Visitors to Portland are generally subjected to a pile of trivia that's meant to show how weird and quirky we are. World's smallest city park, various things that were filmed here, donuts, Shanghai tunnels, quirky food carts. They're told to check out all the breweries, giggle about all the strip clubs, and so forth. The trivia will have a whole section on Local Nature Facts, so you'll hear about the coast and the gorge, and maybe something about Forest Park being the world's largest city park (which is not actually true), and sooner or later the list gets around to volcanoes.
This, admittedly, is not something you'll encounter in most major US cities. But we've been promoting it all wrong for the last century or so. The original claim was that Mt. Tabor was the only volcano within city limits anywhere in the world. Or at least anywhere in the US. Or, at minimum, in the US excluding Alaska and Hawaii. And obviously we're only talking about major cities here, and stipulating that little fun-sized lava domes like Mt. Tabor count as individual volcanoes (and volcanic vents in the West Hills don't). And then City Hall went and moved city limits outward, which brought a few more lava domes into the city, although they obviously don't count due to being east of I-205, or (in the case of Rocky Butte) just barely west of it, and still east of 82nd Avenue. Meanwhile, Gresham and Vancouver and even Lake Oswego expanded to include a few of their own, but any geologist will tell you that suburban volcanoes absolutely do not count, period. And technically most of the Northwest east of the Cascades sits on top of a deep layer of Columbia River flood basalts, but that doesn't count, because reasons, and the hair-splitting just goes on and on. Frankly this all seems like overkill, since the point of all of this is to impress random tourists and conventioneers from the Great State of Corn Rectangle, who have never seen a hill of any kind before.
Another approach is to forget about Mt. Tabor and run with Mt. St. Helens, which is obviously not within city limits but is at least visible from here. The winning move here is to point out the mountain and reassure your audience -- as nonchalantly as you possibly can -- that there's no need to worry, it hasn't erupted at all since way back in 2008, and that one was no big deal, and besides, we're upwind of the mountain and almost never get volcanic ash falling from the sky. This is their cue to look at each other and chuckle nervously, which is the effect you're going for. This will be great fun for a while, but there are a couple of potential downsides. First, your visitors from Corn Rectangle will see this as an opening to tell you about their many white-knuckle tornado encounters. Which is only fair, frankly. Second, it's 2025 now, and sooner or later an impertinent teen in your audience will agree that 2008 was a long, long time ago -- before they were born, in fact -- and so long ago that the mountain is probably extinct by now. And this will not only make you feel old, it might be enough to troll the volcano into erupting again.
And let's be honest here, neither Mt. Tabor or Mt. St. Helens is exactly on brand for us these days. Mt. Tabor is in a ritzy, unaffordable neighborhood and none of its superlatives are actually true, and St. Helens is in a whole other state -- a state with sales tax -- and biking to the top is probably a nightmare. They also have their own Wikipedia articles, and are featured prominently in coffee table books about the region, and just in general are way too mainstream, and thus desperately, terminally uncool.
So with all of that as an intro, it's time to meet Highland Butte, the subject of this post and an obscure local volcano you probably haven't heard of. It's not the tallest volcano in the Boring Lava Field -- Larch Mountain out in the Gorge wins that one by a wide margin -- and I've seen conflicting things on whether it's the southernmost, but it may be the oldest and widest of all of them. A 2009 paper on the Boring Lava Field notes that Highland Butte rocks have been dated to around 2.4-2.6 million years, making it the oldest, or among the oldest of the Boring volcanoes. A lot of other sources say it's around 3 million years old, but I don't know if that's from a different measurement or just someone rounding up to the nearest million. For comparison, Mount Hood is estimated to be no more than 1.3 million years old, Mount Tabor is a bit over 200,000, and Beacon Rock -- the youngest of the bunch -- is only around 57,000 years old.
The summit is a sort of Mt. Tabor-sized dome in a wider rural area known as "Upper Highland", but by the time you see that hill you've already been driving or riding on the volcano for several miles. It's a roughly circular area about 7 miles in diameter centered on the summit and gently sloping away from there, and all streams for miles around drain away from that point. Then there's an extension to the north all the way to Oregon City and the Willamette. I don't know if that's as far as the lava got, or that's where the river cut a path thru later, but it explains the present-day cliffs along the river, and probably the rocks that form Willamette Falls too. I had a vague recollection that I'd read something to the effect that the large rounded boulders here at the main entrance to the Clackamas Community College campus were thought to be volcanic bombs thrown to the campus from the summit, nine miles to the south. I finally located the article where I got that idea from, an April 1986 column about the boulders by the paper's geology columnist. He specifically ruled out the volcanic bomb theory on the grounds that the boulders were too big, and they lacked the distinctive markings rocks take on when they form as blobs of lava hurtling through the air. Instead, he explains, this is just a weathering pattern typical of Boring lava rocks when exposed to the elements, and they just sort of become spherical over time as their exteriors degrade into iron-rich red dirt. Apparently Columbia flood basalts (the other common type of basalt you'll see around here) are denser and darker and they just don't come apart like this.
The summit peak doesn't look all that impressive, but it's still the highest point for miles around, which is why you can visit the place now. First, nobody claimed it as farmland back in pioneer days, or at least nobody successfully claimed it, and the ill-fated Oregon & California Railroad seems to have had no better luck finding a buyer for it, so it was still federal land in the early 20th Century, at which point someone realized it would be a great place for a forest fire lookout.
So here's a 1927 article on the summit's brand new modern Forest Service fire lookout tower. The article explains that while this is the first tower, the summit had been a GLO fire lookout for years before that, in the form of a "peg tree". What you would do is pick out a tall tree near the summit, and hammer wooden pegs into the tree trunk in a spiral pattern, forming a sort of primitive spiral staircase up the tree, like something Ewoks would have in Return of the Jedi. In this case, the stairway used 114 pegs and circled the tree 5 times, taking the fire observer to a point in the treetops, 142' off the ground. Once you were up there, you would just sort of hang out in the top of the tree with a pair of binoculars looking for forest fires and swaying with the breeze. This doesn't sound like a very effective way to keep an eye on the horizon with binoculars, and a great way to get motion sick, but may have been all the GLO could afford. The forest service built a tower, plus a house at the base of the tower for the rest of the lookout crew when they were off shift, plus the road to the summit, and they were even considering putting in a telephone at the base so would-be visitors could call uphill and check if anyone was on the way downhill before trying to drive up.
The article included a photo of the peg tree, so it seems to have been spared when the summit was logged, sometime between 1911 and 1927. I was (and am) kind of curious whether that tree still exists (though I'm pretty sure the pegs either wouldn't be there anymore or wouldn't be climbable). I didn't see any one particular tree that was much bigger than the others, and didn't see one with a spiral of wooden pegs sticking out of it, so it's anybody's guess.
If you want to visit now, the road to the top is gated and locked, but it's simple to park so you aren't blocking the gate and then walk the rest of the way. Or you could come here by bike and ride to the top, though the fresh gravel along the road seemed to be of the especially sharp and tire-puncturey variety. Either way, the road is a bit steep at times, but it's not very long and you only go up a couple of hundred vertical feet from this point. One sort of unfortunate thing is that there isn't much of a view from the top at present due to all the trees in the way. I say "at present" because the land here is designated as part of the O&C Lands, and it's clearly been logged before and most likely will be again, and there will be more of a view from here once they get around to that. So I guess there's that to look forward to.
Over the years the lookout tower existed, Highland Butte was occasionally in the news. Not for erupting or anything earth-shaking like that, but minor news items came up every few years:
- The summit was visited by a Trails Club hike in 1934, so there was presumably still a view at that point.
- There was a small forest fire nearby in 1951. The article doesn't say whether the fire lookout helped or not.
- A field trip by the Geological Society of the Oregon Country visited in 1957
- The summit gained a second tower for a while starting in 1960, a microwave communication tower for an emergency system bypassing Portland in case the city was destroyed in World War III. The new tower would talk to another antenna to the south near Silverton, and one near Mt. Livingston to the north, somewhere out in the back of beyond due north of Camas.
- A full-page photo of this tower with Mt. Hood in the background appeared in AT&T's 1962 corporate annual report, I guess as one of their more photogenic recent technological advancements, if you can avoid thinking about why it was built. Not quite photogenic enough to make the cover of the report, which features a phone operator wearing a headset and smiling while she pages through an enormous phone book.
- The fire tower lasted until the 1962 Columbus Day Storm flattened it, and they never built a replacement, and after that the place languished in even deeper obscurity than before. Then sometime around 2019-2020 the summit got a new tower, this time a shiny new Clackamas County EMS radio tower, built to close some coverage gaps in this hilly, rural area.
- You might have noticed that the BLM got the land back from the Forest Service at some point. I don't know any more details about it than that, but I can see that happening if it wasn't going to be used for a lookout tower anymore. There isn't any other Forest Service land nearby, while there's an actual BLM facility with actual people a few miles SE of here, namely the agency's Walter H. Horning Tree Seed Orchard. The sign at the front gate includes sort of a mission statement, which is readable on Street View: "To produce seed for growing trees of superior quality which will best use the productive capacity of forest lands.", and a few of its Google reviews indicate it also hosts trail rides by local equestrian clubs and even the occasional Civil War reenactment (!). In any event, it was probably just more practical for them to send somebody around to keep an eye on the place now and then instead of having the Forest Service do it.
