Matrix Hill Park

[View Larger Map]

It's time for a rare suburban adventure here on this humble blog. We're headed to Beaverton's Matrix Hill Park, a high point on Cooper Mountain just off Murray Blvd., directly uphill from the new mini-Walmart. The Walmart location was previously a (late, lamented) Haggen grocery store, and long before that it was a rock quarry owned by the Cobb Rock Co. The steep cliffs left over from the quarry days result in sweeping views to the south and east. Granted you're just looking at miles and miles of suburbia, but you can see quite a lot of it from here. There's a bit of a view to the north too, but you're better off going to nearby Sexton Mountain Meadows Park if you really want a better look at the suburban jungle of central Beaverton.

Since it's out in the 'burbs, Oregonian coverage is spotty at best, so I only have a few bits and pieces of info about the place. If the database search function is to be believed, Portland's paper of record has mentioned it precisely once, in May 2001, in an article about volunteer efforts in Beaverton-area parks. However an OSU Extension newsletter from 2010 says the park had just opened to the public. That seems odd, but maybe the Tualatin Hills parks district owned the land for a long time without officially opening it to the public. I'm not really sure, but the path up to the viewpoint looks pretty new, so it's certainly possible. The park district's September 2011 board agenda includes a capital projects list, showing they were spending about $40k per year on renovations here at the time. And a Winter 2010 Metro newsletter showed lots of volunteer events to pull invasive blackberry bushes here.

The park's also mentioned briefly in a 2013 US Fish & Wildlife study, "Willamette Valley Conservation Study: Nature-based Recreation and Educational Opportunities and Underserved Areas Assessment", but it's simply listed as "Existing opportunity identified in spatial data", which I think means they noticed it on a map and didn't investigate it further.

What I really want to know, and what nobody is telling me, is where the name "Matrix Hill" comes from. It's obviously not a native Indian name, nor is it likely to be a pioneer-era name. The first mention I've seen of the name was in 2001, which is a couple of years after the movie The Matrix came out. I'm really hoping it's not named after the movie. I mean, my first guess would be that some clueless polo-shirted real estate developer of the 80s or 90s wanted to build on the hill, and came up with the name independently because he thought it sounded high tech and upscale. This seems plausible because developers are always a rich source of cheesy place names.

But just suppose the park district had asked the public for suggestions, circa 2001 or so; maybe they put the suggestions up for a public vote, and allowed online voting. And suppose that a group of Matrix fanboys decided to troll the vote, and the district was somewhat less than tech savvy and never caught on to their l33t h4x0r script kiddie sk1llZ, and the rest is history. I have zero evidence to back this idea up, so it doesn't even count as a proper theory. But at minimum it would make a great urban legend, so feel free to repeat it if you want to. Be sure to add that we're lucky "Matrix Hill" eked out a win, as a rival tribe of fanboys was rigging votes in favor of "Park-Park Binks".

Moonshadow Park

[View Larger Map]

Today's adventure takes us to the sorta-Portland, sorta-Beaverton borderlands of Garden Home, and the enticingly-named Moonshadow Park. I absolutely admit it went on my todo list strictly because of the name. After a little research, it turns out the place is named after the surrounding late-1970s subdivision, which in turn may or may not be named after the 1971 Cat Stevens song. That sort of thing typically goes unreported-on and unrecorded in real estate news stories. I found a vintage clip of the song on YouTube to try to liven this post up a little. I'd forgotten what a strange and gruesome little song it is. I assume life in its namesake neighborhood isn't quite so gory.

Anyway, back in the 70s this was the site of a rather acrimonious land use battle. Back then there were still large undeveloped tracts of land here and there in the Garden Home area, and 70s also saw the rise of the modern environmental movement -- particularly in Oregon -- so battles over infill development were common. A 1975 proposal for either this plot or another nearby was fought off by the "Friends of Ash Creek Woods". (Ash Creek being the creek that flows through the park here.) The Moonshadow proposal came up in 1979 and quickly met with opposition from homeowners in surrounding neighborhoods, one of their several concerns being that development would adversely affect the creek. Washington County eventually approved the proposal, and creating a public park along Ash Creek was part of the finalized deal.

In retrospect, the concerned neighbors may have been on to something. In 1996, a US Fish & Wildlife study described ongoing creek restoration efforts in Moonshadow Park. The problems were the usual Portland park problems: Degraded water quality, erosion, and an influx of English ivy and Himalayan blackberry. As of last year, Metro was still organizing volunteer work parties to try to control invasive plants in the park.

I do need to apologize for the single low quality photo in this post. The park's in the middle of its namesake subdivision, and there isn't any dedicated parking for the park. I would have just parked on the street in front of the main entrance (such as it is), but there was a postal van in the way just then and I didn't feel like circling the block or parking in front of someone's house. So I snapped a quick photo of the sign and went on my merry way. I figured this was ok because the park was mostly on my list due to the name but I kind of regret not getting out of my car for this, or at least for not rolling down the window when I took the photo.

Dwight S. Parr Park

[View Larger Map]

I was out in deep westside suburbia last weekend running some errands, and I stopped for lunch at a teriyaki place I used to frequent back when I lived out there. I'd forgotten there was a tiny park next to the restaurant; once I noticed that, I figured I ought to take a couple of quick photos and see what I could could come up with about the place. Dwight S. Parr Park (a.k.a. "Dwight S. Parr Woods Natural Area") only comes to 0.63 acres, and the entire park is a stand of old, tall conifer trees, with a short path winding around between them. Taking the trees into account, it's possible the park is actually taller than it is wide.

From what I can tell, the park's named after Dwight S. Parr Jr., former president of Parr Lumber, and son of the company's founder. The missing parts of the story here are a.) How a postage-stamp sized chunk of forest came to be preserved while suburbia sprawled out all around it, and b.) How it came to be named after a lumber and building supply CEO. Spidey sense says there might be an interesting story here, but it happened in the 'burbs so the Oregonian didn't cover it, and Beaverton's Valley Times doesn't seem to have online archives available. Apparently the UO Library in Eugene has the Valley Times on microfilm, but that just seems impossibly inconvenient; I don't even know what year to search for, for one thing. So if you happened to come across this humble blog and can fill in some of the missing parts of the story, feel free to leave a comment below. Thx. Mgmt.

Paula Jean Powerline Park, Aloha

[View Larger Map]

Today's thrilling adventure takes us out to distant suburbia, to Aloha's Paula Jean Powerline Park. As the name suggests, it's a chunk of right-of-way under some Bonneville Power Administration transmission lines; the land wasn't buildable, so it became a long, skinny park instead. Years ago, before I started this humble blog, I used to live a few blocks away from this place. I drove past it all the time, but only walked through it once or twice. So I figured it might be interesting to revisit a place I ignored previously, take a few photos, and try to apply this humble blog's tired tried and true formula to it.

As for why I ignored the place, I absolutely don't buy into any of the various conspiracy theories about powerlines, but they do make a rather disconcerting humming noise if you're walking under them. That wasn't really my cup of tea, I have to say. I'm sure there are interesting things to take photos of, if you have time and are willing to stop and ignore the buzzing -- wildflowers, the few remnant orchard trees, moody shots of the powerlines, possibly -- but I wasn't really into photography back when I lived out there, so I didn't pick up on any of that at the time.

All of that said, the powerline right of way does create a long stretch of unbroken greenspace, so the city of Hillsboro's parks plan envisions a regional trail through here at some point. It may be some time before this happens, as the surrounding area hasn't even been officially annexed to Hillsboro yet; parks in the area previously belonged to the Tualatin Hills Parks & Recreation District but were handed over to Hillsboro in 2002 in anticipation of the city annexing the area in the near future. Ten years later that still hasn't happened, and I'm not sure why not. So right now this and several other nearby parks no longer appear on the THPRD website (understandably), but also aren't listed with the other city parks on the Hillsboro Parks website. So they're in a sort of internet limbo until the city limit issue gets sorted out.

On a related note, another proposed powerline trail a bit further east has run into some local opposition. The Bonneville Power Administration (an agency of the federal government) owns the land under the powerlines in question, but the association's been acting as if it owned the land for many years and has even posted "Private Property" signs on the land, warning all outsiders to keep away, or else. They probably don't have a leg to stand on, legally, considering that it's not their land. But as far as I know that's never stopped a homeowners' association before. Not even once, in the entire history of forever. So we'll see how that turns out, I guess.

Griffith Park, Beaverton

[View Larger Map]

Today's adventure takes us out to the 'burbs, to Beaverton's Griffith Park. You're probably wondering why we're leaving the city and venturing out to the 'burbs, and wondering whether it's the start of an alarming trend. So no, I haven't sold out to the man or anything, or at least not any further; I was merely shopping in the area and happened to stop at a thrift shop across the street from the park just in case they had any vintage camera stuff or old computers or anything (they didn't). The park was across the street, so I figured I'd take a minute and snap couple of photos and then see if I could throw a post together and try to make this part of Beaverton seem halfway interesting. Which remains to be seen.

The park is a sort of irregular oval shape in the center of a suburban office park that includes Beaverton's city hall, across Beaverton-Hillsdale from Fred Meyer. One weekend in late June it hosts the annual Taste of Beaverton festival (which I've been to at least once), and there are concerts every so often, and it seems to be an outdoor lunch spot for office workers when the weather cooperates. I haven't seen it in midwinter, but given the bowl shape of the place it's bound to be a mud pit. It was probably a lake or a marsh at one point, back before anyone -- or at least anyone with power -- cared about wetland protection. The bowl shape also makes the park "problematic" as a possible site for public art, according to the city's Public Art Master Plan, which may explain why there apparently isn't any art there.

I can't find much in the way of contemporary or historical info about the park, unfortunately, not even any hints about who it's named after. This is probably because it's way out in suburbia and therefore mostly off the Oregonian's radar, and so far I haven't come across an online archive of Beaverton's Valley Times newspaper anywhere. So the first mention of the park in the Oregonian is from July 1979. The Tualatin Hills parks district had just purchased the historic Jenkins Estate on Cooper Mountain, and it turns out that the purchase was enabled by redirecting some cash that was originally slated for a fountain in Griffith Park. Which is funny because I was just thinking that the park needed a fountain. Now we know why it didn't get one. So yeah, that's pretty much the only semi-interesting historical anecdote I've discovered so far.

The results of a Google image search are basically unrewarding too; despite specifying "Beaverton" in the search, most of the photos you get back are of the vastly larger and more famous Griffith Park in Los Angeles. Which I guess makes sense. Beaverton's one does make an appearance in an interesting blog post of dusk and nighttime photos from around Washington County. Not sure I'd go so far as to call the photos "esoteric", but someone's making an effort, at least.

Another blog post I ran across mentions that some online maps insist the middle of Griffith Park is a mysterious place called "Beburg". I can actually field that one; "Beburg" is a railroad designation for the tracks around central Beaverton. As far as I know, the name has never been used outside of the railroad industry and the railfan community. If you're into that sort of thing, there are lots of photos around the net, both current and historical. A few examples here, here, here, here, here, and here. The USGS seems to have picked up on the name and decided it's an official 'locale', namely the triangle of land bordered by the rail lines, highway 217, and Beaverton-Hillsdale, of which Griffith Park is roughly the center. I agree this isn't a very colorful origin story. I absolutely agree it'd be a much better story if Griffith Park was the site of an ancient lost city, or maybe a lawless town of the old west, and the very name "Beburg" struck terror in the hearts of the region's citizens. It'd be great if Griffith was a noble sheriff, or knight, or something, and he brought Beburg's infernal tyranny to an end once and for all, and the smoking crater where Beburg once stood is now an idyllic park named in his honor. It would be a great legend, and Washington County's really short on great legends, so feel free to use it if you think your audience will buy it.

Sexton Mountain (seriously)

View Larger Map

This is Beaverton's Sexton Mountain Meadows Park, the little park at the top of the hill in the semi-ritzy / wannabe-ritzy Murrayhill area.

The photos aren't real enthralling, despite the altitude. In that part of town, when you go uphill all you see is more Beaverton. Probably if one was to go to the far edge of the big water tank here, one could look down and see even more Beaverton, if one so desired.

So you may have gathered I'm not posting this because I wanted to share some cool photos I took. Nah, the photos are strictly illustrative this time. And I don't have any fascinating historical tidbits to share, unless you think 1991 is ancient history. Which it is, actually, in interweb years. So without further ado, permit me to present a silly story from the ancient USENET days of yore: "The Ballad of Sexton Mountain". Snort. Giggle.

The subdivision mentioned in the story has a website here. Lots of talk about bylaws and CC&R's, but oddly not a word about their persistent signage issues. Their site does have a photo of their entrance sign, in a non-vandalized state no less, but I didn't check whether it's actually there or not...