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..."