Tamanawas Falls

Next up we have some recent photos from Tamanawas Falls, a ~100 foot waterfall a short distance from OR 35, due east of Mt. Hood, right around where the drive time is the same if you take I-84 to OR35 South via Hood River, or US26 to OR35 North via Government Camp. The hike (OregonHikers | AllTrails) is a fairly easy (albeit rocky) 3.4 mile roundtrip, and the trailhead is right on OR35 (so there's no driving on any sketchy logging roads), and the falls at the end are spectacular, so it's quite a popular trail. At least for a place this far from Portland. If you prefer to hike in complete solitude, this trail is probably not the one for you, but if you like visiting with friendly dogs you'll probably have a good time.

One couple on the trail was hiking with around six dogs, at least half of which were Corgis. I was about to say something along the lines of "If they can do it, you can do it", to try to sound positive and encouraging for once, but realized it wasn't a fair comparison. A single Corgi might struggle on the trail, but put them in a group and they seem to reinforce each other, and all things are possible given enough Corgis cheering each other on. When they have to get up a steep bit of hill, they seem to tackle it one by one while the others beam positive energy at the one currently climbing, and everyone is really stoked once the whole mutual support group is past the latest obstacle. Which unfortunately means they're hopeless at anything that involves all of them working together in unison, like pulling a dogsled.

These photos were taken in fall 2024, and fall seems to be a great time to visit; the trail isn't all that high up -- the maximum elevation you'll encounter is only around 3500 feet -- so you most likely won't have to trudge through snow in September or October, but it's still high enough that autumn leaves start turning while there's still plenty of afternoon daylight available. And then on the way home you can stop for a bite to eat and wait out the blinding sunset light in your eyes on the way home. The internet largely disagrees with me, of course, and the consensus seems to be that you absolutely must go do the trail in the depths of winter, preferably by snowshoe, or dogsled, or probably by fixie snow unicycle (you probably haven't heard of it) just to be Xtreme™ and one-up everyone you know and then wonder why they never want to hang out. Which, as it turns out, is exactly why these people have so much free time to spend opining online about the one and only correct way to do various things.

I do want to add a couple of Useful Protips from this trip. First, if you're going here, or anywhere run by the Forest Service in the Northwest, and you want to know whether you need a Northwest Forest Pass to park there, their website is more authoritative on this point than the various enthusiast websites out there, no matter how good they are in other respects. In particular, the OregonHikers page for the trailhead said something about the pass only being required during prime tourist season, and it may still say that, and maybe that was true at some point. But these days Uncle Sam needs five of your dollars if want to park here, any time of the year. I get that some people ignore this, whether on principle or because they're just cheapskates. And I honestly don't know how strictly they actually enforce this -- it probably matters a lot how close you are to the nearest ranger station, for one thing -- and I also don't know what they typically do to violators -- whether it's just a federal parking ticket on your windshield, or they actually tow your car and leave you stranded out in the middle of nowhere. There have been a couple of times in the past where I decided to just chance it, and nothing bad ever happened when I did that, but I also enjoyed the hike less due to getting stressed out over it. So I pay up and then I can relax and just worry about car breakins. You might think that a big parking lot full of vehicles at $5 a pop (or $30 for the annual pass) ought to cover hiring a security guard to watch the lot, at least for summer weekends, but apparently that's not how it works.

Just to add to that, in 2025 the hot new trend in forest recreation management is to have a concessionare take over running a given site and opt out of honoring the $5 pass, or any pass other than the $30 annual one. They generally want $10 for a day pass for just that site, which really adds up if you want to visit one place in the morning and another after lunch. On the bright side, the $5 pass still exists, technically, and it still costs only $5; it's just that the number of places you can actually use one keeps dwindling. Tamanawas Falls parking was still $5 when I was there, but your mileage may vary, and if it does it probably won't vary in the downward direction.

Ok, second protip: If you rely on Google Maps for driving directions, be sure to ask for directions to Tamanawas Falls Trailhead, not Tamanawas Falls. This matters because Google interprets the latter to mean you want to drive to a point as close as possible to the waterfall itself, no matter what the road to that point is like, and getting there via the normal trailhead is not a priority. In this case Google has you leave Highway 35 a few miles south of here, and directs you onto Forest Service road NF-3520-620, a steep, narrow gravel logging road that climbs around 500' vertical feet up onto Bluegrass Ridge, ending at a point that, yes, is pretty close to the falls as the crow flies, definitely closer than the official trailhead will get you. On the other hand, the crow can soar gracefully over multi-hundred foot cliffs and you can't, or at least you can't more than once. And before you even get to that point, the main problem is that the road is also marked Unmaintained & Closed To Vehicle Traffic, so there's almost certainly a locked Forest Service gate in the way. If you can get past that somehow, legally or otherwise, there will most likely be fallen trees across the road, so bring a chainsaw. (Note that the legal way involves passing a civil service exam and joining the Forest Service, starting out at Junior Assistant Outhouse Inspector, and slowly working your way up the federal seniority ladder until the Forest Service starts trusting you with keys to things, which could take a while.) And long story short, this might be the closest road to Tamanawas Falls, but it's not likely to be the fastest. My photoset includes a couple of photos of the trailhead and parking lot, and if you park somewhere that doesn't look like that, you are in the wrong place.

Geology

Our story starts around 29,000 years ago, the last time (or one of the last times) that an eruption of Mount Hood included actual lava flowing down and away from the mountain. Cascade eruptions in recorded history, and in native oral history before that, only talk about explosive-type eruptions like that of Mt. St. Helens in 1980, but Cascade volcanoes are often surrounded by old lava flows, reminding us they can erupt other ways if they want to. (To any volcanoes reading this: Your kind and generous offer to arrange a demonstration is truly appreciated, but is not strictly necessary at this time. Thanks!)

So the lava erupted from a vent on the east side of Mt. Hood, and flowed east and downhill until it came up against Bluegrass Ridge. This is the north-south ridge that runs for several miles on the east side of Mt. Hood, completely not aligned with Mt. Hood for the simple reason that it's older (I've seen numbers putting it at ~3m years old versus no greater than 1.3m for Mt. Hood) It's also a few hundred feet too tall for anything flowing down from Mt. Hood to just flow over the top, so the other options are to flow around the obstacle if possible, or stop and pile up if not. Water finds a way back to the sea. Lava dreams of that, but flows a bit and piles up a bit and eventually solidifies in place. Some of the lava flowed north, parallel to Bluegrass Ridge, until it could flow around the ridge and continue downhill from there, and finally froze in place at some point, well short of the Pacific Ocean. The regular climate resumed after that event, and water from the mountain still needed a way around the ridge, which led to present-day Cold Spring Creek. This is not necessarily the same exact channel as the lava earlier, or any water channel that might have been here before the lava came, but same basic idea. And then the (usually) slow magic of water plus time took over, and the creek has been eroding its way downward and backwards, and Tamanawas Falls is the slowly moving point where that ongoing process is at right now.

(But don't just take my word for it. Here's a 1997 USGS report, Geologic History of Mount Hood Volcano, Oregon. A Field-Trip Guidebook, which was created for a 1996 geology conference in Portland as a fun driving tour if you're in town for an extra day or two. Pages 22-23 cover the area along OR 35 near the falls.)

History

Depending on who you believe and what the current best evidence says, it's an outside possibility there may have been people here when all that happened. Though current conventional wisdom holds that people have been here for around half that time, with the caveat that ice age floods would have buried or erased a lot of evidence. That's still around 15000 years, which is long enough that it's safe to assume the whole region was thoroughly scouted for useful waterfalls, meaning the ones that migrating fish have a decent chance of leaping over. Tamanawas Falls is clearly too tall for that; the only traditional fishing site I know of in the Hood River watershed is at Punchbowl Falls over on the West Fork of the river.

Beyond that, I have no idea whether this was a significant place for anyone before recorded history. A 1977 Forest Service planning doc for the agency's Mt. Hood Planning Unit (which seems to coincide with the whole Mt. Hood National Forest) tried to inventory all "cultural resources" in the area, and came up with precisely nothing before the pioneer era. And the only maybe-pioneer-era thing they had for Tamanawas Falls was an item for "Initialed Trees", of some unknown age. It does not say exactly where the Initialed Trees were, or even what the initials were, and there aren't any signs along the trail pointing out where one might find said Initialed Trees. Which is fine; quite honestly I don't suppose there's any way to showcase historical graffiti without some percentage of visitors thinking they have permission to add to the collection. If you need a protip about that: First I have to tell you not to carve your initials in trees, because it's bad for the trees. But if you absolutely positively must carve something in a tree, be sure to include today's date and time, and some sort of unique ID (Legal name and address, Instagram or TikTok or YouTube @name, Social Security number, or whatever). Just some sort of ID that future historians of the year 2225 can cross-reference in the archives and pull up your vital records and complete browser history, including the supposedly incognito parts, so a sign next to the tree can include an accurate biography of you. But hey, that's immortality for ya: You can maybe influence whether people of the future have heard of you, but you can't control what they think of you.

I should point out that the Forest Service did not actually consult local tribes for that 1977 study, because 1977. Which is how you get things like a 2008 incident where an ODOT road crew damaged a sacred site named Ana Kwna Nchi Nchi Patat after not realizing what it was. The site happened to be right next to US 26 and was impacted when they added a turn lane to the road. The Forest Service finally agreed to restore the site in 2023.

I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that the odds are extremely low that the very first person to see the falls was a white guy with a camera. The reason I say that is that sometime between 1895 and 1909, photographer Benjamin A. Gifford (1859–1936) took this photo of the falls, eventually publishing it in his 1909 photo book Art Work of the State of Oregon, currently on Amazon for a mere $895.00. He isn't credited with discovering the falls -- he must have already had an inkling that the falls existed before bushwhacking up Cold Spring Creek lugging a heavy large-format camera. But it also wasn't a well-known destination back then, since it apparently didn't have a name when he took the photo and it ended up being called "Giffords Falls" for a while in the early part of the 20th Century. This burst of fresh attention did not, however, result in a trail to the falls right away, and it spent much of the 20th Century as a known and named but rarely visited mystery spot deep in the forest.

The only use of the old name I've come across in local newspaper archives is an Oregon Journal article from September 1907. The article itself is fairly dry, concerning various recent and proposed improvements in Oregon canals and railroads, including the never-completed railroad loop around Mt. Hood. The article is illustrated with a variety of photos from around the state with some vague connection to the text, including one that's definitely the falls here, labeled "Gifford Falls, Base of Mt. Hood". I think they used it on the idea that the creek flows into the E. Fork of Hood River, which powers the hydro plant at Dee, OR, which powers the city of Hood River and may power the proposed railroad someday, plus the falls themselves might be a scenic destination for tourists on the proposed railroad someday. I don't see any photo credits listed for the image, so for all we know the newspaper's one and only depiction of "Gifford Falls" might be illustrated with someone else's photo.

And with that, the falls fell off the radar again until the 1960s. Sometime along this time period it picked up the name "Tamanawas", but I don't know when. Official maps of the Mt. Hood National Forest (updated every few years) showed nothing here thru the 1952 edition, while the 1963 map shows the falls, but no trail or trailhead, and it's labeled using "Tamanawaus", the old spelling. You might have been able to get a look at the falls from above at this point, as the Elk Meadows trail now passed by the general vicinity of the falls and connected to a forest road labeled "S230", which would have to be present day NF-3510-620. (not a typo: the NF-3520-620 I mentioned runs just south of here, and it looks like it was road S229 under the old numbering scheme in effect back then).

If you google the place now, you'll encounter an internet factoid claiming that the name was changed from "Giffords" to "Tamanawas" in 1971, but that's not quite what really happened; I found an Oregon Journal article about the renaming (and a few others), dated December 4th, 1971, and it briefly explains what actually happened. Listed among various decisions by the state geographic names board, the article says "Spelling of Tamanawaus Falls on Clear Creek in the Hood River drainage was changed to Tamanawas to make it phonetically in keeping with the Indian language." So the immediately previous name was basically the current one but spelled wrong.

I was kind of hoping that the old spelling would lead me to more vintage news articles, but no such luck. The only other use of that spelling in local papers was a mistaken use of the old spelling in a 1982 article, over a decade after the experts officially fixed it.

The 1972 map has the falls under the current name, spelled correctly this time, and it now shows the trail too. The trail isn't numbered, though, so it might have been new, or that corner of the map was just too cluttered to add a trail number. I thought that narrowed it down to a six year window for roughly when the trail came about, but then I found a 1964 USGS map showing the falls and trail and labeling it "Tamanawaus", and that's the oldest 1:25000 map of the area available on the USGS site. While lower resolution maps as late as 1978 don't mention it.

The trail appears in Don and Roberta Lowe's 70 Hiking Trails: Northern Oregon Cascades (1974), but it wasn't mentioned in local newspapers until 1978, in an Oregonian article on fun fall activities around Mt. Hood. It also got a mention a Roberta Lowe column in a November 1978 Oregon Journal column full of factoids about trail history. She tells us most of the trail was built by volunteers, but Forest Service experts were called in to blast a way through the big boulder field toward the end, since the agency generally doesn't let volunteers go around dynamiting stuff on federal land. You might think that would go without saying, but it was the 1970s, and you could get away with a lot in those days if you told people that you had done this before and looked like you knew what you were doing. So this "no amateur demolition work" rule might have been a new policy at the time. And she doesn't actually say when this trail construction had happened. It sounds recent, but the rest of article hops around between the first trails on Mt. Hood going in around 1908, and recent work to reopen the Mt. Defiance trail by building a path from Starvation Creek to the old trail -- which used to start at the little state park at Lindsey Creek, now bypassed by I-84. Anyway, mentions of the place seemed to pick up a bit after 1978, and it started appearing in Mazamas hike announcements afterward.

Which is not to say the area wasn't getting the usual Forest Service treatment. On aerial photos it's not hard to see the patchwork pattern that comes from decades of Forest Service timber sales. I couldn't find anything in the newspapers about timber sales near the newly minted trail, so I checked HistoricAerials, which has 1981 and 1994 imagery for the area. The 1981 photo just shows unbroken forest to the south of the falls and trail, while the 1994 edition has a patchwork of clearcuts centered on forest road 3520-620. Until quite recently the forest near the falls was threatened by the proposed Polallie-Cooper timber sale project just north of here, which the Forest Service has been trying to push through since the mid-2000s.

Speaking of clearcuts, I was a bit surprised to realize how little protection the area around the falls actually has. The creek has been proposed as a future "Wild and Scenic" waterway but doesn't currently have that status, though it flows into the East Fork of Hood River, which does. The falls are also juuust outside the Mt. Hood Wilderness boundary, as the area was proposed but excluded during Congressional horse trading in 2009. Instead the falls are part of the ~13,000 acre "Mt. Hood Additions Roadless Area". "Roadless Area" indicates -- as you might expect -- a lower level of protection than "Wilderness" does. Frankly it's more of a description than a protection measure. It doesn't actually ban logging or other development within the designated area. It doesn't even ban roads; a Forest Service explainer gamely argues that "roadless" means "less roads", not "no roads" or even "no new roads". That isn't what "roadless" usually means to the general public, though, and so they're forever putting out new proposals to clearcut a roadless area and always seem shocked and bewildered every time they're sued over it. In a similar vein, the falls are also included in the 82,385.47 acre "Mount Hood Park Division", as designated by the US Secretary of Agriculture way back on April 28th, 1926. (A 16,762.97 acre "Columbia Gorge Park Division" to the north of here was created around the same time.) The "Park Division" designation suggests it's managed for nature and recreation along the lines of a national park but run by the forest service, and a lot of contemporary news accounts from that period act like that was the case. But again, "Park Division" was more of a description than a protected area, and it seems as though the Forest Service eventually allowed these designations to fall by the wayside.

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Footnote(s)

[1] The more that I look at the map, that road might be useful as part of a loop hike: After visiting the falls, take the Tamanawas Tie trail #650B up to the Elk Meadows Trail #645, follow that to where it intersects the Bluegrass Ridge Trail #647, and after a short distance bushwhack over to road 3520-620. Go downhill/south on the road, and cut over to the East Fork Trail #650 at the point where the trail and road run together for a bit, and take the #650 north back to the trailhead. There's also a point where the road and trail pass about 100' feet from each other, as the crow flies, and maybe that would work as a connector and maybe it wouldn't, I haven't actually tried this yet and don't know what it's like in the real world. But the interwebs version looks kind of interesting. Maybe I just have a bias in favor of reusing old forest roads; it's mostly that there are a truly mind-boggling number of them out there in the forest, and the Forest Service is never going to have enough money to either decommission old roads properly, or to build and maintain any more trails beyond what currently exists, so if an old road goes somewhere interesting, the pragmatic thing would be to not turn up our noses at using it. Also old forest roads are wider than the average trail, which miiight help avoid being swarmed by ticks during the height of tick season.

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[2] 1995 Preliminary Geologic Map of the Mount Hood 30- By 60-Minute Quadrangle, Northern Cascade Range, Oregon has a date of around 1.8 million years, from a location on the west side of Bluegrass Ridge, if I understand their latitude-longitude format correctly. The PDF describes the contents of the map but doesn't include the map, which I haven't located yet.

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[3] As for the rest of the article: It was titled "'Cleanup' of Names Protested By Board" Which is and isn't what readers of the distant year 2025 might think. The State Board on Geographic Names was upset. "Outrageous, this cleansing program of the federal agencies", said the director of the Oregon Historical Society. "A colorful part of the West could be lost if this continues", said a board member. But they weren't talking about place names containing racial slurs, or names honoring Confederate generals, or notorious soldiers from the Indian Wars, or anything like that. No, it seems that a few years earlier the Bureau of Land Management had looked at their map of Steens Mountain, in a remote part of SE Oregon, and saw the name "Whorehouse Meadow" and got a case of the vapors. It seems the name dates back to the Old West, named for the only business that has ever existed there or for miles around in any direction, and then only seasonally, and -- according to historians who study these things -- it was more of a gussied-up stagecoach than an actual house. The agency quietly changed it to "Naughty Girl Meadow", a name that invites at least as much curiosity as the original. That finally caught the notice of the state board in 1971, though I gather the original name wasn't officially restored until the early 80s.

In related news, the board concluded the name "Hells Canyon" was not offensive and should be the official name, rather than "Grand Canyon of the Snake". Also, "Moloch Beach" on the coast became "Moolach" since it was intended to be a Chinook word for "elk", not anything biblical, but someone had spelled it wrong somewhere along the way and it got stuck that way for a while. The name has since been further corrected to "Moolack", I guess to be even less Moloch-y. And in another bit of typo repair, "Bagsby Hot Springs" was officially changed to the correct "Bagby".

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[4] In a situation familiar to photographers across the ages, Gifford sued the Ford Motor Company in 1916 for using one of his photos in a company publication without permission or credit. He won the case and was awarded $250 (which is about $7200 in 2024 dollars) plus attorney fees.

Gifford (but not the falls) was mentioned in 1972 article of oldtimer reminiscences. It seems the Giffords owned a raspberry patch near Salmon Creek in the 1920s, near (and now in) Vancouver, WA, where the author and her husband first met while picking berries at age 11.

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[5] Two papers came back after checking JSTOR a few different ways:

Printzen, Christian, and Tor Tønsberg. “The Lichen Genus Biatora in Northwestern North America.” The Bryologist, vol. 102, no. 4, 1999, pp. 692–713. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3244256. Accessed 9 Dec. 2024.

German and Norwegian lichen taxonomists visit the Pacific Northwest to study an inconspicuous lichen genus, announce four new species. A passage describes what they're studying and why this is good place to do it:

"the genus comprises crustose lichens with green algal photobionts, biatorine apothecia, colorless, simple to 3-septate ascospores, and bacilliform pycnospores. Biatora is widely distributed in the Northern Hemisphere, but the extra-European taxa have not received any systematic treatment. The diversity is obviously highest in temperate and boreal coniferous forest."

And you're hearing about this now because a specimen of Biatora nobilis, one of the newly-described species, was collected from a conifer tree somehere along the Tamanawas Falls trail. The type specimen was collected up on Vancouver Island, so this isn't a situation like one of those weird insects that only lives around the base of a few Gorge waterfalls and nowhere else. Common but inconspicuous, and tough to tell different species apart, and there are not a lot of taxonomists out there period much less ones specializing in lichens, and there are big swaths of the biological world where nobody has gone through and done the detailed taxonomy work. Lichens are a weird specialty because a lichen is a symbiosis between a fungus species and an algae species. I actually knew that part already, but I didn't think about how that complicates putting them in categories. At present they're classified by (and named the same as) the base fungus species in the pairing, but this is an ongoing controversy. You can get lichens that seem completely unrelated by swapping out the alga species, yet they're all counted as the same because the fungus is the same. I dunno, you may not find that very interesting. But it's a thing I just learned today and I wanted to tell you about it.

Secondly, a specimen of the stonefly Taenionema kincaidi that was collected further up Cold Spring Creek was examined in:

Stanger, Jean A., and Richard W. Baumann. “A Revision of the Stonefly Genus Taenionema (Plecoptera: Taeniopterygidae).” Transactions of the American Entomological Society (1890-), vol. 119, no. 3, 1993, pp. 171–229. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25078571. Accessed 9 Dec. 2024.

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[6] Vintage USFS maps of the Mt. Hood area from 1921, 1936, 1939, and 1946, 1952 and 1966 don't show the falls, or the trail to the falls, or the trailhead. They generally do show the Bluegrass Ridge and Elk Meadow trails, and a lot of the campgrounds in the area existed that far back, just not anything here.

Likewise, a vintage brochure "Forest Trails and Highways of the Mount Hood Region" (1920) covers a lot of the scenic highlights of the region, including the Gorge, and doesn't say a word about Tamanawas Falls. A 1939 brochure "Trails on Slopes of Mount Hood" comes with a detailed map and doesn't show the waterfall here, while including a variety of others, all smaller than Tamanawas, and a 1961 reissue of the same guide shows even more trails but not one to the base of the falls. A state highway department publication, "Oregon scenic highway drive: Mt. Hood Loop" has an exhaustive log of sights to be found along the route and doesn't mention the falls, and it's dated 1981 (though it looks like a reprint of a much older guide.)

Singer Creek Falls

Next up we've visiting yet another waterfall in Oregon City that isn't Willamette Falls. Right next to the city's famous municipal elevator, there's an Art Deco walkway with a few flights of stairs that also connects the city's upper and lower halves, and this walkway also includes a water feature that descends the bluff in around 5 stairsteps. This "water feature" is Singer Creek Falls, another of the Northwest's many Works Progress Administration projects from the mid-1930s. The idea here was that they would start with an existing, 'natural' waterfall at this same location and improve on it, giving it clean, modern lines, and adding the ability to easily light the falls at night. This seems like a bizarre idea now, but 1937 was the year of Bonneville Dam and Timberline Lodge, and Man Improving On Nature was all the rage back then.

For more info about that project, there's a city planning page about the falls, plus a page at Living New Deal (which is a great site for general WPA fandom, btw.). Also see a post at Meandering through the Prologue, and a photo at The (Daily) Rail Photo.

Somehow I didn't notice any of this during previous visits to the elevator, and I had no idea it was here until stumbling across it on Google Maps, I guess based on previous search history. I can only speak for myself here, but it's possible that if your brain is focused on looking for midcentury public elevator stuff, maybe an unexpected Art Deco urban waterfall simply won't register, and vice versa. After visiting for the waterfall this time, I later found out that there's public art at the base of the falls, specifically a Lee Kelly sculpture titled Moontrap (2011), which I completely failed to notice at the time. I wonder if it's named after the low-budget SF movie from 1989 starring Walter Koenig and Bruce Campbell. So if I decide I need photos of it I'll need to make yet another visit to the area, and probably miss out on yet another interesting detail while I'm at it.

The usual waterfall websites have absolutely no info about this one, as traditional waterfall snobs aren't really sure what to do with a place like this. So instead we'll have to figure out the height for ourselves, going by the state LIDAR map. If we take this point as the top and this point as the bottom, the falls could be up to 70' high, though that might be a bit generous; we can at least say the cliff is around 70', and the falls may be a few feet shy of that on either end. Also shows what looks like a second path or stairway coming up diagonally from 9th to right around where the stonework ends up top. No stairs or trail are visible on Street View now, so it evidently was closed or fell out of use at some point.

A news item about the upcoming redesign project explained what was coming in detail:

Designed by City Manager J.L. Franzen, a series of waterfalls will feature the Singer Hill park project which was started last Monday under WPA. These falls, formed by diverting Singer creek into a series of five drops by means of natural stone incased in cement, probably will be lighted and will constitute one of the most beautiful spots in the country, either day or night. The WPA crew which is working under the direction of Mr. Miller, foreman, and which will be augmented Monday with additional workers, will brush out the bluff for approximately two blocks between what would be the extension of the alley between Seventh and Eighth streets to the alley between Ninth and Tenth and between the railroad and Singer Hill highway. Trails along the bluff will also be built. The new course for the water which now plunges down the hillside from the outlet at the head of the stairs at Seventh and Singer hill will be 20 feet wide. It will include four 10-foot drops and the other a 12-foot drop. Water will be picked up where it goes under the stairs, carried over the falls which will be just south of the present stream, then dumped into a pool at the foot of the falls. Stone for the falls and pools will be obtained from the city quarry on Center street.

• November 1896: mention of the creek as one of the many Willamette tributaries flooding at the time
• 1909 Journal : a local furniture co. harnessed the creek to power a little 75hp generator, partially powering their operations
• May 1935: proposed as part of a park along the bluff, along with a second WPA project to upgrade everyone in town to a modern, graded gravel road, at minimum.
• September 1935: WPA approved the sum of $1835 toward the project; mentions flood control
• January 1937 (Journal) : the falls turned to icicles during a cold snap, were still under construction at the time
• January 1938 (Journal) : a roundup of great new things around OC, with a photo of the falls and another of the stairs. The article explains that the city was deeply dysfunctional back in 1925, noting that city council meetings drew large public audiences, not out of people being all civic-minded and public-spirited and whatnot, but because the meetings tended to end in a free boxing match between councilmembers. Now, however, things were swimming right along under the modern council-manager form of city government. It mentions the total project cost for the falls came to around $22,500.
• I've never come across a photo of what the original falls looked like. I'm not saying there aren't any, just that I've never seen one. But I did come across the next best thing in an October 1938 Oregon Journal column. The paper's weekly "In Old Oregon" feature reprinted someone's 1847 sketch of the Oregon City skyline, featuring the town's few scattered buildings at the time, along with the creek tumbling down the bluff. A note along with the feature offered to pay $2.50 for readers' photos from the old days suitable for publication. That's almost $60 in 2025 dollars.
• A rather gross 1959 sewer incident: The city was busy replacing the pipe carrying Singer Creek thru downtown Oregon City from the base of the falls to the Willamette, and city workers kept bumping into old un-mapped, unrecorded sewer pipes, dumping raw sewage straight into the river.
• The falls have been illuminated for the holidays on and off over the years, and (for example) they were brightly lit for Christmas 1964. The linked article claims the falls are 90' high overall, which is more than you get just adding up the drops.
• The city was still busy putting parts of the creek underground in 1967, as part of a larger project to eventually pave part of John Quincy Adams St. The older part of town atop the bluff uses a street naming convention common to US cities of a certain age, where the streets parallel to the Willamette are named for US presidents ordered chronologically extending uphill away from the river, with a slightly odd twist. The order didn't look quite right, so I double-checked a list at the Library of Congress and realized Oregon City had skipped over anyone who became president on the death of his predecessor. And as a result, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, and Andrew Johnson aren't honored with streets of their own, which is probably just as well. It seems there had been a rather vociferous (yet long-forgotten) public debate around whether a Vice President actually becomes President as part of the succession thing, or merely takes over presidential job duties without scoring the upgraded job title, salary, official residence, and so forth, as the constitution was a bit ambiguous on this point. Tyler's presidency overlapped with Oregon City's brief tenure as territorial capitol, so it was a contemporary issue at the time, and locals evidently disagreed with his taking the oath of office and calling himself "President". Once established, they then had to apply the same naming convention as the city expanded away from the river. The naming convention ended with US Grant, sparing the city from having to figure out what to do about presidents with non-consecutive terms (like Grover Cleveland, and that one orange guy), and two Roosevelts, and two Bushes with very similar names, that sort of thing.
• A 1968 article about the same project primly notes that "[p]resently the creek is not as pure as might be desired", but it was hoped that a future project would connect the neighborhood to the city sewer system instead of feeding directly into the creek.
• The city didn't light the falls for the holidays at first in 1970, but a small child wrote a sad letter asking the city to please turn them back on, and they did.
• September 1970, a Journal photo of a city maintenance crew hosing debris out of the falls in preparation for fall
• 1985 experiment stocking the creek with coho salmon. I think the idea was that the falls look a bit like a fish ladder, and maybe a few salmon out there were athletic and ambitious enough to pull it off, eventually leading to a new subspecies of supersalmon that would hopefully also be delicious.
• ...but it later turned out that it wasn't an experiment at all, but an attempt to put the baby salmon in a sort of protective custody, after an unexplained (but suspicious) mass fish kill at a Clackamas Community College facility.
• The current lighting dates to 2012, funded by a $17k Rotary Club grant. The city posted a video of the illuminated falls shortly after they went live. Watching it, I found myself thinking the phrase "vintage YouTube video" about something that was posted 11 years ago.
• another 2012 article relates one of the city's many ghost stories. Ghost is a small redheaded child who died in a 1913 typhoid epidemic, seen around town as an ungentle reminder that drinking untreated water straight from local streams is not safe. At this point the ghost is probably trying to head off to wherever ghosts go when their work here is done, only to be blocked by a local measles epidemic ghost who says "I used to think I was done here too", and they both swear up a storm at the local antivaxxers.
• April 2021 article mentioning the falls; I had never heard of them before despite being right next to the elevator

Little Zigzag Falls

Here are a few photos of Mt. Hood's Little Zigzag Falls, a short distance off Highway 26 on the way to Government Camp. You follow Highway 26 eastbound toward Government Camp, but hang a left here onto a road that's signed as both "Kiwanis Camp Road" and "Road 39". Then you stay on that road for 2.2 miles, past the Kiwanis camp to the trailhead. The road crosses a bridge and looks like it's going to continue past here, but it really doesn't, and it hasn't in decades, and we'll get to why in a bit. From here, a short, easy, and surprisingly flat hike (trail #795C) takes you to the falls, strolling along next to the burbling Little Zigzag River the whole way. It's not the highest waterfall you'll ever see, or the most challenging trail you'll ever tackle, but it's great. At least I thought it was great. Maybe it was the perfect weather, or the season, or the late afternoon light, or the stars and planets lining up in exactly the right way, or who knows. I didn't take any selfies on the way and mercifully have no evidence of this, but it's possible that I had a goofy grin on my face the whole time, thus looking like a complete idiot, and belated apologies if you had to witness that.

The history bit I mentioned is that this old bumpy road is a piece of the original 1925 Mt. Hood Loop Highway, the predecessor of the modern Highway 26 you took to get here, and back in those days Little Zigzag Falls was one of the new highway's big scenic attractions. The old road was modeled on the recent Columbia River Highway and did not assume you were in any great hurry to get where you were going -- or that your car was capable of tackling steep slopes even if you were in a hurry -- so it wandered around the landscape connecting various scenic and historical highlights. After the bridge here, the old highway doubled back and headed uphill to Laurel Hill, where it's abruptly cut in two by the present-day road, and you can't really see where or how the old route passed through because of how thoroughly ODOT reshaped the land with dynamite. To get to the other side, you have a few options. First, if you have superpowers you can jump across or teleport or punch cars out of the way or whatever. Second, if you're a good sprinter and also an idiot, you could try that and see how it goes. Otherwise, the third option is to backtrack to 26, get on heading east, and then pull off at the tiny parking area for the Laurel Hill historical marker. From there, a short trail takes you uphill to the next fragment of 1925 highway and you can resume exploring for a bit. The main attraction along this stretch is a slope of bare rock where the old highway crosses its predecessor, the 1840s Barlow Road. That road was an especially treacherous stretch of the Oregon Trail, and its operators charged, or tried to charge, ruinous tolls for the privilege of using it. The crossing is right at a point where covered wagons were slowly eased down a near-vertical slope with ropes and pulleys. This might have been yet another way of dying in the old Oregon Trail video game, but I'm not sure I ever got to this point in the game. Usually I chose the water route to end the game instead, and generally ended up drowning at The Dalles, or at Cascade Locks if I was having an especially lucky game. Anyway, past the the Barlow Road bit the old abandoned highway continues uphill in a gentle S curve for a while, before it's cut by Highway 26 again. Somewhere along that segment you can find Yocum Falls, another former highlight of the old road, which is now so obscure there isn't even a trail to it anymore.

Which brings us to the historical timeline part of this post, which (as usual) is a bunch of items from the local library's newspaper database. You'll need a Multnomah County library card if you want the links below to work, but (as usual) I tried to summarize the items so everybody else gets a bit of history too.

• A June 1913 account in the Oregon Journal of trying and failing to drive to Government Camp because of excessive snow on the road, at a time when it was 85 degrees back in Portland. The article notes that the normally placid Little Zigzag was close bursting its banks due to melting floodwaters. An adjacent, unrelated article noted that the upcoming Rose Festival would feature a motorcycle parade for the very first time that year.
• Around this time, Portland businessman Henry Wemme bought the old, privately-owned Barlow Road from its previous owners and donated it to the state for free public use. I gather the old road was more of a disused series of wagon ruts than a proper road at this point, and the 1925 road was not really built on top of it, for the most part, so buying it out was probably more to get its owners out of the way early on, before they could really gouge the state for a larger payoff. You might know the name "Wemme" for the sorta-town further west on 26, between Brightwood and Welches, part of the long stretch of highway sprawl that occasionally tries to rebrand as "Mt. Hood Village". Wemme was also the first person in Oregon to own an automobile, a steam-powered 1899 Stanley Locomobile. Wemme died in 1914, and his will left nearly $500k to found "a maternity home or laying-in hospital for unfortunate and wayward girls in the city of Portland, Multnomah County and State of Oregon.", which eventually became the Salvation Army's White Shield Center. This was located in an oddly remote corner of Portland's Forest Park, and was only connected to the outside world by the peculiar Alexandra Avenue Bridge, which is how I know about all this.
  
  The news article mentions that local businessman George W. Joseph was also involved in the Barlow Road deal; Joseph is best known today as the namesake (and donor) of a state park in the Gorge containing Upper Latourell Falls. As the story goes, Joseph actually had a house or cabin on that property at one point, and an early version of today's Latourell Falls trail started out as part of his daily commute, from home to the Latourell train station.
• Oregon Journal December 1920 article about surveyors doing their thing in this part of the forest primeval. Most is about the team looking for good homesites for summer cabins, which would somehow play into the routing of the upcoming Mt. Hood Loop Highway. There's a mention of the river & falls as an attraction along the way to Government Camp, which was bound to help move a lot of real estate. This survey work probably led to a lot of the now-famous and very expensive Steiner Cabins that were built around the wider Mt. Hood region.
• Oregonian bit on the same survey. Mentions what miiiight be today's Pioneer Bridle Trail, which began as an alternative to the block and tackle nonsense down Laurel Hill. This route was built along a ridgeline for better visibility in case of Indian attack, and was later abandoned after that risk diminished due to war and disease.
• December 1928: Exploring the road to Mt. Hood and winter sports via 1928 Oakland Sedan, with an extended stop at Laurel Hill to visit this half-forgotten historic place while they were in the area. The article asserts that "Zigzag" refers to the switchbacks the Barlow Road was eventually retrofitted with, after the first few years of winches and pulleys and price-gouging fees to use them. And that sounds plausible, I guess. The "Little" part is because this is a tributary of the somewhat larger Zigzag River nearby, which flows into the Sandy River a few miles west of here, and the Sandy joins the Columbia at Troutdale, and so forth. I haven't visited any of these, but the NW Waterfall Survey says the [Big] Zigzag River is home to at least three waterfalls: [Upper] Zigzag Falls, way up above the treeline and the PCT on Mt. Hood, and a Middle and Lower falls downstream from there, and my usual LIDAR-based guessing technique says they're about 125', 110', and 60' high, respectively.
• July 1929 public notice about an upcoming Mazamas work party to build a connector between the Little Zigzag Trail and the Hidden Lake Trail. The latter starts just down the road, goes to Hidden Lake, and continues uphill from there, eventually connecting to the Pacific Crest Trail as it circumnavigates Mt. Hood. For variety, the other trail off the same road (the Paradise Park Trail) also connects to the PCT and even continues uphill from there for a while. The official Forest Service page for the present-day Hidden Lake Trail admits the lake is really more of a pond, but "is still a pleasant destination". Meanwhile the Forest Service Interactive Visitor Map does not show a connector trail like the article describes, so either they never finished it, or it was abandoned at some point later on.
• September 1950, Little Zigzag Canyon was mentioned briefly in an article about the multiday loop hike around Mt. Hood, via the Timberline and Skyline Trails. The Skyline Trail was the immediate predecessor to today's Pacific Crest Trail, and the PCT/Timberline loop is still a very popular hike, following more or less the same route.
• A section of highway through here, either the old one or the new one, I'm not sure which, was officially dubbed the "E. Henry Wemme Forest Corridor" in 1955. I have never seen that name used to describe this area, and have never seen it on any maps or road signs, so maybe everyone just sort of forgot.
• Typical mentions of the river and its canyon over the years involve lost climbers and hikers; this and the 'big' Zigzag River in the next canyon clockwise from here seem to be where a lot of lost people have ended up, either by hiking straight downhill and hoping to bump into civilization, or, well, just tumbling into one of those river canyons along the way. A June 1981 article on the subject interviews several exasperated forest rangers and search-and-rescue experts, who rattle off long lists of dumb ways people have gotten hurt on the mountain over the years. Like not knowing how to use their climbing tools, or not trusting what their compass is trying to tell them. The article relates this to 1981 pop culture by comparing the large area west/clockwise from Timberline Lodge the "Mt. Hood triangle", by analogy with the Bermuda Triangle.
• One oddball search result was from August 1987, and the term "little zigzag" described the typical antenna shape of that amazing new modern marvel, the cellular telephone. The phones had launched three years earlier and there were now an estimated 884,000 cellular phone subscribers nationwide, including around 100,000 in just the LA metro area alone. A spokesman for the local cell company hastened to add that the devices were not just for rich and famous celebrities anymore, and they were now becoming popular among busy executives and even "unglamorous" small business owners. Which is not really relevant to our main subject, but it was kind of cute, and most of the photos in this post were taken with a distant descendant of 1987's chonky car phones.

Mossy Falls

The next obscure Gorge waterfall we're visiting actually gets a lot of foot traffic, but most people walk right by and ignore it. It's on the Return Trail (#442), the one-mile-ish path that connects the Multnomah Falls parking lot to the Wahkeena Falls parking lot, just so people doing various loop hikes can get back to their cars without walking down the road and getting run over. In general it has got to be the easiest and least interesting trail in the entire Gorge, and it has either zero scenic highlights or one, depending on what you think of place we're visiting now. The problem here is that the waterfall is fairly seasonal: It flows strongly in the winter and into early spring, when almost nobody is here to see it, but it shrinks down to a wall of cool drippy moss during high tourist season. I have never seen it dry up entirely, though I can't claim this never happens. It's maybe not the most dramatic, stupendous sight in the Gorge, and a lot of people on the Return Trail are tired and hungry and just want to get to their cars and go home at this point in the hike, so the big wall-o-moss doesn't get a lot of attention, except from a few people who like to use it as a nice cold trailside shower. But it's kind of cool in its own way, if you have time to slow down and look at it for a few minutes.

The name "Mossy Falls" seems to have originated with a 2016 entomology paper: "Surveys to Determine the Status and Distribution of Three Columbia River Gorge Endemic Caddisfly and Stonefly Species: Farula constricta, Neothremma andersoni, and Nanonemoura wahkeena". The waterfall was one of several locations around the western Gorge that the researchers focused on, and the paper needed to refer to the falls enough that they went ahead and gave it a name. As the people who have most likely paid the most attention to it of anyone in history, it seems only fair to go with the name they came up with.

The study found that Mossy Falls is home to a population of Farula constricta, a rare species of caddisfly with a rather constricted range, hence the name. It lives here, plus Mist and Wahkeena Falls to the west, and then at Nesika and Waespe Falls, and in Oneonta Gorge, and also at Eagle Creek. That actually makes it the most widely distributed of the three species they were studying, but it's still only found within a 12 mile stretch of the Gorge, at lower elevations, and only at the base of waterfalls, and nowhere else in the known universe. Here's how the authors describe it:

Farula constricta (OR-SEN) is a small, dark brown caddisfly reaching lengths of 5 mm (Wiggins & Wisseman 1992). Larvae of this species make extremely slender, smooth cases out of tiny sand grains; they can be mistaken for conifer needles (Wiggins 1996, Figure 2). Adults have been found at lower elevations in the Gorge in April and May, and the flight season may extend from March through June (Wisseman 2015; see Appendix II). The preferred habitat for F. constricta caddisflies is small, cool perennial streams at waterfalls and talus slopes below waterfalls. This is the most widely distributed of the three target species and had been found in several different basins, ranging from Mist Falls near Wahkeena Creek in the west to Eagle Creek in the east (Figure 1). It has a global status of G1, a national status of N1, and a state status of S1 in Oregon (NatureServe 2015, ORBIC 2013).

The other two species in the title are only found in the Wahkeena Creek watershed and apparently nowhere else. Or at least they were there before the 2017 forest fire. If anyone has gone back to check in on these little beasties since 2017, I haven't seen any publications about it.

Also, before I get anyone's hopes up about this place being a cavalcade of cute charismatic critters, I did visit a couple of times during what I think was peak caddisfly season, and saw lots of small bugs flitting around at top speed but couldn't get a good look at one, and frankly I have no idea what I was looking at. Most likely the only way to get a good look at one would be if it was deceased, and I'm certainly not going to do that just to satisfy a bit of personal curiosity.

Elsewhere in the animal kingdom, the creek might also be home to the somewhat rare Cascade torrent salamander, which reportedly lives in Wahkeena Creek and "an unnamed creek 500m east of Wahkeena Falls". Though I have never seen any salamanders here, though I suppose if they held really still they might avoid being seen. And somewhere around the Wahkeena Creek watershed there's a spring that's home to Stygobromus wahkeenensis, the Wahkeena Creek Amphipod, a tiny crustacean that (like those two caddisfly species) just lives in that one spring and nowhere else. Wahkeena Creek is also the sole home of Parasimulium crosskeyi (a species of primitive black fly, found in 1977) and Stylodrilus wahkeenensis (a small freshwater aquatic worm, discovered in 1996). Meanwhile Multnomah Creek, just down the trail and right in the heart of tourist central, is home to Acneus oregonensis, a species of water-penny beetle that was discovered there in 1951 and has apparently never been found anywhere else. I don't know of anything that's only been seen here at Mossy Falls, but it's possible biologists just don't look for things here quite as often as they look in the more well-known places.

If you think you may have heard of Mossy Falls before while poking around out on the general interwebs, you might be thinking of Mossy Grotto Falls, which is on Ruckel Creek (the next creek east of Eagle Creek), and is the next waterfall upstream from (Lower) Ruckel Creek Falls (which we visited back in 2011). Mossy Grotto was Instagram's favorite off-trail "secret" waterfall for a while back in 2015, right around when "extreme HDR" was the hot trendy aesthetic people couldn't get enough of. So I avoided the place at first and then forgot all about it, successfully avoiding Instagram fame and fortune as a result, and going there now to do yoga poses is probably not the license to print money that it once was. I dunno, if my IG feed is any indication, the current Algorithm just wants to show me a bunch of low quality AI-generated car crash videos for some reason.

There aren't any official numbers on how tall this waterfall is, but that's something we can figure out for ourselves, thanks to the state LIDAR map and the magic of grade school-level subtraction. Looking at it here on LIDAR indicates the drop here comes to around 145 feet, plus there's an additional upper tier you can't see from the Return Trail that adds another 150 feet, and counting the two tiers together means Mossy Falls is actually around 50 feet taller than Wahkeena Falls next door. That seems kind of excessive, but I'm just relaying what the map seems to be telling me. And it does make a degree of sense: If the two formed at the same time, and they flow over essentially the same kinds of rocks, and in general all other factors are held equal, the one that flows less will also erode less, and it'll eventually end up as the taller of the two.

The lack of a common well-known name makes it hard to search for other info about the place, and I only have a few scant things. There are blog posts at Orangeinall, Loomis Adventures, and Hiking Northwest and one 2006 OregonHikers thread. The embedded photo in that thread doesn't appear due to an http vs https thing, but a direct link to the photo seems to work ok.

The only other name I've ever encountered for this place is "Benson Ice", which is what the local ice climbing community calls it when it freezes, probably because the creek flows into Benson Lake, the centerpiece of Benson State Park. Multnomah Falls flows into the same lake after passing under Benson Bridge, and there's already a Camp Benson Falls out near Hood River, named after a nearby Depression-era CCC camp, and an obscure Benson Falls on a tributary of Eagle Creek that tumbles down off the Benson Plateau. And all of these things are, in turn, named after either Simon Benson, a local timber baron/philanthropist (who bought up the land around Multnomah and Wahkeena falls and donated it to the City of Portland), or his son Amos, who continued on with the family philanthropy-ing. Portland also has a bunch of drinking fountains, a high school, a hotel, and a historic house named "Benson", and likely other stuff I'm not aware of, and that's already more than enough public recognition for any one person no matter what they've accomplished, and there was no freaking way I was going to use the B-word for the falls here. So thanks, entomologists!

Scotts Mills Falls

Next up we're checking out Scotts Mills Falls, in the small city of Scotts Mills, pop. 419 (2020), located about halfway between Molalla and Silverton and a couple of miles east of Highway 213, the most direct line between the two, if that makes any sense. It's also about five miles (as the crow flies) west of Wilhoit Springs, a once-famous place we visited in a recent post, and six from the epicenter of the 1993 Scotts Mills earthquake. Which is one and only thing the town is semi-famous for here in faraway Portland.

The town's little downtown area is bordered to the east by Butte Creek, a large tributary of the Pudding River (no, really, that's what it's called), which meanders around and eventually joins the Willamette somewhere around Canby. The waterfall is right in town... ok, looking closely at Google Maps it looks like the city limit kind of zigzags through the falls, running right along the brink of the falls for a bit and swerving to avoid most of the decrepit low dam just upstream of it, as well as the Marion County park centered on the falls and the old mill pond. Maybe this is to dodge liability for various things, like the occasional drownings here (like one in 2021 a few weeks before I took these photos), or in case the dam collapses before the proposed dam removal finally happens. (As of February 2025 the removal is on hold due to handwringing at the county level.)

I should pause here briefly to note that there's also a Scotts Mills City Park, a few blocks further downstream along the creek, and visitors seem to endlessly confuse the two. A recent one-star Google review complained about the park being overwhelmed with drugs and crime and drinking and illegal overnight camping, which quickly got an indignant reply from an anonymous city staffer, who said the reviewer must be thinking of the nearby county park, which is not the city's problem, and the reviewer should contact the Marion County sheriff's office in case of trouble way out there (a few blocks away).

And if you're more interested in visiting waterfalls than city parks, there are a couple of others further up Butte Creek, namely Upper and Lower Butte Creek Falls. And this the part where I awkwardly point out that I've been there and have photos of both waterfalls and I have no frickin' idea when I might finish the draft posts about them.

If you go browsing around the waterfall maps attached to those pages, you might notice there's one called Bear Creek Falls in the general vicinity. I haven't been to that one, but I gather it's a bit underwhelming, and (more importantly) it has one fairly ominous-sounding one-star Google review: "Stay away would rather not have new people around". I am probably not alone in noticing that people in deep rural parts of the state seem to be a lot more hostile since the pandemic. I could be wrong here, but as I understand it, city folks and other outsiders were never exactly welcome out in the woods, but at least they were a good traditional source of meat for your family, and no pesky bag limit, either. But then COVID came along, and now the odds are pretty good you might chow down on some vaccinated folks this way and get a belly full of those gosh-dang confernal 5G nanobots for your trouble. It's not hard to see why the locals would be feeling a bit ornery after dealing with all that.

Anyway... the dam is obviously very old, but nobody seems to agree on its exact age. The county Soil & Water Conservation District says it was built by PGE for hydropower in 1917 and then abandoned in 1954 after it was damaged by a flood and judged not worth fixing. A 2019 article about the dam at OurTown Community News (a local news site) says it was built between 1860 and 1870. A 2020 Salem Statesman-Journal article says it's from the 1850s, and an article at SHINE on Salem (a history site about Marion County) notes that a mill was built here in 1846, and the dam was already in place at that point.

So who knows, really. Maybe the dam has always been there. Maybe Bigfoot built it for hydropower, countless millennia ago, back before the Ice Age floods wiped away all other traces of their highly advanced society. Or maybe it's much older than that, even, and it was built by the sentient dinosaurs from that one Voyager episode, but way back in their medieval days, long before they escaped the coming asteroid and headed off to wander the galaxy. And what if the dam was built to imprison some kind of ancient evil deep beneath the mill pond for the last 65 million years, and demolishing the dam would unleash a new plague of zombo-raptors against our unprepared world. And what if the present-day locals know all about this somehow, maybe through some kind of hidden device that still transmits occasional warning dreams of that ancient lost age. Although of course you can't say that in front of the county commissioners, or the state salmon regulators, or any of the other outsiders, people who would just laugh at you, people who have never dozed off after a picnic near the dam on a lazy afternoon and then had The Dream. I mean, I'm just speculating here, but it would certainly explain all the local opposition to removing the dam.

Naturally the city's history page mentions none of that but does relate a curious detail about the town's early days. Starting in 1888, the Oregon Land Development Co. promoted the town as a Quaker-friendly town and persuaded people to move there on that basis, and promised various modern urban amenities that never panned out. The company eventually went under in 1902, bringing financial ruin to a lot of residents. Maybe I'm just a cynic in assuming it was a scam the entire time. Fourteen years is an exceptionally long time to wait for a log con to pan out. On the other hand, if you set out planning to swindle an entire town out of their life savings, it's always safer to swindle a bunch of pacifists.

More history and related news from across the greater Scotts Mills metro area:

• The very first mention of the town in the Oregonian was back in 1877, in connection with a homicide case. In which a witness testified that he had never even heard of Scott's Mills.
  
• On a brighter note, here's a March 1893 blurb on the then-flourishing Quaker colony. We're told they were trying their hand at growing grapes. They were about a century ahead of their time, I guess.
  
• The SHINE page up above mentions that the town's boom times in the early 20th century were due to three pillars of the economy: The mills, obviously, along with prune growing, and "mining speculation". And yes, as a matter of fact I do have a bunch of old news links about what that means, exactly:
  
• July 1907, the Journal breathlessly reported that coal had been discovered somewhere near Scotts Mills, it was of the very finest quality, and the recently-formed Diamond Coal Company would have it on the Portland market soon, undercutting the other available options.
  
• the next month, news came that a branch rail line was coming soon, and this line would haul Scotts Mills coal to market and bring general commerce and progress and whatnot to town, though the actual mining would have to wait for a bit until they could find enough skilled miners, apparently.
  
• in the middle of coal fever, August 1908 saw a failed scam attempt that ended up in court. Seems that one D.C. Forbes tried to interest a couple of local businessmen in his amazing new gold-finding widget, after salting the mine in question with just enough gold to make it demo well. After a couple of days employing the device at the mine, Forbes feigned illness and left. Normally this is the point where a professional swindler would skip town with his jackpot, grow a luxurious handlebar mustache (or shave it off if he currently sports one), and then resurface in Colorado as "A.G. Williamson", inventor of a miracle gold-finding gadget. But Forbes screwed it up: The local marks were at least a little skeptical and only agreed to lease the device for 30 days to test it out properly, saying they'd buy it if they were satisfied at that point. (Note to scammers: Never agree to this, especially if your device doesn't work.) Which meant Forbes had to stick around another 30 days without their money, and somehow string the marks along and keep them thinking the device was working the whole time. Seeding the mine with a month's gold production would've been prohibitively expensive, so I'm not sure how he intended to pull this off. In any event, the unsatisfied customers declined to buy the gizmo. (Note to scammers: This would have been another good point to slink away emptyhanded and try again elsewhere, if you haven't already.) Ah, but Forbes was a very persistent man, and decided to sue his escaped prey, asking the court to make them pay up. He also accused the pair of seeding the mine themselves in order to sell it or attract unwary investors, although he had no actual evidence they had tried doing so.
• Court case had been filed a few days earlier. An article on August 26th covers the claims of the Hydraulic Gravity Separator Co. against the pair

• A longer article dated August 28th summarizing (and snarking about) the case:

  Peculiarly enough the public’s only interest in this mining venture is one of morbid curiosity. The public has no equity in the company’s lands or bonanzas. It is one of the very few cases on record where everybody gets hurt except the dear old public.
  
  ...
  
  Stripping these papers of their superfluous verbiage, the public is able to get an excellent idea of the modus operandi in mining bonanzas of a certain class.

  Apparently Mr. Swift (one of the two local investors) was very eager to start touting mining stock, even though the very existence of any actual gold here was currently being argued in court. Which is another hint that their operation was not exactly above board either.

• A January 1909 item recounts the competing claims in the case.
• A ruling came the next day, essentially tossing everyone out of the courtroom emptyhanded. First, no persuasive evidence had been introduced that anyone had seeded the mine, so the mine's proprietors couldn't collect on that count. And as for the 30 day try-before-u-buy arrangement, Forbes and his firm had never actually gotten this in writing.
• Two years later in June 1909, the Oregonian finally caught wind of the still-imminent coal mine, and reported breathlessly about it. That's the last we hear of the coal scheme in the paper.
• A related gold-mining case was still ongoing in December 1911, however. This time one of the three partners in the Hydraulic Gravity Separator Co. was suing the other two. The judge became fed up with all parties to the dispute and dismissed the case, declaring "he was not sitting in equity for the purpose of dividing spoils among thieves". He then declared that one of the defendants in this civil case really ought to be indicted for forgery and imprisoned, and personally walked over to the DA's office to persuade him to do so. Though I couldn't find any news on how that followup case had gone.
• However there were a few appearances of a Portland-based Diamond Coal Co. in the news in the 1920s and 1930s, but it's not clear whether it was the same company. If so, they got a new delivery truck in 1920, and experienced several failed burglaries starting in 1929.
• A 1948 article related the story of Ted Mandrones, who had been quietly mining coal in the Wilhoit Springs area as a virtual one-man operation for much of the last decade, trying to convince skeptics and find investors for his operation.
• Er, meanwhile, the fish ladder here dates back all the way to 1924, or at least that was the date on the first one, which may or may not be the current one.
• A 1932 Journal article notes Scotts Mills was on the road to Moss Lake, where (we're told) aquatic plants grew in such a thick, dense layer that you could walk on it, and reportedly it could even sustain the weight of an adult bear. This layer was supported in part by swamp gas, such that a lit match would burn briefly like you were lighting a gas stove. Which seems like an unwise thing to do while standing on this aquatic plant layer, unless maybe a bear is chasing you. Google has a location for this natural wonder here, but the only visible lake on the map is here, about a mile to the SE of where Google thinks it is. It seems to fit the description -- steep sides around the lake, floating biomass seemingly on the surface, in the upper Butte Creek watershed, with a nearby road named "Moss Lane" just off Crooked Finger Road. Looks like it's had a few nearby clearcuts in recent decades, and the lake is only maybe 1/4 covered now, versus nearly entirely so in 1932.
• 1967, Clackamas County was given three acres of land constituting 1000' of frontage along Butte Creek, about four miles upstream from Scotts Mills, to be known as the "Fryberger Wayside". Which I don't see any record of on the interwebs, but that wouldn't be the first chunk of Clackamas-owned parkland they've forgotten or lost track of. Can think of a couple along the Sandy River off the top of my head that don't appear on their official list.
• 1988 story, the park was closed temporarily by the county sheriff due to fights between hispanic and anglo residents. The paper interviewed several people with Anglo names relating a variety of lurid incidents they had either seen or heard local rumors about, like people going to the park to wash laundry in the creek. In nearby Silverton the city council had recently voted to deport the town's non-citizen hispanic population, estimated at several hundred people, only to find out there was currently a federal moratorium in place on deporting agricultural workers.
• 2004 Foster Church column, just sort of wandering around Molalla and surrounding towns in the dead of winter, chatting up the locals. He did stop in Scotts Mills for a bit but look at the falls for a bit.