Forest Road NF-20, Larch Mountain

Ok, so the last Columbia Gorge Forest Service road we looked at (NF-1500-150) was a tad underwhelming. Hopefully this next one is a bit more interesting. We're still poking around on the south side of Larch Mountain Road, this time at the crossroads where Larch Mountain Road meets (gated) Palmer Mill Road, around milepost 10. The seasonal snow gate goes up here in the winter. Today we're exploring Forest Road NF-20, which is sort of a continuation of Palmer Mill that continues south, curving around the side of Larch Mountain and continuing on toward points unknown deep within the forbidden Bull Run Watershed. So far this probably sounds a lot like Forest Road NF-1509, and it is, with a couple of differences.

Like NF-1509 and the upper portion of Palmer Mill (aka NF-1520), NF-20 was gated off sometime in the late 90s due to undesirable uses of the area. Then in 2010 the Forest Service went a step further and decommissioned NF-20, evidently with a great deal of enthusiasm and an unusually big budget. Which means they daylight every culvert under the road, grind up any asphalt that might be there and cart some of it away, then go through with an excavator and dig a sort of tank trap pit every so often, to make the road impassable by any sort of vehicle, and by people on foot if possible, then remove it from all maps, never speak of it again, and deny it ever existed, under penalty of I'm not sure what exactly. As you'll see in the photoset here, returning the forest to something resembling a pre-road natural state was not a goal, so the finished state is a long line of little hills and pits with a lot of clumps of old asphalt lying around. On the other hand, I suspect this treatment would work really well against the tanks of an invading army, should we ever need that.

I turned around and went back at a multiway intersection of Forest Service roads, which is close to the Bull Run boundary, and I seem to recall that all but the rightmost of the available roads continue into the Forbidden Zone, so those are out. The remaining road takes you to the big powerline corridor, and after a short distance strolling under the buzzing wires you can connect to NF-1509 and make a loop of it. The main problem with this loop is that getting back to your vehicle (assuming you brought a vehicle) will involve a stroll along Larch Mountain Road, which has a lot of fast drivers who aren't expecting to see pedestrians through here. A bike would help for this part, but it would be kind of useless now on the NF-20 part of the loop. I dunno, I have no useful advice here, but I'm sure you'll figure something out if you decide to try it.

The only other intersection or trail crossing or what-have-you that you'll encounter is closer to the start of the road. NF-20 crosses a small stream and intersects a trail that runs parallel to the stream, heading steeply uphill without switchbacks. There are no signs to explain this, but I'm fairly sure the trail is actually County Road 550, which was once the main road up Larch Mountain from 1891-ish until 1937 when the current road opened. The county never actually vacated it after the big rerouting happened, and the unused old road just sort of faded away into the forest over time. But it still legally exists on paper, as the county never officially abandoned it. (You can see the county's collection of these on this ArcGIS layer. It's a map of "local access roads", the county's term for roads it owns but feels it has no legal obligation to maintain.)

I think I've found one end of Road 550 over near the Donahue Creek Trail, or technically a bit of County Road 458 heading to the long-abandoned town of Brower, where the 550 branches off, in theory. On paper the old road heads due east and straight uphill, crossing Larch Mountain Road (though I can't find any surviving traces of that intersection) and vaguely tracking along the section line a mile north of the Stark St. survey baseline. After crossing NF-20, instead of climbing to the very top of Larch Mountain it turns south and curves around the side of the mountain instead, running roughly parallel with NF-20 and a bit uphill of it. Eventually it, too, enters the Bull Run zone, and probably once connected some godforsaken logging camps to the outside world, so long as it hadn't rained recently. Evidently when it came time to build the scenic viewpoint on top of the mountain, and a modern paved road with two normal-width lanes to get you there, the powers that be decided to just ditch the existing road and start over from scratch. I may try to check out the 550 at some point since I'm curious how much of it still exists, though my expectations are pretty low and I wouldn't say it's a top priority.

Anyway, regarding the NF-20 and what happened to it, 2010 doc from Zigzag Ranger District about that year's round of road decommissioning explains further, and makes it clear they knew Putin-proofing the road would be a bit disruptive for the slow trickle of visitors who used it, but went ahead and did it anyway:

page 70:

The Gordon Creek area is located on the western flanks of popular and scenic Larch Mountain. It is the watershed for the town of Corbett. Forest Road 15 takes recreationists to nearly the summit of Larch Mountain ending at Sherrard Point Picnic Area with views of five Cascade peaks. The road system south west of the road to the summit, Roads 20 and 1509 were blocked with gates more than ten years ago due to illegal target shooting, dumping and other inappropriate uses that could adversely affect the Corbett Watershed. The loop roads behind the gates are used by dispersed recreationists for mountain bike riding, horseback riding, hiking, hunting, and special forest product collection. Gating the area has greatly reduced the previous dumping and target shooting problems.

page 73:

Alternative 2 would decommission Forest Road 20 and several spur roads in the area effectively eliminating the “Road 1509-Road 20 loop” used by hikers and mountain bikers. It is possible hikers may still be able to access the loop, but mountain bikes may be displaced.

Which brings us to the main reason anyone still ventures down the former road. In the Northwest, "special forest products" typically means mushroom picking, which is big business around these parts. In the eastern US it can mean wild ginseng ( https://www.fs.usda.gov/wildflowers/Native_Plant_Materials/americanginseng/index.shtml ), while in Oregon state forests the list includes "Truffles, Mushrooms, Alder or Corral poles, Beargrass, Ferns, Huckleberry, Manzanita, Rock, Salal". If you're curious how this works in practice, here's a 2019 Zach Urness article at the Salem Statesman-Journal about obtaining and using a permit for collecting sword ferns.

In any case, a Mt. Hood National Forest map of legal mushroom-picking zones includes a corridor along either side of the road formerly known as NF-20, despite the road no longer existing from a legal standpoint. In practice, the gravel roller coaster ride they made is still the only useful access into the picking area. This is one of the few parts of the whole National Forest where this is allowed -- the only other one north of the Bull Run watershed is a bit of the Bonneville powerline corridor along Tanner Creek, outside of both the National Scenic Area and Bull Run. Inside the National Scenic Area it's currently not legal anywhere and evidently not a high priority for them. The linked page explains that, by law and in theory, they could allow mushroom hunting, but even now they're still a very new unit of the National Forest system (established in 1986, which is almost yesterday by federal bureaucracy standards) and they've had higher priorities and just haven't had time or money to perform the full environmental analysis they would have to do first.

Which is not to say there hasn't been any research done. Here are a couple of Forest Service docs: "Handbook to Strategy 1 Fungal Species in the Northwest Forest Plan" and "Handbook to Additional Fungal Species of Special Concern in the Northwest Forest Plan", both part of a survey of fungi known to be present in Northern Spotted Owl habitat. It's not that owls eat mushrooms directly; as I understand it, the idea is that they indicate general forest health, and you never know if one might be a key part of the spotted owl food web, especially if the number and distribution of species is poorly known. Plus it's basic research fieldwork that generally doesn't get funded on its own.

Speaking of mushrooms, and the variability that comes with eating things that some rando found in the forest, a recent food poisoning case out of Bozeman, Montana was linked to either morel mushrooms (which are generally recognized as edible), or possibly false morels, which are quite bad for you. Evidently the toxic component in this event was a chemical called hydrazine (or maybe a precursor chemical that turns into hydrazine when eaten), which is often used as a spacecraft propellant because it's simple to ignite, meaning it spontaneously combusts on contact with all sorts of things. In fact NASA and the US Air Force are working on a 'green' alternative fuel to replace hydrazine because it's is so dangerous (and therefore expensive) to work with. 2013 Proton rocket launch accident, to give you some idea.

And since we're off topic already, it turns out that hydrazine is also the stuff of myth and legend in the drag racing community, spoken of in hushed tones, comment sections full of stern warnings from surviving oldtimers:

• Dragzine: "Flashback Friday: The Story of the Lethal Fuel called Hydrazine"
• Motor Trend: "What is Nitromethane, anyway?"
• DragList:
• Nitromater: "What can you tell me about hydrazine and drag racing?"
• BangShift: "This 1966 NASA Film is all about hydrazine, how bad it is, and how it is properly handled"
• Dover Dragstrip: "Hydrazine: Doomsday Fuel of the 60s"
• Euclid's Bridge: "Drag Racing Pioneers or Suicidal Nutjobs?"

And I can't really go off on a tangent like this without recommending John Drury Clark's 1972 book Ignition!, concerning the early days of liquid fuel rocket research. Here, the author reminisces about chlorine trifluoride, another rather alarming substance:

“It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.”

Forest Road NF-1500-150, Larch Mountain

View Larger Map

Back during the height of pandemic-related social distancing, I had a sort of mini-project going to try to find places where I could get outside and go for a hike or at least a walk without encountering any other human beings, and -- ideally -- doing this without having to drive for hours and hours first. At one point I realized that old logging roads were great for this, because they usually don't go anywhere very interesting (so there isn't much to attract crowds), and they stay open and navigable without a lot of foot traffic (due to densely packed soil left over from the logging days). A side benefit to this is that you aren't fighting your way through brush all the time, which is nice during the height of tick and poison oak season. Ok, sure, having no-grow zones snaking through your forest and persisting for decades is on the whole bad for the environment, but... well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

That brings us to the subject of today's adventure, an obscure Forest Service road named NF 1500-150, which is one of several obscure Forest Service roads that branch off to the south from Larch Mtn. Road on its way to the summit. I had moderate hopes for this one, as in, it might at least have a decent view given its location near the top of the mountain. The National Scenic Area boundary -- which largely tracks Larch Mountain Road in this area, actually jogs south and west a bit more just to incorporate the land around road 1500-150. I had never heard of this being an interesting place, but it seemed at least possible that it might be a hidden gem waiting to be rediscovered. That occasionally works, so I figured I had to check it out. But no such luck this time. It's a short stroll through a dense young-ish replanted forest, along what is obviously an old logging road. And then it just gets to the end of the old clear cut and stops, and all you can do is turn around and go back. There aren't even any side trails to explore.

Maybe they figured nobody would object to this area being inside the boundary, since it had just been logged and adding it to the Scenic Area would pad out the total acreage without impacting the timber industry significantly. I don't know whether there was once a nice view looking west to Portland at the time, but if so they didn't add it to the Scenic Area's list of specific protected views and the forest has since grown back enough that there's nothing much to see here while strolling through the forest.

I couldn't find any info online about the old clearcut operation. The Forest Service has a vast amount of GIS data online including all sorts of really esoteric stuff, but if they have any public records online about historical timber sales I have yet to come across it. It's not something I would need on a daily basis but it would've come in handy here. I did find an alternative, though: This company sells hardcopy aerial photos taken over the last century or so, and to shop for what you need they have online maps with heavily watermarked versions of these images. So looking at historical photos of this spot gives us a rough timeline for what happened here:

1. 1953: No clearcut. If anything, the forest looked older and taller than the surrounding area.
2. 1973: The initial phase of the clearcut was visible, which was a square-ish area maybe halfway down the road. Evidently they started in the center and cut outward from there. I don't know whether this is a common pattern with clearcuts, or something specific to this place.
3. 1981: They expanded the cut to the south by this point.
4. 1993: After 1981, the cut expanded further, this time to the north and to the sides. I assume all of that happened prior to the present-day National Scenic Area being created in 1986, since that generally prohibits logging, at least where anyone might see it. Maybe this place was grandfathered in as a cut already in progress. In any case you can see kind of a donut pattern as the early pre-1973 cut area had already filled back in a bit.
5. 2020: At this point the forest has grown back a lot, though most trees are still shorter than surrounding forest, and it still doesn't resemble a natural forest.

The road branches off at an altitude of nearly 3200', and descends to about 3070', around 800 feet below the summit but still higher than any of the surrounding hills nearby, so I think the clearcuts would've been very visible while it was happening. Maybe the clearcuts were enough of an eyesore that they added the cut area to the Scenic Area boundary just to make sure it wouldn't happen again. Meaning it contributes to the Scenic Area by being scenic from a distance, not because it's a scenic place to visit and see close up. That's my current theory, anyway; if anyone really needs an answer to this, you might need to check the Congressional Record, and the searchable online form of it only goes back to 1995 or so, so instead you'll need to find a library that has it in traditional hardcopy form covering the mid-1980s. (There are limited records going back further, so you can find stuff like subcommittee hearing summaries, indicating who testified but not what they said. Which is a start, I guess.) And if that approach doesn't pan out, maybe try calling or writing to people who were Congressional staffers or lobbyists back then and see if anyone remembers. I've switched to second-person here because I'm not quite curious enough to try that myself. I really, really dislike cold-calling people on the phone, for one thing.

An unfortunate thing about the area is the way it was replanted. Evidently nobody told the logging companies that the land here would be protected for forever after once they were done logging it, so the replanting was done in the usual densely packed mono-crop style, like a Christmas tree farm instead of something a bit more natural. And maybe it's just me, but I think tree farms are inherently creepy. They're a kind of liminal space, positioned in a hazy spot somewhere along the civilization vs wilderness boundary, and subtle enough that you may not realize what felt wrong about the place until later. It somehow feels like an urban exploration environment, but one made entirely of trees, if that makes any sense. I gather this is a common feeling around the New Jersey Pinelands, driven by both fact and fiction. Ok, you probably won't stumble into a mob whacking here and suddenly have to go into witness protection or whatever, and there's no science to back up the idea that a place can just have inherently "bad vibes", if you can even define that. But the place still just felt off somehow, and I didn't feel like sticking around long to figure out why.

Old Boneyard Road

Our next Columbia Gorge adventure takes us back to the former mill town of Bridal Veil, or what's left of it. This time around we aren't visiting the falls, or the bridge above the falls, or the Angels Rest Trail, or Dalton Point, or any of the other usual sights; this time we're wandering down an old gravel Forest Service road at the edge of town, a place the agency calls "Old Boneyard Road". Who am I kidding, I saw the name and had to check it out. Knowing, as I do, how this always turns out in the movies -- "Blair witch, you say? Let's make a documentary!" -- I still had to check it out. So I did, and was underwhelmed, and I also couldn't find any interesting stuff to share about the place, so once again I'm resorting to the usual mix of guesswork, wild tangents, and unbelievable stories I just made up, and hopefully readers can tell which is which. I figured the name might work as a little clickbait, at least; I even held off finishing this post until late October, on the theory it might drive more clicks now than it would if posted in April, say. To be honest I mostly stopped caring about metrics years ago and will probably forget to ever check whether this theory of mine panned out. But never mind all that; we're here now, and I'll see if I can make the place seem at least a little spooky while I'm at it.

The usual embedded Google map up top isn't very helpful this time around, and on Street View it looks like the first couple of photos in my photoset but even less artsy, so here's a US Forest Service road map to give a better idea of where the road is at and where it goes. (That link goes to an interactive version of the USFS map, since I can't seem to embed the real thing here.)

Finding the road in real life takes a keen eye. The spot where it branches off the historic highway is marked only by an easy-to-miss Forest Service road sign noting this is road number 3000-297, and an unusually wide bit of shoulder on the other side of the highway. Surprisingly the road's not actually gated off, so in theory you could drive down it and maybe get past the muddy parts that way, but I wouldn't recommend it; your best bet is to just park in that shoulder area and walk the rest of the way, and turn around if it's too muddy since you aren't really missing anything. Past the sign, the road heads downhill into a narrow, triangular bit of land wedged between the old highway and the Union Pacific railroad, fording Dalton Creek on the way. As it nears the railroad, the road splits: A bit heading east peters out into a small meadow almost immediately, with impassable brush east of there. (A 1927 Metsker map showed the road continuing east from there and rejoining the old highway, but it was gone as of the 1944 edition of the same map.) The main road does a hairpin bend and heads west, but soon turns into impassable mud where it recrosses Dalton Creek. Maps show the road continuing west for a bit after that before dead-ending near the property line with the ODOT's rock quarry next door. Overall it gives the impression it was once an access road for something that used to be here, but gives no hints about what that was, unless maybe the name is a hint.

I first saw the name in a pair of Forest Service road studies, the 2003 original and its 2015 update. They're large (since they cover all USFS roads within the National Scenic Area) and quite dry to read, so let me summarize briefly. The 2003 report said the road was "needed by state government", while posing a "high" risk to aquatic life. The 2015 update said the need for the road was now "low" (and was merely a "low" risk to aquatic life), and proposed downgrading it from maintenance level 2 (suitable for high clearance vehicles) down to level 1 (gated off, with minimal maintenance), commenting "Consider decommissioning. This road has two stream crossings and flooding is occurring on the lower section of the road." So, reading between the lines here, whatever the state was doing here back in 2003 was causing the water quality trouble, and things got better after they stopped, but now the road's redundant. Maybe it used to be a backup quarry entrance, and dump trucks used to roll through the mud here, I dunno. Meanwhile a map titled 'Road Risk/Benefit Assessment', also from September 2015, labeled the road in green as 'Likely Needed for Future Use', so I gather the report's proposal was not a unanimous opinion. In any case the agency defaulted to not changing anything back then, and it still hasn't.

None of which explains the spooky name, which is annoying since the spooky name is the one and only reason we're here. And maybe it's not even a spooky name at all. I'm reasonably sure -- like 75% positive, ok, 51% -- that it's not actually about skeletons, at least not of the Halloween persuasion. Or at least the official old Bridal Veil town cemetery is elsewhere, due west of here over near the Bridal Veil freeway exit. The convent near Coopey Falls has its own cemetery on the convent grounds, so it's not that either; interestingly it -- according to the county surveyor's office -- is legally a "subdivision" named "Transitus". As in "sic transit gloria mundi", I suppose, which in a way follows the long tradition of naming subdivisions after things they replaced. It's said -- and never ask me how I heard about this -- that many Transitus residents return from the Other Side on the last night of each waning crescent moon for the monthly HOA meeting, which -- I'm told -- is conducted entirely in Latin and can get surprisingly heated at times, especially if they think the new groundskeeper has been edging their plots all wrong, or showing favoritism in who gets the most graveside flowers. Some propose a resolution to haunt the new guy until he quits, others remind the residents they've now done this to the last three groundskeepers, and word is starting to get out in the regional groundskeeping community that this is a bad gig, and it's lowering their property values somehow, and the phantasmagorical bickering continues for hours. But after the meeting finally wraps up, the ghostly nuns relax and play bridge til daybreak and then dematerialize back to... wherever they spend the rest of their time. Nobody really knows for sure where they go or how they get there, and it remains a deep mystery of nature (or supernature), along the lines of Atlantic eel migration. But I digress.

Anyway, my guess is that this was some sort of machine boneyard at one point, packed with mechanical bits located somewhere along the "useless junk" <==> "critical spare parts" continuum, like a larger version of my dad's garage. But what kind of machines? There's essentially nothing left now that might give us any clues about that, but I think parts for the old sawmill would be the obvious (albeit evidence-free) guess. So I can't prove it, but searching the interwebs for various logging keywords plus the word "boneyard" led me off on an interesting tangent, so I'll explain that instead for a bit. So if you don't like interesting tangents, just scroll down until you see a paragraph starting with the word "Anyway", and resume reading at that point. Which means there's only one paragraph starting with "Anyway" in the remainder of this post, believe it or not. (And yes, I added an "anyway" to this paragraph later, for ironic effect or whatever. Don't count it while scrolling down, otherwise you're liable to be here for a long while.)

This tangent takes us to a different sawmill down in the mid-Willamette Valley. The Hull-Oakes Lumber Co. operates a very traditional-minded mill near the tiny town of Bellfountain, a few miles west of the small town of Monroe. The mill ran entirely on steam power as recently as 2013, and still uses a lot of early and mid-20th century machinery, on the theory of not fixing it if it ain't broke. They even have an intact old wigwam burner, though it's strictly decorative now since Oregon banned them decades ago. Articles I've seen about the mill include a recent piece in Popular Mechanics, and an older one at OPB, plus others in trade publications like Timber West Magazine, Sawmill Magazine, and This Is Carpentry. One of the articles mentions that finding spare parts can be a big problem, so they watch auctions around the region for gear they might need someday, and sometimes end up bidding against museums. When they win an auction, the parts go to the mill's boneyard until they're needed, which is the reason I bumped into articles about the place.

At one point a few decades ago the mill helped create a unique picnic table for the nearby Bellfountain County Park, 85 feet long and cut from a single piece of wood. Some (including the county parks website) suggest it's the world's longest picnic table, or at least the longest in the "cut from a single piece of wood" category. A state historical record merely claims it "has been referred to as" the longest in that category within the US. (By contrast, the old Bridal Veil mill was best known for manufacturing the little wood boxes that Kraft Cheese used to come in.) Benton County also claims Bellfountain Park is the county's oldest park, founded way back in 1851. Although the county's only run it since 1965, and before that it was a privately-run religious campground used for revival meetings, which is not really a park in the ordinary sense.

Bellfountain's other claim to fame (besides the mill, and the park and its various amenities) is having won the overall state high school basketball championship back in 1937. If you're familiar with the movie Hoosiers or the 1954 true story it was based on, that's essentially what happened here, once upon a time. Like most states, Oregon puts schools in multiple 'divisions', organized more or less by school size and program budget, with a separate championship for each division. There were five divisions when I was in high school, and a sixth was added sometime since then, but back in 1937 there were just two. Class A for big schools, and class B for small schools. But, uniquely, if you won the class B championship in a sport, you had the right to challenge the class A champion for their trophy. Which is how a tiny K-12 school with 27 students once came to play -- and defeat -- Portland's Lincoln High School.

While we're briefly on the subject of high school sports -- briefly, I promise -- in 2020 the town of Monroe had a small cameo role in the state's endless culure wars over high school team names. It seems that they're one of several schools around the state that go by "the Dragons", including the much larger high school in the city of Dallas, OR, and in many cases the name dates back to the early 20th Century. The problematic part here is that there's a longstanding story/legend/rumor that "Dragons" is a sly reference to dragons of the "Grand Dragon" variety, and to Oregon's long history as a Ku Klux Klan hotbed, which peaked back in the 1920s (though I'm cynical enough about this state to consider adding a "so far" here). That suspicion is not helped by both Dallas and Monroe having long reputations as sundown towns. A local website in Dallas insists the stories about the name are untrue, at least in their particular case, and "Dragons" was chosen for a.) alliteration, and b.) because nobody's scared of playing a team that calls itself the "Prune Pickers", the school's previous mascot. Which, maybe. Though I'll just point out that Bellfountain proudly played as the Bells the whole time, and let the name of the town do all the intimidating.

(deep breath)

Anyway, back at Bridal Veil, the place we're actually visiting right now could've been a railroad boneyard instead, since it's right along a major (and very old) Union Pacific rail line, right where the line goes to double track through the old townsite. And I think it's also close to where the mill's old logging railroad once connected to the main line. So this place could've been for old trains and train parts, albeit on a fairly small scale. A quick search came up with examples in remote corners of Maine, New Jersey, Bolivia, and even Ukraine's Chernobyl exclusion zone, all of which are much larger than whatever could have fit here. For the same reason, I think we can rule out "aircraft boneyard" as a possibility since that requires even more space, ideally a large chunk of empty desert like the famous ones in California and Arizona.

Or maybe this area used to be parts storage for ODOT's remarkably well-disguised Coopey Quarry next door. This is the source of at least some of the gravel used to constanly patch up I-84 and the old highway, and an endless need for gravel kind of implies an endless need for spare parts, especially given the agency's legendary reckless enthusiasm for dynamite. In fact the state's 2014 LIDAR map of the area (the source of the graphic above) shows some near-vertical slopes next to the highway that to me don't look entirely natural, but do look a lot like the quarry next door. So maybe some quarrying happened here at one point too. But (as with most of this post) I have zero documentation to prove that; it's just me looking at a map and guessing wildly.

PortlandMaps says the bulk of the area was last sold in 1989, so the feds haven't actually owned the place all that long. I don't know if the deals were connected at all, but 1989 was the same year that the Trust for Public Land bought the ramshackle sawmill and what was left of its company town, and after a long nature vs. historic preservation battle all remaining structures were demolished and erased. Except for the local post office, which continues to do a brisk business in novelty wedding announcement postmarks. Before the 1989 sale, much of the town (and possibly the boneyard site here) had been owned since 1964 by an eccentric ">local NASCAR driver, who (I gather) just sort of liked the idea of owning his own town. But that's a whole separate blog post I'll get around to sooner or later.

I was really hoping there would be something left over from the place's working days, I dunno, rusty old boxcar wheels or steam engine bits or something, giant sawmill blades, sized for trees it isn't legal to cut anymore, etc, but no luck. Or at least I had no luck; maybe if you're a metal detecting expert (and have the appropriate special permit), or you just have better powers of observation than I do, you might be in for a treat. I mean, I think I would have noticed if there'd been, I dunno, an intact vintage locomotive there, hidden under a big blue tarp but fully fueled and ready to joyride, and with the model number visible so you can find the right "How To Drive This Thing" video on Youtube. I didn't see anything like that, so don't get your hopes up too much. In fact the only remaining maybe-artifacts I noticed were a couple of large concrete boxes that I couldn't identify. Maybe they were the only objects that were too heavy to remove, I dunno. I took a few photos (see photoset above) in case they ring a bell for anyone.

Or maybe I've gotten it all wrong. Suppose these concrete mystery boxes are the reason for the "Old Boneyard" name, and it's all about creepy skeletons after all. Suppose a couple of late 19th century vampires were making their way west by train to Portland, nomming on unaware locals as they went, having heard the stories of other vampires living the high life in Portland's North End (present-day Old Town). A place where people constantly vanished, never to be seen or heard from again, generally without anyone noticing or caring. And on the off chance a missing person was actually missed and questions were raised, it could always be explained away as yet another Shanghai-ing, which the public just sort of accepted as a fact of life. But what if a few people here knew the awful truth of the matter; what if the vamps were ambushed when they hopped off the train for a quick midnight snack, just before they could escape into the city and the unmapped tunnels beneath it. Perhaps the townsfolk here got a hot tip about the unwanted visitors via the newfangled telegraph; it might have even been from from a rival vampire in Portland who didn't want the competition, or had a centuries-old score to settle. Bridal Veil lacked many of the traditional anti-vamp tools (garlic, rice, Catholic priests, etc. -- the nearby convent has only been here since the 1980s), but there were plenty of wooden stakes to be had, or at least cheese boxes that could be quickly broken up into stakes. But these were vampires of the type that are merely immobilized when staked, not the exploding Buffy variety, so a little quick thinking led to entombing them in concrete -- made with 0% Transylvanian soil -- while still staked, and that's where they've stayed ever since, the name being a clue to locals to leave those boxes the hell alone. But then the mill and its town went away, and the residents dispersed to all points of the compass, and certain key details about this place were lost to current generations, and sooner or later someone's going to jackhammer the things open in the interest of making the area more natural. Whoever does this will be in for a big (but brief) surprise, and yet another ancient horror will be unleashed on the world. In fact, this will most likely occur within the next few years, because that's just how the 2020s have been going so far.

Forest Road NF-1509, Larch Mountain

[View Larger Map]

I need to set the stage for this post a bit, since we're visiting an area that's likely unfamiliar to most people in the Portland area, despite being fairly close to the city and very close to major tourist spots in and around the Columbia Gorge. Larch Mountain, 30 or so miles due east of Portland, is one of these tourist spots: A huge and (hopefully) extinct shield volcano that includes the highest point of the western Gorge (4062'), with a famous view from the top, reachable by Larch Mountain Road whenever the road isn't closed by snow. It gets a lot of snow, and a lot of rain when it isn't snowing, and many of the Gorge's famous waterfalls (Multnomah, Wahkeena, Oneonta, etc.) are on creeks that flow north off the mountain or out of its eroded crater. A raindrop that falls on the north side of Larch Mountain likely ends up on Instagram on its way back to the Pacific Ocean. Meanwhile creeks that flow south off the mountain flow into the forbidden Bull Run Watershed and become part of the Portland city water supply, so a raindrop that falls there could flow out of somebody's showerhead, drop some minerals on their shower door, and then flow through some pipes to the Willamette, and eventually back to the Pacific that way. Or maybe it'll end up inside a beer bottle and eventually wind up on the far side of the planet, who knows. There's also a third possibile destination: Several large creeks with unfamiliar names -- Gordon Creek, Buck Creek, Trout Creek, and a few others -- flow due west off Larch Mountain toward the Sandy River, and a raindrop that falls somewhere on this western slope will likely get to the Sandy completely unseen by anyone. This watershed area is roughly south of Larch Mountain Road, and north of the Bull Run boundary and the invisible force field barrier that probably keeps eviloers out of our water supply, and also keeps the watershed's resident Sasquatch population from sneaking out for midnight junk food. I mean, as far as I know.

Anyway, the uppermost part of this area, the first couple of miles west of the summit, largely belongs to the Mt. Hood National Forest, but is outside the national scenic area boundary except for the very top of the mountain. West of there it becomes a checkerboard of BLM and private timberland, and then more private timberland mixed with scattered farms and rural homes, and then some undeveloped Metro greenspace along the Sandy River. So there's actually a lot of public land around here, but as far as I can determine exactly one hiking trail in the entire area south of Larch Mountain Road; it's obscure, less than a mile long, and not the thing we're visiting today. What the area does have is a web of little-known and rarely-used forest roads, all gated and closed to motor vehicles, so they function as really wide trails. They don't always go anywhere interesting or offer dramatic scenery along the way, but if you just want to go walk in a forest for a few hours without meeting a single other human being -- or any coronaviruses said human being might be superspreading -- these roads do fit the bill for that.

So with that long prelude out of the way, let's get to the destination for this post. A bit over 8.5 miles from the start of Larch Mtn. Road, you're greeted by a very weatherbeaten sign welcoming you to the Mt. Hood National Forest. On your right, immediately past this sign, is the... trailhead? Intersection? I'm not sure which word applies here, but it's a spot where you can pull off the main road and park, and there's a gate, and a road behind the gate that continues south. If you know where to look, signs tell you this is the Lower Larch Mountain Gate, and the road behind it is Forest Service road NF-1509. (Depending on which map you look at you may see it labeled as 1509-000, with or without the hyphen, which is its full 7-digit road number.) This road is flat, and level, and the first ~2 miles of it are even paved. Which is really unusual if you know anything about Forest Service roads, especially gated ones.

The deal here is that this road doubles as a service road into Bull Run for the Portland Water Bureau, and triples as a service road for the Bonneville Power Administration, which has a major powerline corridor south of here. One of the Forest Service road inventory reports that I've been linking to a lot lately (specifically a huge spreadsheet inside this report) has a semi-cryptic description for this road: "Under SUP w/COPWB for Road Maintenance, OF=BPA Accesses BPA Transmission Towers". I'm reasonably sure COPWB stands for "City of Portland Water Bureau", and the "OF" refers to another column indicating who the primary maintainer or maybe user of the road is. Or something along those lines. I don't know the exact arrangements, but someone who uses the road and is paying for its upkeep thinks the first 2.3 miles ought to be paved, so it is.

I couldn't find a lot of other info about the road besides that official road list. Basically just was a lost dog notice from several years ago, and a 2018 sighting of Anchusa officinalis right at the gate/trailhead. Apparently this is a non-native/invasive plant that's taken up residence here and there around the region, but it's not considered that bad as far as nonnative plants go as it's known for producing lots of nectar for pollinators. So watch out for bees, I guess.

In any case, before you start hiking, you'll want to look around for a blue arc painted on the street in front of the gate. Don't park past it; the gate opens outward, and there's a small but nonzero chance it might need to while you're there. One that's all sorted, the road heads south-southeast from the gate, meandering side to side a bit, crossing several forks and branches of Gordon Creek in the process. These streams rush downhill into deep forested canyons to the west, and you'll catch occasional glimpses through the trees suggesting there'd be a really nice view in that direction if only there wasn't a forest in the way, but at no point does it actually open up and let you see more than that, which is too bad.

At least the near-solitude is nice. I encountered one other person near the start of the trail with two large and very good dogs, and later was passed twice by an official Portland Water Bureau truck. First as he was heading out to the gate and again on his way back back. At first I thought maybe the driver was off shift and going home, then the second time I figured maybe he popped out to grab a late lunch down in Corbett or Springdale, though he must've driven extremely fast once he hit a main road to be back so soon. Or maybe he was going home but forgot his hat or something. Later I figured out (via a recent "Interim Measures Watershed Report") that the water bureau employs a number of "watershed rangers" here, and one of their duties is making the rounds checking the various gates into the area, and generally sort of securing the perimeter.

At one point along the road, just before it meets an old decommissioned side road (no. 1509-041, if you're keeping track at home), a small creek passes under the road in a culvert and then disappears over the edge of a cliff just steps from the road. A little map-based guessing suggests this miiight be the top of a waterfall, possibly up to 70' high, though I've never read anything about one being here. And just below that, it looks like the stream tumbles down a steep slope maybe another 150' to where it joins Gordon Creek, kind of like the stretch of creek below Wahkeena Falls. I'm not a big fan of sheer cliffs and didn't peek over the side of this one, so I'm not positive about any of this, mind you. I tried to check it out from below a couple of weeks later via an old BLM road, but I couldn't find it from there, so either it's not visible from below due to trees, or possibly I was just looking up the wrong creek, as there are several others that join Gordon Creek at around the same spot. At this point I'm about two-thirds convinced there isn't a safe or practical way to settle the question, at least for a risk-averse person like yours truly. This might be a perfect use case for a drone, actually, but I'm still trying to figure out whether drones are legal here, plus I don't actually own any drones.

So after that unsolved mystery, the next point of interest is the spot where the road turns to gravel, right after the four-way intersection with a pair of decommissioned, dead-end roads (1509-180 and 1509-190). As far as I can figure out, those were purely logging roads and they just end after a while without going anywhere interesting, and they're well on the way to being reclaimed by the forest, so exploring them further seems like a lot of effort for very little reward. I don't know why the paving ends where it does, and whether that's connected to the two side roads. I don't have any theories about that, unfortunately.

After a half-mile or so of gravel road, the forest abruptly opens up and you're in the powerline corridor. The buzzing wires overhead belong to the Bonneville Power Administration, and carry power to Portland from various dams along the Columbia as well as the one commercial nuclear plant at Hanford.

This spot is also home to another four-way intersection. You can turn around and go back at this point, which is what I did, but if you wanted to keep going you have a couple of options. To your left, a gravel road heads uphill under the powerlines. This is a continuation of NF-1509, so you can keep going that way if you feel like hiking under powerlines. Eventually it intersects with NF-20, another forest road that runs sort of parallel to NF-1509 but a bit further up the mountain. In fact you can form a loop route this way, heading south on either NF-1509 or NF-20 to the power corridor, connecting to the other road from there, and then heading back to Larch Mt. Rd. that way. The 2010 USFS study that resulted in decommissioning NF-20 and the side roads along 1509 mentioned this route as a known recreational use of the area, but since the area isn't managed for recreation they went ahead and tore up the road anyway. NF-20 is still passable on foot (and I'll finish that post eventually) but going by bike now is going to be a hassle unless maybe you've brought a BMX stunt bike and your advanced half pipe skills, or you're up for a bit of cyclocross. On the other hand, getting from the NF-20 trailhead to the NF-1509 one or vice versa involves a stretch of Larch Mountain Road, which would be fine -- even fun -- by bike, but sketchy if you're trying to walk it.

To your right from the crossroads is road 1509-016, which continues on west under the powerlines to the National Forest boundary and then beyond under various other names. This long stretch of road figures in several variants of the (highly unofficial) Dark Larch cycle route, eventually ending up somewhere vaguely near the eastern side of Oxbow Park. Looking that direction, in the distance I could see the same Water Bureau ranger truck that had passed me earlier, because there's plenty more perimeter that needs securing off in that direction.

It turns out the gate check thing is less about evildoers and more about germs, specifically Cryptosporidium, a waterborne intestinal parasite that causes diarrhea in people and animals, and can cause more serious disease in immunocompromised people. The microbe has an outer shell that largely protects it from chlorine in water, so if it exists in your watershed, just chlorinating your water supply isn't enough, and you also need an expensive filtration system to keep these little bastards out of the water supply. Portland doesn't currently have one of those systems, and didn't want to build one, and (uniquely) got away with a series of repeated waivers until a few years ago, arguing that its water supply is so remote and pure and natural and pristine thanks to the watershed closure plus chlorine that it would be a huge waste of time and money building a plant.

But the bug kept popping up sporadically in water quality tests, most likely because you can't close the entire watershed area to all animal life, and you may have heard about what bears famously do in the woods. So the city eventually stopped getting state waivers about this in 2017 and had to agree to build a filtration plant by 2027. In the meantime the city agreed to various mitigation measures so they could continue using the watershed until the new system was ready. Hence the "interim" in the "Interim Measures Watershed Report" I mentioned earlier. The confusing thing here is that the positive tests that caused all of this trouble are not thought to be from a human source, so I'm not clear on how doing more to keep motor vehicles out of the area helps with that. Unless maybe there have been recent hushed-up events involving bears driving trucks, in which case humanity has more to worry about than a little watershed mischief.

That same report notes that they've left out key details of the local security arrangements, because security. Which is why you don't want to take the remaining option at the intersection. Going straight ahead would put you on road 1509-510, which continues south and downhill into dense, dark, creepy Mirkwood-like forest, flanked by stern Bull Run Watershed signs strictly forbidding you from going any further in that direction. Assume you're on camera here, in other words, even if you don't see any obvious cameras. It's bound to happen eventually, at least. The fabled force field barrier I mentioned is probably around here somewhere too. It's quote-unquote probably just the kind you bounce off of, and not the kind that disintegrates you on contact, though it's hard to be sure since both are invisible. And more to the point, speaking as a Portland water customer, I am asking you nicely not to go that way.

Before we leave here, take a closer look at the trees on the Bull Run side. Notice how they're packed together and are all about the same size? A natural undisturbed forest wouldn't form a uniform wall of trees like that. What you're looking at was one of Portland's dirty little secrets for most of the second half of the 20th Century. People tend to think Bull Run is an oasis of pristine wilderness except for a couple of unavoidable dams and some water works infrastructure, but that's not really true. In 1958 the Forest Service concluded they could rake in an extra million dollars per year by allowing logging in Bull Run. Everyone had sort of assumed this was prohibited by the 1904 federal law governing the watershed -- signed by Teddy Roosevelt and everything -- but the agency decided it had found a loophole: The law limited access to authorized personnel only, but neglected to limit exactly who could be authorized and what they could be authorized to do, so they ran with it and started authorizing logging companies to clearcut Portland's city water supply. They suspected this would be a tad unpopular, so the plan was to do the logging semi-clandestinely and rely on the same 1904 law to keep the public from finding out. You might think city government would object to this. What possible inducement could there be for them to go along with this? Apparently the Forest Service brought in some tame industry-friendly scientists of theirs, who argued that old growth trees were "decadent" and prone to forest fires, and probably listened to beatnik jazz records and indulged in a bit of tree communism when nobody was looking, while freshly-planted trees were young, vigorous, non-combustible, upstanding citizens. I may have paraphrased that a bit. The fire argument was especially persuasive just then, as over 2000 acres of Forest Park had burned in 1951 (and in 2021 the city worries it's overdue for another fire now), and the same year saw the fourth and last (so far) Tillamook Burn, in the Coast Range due west of Portland. So the city went along, though perhaps wondering privately why it needed to stay on the down-low if it was such a good idea and based on settled science.

So this arrangement worked out as planned until July 1973, when a federal lawsuit ended up exposing what was really going on. (The suit was a front page Oregonian story that day, just below President Nixon refusing to comply with Watergate subpoenas.) Until then, the party line was that any logging that may or may not be happening was on a small scale, with a negligible impact. As one absurd example, here's an April 1973 Oregonian profile of a gentleman who, yes, was logging somewhere in Bull Run, rather close to one of the main reservoirs, but his was a rustic one-man operation and harvested almost no trees. And due to extremely strict watershed rules he was doing this with adorable draft horses -- Clydesdales and Percherons, just like in the beer commercials -- instead of modern machinery that would compact the soil and hurt trees (other than the ones he was there to hurt). And to protect the watershed from what horses do in the woods, the horses wore cute special diapers, and the guy even had a special shovel ready in case of diaper accidents. And he'd recently been on a national trivia game show about all this, and Hollywood was interested in his life story, and it was all very bemusing for a simple man of the forest. And in short, things were just peachy keen and bucolic on the Bull Run front, and please pay no attention to the chainsawing noises behind the curtain.

A 1973 City Club of Portland report on the watershed tried explaining the contradictory laws and rules and regulations applying to the area. Among other things, the Forest Service was insistent that per federal law, if the city didn't want clearcuts within its supposedly-reserved watershed, the city would have to write annual checks compensating the feds for lost revenue. Which the city wasn't keen to do.

After several years of legal wrangling, the sneaky feds lost the case in 1976, and if this was a Hollywood plotline the credits would've rolled at this point, and everyone lived happily ever after. That's not how things actually played out, though. A March 1976 Oregonian article described the timber sale situation as merely 'stalled' due to the lawsuit, and explained a major unintended consequence of the recent decision in the case. It seems the ruling was, specifically, that under the Bull Run Act the Forest Service did not have the discretionary authority to permit any commercial or recreational activity within the original 1892 boundaries of the reserve. This was a problem because the 1892 boundaries were based on a gross misunderstanding of the size and shape of the Bull Run River's actual watershed, and the original forbidden zone included over 40,000 acres that were physically outside of that watershed, but legally within it. The USFS had administratively shrunk the off-limits area in 1959 to roughly conform to the actual watershed, as -- law or no law -- keeping people out of the non-watershed area defied basic common sense, and enforcing that limitation cost money. Over the next nearly-two decades, a number of roads and trails extended into the formerly closed area, and people soon became very attached to them. But the judge concluded that this 1959 order was no more legal than the 1958 order allowing clearcuts.

An October 21st 1976 article told readers to "see it while you still can". Seems the judge had ruled that everything had to be gated off and secured by November 1st, and if anyone was caught violating the 1892 boundary both they and the Forest Service would be punished severely. The new off-limits zone included parts of the Oneonta, Eagle Creek, and Tanner Butte trails, along with the road to Ramona Falls, part of the Timberline Trail around Mt. Hood, and a third of Lost Lake, among other things. The one big exception to the closure was the Pacific Crest Trail, as was (and still is) governed by a separate act of Congress that superseded the old Bull Run law. So you could still hike that one trail, you just couldn't legally step off the trail even just little, at any time, for any reason, at any point between Paradise Park on Mt. Hood and a point near Cascade Locks.

The closure is mentioned in passing in a March 1977 Roberta Lowe article mostly about how the very dry winter of 1976-77 would likely affect the upcoming hiking season. She speculated that a "nasty" stream crossing on the upper reaches of Eagle Creek (on the Eagle-Tanner Trail #433) would in theory be less sketchy than usual in the coming year, if only it was legal.

Another Lowe article in May 1977 updating readers on the ongoing saga, the bureaucratic gears were still slowly grinding away when one of the state's congressmen and both senators introduced legislation to restore the old status quo and reopen the beloved closed areas. Not putting a whole lot of emphasis on the fact that they were also legalizing Bull Run clearcuts in the same law. Portland city government saw this in the fine print and made a fuss about it, but it was essentially a done deal at this point, the specific deal being that logging in Bull Run had to resume if the public ever wanted to see Ramona Falls or Wahtum Lake again.

In any event, the new law passed, and the clearcuts resumed, and this state of affairs continued for another 20 years, now protected by a special law and unaffected by all the spotted owl stuff going on in the outside world, right up until the 1996 floods, when the bill came due. Mud and silt from clearcuts poured into the Bull Run reservoirs, forcing the city's primary water supply offline. The city fortunately had (and has) a backup supply to switch to, but keeping the status quo was instantly a nonstarter, and Congress changed the law again, this time banning any further logging in the watershed. Sponsored by the same Senator Hatfield who pushed through the previous law, because legislating is like any other job: If you stay long enough, eventually you have to clean up messes you helped cause.

So that's where things stand now. As far as I know the feds haven't found a convenient loophole in the 1996 law yet, and if any top secret special ops logging was happening anyway it ought to show up on your favorite online map's airborne/satellite view. Of course the online photo is not the territory, and in theory the feds could lean on Google et. al. to conceal any new clearcuts, and make it more subtle than the obvious pixelation map services used to do in the mid-2000s. One of the key arguments in the 1973 suit was that if runoff from clearcuts damaged Bull Run's water quality, the city would be forced to build an expensive filtration plant much like the one it now has to build due to cryptosporidium. So when that plant comes online sometime around 2027, we may hear arguments about how the watershed closure is now obsolete and it's time to go in and clear out the trees before they catch fire due to climate change or something. And who knows, maybe the closure as it exists now would be overkill at that point; I know I'd be interested in visiting a few of the 20 or so waterfalls said to exist in the closed area, if that was legal. But I don't really see Portland going along with that sort of proposal anytime soon; as recently as 2019 the city passed a local ballot measure putting Bull Run protections into the city charter. There were already city ordinances to that effect, but the thought was that some future unsavory city council could simply repeal those ordinances and then do as it pleased with the city-owned parts of the watershed. So as of the 2019 measure, that can't happen without amending the city charter again, which would require another public vote.

Backstrand Road, and a small mystery

As I think I've mentioned once or twice now, one of my coping strategies during the ongoing pandemic has been to get outside when I can, while encountering as few other people as possible, ideally nobody at all. It's not just about avoiding getting sick; I've had all my shots, and will get my booster when it's available, and I've seen all the (pre-Delta) studies that say the odds of catching Covid outdoors is very low, especially if you're just passing someone on a trail for a few seconds. But people still stress me out, even knowing all of that. I also figure that even if I'm overreacting -- and I probably am, even with the Delta variant on the loose -- it's still an excuse to spend way too much time staring at maps and looking for the most obscure, least visited places I can come up with, which is a big part of the fun.

So a while back I ran across the US Forest Service Interactive Visitor Map and started poking around the Columbia Gorge on it, as one does. The key thing here is that this map shows Forest Service roads as well as trails, and a lot of these roads are either gated and closed to motor vehicles, or get so little traffic that they effectively count as trails. The downside is that they often don't go anywhere interesting, and just end in the middle of the forest at the site of an old 1960s clear cut, or power lines, or a cell tower, that sort of thing.

While staring at that map I noticed a couple of short forest roads branching right off the old Columbia River Highway just east of Bridal Veil, smack dab in the middle of the main tourist corridor, and I'd never heard of either of them. So those obviously went on the big TODO list, and now you're reading a post about one of them.

So right around the pushpin on the map above, roughly halfway between the Angels Rest trailhead and Wahkeena Falls, there's a small turnout off the eastbound side of the old highway, with a closed and dented gate and no obvious signage visible from the street. If you're like most people, you probably won't notice it at all, and if you do you'll probably assume it's private property of some sort, since that's exactly what it looks like. It sure doesn't look like a trailhead, at any rate. But this gate belongs to you, the federal taxpayer, and behind it is an old road the Forest Service calls "Backstrand Road", aka road number 3000-303. Past the gate, the road heads steeply uphill for a bit -- a back-of-the-envelope calculation and some guesswork says it's a 10% grade, within a few orders of magnitude or so -- and it then turns right/west at a corner with some old decorative rockwork, then widens and levels out for a short stretch, before petering out into dense underbrush.

At the corner where the road levels out, you can clearly see where the road once continued east as well, and a current county assessor's map shows that bit of road heading back down to the highway at a more reasonable angle. But that road has also been thoroughly consumed by the forest and you can't make any progress on foot in that direction either. So that's about all there is to do here. I didn't see any obvious side trails or other attractions. Glimpses through the trees suggest there'd be a decent view from the top of the trail if it wasn't for all the trees, but there are zero breaks in the trees so that's kind of a moot point.

So given all of that it's not surprising that a 2003 Forest Service roads assesment and its 2015 update both labeled the road as "low value" and recommended it as a high priority for decommissioning. But the reports also noted that the road wasn't a significant risk to anything or anyone if it was just left the way it is now. Which is probably why they still haven't gotten around to ripping it up in 2021. But why was the road here in the first place?

To me the road really doesn't look like your ordinary Forest Service logging road, even in its now-overgrown state. It just seemed like someone spent more money on it than the USFS likes to spend on logging roads. So I did a little digging and apparently this was private property with a house on it just twenty years ago. I know this because of four data points:

• The PortlandMaps entry for 49666 (!) E. Historic Columbia River Highway (the honest-to-goodness street address of the lot containing the road) has a last-sale date of 2001, and the assessor history shows that property taxes were being paid on the land before that sale, which tells us it was private property just 20 years ago. The entry also says the 27.36 acre lot is still technically zoned as residential.
• The road appears in 1961 and 1995 county survey records, the latter looking much like the current road layout. A comment on the 1995 survey refers to the road as a "driveway".
• The Multnomah County surveyor site also has a neat feature with aerial imagery taken periodically since 1998, which unfortunately I don't see a way to link to directly. The 1998 and 2002 image sets show a structure at the west end of the flat bit of road, while the 2004 edition shows fresh dirt where that structure was, and the latest edition shows nothing as the forest canopy has now grown in by a lot.
• I also managed to find some info about the former building, thanks to whoever had the brain-genius idea to auto-generate a "real estate listing" page for every street address in every dataset they could lay hands on, including obsolete stuff. The resulting pages are just search result-clogging SEO spam upwards of 99% of the time, but the listing for this place tells us the long-gone house was 974 square feet, built in 1958, with one bedroom, one fireplace, and baseboard heat.

I unfortunately couldn't find any news stories about the sale here. I suppose there either wasn't a press release at the time, or there was but nobody deemed it newsworthy.

That's not a very interesting story by itself, but there's a bit more history around here, and for that we have to zoom out a little. The state LIDAR map shows what kind of looks like a faint trail or service road or something heading west from where the house used to be, heading toward Dalton Creek.

Now, Dalton Creek was the subject of several OregonHikers forum threads, mostly in the late 2000s and early 2010s, several of them trip reports from people trying to sort out the "which waterfall is Dalton Falls" controversy (see my old Dalton Falls posts for more on that) and looking for additional falls on a few creeks immediately east of Angels Rest:

• April 2007: "Hidden in plain sight: a waterfall at Angels Rest!"
• February 2008: "Foxglove Falls 2-9-08"
• Early December 2010: "Foxglove Creek"
• Mid-December 2010: "Dalton Falls to Mist Falls Loop 12/19/10"
• Late December 2010: "Dalton - Foxglove Conundrum"
• Later December 2010: "Mesachie Creek"
• Mid-December 2013: "No Waterfalls on Devils Rest 11-Dec-2013"
• Late December 2013: "Angel's Rest (Nostalgia) Trip! (Dec 27)"
• December 2018: "Palmer Mill Rd/Primrose Path - Dec 7, 2018"

There were a couple of mentions of bushwhacking along Dalton Creek up from the old highway and sometimes climing all the way to Angels Rest from there, so apparently nobody realized there was a simpler and less thorny way to do the initial approach, a way that also skips traipsing along right past someone's house.

Dalton Creek is also the property line betwen the Backstrand Road property and a pair of small lots with diagonal property lines that together form a rough diamond shape totaling about 10 acres. Those property records show the Forest Service has only owned them since May 2002, and whoever owned them before was exempt from paying taxes on the land, so either another government body or some nonprofit group. I'm not positive I've found any news about that sale either, but I did find an April 2002 article that briefly mentions a possible upcoming land deal somewhere in the Bridal Veil area. It says the sale would cover 77 acres & could enable an ADA-compatible trail to Bridal Veil Falls someday, so it may be about a completely different land deal, or it might have covered the lots here and others elsewhere. The timing seems right, but there just aren't enough details to be sure.

Which brings us to the small mystery from the title of this post. A 1962 zoning map and an earlier 1950s tax assessor's map both label the diamond-shaped area as "YMCA". That got my attention, and before long I thought I had it all figured out: An April 1919 Oregonian story explained that local farmer George Shepperd (famous as the donor behind Shepperds Dell State Park) had also donated a house and land somewhere in the Bridal Veil area for a new YMCA camp. A WyeastBlog post about the nearby Bridal Veil Cemetery gives some backstory on Shepperd, his YMCA donation, and a series of strange and melancholy events in the years after he donated the falls. The trouble was that I couldn't find any subsequent news stories about the camp -- no grand tour when it opened, no vintage photos of kids doing crafts, nothing -- and a 1927 Metsker map doesn't show a YMCA camp here, or even any property lines corresponding to the camp we saw on the 1950s & 60s maps. Instead, it shows that roughly the entire area beyond the old mill town was then owned by a "Columbia Highlands Co.", including the Backstrand Road property, the future YMCA diamond, and points east all the way to Wahkeena Falls.

(Incidentally the other (and the oldest) ownership map I ran across was from 1889, and shows the whole area owned by a W. Dalton, who we met but learned nothing about in one of my old Dalton Falls posts, or maybe the Dalton Point one. He or she also doesn't figure into the present story any further, other than being the namesake of the creek here.)

Anyway, the Columbia Highlands company was incorporated in July 1915, and a brief business item the day after the big announcement noted it was capitalized at $400k and would be "a general brokerage firm dealing in real estate". Another item the following month finally explained what the company had in mind:

The Columbia Highlands Company was given permission last week by the state corporation department to plat and sell approximately 1760 acres of land along the Columbia River Highway, about 30 miles from Portland, and to construct a scenic road, clubhouse, and hotels. The company is capitalized for about $400,000, and its officers are Portlanders.

A similar Oregon Journal item also explained that the company is a consolidation of the interests of the Gordon Falls company, Charles Coopey, and Minnie Franklin.

Those names got my attention, and let me try to explain why briefly. "Gordon Falls" is an old name for Wahkeena Falls, Coopey was one of that company's founders (and namesake of Coopey Falls along the Angels Rest trail), and Franklin was the future Mrs. Charles Coopey, and the full story of the company is a whole other half-finished draft blog post I need to finish, but the short version is that the company proposed to build a woolen mill somewhere near Wahkeena Falls, to by powered by damming the creek above the falls. The mill would of course have its own company town nearby, to be named "Gordon Falls City", whose water supply would come from diverting Dalton Creek right here. It turned out the plan was not to build a new mill from scratch; instead the new mill would be a relocation of the famous woolen mill at Pendleton (which still exists today), disassembled and shipped west piece by piece. The whole scheme sounds outlandish, and it came to nothing when locals in Pendleton passed the hat and outbid the Gordon Falls investors, and found someone in town who was willing to take over the recently-closed mill. Which may have been the real plan the entire time, and the Gordon Falls City scheme was just a ruse to scare Pendleton into paying up. In any event, the company's stock was instantly worthless, and Portland-area investors who lost everything were outraged, and the whole mess ended up in court for years and years afterward.

The company's only real asset was all the land it had accumulated between Bridal Veil and Wahkeena Falls. Under modern bankruptcy law that land would go to pay off Gordon Falls creditors, but back then it just sort of quietly rolled over into the new Columbia Highlands company, just in time to try to cash in on the brand-new Columbia River highway next door. A May 1916 story announced the new business plan was to subdivide the company's holdings for summer homes and general development. The company's land extended way up into the hills and canyons above Bridal Veil, and in some alternate timeline where this plan panned out there are endless historic preservation battles around a cluster of fabulous but decaying Gatsby-like Art Deco mansions atop Angels Rest, which have proved to be prohibitively expensive to own and maintain. In our timeline, a pair of Journal stories from July 1916 note that part of the company's now-1700 acres had been surveyed and platted as residential property, and they had already sold a pair of lots totalling 2.5 acres with a prime view of (newly renamed) Wahkeena Falls, with home construction to begin shortly. Typically an item like this would be the kickoff for a long stretch of weekly or even daily real estate ads touting the area and reminding the reader that the area will be sold out soon and this may be their last chance to own a piece of the Gorge. But I couldn't find any sign that they had ever advertised Columbia Highlands, unless maybe the ads neglected to use the key phrase "Columbia Highlands", or the words were in an overly ornate Deco font that the newspaper database's OCR system couldn't parse. And what's more the Multnomah County Surveyor's Office GIS map has no trace of any of this alleged subdividing and platting ever being filed with the county, so it's anyone's guess what was really going on here. In any event, the next mention I found of the scheme was an August 1918 news item suggesting the company had changed plans again:

Following the annual meeting of the Columbia Highlands Company, held yesterday, it is announced that the directors have decided to carry forward a plan of development of their property through which the Columbia River Highway runs for nearly three miles. Trails will be developed to various scenic points, including the hanging gardens on Dalton Creek and numerous grottoes of exceptional scenic beauty. Attention will be given to lands adjacent to the highway, and steps will be taken to protect the shrubs, trees, and forest from the vandalism of thoughtless visitors.

A similar Oregon Journal article explained that the company was now just going to develop land along the highway, with the balance reserved as a privately-run tourist attraction. Hiking trails would come first, followed eventually by longer trips up into the mountains by burro or pack mule, I suppose along the lines of what you can still do at the Grand Canyon. The new board of directors listed a local judge as president of the firm, the other seats filled by familiar names, including Coopey as secretary, and Coopey's wife as treasurer. I'm reading between the lines here, but I wonder whether Coopey's presence on the board and long bitter memories of the woolen mill scheme were a hindrance to the Columbia Highlands operation, and they brought in a respectable outsider to be the public face of the struggling project going forward.

There is almost no further news about the company after that. A1922 public notice from the Secretary of State's office listed it among a large number of companies that had not maintained a current business license, or paid any fees, or made any required filings with the state over the past two years and were hereby officially dissolved. After that, the very last we see or hear of the company is a 1933 business item simply listing it under "dissolutions", with no indication of what happened during the intervening eleven years, other than the company name being all over that 1927 map. Did the 1922 notice finally get the attention of the company's lazy lawyers, who went back through the company's unopened mail pile and found the relevant "final notice" letters and somehow got back in the state's good graces? Did the dissolution order get tied up in an endless court case for a decade and change, without making the newspapers at any point? Or did various authorities just neglect to follow up on the 1922 order for all that time? July 1933 would've been during the initial burst of New Deal legislation, as it was becoming abundantly clear that 1920s laissez-faire business was on its way to the dustbin of history; maybe the state or the county figured it was time to tidy up some zombie corporations and other loose ends, before the feds did it for them. I do wish the company had at least managed to build a few of those trails before cratering, since (per the OregonHikers threads above) there still isn't a reasonable way for ordinary hikers to visit the "hanging gardens" along Dalton Creek.

That 1933 item is followed by another eleven-year gap, as we jump forward to the next historical map I could find. The 1944 Metsker map of the area is essentially identical to the 1927 one, but with the former Columbia Highlands properties now owned by a Catherine B. Fairchild, about whom I can find almost no information. The 1927 map showed the name "Fairchild" on a small lot along the highway. And if you look closely at the 1944 map you can see where someone applied whiteout in a few spots, replacing "Columbia Highlands" with the name of the new owner, suggesting this was either a recent development, or the news was slow in reaching the Seattle offices of "Metsker the Map Man"

Other than names on maps, the only news item I could find with a matching name or initials was a 1926 traffic item noted that a Mrs. C.B. Fairchild, of Aberdeen, WA, had broken a few ribs when her car flipped on a gravel road along the Washington Coast. This was part of a long list of traffic accidents and injuries around the region, so if somehow you're ever sent back in time by a century or so you might want to make a note to avoid driving or riding in cars if you can, because it sounds quite dangerous. This item was just below a group photo of the new state Republican committee, which (quite unlike the present day) had 8 female members out of 18 total. You can still tell it's the GOP, though, because the photo is 100% white, and everyone in it is scowling at the camera. Below all the traffic gore and mayhem, another item concerned a lobbying campaign to have a Three Sisters National Monument declared, which still hasn't occurred nearly a century later. The area does get National Park-level visitorship, but still doesn't have a budget or protection level to match. Or at least not yet.

But back to our story, specifically a 1952 front page story. It seems the Fairchild estate had been foreclosed upon a few years earlier for unpaid back taxes, with the land going to Multnomah County. The controversial part was that the county had then sold off large tracts of the land to private buyers -- including 600 acres in the general area we're visiting right now -- without first asking the state parks department whether they wanted any portion of the land. The county seems to have been caught flat-footed by the controversy; the head of the county land office explained that notifying the state wasn't his job, and in general the county preferred to get land back into private hands and back on the tax rolls, and besides they might have mentioned the Gorge land in passing while talking to the state about something else, so it was really the state's fault for dropping the ball. That didn't go over very well, and he ended up promising to notify the state first if any more Gorge properties ended up in county hands. Meanwhile the new owners in the area -- a Mr. & Mrs. Calvin C. Helfrich, an elderly couple who had picked up the property back in 1949 -- had already logged much of their acreage, and were talking about building summer cabins in the area, and had applied for water rights on Dalton Creek, echoing a few parts of the earlier Highlands and woolen mill efforts.

Later in October 1952, the Helfriches -- possibly stung by the recent public outcry and bad press -- donated 30 acres of the property to the YMCA to be used as an Indian Guide camp to be known as "Camp Helfrich". They also gave an adjacent half-mile of highway frontage to one of their sons, but the article doesn't specify in which direction so I don't know whether that included the Backstrand Road property or not. The article notes that both properties were still timbered, unlike much of the surrounding area. So the earlier Shepperd donation turns out to have been a total red herring, and I have no idea what happened to the land from that donation or even where it was, exactly.

Now that I had an actual name for the camp, I figured I could just put "Camp Helfrich" into Google and the library's newspaper database and the rest would be easy, just with a start date of 1952 instead of 1919. And once again I was surprised by how few results came back. First off, we have a 1953 fundraising campaign for the new camp, with a cringey photo of beaming white kids in pretend-Indian garb. And not long afterward, a 1954 classified ad offering the remaining 550 acres for sale at $40/acre. Which sounds like a good deal until you realize the 1949 foreclosure sale had privatized the land at just $8/acre. The ad may have had the desired effect though; it only ran once, and the State Parks department bought most of the land in 1955. 403 acres changed hands this time, including Mist Falls and Angels Rest, but not the land right around the new summer camp. The article doesn't mention what the state ended up paying per acre.

In 1959, a different donor gave $10k to the local Indian Guide program. A YMCA spokesman said they might use some of the money for a new longhouse building. Which, however, would be located at Camp Collins, their much better-known youth camp next to Oxbow Park, and not their supposedly dedicated Indian Guide camp further east, which wasn't mentioned anywhere in the article.

Two small Oregon Journal news items in 1958 and 1963 alerted parents about upcoming summer day camps at Camp Helfrich, along with a whole galaxy of other summer camp options. The 1958 notice said swimming was on the agenda, though it beats the heck out of me where you could put a swimming pool or a pond, or really any part of a summer camp for that matter, in this kind of terrain. Maybe it just wasn't a very good site for a summer camp, I dunno. The 1963 mention is the last newspaper item I could find about the camp, and that's where the historical record (or that portion of it that I can find on the internet for free) just sort of ends. Inconveniently none of the news items about the camp included a map of it or even gave a street address, so I don't even know how people got there from the highway, whether Backstrand Road once doubled as the camp entrance, or if the entrance was somewhere else and it's just been erased so well that there's no trace of it on the LIDAR map anymore.

The really puzzling thing about all of this is the complete lack of Google search results about the camp. That honestly surprised me a lot more than the lack of news items. I figured there would at least be a handmade web page from 2001 about a the place, or an Angelfire or Tripod site, with Boomers waxing nostalgic and swapping memories of their summer camp days, maybe even with a few teen crushes finally hooking up half a century later. But no dice. Then I checked the Wayback Machine in case those pages had been on Geocities or some other long-deleted location; I even checked Facebook in case there's a private FB group out there for camp alumni or former counselors, or just somone posting a photo or mentioning the place in any way, and I don't even like Facebook and trying to do a useful search there is even harder than getting straight answers out of 2021 Google. If nobody's nostalgic about an old summer camp, did the place ever really exist? I'm only mostly joking here. If you just tell everyone that signups are already closed, and the waiting list's full, whenever anyone tries to register their kid or to volunteer, you could probably keep a phantom summer camp on the books for a fair number of years before anyone caught on, or you got bored of the charade. I'm not sure why somebody might do this, maybe as part of an elaborate tax dodge, or as a cover story for a secret CIA sasquatch lab, that sort of thing.

Another more disturbing possibility is that the camp was 100% real, but was home to history's most successful summer camp slasher, just like in the movies but worse, and it all got covered up, and even now the few survivors are still being threatened or bribed to stay quiet. Call me a former 80s teenager if you like, but when I see an abandoned summer camp and a mysterious house in the forest next door with "666" in the street address, I can't help but draw a cinema-based conclusion or two. I mean, it doesn't strike me as the most likely real-life explanation; the camp was probably just surplus to requirements after the postwar baby boom subsided. It's just that it's hard to explain how an entire summer camp has been completely forgotten, poof, when it ought to still be within living, non-suppressed, memory of at least a few people out there.

So that's your writing prompt, o Gentle Reader(s): If you once attended Camp Helfrich and have fond (or otherwise) memories of it, feel free to leave a note below. Or if you didn't, but heard tales of what happened to the kids who did, feel free to drop that into the comments too. Or if you've been on the run from the secret CIA sasquatch lab since 1962 and want to finally tell your strange but 100% true story, I'm all ears. And while I'm lobbing questions out there, if you have any idea why the road's called "Backstrand Road", I'd be really curious about that too, since I found absolutely no info on the subject, and the name appears nowhere in any of the maps or news stories I've seen about the area.

Thx,
  mgmt.