unmarked. Turning right eventually takes you to a sunny happy burbling stretch of river -- or at least it was sunny when I was there, your mileage will vary -- where you can don your vintage L.L. Bean gear and do a bit of gentlemanly fly fishing, which I gather was the main reason the original donors felt this stretch of the river was worth preserving.

That area is attractive enough to make the area worth a visit, even if you aren't into catching or eating fish. But the real secret treasure of this place is down the side trail that was off to the left back at the trail junction. After a short distance, a sheer cliff comes into view, covered in moss and ferns, with a small creek tumbling along below it. The trail heads toward the upstream end of this creek, and you soon find yourself in a narrow sheer-sided canyon, with the stream undercutting the cliff in a rather extreme way. At the head of this mini-canyon is a waterfall, and one like you've probably never encountered. The creek falls into a sort of cylindrical hole, slightly open on one side where it faces the canyon, so you can only see the lowest one-third or so of the waterfall. If you've been to the so-called "Pool of the Winds" at Rodney Falls on the Washington side of the Gorge, it's kind of like that but even more so. The cherry on top of all this is that if you're here at just the right time, on a late summer afternoon, the sun shines directly into the mini-canyon and the alcove holding the waterfall, catching the spray from the falls and causing fleeting mini-rainbows. I dunno, this may not be your cup of tea, and as always your mileage may vary, but I thought it was fairly magical.

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A small plaque dating to the Nature Conservancy days proclaims this area to be "Duckering Glen", honoring a late donor who had loved this spot in particular. I don't know whether Metro still considers that name to be in effect, and as far as I know both the creek and the falls have remained nameless since the first Euro-American settlers showed up. And this is the point where I tell you that this spot is -- as the crow flies, at least -- less than twenty miles from downtown Portland. It astonishes me to no end that this place hasn't been loved to death by crowds and ruined, like what happened to Oneonta Gorge before the Eagle Creek fire.

One thing that might be limiting the crowds here is that Multnomah County strictly prohibits parking on the shoulder along much of Gordon Creek Rd., and you sort of have to read between the lines and suss out where you can park just going by the absence of No Parking signs. If you do this and guess wrong, Officer Friendly is only going to ticket you for it, but I'm pretty sure I've seen a tow truck from a notorious predatory towing company scoping out one of the other Sandy River trailheads on at least one occasion, so maybe don't push your luck here.

South Roadside Falls

So this post marks one of those extremely rare occasions where I actually wrap up a series of posts, without leaving any unfinished ones forgotten in Drafts or letting the project scope creep out of control so it can never finish at all. Or at least that will be true assuming I can get this one finished. This series covers a group of mostly-nameless seasonal waterfalls along the Sandy River stretch of the Historic Columbia River Highway. To recap, this was part of a mid-pandemic effort to find obscure and less-visited places to go, in order to get outside while avoiding all other human beings to the greatest possible degree. That worked out really well in a lot of places but not here, exactly, as people kept stopping to take photos of whatever I was taking photos of. Ok, technically it happened twice. So far we've had a look at:

• Keanes Creek Falls, the southernmost of the five
• City Limit Falls, the northernmost of the bunch
• North Roadside Falls, continuing south from there
• Middle Roadside Falls, apparently the tallest one, if you trust my math and map-point-picking skills

And this one finishes the set, unless you count a couple of others that are so seasonal that they only seem to run literally in the middle of big winter storms. Which to me just doesn't seem worth pursuing.

Heightwise, given the top (167.75' / 162.25') and bottom (61.45' / 61.22'), the math says it's around 100.8 - 106.5 feet high. Which, possibly.

You might notice that the highway shoulder is especially wide along this stretch of road. It turns out the stretch of riverbank through here is a small Metro-owned public park, and it's here to provide public river access, specifically public fishing access. There aren't any signs around that say this, but there's plenty of room to park, and usually a car or truck or two parked here, so I guess enough people find out about the place by word of mouth. This is actually not the only spot like this; depending on whose map you look at there are either three (lettered A thru C) or five (numbered 1-5) of them, all on the east bank of the Sandy, and located between the Stark St. & Troutdale bridges.

And if this doesn't sound like a very Metro thing to do, you're absolutely right; these sites were part of the old Multnomah County park system before Metro absorbed it in 1994, and you can check out a 2008 post of mine for more than you probably care to know about that whole thing. I couldn't find any info on when the county may have purchased these places, the closest data point I have is a

a March 1963 Oregonian article about the county's ambitious new parks plan, with a map showing roughly where the county's new parks would be. Their focus at the time was on adding neighborhood parks to serve then-unincorporated parts of the county, and the only ones, current or proposed, east of the Sandy would have been neighborhood playground-type ones in the Springdale and Corbett areas. The river access parcels aren't mentioned and don't appear on the map, so either the county hadn't bought them yet, or river access fell under a separate budget category or a whole different department and didn't count.

As I understand it, the rationale behind these fishing spots is that the Sandy might be the best river for salmon in the region, and the stretch between the two bridges is possibly the best part of the river, and it would be undemocratic to have it limited people who can afford to own a boat, or build a house on the river. For many years the state prohibited fishing from boats anywhere upstream of the Stark St. bridge for similar reasons, the idea being boaters had an unfair advantage over people fishing on the riverbank when both were allowed. So when the state pushed the no-boats boundary back four miles to Oxbow Park in December 1987, some people reacted like democracy itself was being eroded in favor of rich people always getting whatever they want. And who knows, maybe that really was an early symptom on the way to January 6th 2021. This happened in the middle of the Reagan-Bush era, when a lot of little things like this happened, so the timing's spot on, at least.

Anyway, here's the list, starting here and heading downstream:

• Unit C (1.21 acres, aka unit 4) is where we're at now. If I'm reading it right, a 2007 iFish forum post is saying this place is called "The Willows" out in the real world.
• Unit 5 is not actually river access, but two tiny pieces of land on the waterfall side of the road, 0.11 and 0.01 acres respectively, with the larger one possibly including the falls we came here to look at. For anyone who missed the wrong day in grade school weights and measures class, one one-hundredth of an acre is equal to about 344 square feet, equivalent to an 18.5' square.
• As for unit 2? Maps that have the sites numbered it show it as a long and extremely skinny bit of riverbank, roughly the whole stretch between City Limit Falls and North Roadside Falls, while maps that give the sites letters don't show this one at all, and PortlandMaps has it listed as private property, so I'm not sure what's going on here. I think the forum post from above is saying this area goes by "Duck Hole", unless maybe the highway speed limit signs have moved around since 2007. Google seems to think it's a popular place, or at least one that gets talked about a lot, so I dunno. I guess my point here is that if you want to know more about it (and what the legal situation is, etc.) your best bet is to go ask someone who actually knows what they're talking about, because I sure don't.
• Unit B (0.43 acres, aka unit 3) is further downstream, right around the (relatively) busy intersection of the Columbia River Highway & Woodard Road. Thing is, there's not really anywhere to park around this one, and there are several "No Parking" signs are posted on both streets just in case anyone even thinks about trying it. So this one may be more of a locals-only thing. Or maybe it isn't a thing at all; I am absolutely clueless about the fish situation here, and you're on your own for that.
• And finally there's Unit A (0.1 acres, aka unit 1), which may have been public access at one point but is now home to a boat launch for the Multnomah County Sheriff's River Patrol, accessed from a shared driveway to the south that's clearly posted No Trespassing. Given what the river patrol does, and the kind of river the Sandy is, the place is probably haunted too. I mean, if you believe in that sort of thing, and I'm not saying I do.

Middle Roadside Falls

Continuing from the previous post, a short walk or drive south on the Columbia River Highway brings us to the next seasonal waterfall. "Middle Roadside Falls", which is another of the 'meh' names I made up just so I'd have some titles for blog posts. This one might be the tallest of the five waterfalls in the area, assuming you trust any of the height numbers I've been coming up with, which I'm not sure I do. The top (189.14' - 198.31') and bottom (64.93' - 86.06') points I came come up with once again give a height number that seems to be on the high side. As in 100-130 feet high, or technically 103.08 - 133.38, although I doubt the second decimal place is significant. I guess what I'm trying to figure out is whether my LIDAR-assisted guessing is any more accurate than the old-fashioned kind, and what I'm doing wrong if it isn't.

On the subject of whether to believe state GIS systems, the unnamed stream here (like the others nearby) appears on a state map of barriers to migratory fish. Which is technically true, but the entry here is just for the long culvert under the street, with no mention at all of the maybe-130' waterfall about a foot or two upstream of the pipe. So if anyone's divvying up habitat grant money sight unseen based on that dataset, it could lead to some really odd projects getting approved. At least the map has you click through a EULA first, agreeing that the data comes "as is" and isn't guaranteed to be accurate or complete or useful for any purpose whatsoever, which I guess is nice because nobody ever clicks though EULAs without reading them.

(The same dataset insists there's an 8' waterfall on Johnson Creek just west of Bell Ave. in Milwaukie, complete with a midcentury fish ladder, that as far as I can tell doesn't actually exist. But I haven't yet gone looking for it in person, and I may need to go do that just to be extra sure.)

North Roadside Falls

In the previous post we made a quick visit to "City Limit Falls" (a name I just made up), one of about five seasonal waterfalls you'll see right along the Columbia River Highway as it heads south out of Troutdale. Continuing south from there brings us to the middle trio of the five, which occur within sight of each other on a 0.2 mile stretch of the road. Inconveniently the middle three don't have names or much in the way of distinguishing features, so these photos got hung up in Drafts for months while I figured out what to call them. Which is a really dumb problem to have, so I'm not going to bore you going on about it. The important thing is that we're visiting "North Roadside Falls" this time around. The name describes the location, and (to me) "Roadside" also has an air of "roadside attraction" which kind of fits because of a weird phenomenon I noticed: Normally people just drive on through here on their way to the big tourist spots, but if you stop and people see you standing there taking photos, they'll stop and take photos too. Or at least it's happened to me a couple of times. I dunno, maybe I just look like I know what I'm doing, and people think if they don't stop where the experts do they'll miss out on the full Gorge tourist experience. Ok, that or I'm drawing a lot of unjustified conclusions from a sample size of two. And your mileage may vary, obviously.

But if people will stop if they see you taking photos, maybe they'll also stop for actors pretending to take photos and then decide they need a cup of your "famous" hot cocoa or lemonade or maybe a hot dog from your stand nearby. And maybe pick up a commemorative shot glass or spoon from your gift shop next door for their display case back home, and while they're occupied you slap a bumper sticker on their RV and they proceed to drive around the country proudly advertising your cozy little tourist trap. And more tourists come, and you put in a motel, and a petting zoo, and you light the falls at night, and add a pump system so they don't dry up in the summer, and you put the kids thru college that way. But then they're off doctoring and lawyering and succeeding generally and don't want to take over the family business, so after a while you sell the place and retire to Florida, and the new owners let it go to seed and eventually burn it all down for the insurance money and do 6-10 years in the state pen for it, and I've completely forgotten where I was going with this idea.

Anyway, as in the previous post, I looked at the state LIDAR map to try to figure out how tall this one is. Given a top point somewhere between 132.53' and 152.59' above sea level, and a base in the 62.47' - 79.21' range, that comes to, er, 53.32' - 90.12', which is broad enough to be almost meaningless. I think the 79.21' number is an outlier for the base as most of the other height measurements around that point are more like 64'. And yet, a height somewhere in the 70'-90' range seems way too tall again, even knowing that we're only looking at the bottom part of the thing from street level. So who knows, really.

City Limit Falls

Ok, so back in May of last year I did a post about Keanes Creek Falls, one of the little seasonal waterfalls along the Sandy River stretch of the old Columbia River Highway. (Specifically, the one across from where the old Tippy Canoe dive bar used to be.) I mentioned in passing that it was the southernmost of about five waterfalls along a 0.6 mile stretch of the road, and it should come as no surprise to anyone that I decided I had to go back and visit the others. Which I did, so (after the usual delays) here we are at another of them.

Now, the problem with this sort of mini-project is that blog posts need titles, but none of these waterfalls seem to have names, and the creeks they're on also don't have names. So I figured I'd have to make up some nicknames for them just to tell them apart. Which is the hard part, of course; there's an old tech industry saying dad joke that the two genuinely hard problems in Computer Science are cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

In any case, here we are at the northernmost of the five, which happens to be just a few feet outside, or possibly inside, of the current (as of December 2022) Troutdale city limit along the old highway. That seems to be the only landmark nearby so I went with "City Limit Falls" for this one. Google seems to think there aren't any other waterfalls by that name anywhere on Earth, which may be a clue that it's a dumb name. For one thing, the name instantly becomes wrong if the city limit ever moves. But hey, I just need titles for a few blog posts, I'm not trying to be Columbus or anything.

For a little context on what's going on here, this stretch of the highway runs along a narrow bit of floodplain with the Sandy River one one side and near-vertical basalt cliffs on the other, generally about 150'-250' high. Those cliffs are actually the eroded west side of Chamberlain Hill, an old volcano that's part of the same Boring Lava Field as Portland's Mt. Tabor and Kelly Butte. Above the vertical edges the mountain is mostly gentle rolling farmland, with a steeper cone at the 909' summit. Note that you can't actually visit the top; the road that seems to go to there ends in a cluster of gated driveways, as you can see on Street View here. So you should probably ignore the auto-generated Peakbagger and Lists of John pages about the place. The key point right now is that it rains a lot here, and rain that falls on the west side of the hill has to go off a cliff to get to the Sandy River. This particular creek has carved sort of a north-facing grotto so it doesn't get a lot of direct sunlight even in late afternoons, and it's harder to see from the road than some of the others. You catch a glimpse of it heading south but there's nowhere to park when you're going that direction. Heading north there's room for about one car to park on the shoulder, though you won't really see the waterfall until it's in your rear view mirror going that way. So if you want a good look at this one, you sort of have to study a map and plan it out ahead of time. Honestly it's probably easier to walk or bike this one, though admittedly I haven't actually tried that.

I don't have any fun facts to share about this one, so I guess the next order of business is to figure out how tall it is. I'm not very good at just looking at things and guessing, and I don't own any climbing gear or surveying equipment to measure it either of those ways. But I do know my way around the state LIDAR map fairly well, so we'll see what we can come up with that way. The map has a "Bare Earth Slope (degrees)" layer, where the steepest terrain is coded as white and flattest is a dark grey. So the trick is to find the river/creek/stream you're interested in, then squint at the map and find the points where it becomes very steep and then flattens out again, and and take those as our top and base. Each point on the map has several elevation numbers, up to around 10-12 of them; then the slope at a given point is derived from those altitude numbers with a bit of simple calculus, which you fortunately don't need to compute on your own. For the overall height, take the highest and lowest elevation from both points (124.77' and 117.37' for the top point and 68.06' and 61.54' for the base), then do a little subtraction, and that gives you a range. Sounds easy, right? The only problem (which may not be a problem at all) is that this consistently produces numbers that are quite a bit higher than what I come up with standing at the base and guessing (which -- as I keep saying -- I am notoriously bad at). As in, I get around 50-60 feet (49.31' - 63.23' to be precise) from the map and would not have guessed over 25-30' here. I'm not sure where the discrepancy is creeping in; maybe the map numbers are absolutely spot on, and you just can't see the very top of the falls due to the angle. Or the point I picked as the top is somewhere above the real top and I'm picking up extra height that way. I'm honestly not sure.

Keanes Creek Falls

Ok, next up we're visiting another see-it-while-you-maybe-still-can seasonal Columbia Gorge waterfall. The first one of these was Crusher Creek Falls, which you can catch a brief glimpse of along I-84 while going somewhere more interesting (let's be honest here). This time we're visiting one you can catch a quick glimpse of along the old Columbia River Highway while going somewhere more interesting, honestly, though I do have a fun bit of history to pass along this time. Recall that my goal in this little project was to visit places where I wouldn't run into anyone else or (more importantly) any viruses they might be superspreading at the time. My point of view is that it's better to visit a fourth-rate destination and have it all to yourself than go to a crowded first-rate one and then drop dead and maybe take a bunch of people with you. It still astonishes me that this is a controversial idea, but as we've seen over the last year, millions of people, and entire states, and certain major national political parties violently disagree. As in literally violently. But I digress.

As scenic highways go, the Columbia River Highway gets off to a slow start, and tourists who haven't done their homework are bound to wonder what all the fuss is about until the big reveal at Chanticleer Point. The initial part of the road heading south and east from Troutdale closely follows the Sandy River at a low elevation, with steep 100'-200' bluffs set back a bit from the river. Right along the highway is largely residential, almost suburban, with a handful of scattered businesses, while the land atop the bluffs is a sort of plateau, agricultural and roughly flat, or at least flat enough for tractors, and part of that land is drained by a number of small creeks that tumble off the plateau on their way toward the Sandy, at least during the wet season. Several of these appear right to the highway, as kind of a seasonal preview of what things are like along the highway a few miles east. I've tried counting them a few times under the right weather conditions and usually come up with 5 along the stretch between Glenn Otto and the Stark Street Bridge, plus/minus about 2 depending on how wet it's been recently.

Beyond idly trying to count them while driving, I'd never really paid them much attention, and it doesn't appear anyone else has either. They largely don't have names, there aren't signs for them, or official parking to stop and look, or trails to the top, or anything like that. And let's be honest, nothing along here really holds a candle to what you'll see at Latourell Falls and points east, so the lack of attention is understandable. So a few months ago I was looking through the USGS Geographic Names database for a different blog post, as one does, and noticed that exactly one of the streams through this area has an official, federally-recognized, taxpayer-funded geographic name. And on looking up the GPS coordinates of Keanes Creek on the state LIDAR terrain map, there was obviously a vertical drop of at least a few tens of feet from the point where the creek tumbled off the bluff. I came up with a height of about 45' from the map, but I always seem to overestimate heights that way and I can't say this looks 45 feet high to me -- though the top's obscured by brush, so there may be another 5 feet or so of it we can't see here. The most important detail here is that it's the one waterfall on the creek, and the creek has a name, so -- per the rule of thumb I mentioned in the last post -- it can automatically go by "Keanes Creek Falls". Which matters because I can't exactly do a post about it without a title. Or more to the point, I could do that but without a name nobody will ever stumble across this post as a search result.

The USGS database tells us basically nothing about the name, merely saying dates back to at least 1964, when the name appeared on a state watershed map. A 2016 county survey map included a number of earlier maps for context, and one (unfortunately undated) map (4th image in the doc) shows the surrounding area being owned by a "Thomas Keane", so it may have been "Keane's Creek" at some point and then fell victim to the strict USGS policy against apostrophes -- an FAQ page of theirs indicates that nobody knows when or why this rule came about, but they've only granted five exceptions to it since 1890. I can at least tell you that it's the only creek by this name in the United States, although another Keanes Creek does exist in a mountainous corner of the Australian state of Victoria, and there's a Keane Creek in far northern Alberta.

None of those details make for a very interesting story, so I tried searching the library's Oregonian database for the name "Thomas Keane" to see if any fun leads came up. If we stick to local people and events there isn't a lot of material there: A man by that name broke his arm in a car accident in 1911, and there's a 1921 obit for someone by that name, who may or may not be the same gentleman as the first item, and he -- or they -- may or may not be the same guy from the survey map. Somewhat intriguingly, the obit was followed up by a 1923 classified ad trying to contact the executors of his estate, regarding a letter from a Richard Keane of Queensland, Australia. But that particular loose end stops there, and we can only guess at whether the letter ever found its destination, or what the letter was about. Perhaps the two long-lost twin brothers had a childhood pinky-swear deal to someday name creeks after each other, and it happened as agreed but neither one ever learned whether the other had held up his end of the deal. Or at least that's one of many possibilities.

Of course you don't have to live here to own land here, and a few other Toms and Thomases from around the globe had cameos in the local paper over the years, several of whom would make for a more interesting origin story than "named after a farmer who once owned the land here":

• A famous Irish actor of the late 19th century; an 1891 article noted that a local theater ensemble had recently hired someone who had once worked with him, which either tells us he was a very big deal, or that our local theater scene was not.
• A notorious New York gambler, circa 1950
• A Chicago mob figure who got whacked in 1923, during a gang war over control of the illegal beer trade, because Prohibition.
• Also in Chicago, a multimillionaire city alderman (and prominent member of the Daley machine) who went to Club Fed for mail fraud in 1974. He appeared in the Oregonian via a lot of cynical Mike Royko columns over the years, like this one from 1973 (while he was under indictment) and a later one in 1982, just to pick out a couple.

The reason I'm throwing all of this at you is that the falls are directly across the street from the the site of a once-notorious roadhouse-slash-dive bar that I do have some links and anecdotes about, and it would really tie this post together if somehow the creek and falls were named after someone a bit more... colorful, let's say. The chain link fence in the first photo surrounds what's left of Shirley's Tippy Canoe, which burned to the ground in January 2020 in a fire authorities described as "suspicious" at the time (though no further news on that front has come out since then). A 2008 profile of the old place's last owner notes that it had long been a notoriously rough biker bar, until she took over and gave it the family-friendly treatment, even bringing in Guy Fieri to have a look at the place for his Food Network show in 2018.

News stories about the fire say the Tippy Canoe dates back to the 1930s, but it seems to have first appeared in the Oregonian in 1946, in an article about the Oregon Liquor Control Commission changing its mind and granting the owner a liquor license for a "Dine and Dance" establishment. Which was a specific category of liquor license back then, and is a term you still see on a few historic bar signs. As I understand it, if you served dinner and offered a dance floor with live music afterward, the state figured you were a high class joint and could be trusted to serve mixed drinks, instead of just beer and wine.

The Tippy Canoe next showed up in the news in 1948, when its liquor license was suspended for 60 days "on the ground that a liquor sale had been made there", meaning shots as opposed to mixed drinks. Which was highly illegal at the time because reasons.

Next up we have a 1951 story in which the bar's owner publicly denied that a sympathetic OLCC agent had tipped him off about an upcoming inspection. It seems that the OLCC agent and several others had been fired for this and other alleged offenses and it all ended up in court, which was embarrassing for everyone involved. The owner related that he had, however, been visited by several OLCC agents employing one of the agency's time-honored stings: The agency liked to hire agents who either were or looked like they might be underage, to see if various establishments checked ID like they were supposed to. However the would-be enforcers succumbed to the siren song of the Tippy Canoe's pinball machines, and after downing three or four beers while playing decided to try to cheat the machine. This got them 86'd, at which point they revealed they were important government agents on an undercover mission. Which must have been hilarious. The presence of pinball machines in a drinking establishment was scandalous in itself in 1951, as they were seen as (and sometimes were) thinly veiled slot machines. And furthermore, it was widely understood that the Portland-area pinball trade was controlled by the local mafia outfit. You might think this would be a long and juicy scandal the papers could milk for weeks or months, but it just sort of fell out of the news after this, almost as if some sort of backroom deal had been made.

This all sounded very familiar, and then I remembered Portland Exposé (1957), a low-budget film noir that I wrote about back in 2007. The movie was set in Portland, with at least some exterior shots filmed here. I haven't rewatched it in years, but I remember thinking the outside of the hero's roadside bar was either the Tippy Canoe or the nearby (and similar) Tad's Chicken 'n Dumplings. In the movie, the hero allows a few pinball machines into his bar and quickly gets roped into all sorts of underworld shenanigans, before agreeing to wear the world's most obvious wire for the feds. Using exterior shots of a place widely known to offer such illicit entertainments in real life may have been a little wink at local audiences. Maybe that even counted as product placement, I dunno.

The OLCC semi-liberalized some of its vast galaxy of arcane rules in 1953, finally legalizing shots, the very thing the Tippy Canoe had been busted for in 1948. The Tippy Canoe promptly applied for one of the new "liquor by the drink" licenses and got one. The article goes on to explain that the OLCC also lightened up on advertising rules a bit, legalizing the words "bar" and "barroom", and allowing the use of brand names and sports scenes (but only noncompetitive sports). Other phrases like "saloon", "tap room", and "club privileges" were to remain strictly forbidden. And while it's fun to chuckle at the state's 1950s uptightness, I should point out that you couldn't advertise happy hour drink specials until 2017. If remember right, "saloon" and several common phrases like "happy hour" and "ladies night" were technically forbidden until quite recently, though the ban was not always strictly enforced.

The city's Mafia era tapered off after the 50s, but the Tippy Canoe remained a rough spot long after the mobsters relocated to Vegas. For instance, here's a 1966 item about someone arrested there for assaulting a deputy sheriff. In 1979 the bar's liquor license came up for periodic renewal, and it just so happened that the current Multnomah County chair was a former deputy sheriff, and during the hearing he reminisced about being assaulted by a patron there while on duty, many years ago. The best part is that he was not the deputy from the previous item, and this was just a thing that happened there now and then

In 1982, a couple wanted to buy the place and take over and be the next of a seemingly endless string of owners. The county sheriff opposed licensing them due to multiple rule violations at a bar they'd owned in Oregon City. The county commission disagreed and let them go ahead and have a go at running the place. After that it was mostly just live music listings, and then it closed and sat empty for a number of years in the 90s, before the family-friendly 2000s revival and the 2020 fire.

As for what's next, the site was recently (as in mid-April 2021) purchased by the couple behind the Sugarpine Drive-In at Glenn Otto Park (which I am a huge fan of). It seems they plan to rebuild here, while referencing the original restaurant's midcentury heyday.

So yeah, none of that really relates to the waterfall we're supposedly looking at, so I'm going to have to make a few things up for the sake of a better story. I'd love to be able to tell you this is the only waterfall in the state named for a shadowy mob figure, or spread a rumor about a mysterious safe deposit box key that may still be hidden behind the falls. It would even be fun to explain how 60s bikers often used the falls to get the excess blood and gore out of their gear after a good bar fight; this may have actually happened, as far as I know, but nobody else is going to explain how -- as late the mid-1980s -- you could make a lot of money panning for gold teeth below the falls. Or how I know all of this because our local enchanted nature spirits (naiads, dryads, hesperides, etc.) like to grab a few beers and talk shop after a long day dealing with tourists, and you can kind of eavesdrop if you're in the right place at the right time. And how the one who lives in Keanes Creek always has the best stories, though they all begin with "Long time ago, back in the day..."

Sandy River Delta

Next up, here's a photoset from a few hours wandering around the Sandy River Delta, just east of Troutdale, at the western edge of the Columbia Gorge. It's been public land since 1991 when the Forest Service bought it, but I'd never been there, so I thought I'd go check it out. It's basically 1500 acres of low, flat, and sometimes swampy land, with a trail network that OregonHikers rates firmly in the "Easy" category. The key thing to know about it is that it's essentially a huge off-leash dog park, so be prepared to say hello to lots of excitable, friendly, muddy dogs. Strictly speaking dogs are supposed to be on leashes within 100 feet of the Confluence Trail, but I didn't encounter a single person or dog obeying that rule. The area also allows horses on some trails, but I didn't encounter any the day I was there. Come to think of it, I can't remember the last time I ran across any horses on multiple-use trails that allow them. I don't know whether owning horses is less popular than it once was, or it's just due to chance and timing.

Anyway, as an unaccompanied two-legged visitor the main thing I wanted to see was Bird Blind, a Maya Lin art installation along the Columbia River, at the far end of the aforementioned Confluence Trail. Which gave me a rare chance to combine two of this humble blog's ongoing projects (which was nice since art posts have been pretty rare over the last year or two). So the art at the end of the trail is a small round structure, built in 2008 for the 200th-ish anniversary of the Lewis & Clark expedition, part of a larger series of installations between Astoria and Clarkston, WA. I didn't really notice a lot of birds there so I can't speak to its bird blind qualities; possibly the art and the dog park are working at cross purposes here. In any case, I took a batch of photos of it from various exciting angles, because Art, and continued on with my loop around the place.

Eventually I ended up at a viewpoint along the Sandy River side of the park, just in time for a bit of sorta-golden-hour light, with dark storm clouds rolling in off in the distance. (Note that "golden hour" meant about 3pm, thanks to the season and our, uh, tropically-challenged latitude here.) I liked how some of those photos came out, so I left the photoset in the reverse order Flickr gives you by default. So it starts with those, and then the art photos are more or less in the middle, and the others are sort of 'meh', quite honestly, so that would be today's protip if you have time to look at some photos from a random internet person, but aren't inclined to spend it lingering over each and every one of them.

Glen Otto Park expedition

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Today's adventure takes us out to Troutdale's Glenn Otto Park, on the Sandy River. The park is mostly famous for the sort of safety issues that result when you combine warm weather, cheap beer, testosterone, and a very cold, fast river. Which is something that's come up in a few earlier posts (the High Rocks one for example), and I'm not really interested in revisiting the topic. The problem is that I'm not sure what else there is to say about the place. I stopped by just to take photos of the bridge next door, and I ended up with some photos that weren't of the bridge, and here they are.

I did manage to find a few non-picnic, non-drowning-related items to pass along, so here they are as well:

• The city's 2002 Master Plan for the park.
• 1995 memorial resolution by the state legislature honoring Mr. Otto.
  
• A 2009 Portland Tribune profile of Helen Otto (Glenn Otto's wife), on her 90th birthday.
  

thistle, glenn otto park

Stark Street Bridge

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Today's installment in the ongoing bridge project takes us out to the Sandy River once again, this time to the Stark Street Bridge. Stark was one of the first roads on the east side in Portland, and generally follows the Willamette Baseline for much of its length. It extends all the way from the Willamette River to the Sandy, and originally sported milestones (some of which still exist) at one mile intervals along its entire length. At the Sandy end, the road winds down the hill to the river, and ends when it merges into the Columbia River Highway. Although the historic mile markers along surviving parts of the Columbia River Highway continue with the Stark St. numbering all the way to The Dalles, believe it or not.

This bridge dates to 1914, around the same time as the old highway went in. Apparently there was a ferry at this spot before that, and the original road alignment went more or less straight downhill to the river, and roughly straight back uphill on the other side on present-day Woodard Road. Those steep roads wouldn't have been paved at the time either, so it would have been muddy most of the year in addition to being steep. The newer road alignment along the river on the east bank of the bridge required a bit of blasting and excavation, apparently.

Although I just said "east bank", there's a geographic quirk here that's worth pointing out. The bridge sits on a bend in the Sandy River, so when you cross to the east bank of the river, you're actually heading north and slightly west.

Info from across the interwebs, mostly the usual suspects:

• Structurae
  
• BridgeHunter
  
• Byways.org has a historic postcard image of the bridge.
  
• Series of photos on Wikimedia from something called the "Historic American Engineering Record", which sounds like a fancy name for going around taking photos of bridges, basically.
  
• Photos by Mike Goff, Michelle Smith, Jodi Tripp, Richard Doody
  

There's one amusing bit of trivia to relate about the bridge. This isn't the first bridge at this location; the first was an extremely flimsy wood truss bridge that collapsed under the weight of traffic. The Oregon Highway Commission's 1914 Biennial Report described the current bridge and its ill-fated predecessor:

Located two miles from Troutdale, Oregon, over Sandy River, near the Portland Automobile Club House. This bridge replaces an old wooden structure which fell on Good Roads' Day, April 25, 1914, dropping a 5ton auto truck into the river.

The report even includes photos of the original bridge, both before and after it collapsed. It's not hard to imagine the cruel mockery that would have ensued had the Internet existed in 1914. I suppose it's not too late if you want to get in on the mirth and mayhem. Just copy one of the report photos and give it a meme-compatible caption, something along the lines of "GOOD ROADS FAIL". Upload it somewhere the cool kids can find it, and shazam, you win +1 internets.

Walking across is about the same situation as the slightly older bridge downstream in Troutdale, although the walkway is less rickety. If anything, it gets even less pedestrian traffic than the Troutdale bridge, since there isn't a public park right at either end of the bridge, and there's no sidewalk once you're on the east bank of the river. I don't really have any helpful safety tips when it comes to the usual "not dying" angle. If you're superstitiously inclined, you might want to avoid the bridge if they hold another Good Roads Day here. Not sure there's much danger of that; the practice seems to have fallen out of favor except for one town in New Hampshire that's kept the tradition alive semi-continuously since 1914. Same time of year and everything. So if New Hampshire falls into the ocean or has a civil war, or all of New England is consumed by an unholy Lovecraftian apocalypse or whatever, and we're colonized by the refugees, and they try to transplant one of their quaint and unironic New England festivals here, and you're of a superstitious bent, and you happened to read this humble blog and know there's something to be superstitious about, there are a lot of nice places you could be on that day that aren't this bridge. Yeah, ok, that's a real stretch, I readily admit that. But the rules say I have to come up with something, because them's the rules.

Sandy River Bridge, Troutdale

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This somewhat delayed installment of the long-running bridge project takes us back to Troutdale for another Sandy River bridge. This one carries the Historic Columbia River Highway over the river, and doesn't seem to have an agreed-on name of its own. I've seen "Troutdale Bridge" and "Sandy River Bridge", but there are other bridges in Troutdale, and others over the Sandy outside of Troutdale, so those aren't overly specific names.

The bridge dates back to 1912, making it the oldest extant part of the Gorge Highway. It looks it, too. I think they built it just barely big and strong enough to carry the occasional Model T, but today it gets ginormous luxury RVs towing ginormous luxury SUVs piled high with bikes and kayaks and sailboards and such. I mean, it's not actually falling down as far as I know, but I kind of feel sorry for the poor little thing. Except when I have to drive across it and there's oncoming traffic larger than a Vespa, in which case I'd curse its name if only it had one.

Walking across isn't so bad. There's a separate walkway on the south (upstream) side of the bridge. Granted it's made with extremely old wooden slats, and here and there you get glimpses of the river through gaps in the slats. So that part isn't so fabulous, really. But I've never heard of the slats actually giving way and dumping people into the river, although I suppose there's a first time for everything. In any event, once you're across there's no sidewalk along the Gorge Highway, and you'll need to walk on the shoulder to get anywhere, while avoiding the aforementioned ginormous luxury SUVs, so I don't think the bridge gets much pedestrian use. Bikes maybe, but not pedestrians.

It does, however, attract daredevils who jump into the river from here, on purpose, for fun, although getting back out of the river in once piece (or being found at all) is not exactly guaranteed. I won't spend a lot of time on this point, because a.) I've gone on about it before and already feel like I'm being a tedious scold and a founding member of the anti-fun police for doing so. And b.) I've found that when I write about places that get a lot of newsworthy, untimely demises (High Rocks and the Vista Bridge, for example), sooner or later there's going to be another one. Then the post gets a sudden flood of search hits, and I have to hurry and check it to see if it's reasonably tasteful under the present somber circumstances, which it quite often isn't.

Info about the bridge, from sources spanning the interwebs:

• Structurae
  
• Bridgehunter
  
• ColumbiaRiverHighway.com has an extensive history page about the bridge. It notes that the bridge was considered to be obsolete (and far too narrow) as early as 1930, and the bride deck system was replaced in the 1950s. Which I read as saying it's not really that special and historic, and could be replaced if money was available. They could always move it somewhere else, and/or turn it into a bike-only bridge, if people are really that attached to the thing.
  
• Two Waymarking pages
  
• City of Troutdale
  
• A moody Holga photo
  
• Wikimedia images
  
• Via Google Books, the April 4, 1912 issue of Municipal Journal and Engineer, with a line indicating Multnomah County was asking for bids on the project at that time. The line just above it, incidentally, is for the famous and historic Colorado St. Bridge over Arroyo Seco, Pasadena, California.
  
• Via the Washington State University library, a set of vintage photos (not online, sadly) with a reference to an "Auto Club Bridge" in Troutdale. Which may be a historical name for this bridge. Or it's some other bridge near Troutdale, past or present, in which case never mind.
  
• Intel's code names for upcoming products and technologies borrow heavily from Oregon geography. For example, the microarchitecture used in many of their current CPU lines is called "Nehalem", and its successor is codenamed "Sandy Bridge". But like everyone else, they don't specify which Sandy bridge they have in mind.