Crown Point Viaduct

Ok, we're back in the Gorge again, looking at yet another bit of historical 1910s engineering from the old Columbia River Highway. Virtually every new visitor to the Gorge stops at the Vista House to have a look around, maybe use the restroom and have a peek at the gift shop, before continuing down the road as it winds around Crown Point and then switchbacks down the hill to Latourell Falls and points east. We're here having a look at that initial bit of road, the part below the Vista House with the sidewalk and streetlights on the outside of the curve. And the reason we're doing that is because the sidewalk (and probably part of road) aren't built directly on solid rock, but on a concrete viaduct structure similar to the ones on either side of Multnomah Falls, so it gets categorized as another historic Gorge bridge, just a curving one along the edge of a high cliff that doesn't cross over water. There aren't a lot of clues to this when you're actually walking on it, but you can see it clearly in photos taken from the Portland Womens Forum viewpoint, or from nearer spots like the Bird's Nest overlook. So I've included a few photos from those places.

Anyway, when I say it gets categorized as a bridge, I mean that all the internet resources I usually consult for semi-interesting factoids about bridges have the same kind of info about the Crown Point Viaduct too. Obviously there's a Recreating the HCRH page for the viaduct, and it had a BridgeHunter page back in the day (now available via the Wayback Machine). Its entry in the old highway's National Register of History Places nomination calls it "Crown Point Viaduct, No. 4524", and describes it briefly:

This 560-foot spiral viaduct was constructed of reinforced concrete and runs for 225 degrees of a circle around Crown Point. It functions as a 7-foot-wide sidewalk and curb with a 4-foot-high parapet wall on the outside of a 24-foot roadway cut into the rock formation. A dry masonry retaining wall stabilizes the hillside above and below the viaduct and masonry parapet walls that ring Vista House (see under “Buildings”), the sandstone public comfort station completed on top of Crown Point in 1918.

The Historic American Engineering Record collection at the Library of Congress has a writeup about it, plus several black & white photos, including two photos from underneath the deck. I wanted to point those out in particular because I don't have any photos taken from down there, so go look at those if you really want to see close-ups of that area. I did sorta-consider the idea for a moment, way back when I was taking photos for various other Gorge bridge posts in 2014 or so, but realized I just didn't want to, and remembered that nobody is paying me to do any of this, so I skipped it.

But continuing with the usual sources, ODOT's 2013 historic bridge inventory, page 214 describes it briefly as "Twenty-eight 20-ft reinforced concrete slab spans as a half-viaduct surrounding Crown Point, a rock promontory overlooking the Gorge", while their guidebook Historic Highway Bridges of Oregon elaborates a bit:

The Crown Point Viaduct was the first structure started on the Multnomah County portion of the Columbia River Highway. Samuel C. Lancaster was the supervising engineer for both Multnomah County and the State Highway Department. Lancaster located the highway to encircle Crown Point, a promontory rising vertically 625 feet about the river. (Crown Point was designated a National Natural Landmark in August 1971.) The "half-viaduct" prevented unnecessary excavation or fill to establish a roadbed on the point. The structure is 560 feet long and consists of twenty-eight 20-foot reinforced concrete slab spans. Vista House, an observatory and rest stop dedicated to early Oregon pioneers, was completed on Crown Point in 1918.

Lancaster often gets credited for everything along the old highway, but like most of the regular bridges along the road, the viaduct was actually designed by the engineer K.P. Billner, who wrote about his Gorge bridges in the February 10, 1915 issue of Engineering and Contracting, Vol. XLIII No. 6, pp. 121-123. Most of the article is about the Latourell Creek Bridge, but he included a bit about the Crown Point Viaduct too:

At Crown Point there is an abrupt cliff rising to a height of about 700 ft. In rounding the turn above the river the road follows a curve of 110-ft. radius through an angle of 225º. A 7-ft. concrete sidewalk and railing crowns this cliff. Surmounting the 4-ft. solid railing there are electric lights, at 20-ft. intervals, which are visible from the transcontinental trains and from the river boats below. A high curb protects this walk from the traffic on the road.

The accompanying photo shows the top of Crown Point with the road like it is today, but with the original natural rock formation in the center instead of the Vista House, which would not be constructed for a few more years.

I didn't run across much in the way of historical anecdotes concerning the viaduct bit specifically, but I've got two, and you can draw whatever conclusions you want from them.

First an odd episode in December 1927 when Samuel Lancaster had a freakout over accumulated ice on the road during a winter storm, insisting that everything from the Crown Point viaduct through to Multnomah Falls was in imminent danger of collapsing if something wasn't done immediately to clear the ice off the road. A couple of days later county engineers inspected that stretch of the road and confirmed it was fine and in no danger of any kind of apocalypse. I can see Lancaster being a little overprotective of his "babies", but this is not how civil engineers usually react to potential dangers to something they had a hand in building.

Oh, and in March 17th 1942 the Crown Point viaduct -- along with the east and west Multnomah Falls viaducts -- was officially placed on a list of 934 new "prohibited zones", newly off-limits to anyone considered to be an an "alien enemy", meaning anyone of Japanese ancestry. The order also added Idaho, Montana, Utah, and Nevada to a list of "military areas"; Oregon, Washington, California and Arizona were already on that list as of a previous order two weeks earlier. This happened a month and change after FDR issued Executive Order 9066, and shortly before the government started shipping Japanese-American citizens off to internment camps. The linked Wikipedia article shows a deportation order for the Bay Area dated April 1st, less than two weeks after this. And it just so happens that I'm finishing this post on election night 2024, and things aren't looking great for the civilized world right now, and the prospect of the very same 1798 law that enabled internments being used again against immigrants seems to be right there on the horizon all of a sudden, and I was kind of hoping finishing this post would be a nice distraction from watching election news, and now it's actually not helping at all. Because history isn't just a selection of quaint anecdotes, and tends to be intertwined with the present in all sorts of unexpected ways, especially when you don't want it to and least expect it.

Cruiser Falls

Ok, time for another installment in our now-unseasonal tour of seasonal Columbia Gorge waterfalls. This time we're visiting one I tracked down along the old Columbia River Highway, about midway between Latourell Falls and Shepperds Dell, on a long stretch where the highway runs right along the base of a long row of bluffs averaging maybe 100' high, while the north/downslope side features a few farms and assorted houses. During the wet part of the year, every few dozen to hundred feet or so, a small seasonal creek tumbles over the bluff, forming a small waterfall; as far as I can tell nobody has ever bothered to make a list of these, or dream up names for any of them, or the creeks they're on. If any of you were following this weird little blog back in 2014 you might recall a post I did about one of the more prominent seasonal falls in this area -- albeit with photos I took in 2011, because some things never change around here. (Google Maps has recently started calling that particular one "Huerta Falls" for some unknown reason, which I guess is sort of an exception to the general absence of names.) It's not that the area is boring exactly, but for almost everyboy it's just a stretch of scenery you drive through on your way to one of the major visitor attractions, someplace that has an official National Scenic Area sign.

If you've been to this humble corner of the interwebs before, you might have guessed that the word 'almost' was the operative part of the last sentence, and you would be right again. While I was putting together last January's Palisade Falls post, I came to realize that a.) "ice climbing" is a real sport that exists, b.) when the Gorge freezes (which is increasingly rare, because climate), Palisade Falls is kind of a big deal in that community, and c.) in general, many of the, uh, hottest ice climbing spots are minor or seasonal waterfalls that largely get ignored when they aren't frozen. That sounded directly relevant to my interests, so I filed it away as something to investigate further during the next wet season. Then I spent the intervening months looking for places where I could get outside without meeting a single other human being or any of the microbial nasties they might be superspreading, and also without buying a massive 4WD vehicle and driving 200 miles past the back of beyond, and then being stuck with said vehicle the rest of the year too, fetching groceries and so forth at 4 miles per gallon while bystanders sneer and wonder what I'm compensating for. It occurred to me that tracking a few of these falls down in an unfrozen state would fit my requirements nicely, while also allowing me to once again write about an obscure thing nobody's ever heard of, and land a top search engine result for a thing that probably nobody will ever search for. The problem was that I didn't have a list of these very obscure spots, because obscure, nor did I have any idea where to find such a list if one existed.

I eventually came to realize that the canonical guide to local places that freeze in just the right way is a chapter in Tim Olson's Northwest Oregon Rock, one of a series of Northwest climbing guidebooks. The book's companion website has sort of an overview of the subject here, but most of the relevant info isn't available anywhere online, so I went ahead and bought the book. I'm not actually planning on dangling off any overhanging cliffs -- icy or otherwise -- by my fingertips anytime soon, unless the only alternatives are even worse. But the author did a great deal of that as part of researching the book, so sending a little business his way seemed only fair.

So, per the book's "Columbia Gorge Ice" chapter, the waterfall shown above doubles as a climbing route called "Cruiser" when it freezes. Which I gather is a common climbing term for something that's (relatively) straightforward and nontechnical that can be climbed quickly. Having searched high and low, this appears to be the only name anyone has ever given it. The point of all of this is that I needed a title for this post, so I figured the falls needed a nickname, so here's a new rule of thumb I dreamed up: If it needs a name and all it has is the nickname "Foo" from when it freezes, or dries up, or picked up a name from some other very niche reason, it can go by "Foo Falls". As in, the falls that become "Foo" when they freeze or dry up or whatever. So "Cruiser Falls" it is, I guess. At least it's better than "seasonal falls, columbia gorge", which is what I titled the 2014 post. Which was accurate, but as a general naming scheme it scaled up rather poorly.

Getting to Cruiser Falls is not complicated. The only place to park nearby is a mysteriously large parking lot on the westbound side of the highway, almost directly across from Huerta Falls (a.k.a. "Water Heater" as the ice climbing folks call it -- look for the rusty tank at the base) There are no signs explaining what this parking lot is for, or why you might want to park there. If you look closely a small unofficial sign calls it "Oasis", which is a name but not an explanation. It kind of looks like a trailhead parking lot, but without any trails that start there, official or otherwise. Per a page at Recreating the HCRH, it turns out that's not what it is at all, and it's actually restaurant parking for a long-departed restaurant; the page includes an old photo of the building, which went by a couple of names in its day including "The Dell" and "The White Elephant". At one point decades ago there were a lot of little roadside cafes like this along the old highway, but I gather they generally either went out of business after I-84 opened, or were purchased and torn down as eyesores, in an effort to make the old highway look more remote and natural. Which, I understand the motivation behind doing that, but it's also no fun to realize you need coffee and can't get any without driving west back to the Vista House or Corbett, or east all the way to Cascade Locks, or wait around and hope a parking space opens up at Multnomah Falls someday. So I don't think it would be the end of the world if they at least allowed a coffee stand or a couple of food trucks in a few spots here and there. A thing that will never happen, but I think we could really use here, would be a few German-style "mountain huts" out at the far ends of various long or difficult trails, so when you get to the top of Larch Mountain, or Mount Defiance, or Wahtum Lake at the far end of the Eagle Creek Trail, there's a large stein of an ice-cold pilsner and a platter of sausages and fondue and sauerkraut waiting for you, and maybe a nice spot for yodeling into the hills later if you're so inclined. (I mean, I'm not saying we absolutely have to copy the entire concept down to the menu, I'm just saying it's a time-tested model, and it wouldn't really be authentic without the sauerkraut.) But, er, I digress.

Anyway, I have never seen the Oasis lot anywhere close to full, seeing as there's officially nothing to do there, and nowhere obvious for you to go on foot from there. What you want to do is park there and walk west along the shoulder of the highway for a few hundred feet, maybe a tenth of a mile. If you pass any driveways, you've gone too far. On the south side of the road, look for a sort of east-facing ramp climbing up and away from the highway. It'll be overgrown with brush so you may not notice it immediately -- here's a Street View link that shows what it looked like in July 2019, in case you want to try finding it there first before trying it in real life. (I don't know whether it's even running right now in this hot, dry summer of 2021, though you can go a few Street View steps west and see the creek was running at the same time of year two years ago. If you missed the ramp the first time and are backtracking, there's a similar west-facing ramp for traffic coming the other direction. If you look at the area on the state LIDAR map here, you can see the two ramps join after a short distance and form what looks like an old, long-abandoned road or driveway. This track does a couple of tight switchbacks uphill and then fades out at a flat area that might be the foundation of a long-gone home or barn or other structure. I don't have any further info about what might have been here, and it's all a bit academic anyway since a.) the possible homesite and beginning of the west-facing ramp seem to be juuust over the state park boundary onto someone's private property, although this isn't marked by any signs that I noticed, and b.) there's a big patch of devil's club right in the middle of the west-facing ramp, almost as if it had been planted there intentionally. These two things may not be completely unrelated.

Anyway, after making your way up the east-facing driveway an obvious use path heads uphill toward the falls. So obviously someone besides us knows about this place, and visits often enough that the trail isn't eaten by the forest. The trail turns into a talus slope before long, but finding your way from there is not a big deal, as you ought to be able to hear or see the falls at that point. The route is kind of steep but short, maybe just a few hundred feet to the falls, but steep enough that your calves might remind you of this little mini-hike the next day. Especially if you've been holed up at home for the last year because pandemic. Overall it kind of reminds me of a miniature Mist Falls: You park at the site of a long-vanished early 20th Century business; the waterfall is a short distance from the road, but you may not be able to see it fro there; summer is not prime viewing season; and you get to it with a short but steep slog up a talus slope.

After you've had a look at the falls and taken some photos, unfortunately all you can really do at that point is retrace your steps and head back to the Oasis lot (or wherever you stashed your bike if you arrived that way). There's no trail up to the top of the falls, nor is there a trail over to the next falls, or viewpoint or whatever, to the east or west. You're on State Park land at the base of the falls, but another property boundary seems to run right along the top of the bluff, as if the state bought the minimal amount of land to protect the parts you can see from the road. So probably no trail to the top here anytime soon. In theory they could probably route a trail along the base of the bluff, next to the highway, to at least keep climbers out of the road in case the Gorge ever freezes again. But I gather the state has only owned land here since the late 1970s -- I say 'only' because I remember the late 1970s and therefore it was not very long ago -- and the Gorge as a whole essentially had one big burst of trail construction in the years before and after the old highway opened in 1916, so any place that was in private hands a century ago missed out on the one and only bite at the apple there's been (so far). Which of course comes down to money, or the lack thereof at any time since the late Wilson or early Harding administration. That's the main reason there's no trail here, and why there isn't one at Mist Falls, or a trail up Bridal Veil Creek to the middle and upper falls there, or anything at Moffett Creek, and any number of other places.

In particular, the stretch of Gorge from Angels Rest west to about Portland Womens Forum largely belongs to various state parks, with bits of Forest Service and private land here and there, and it seems like there ought to be a trail or two connecting the various major attractions (Portland Womens Forum / Chanticleer Point, the Vista House, Latourell Falls, Shepperds Dell, Bridal Veil, & Angels Rest, plus Rooster Rock & Dalton Point along the Columbia.) Unfortunately much of this block of parkland was assembled piece by piece starting in the 1950s, and typically there was just enough money to buy the land and not enough to do anything new with it, so no such trail was ever built.

It's not as if there haven't been grand plans over the years. The Gorge Trail #400 -- the east-west connector between a bunch of other trails -- was a late 20th century addition to the trail network. Long stretches of it already existed under other names, but the notion of hiking the Gorge more-or-less end to end did not really occur to anyone until well after the 1910s and 20s. The present-day trail stretches between Angels Rest and Wyeth in two segments, with a long gap west of Elowah Falls where the trail was never rebuilt after an enormous landslide in 1996. A third, very obscure piece of the trail starts at Lewis & Clark State Park at Troutdale and peters out randomly in the woods a few miles east of there (which is a whole other unfinished blog post.) This sort of hints at the original goal of the project, a continuous trail between Troutdale and Hood River, or maybe The Dalles, or points east. It seems like a trail from Chanticleer Point to Angels Rest ought to be the lowest-hanging remaining fruit of the wider project, but even that hasn't been enough to get the thing funded.

There was even a specific (potential) route picked out at one point, in the early 80s before the Trail 400 effort lost steam. If you look at a regular map of the area, say Google Maps, you'll see a couple of minor side roads heading uphill from the HCRH. Alex Barr Rd. is a steep, lightly used single-lane gravel road, but it eventually connects through to the web of rural roads further up and to the south, with homes, farms, horses & cows, even a few clearcuts, and you can easily get to Larch Mountain Road from there. Further east, Henderson Road is just a short access road up to Bridal Veil Lakes, a private event venue more or less above Shepperd's Dell. However if you look at a map that shows official property boundaries, say, a current county survey map, you'll see a few additional roads in the Bridal Veil area that don't appear on ordinary maps, one of which is a mile-long continuation of Henderson Rd. to the west so that it connects to Alex Barr Road, and runs above the full length of the Shepperds Dell bluffs.

That section of Henderson Road (aka County Road 634) doesn't appear on most maps because Multnomah County closed it to motor vehicle traffic back in 1981^[1]. But they explicitly did not vacate the right of way entirely, as they wanted to keep their options open for reusing it someday. Namely for reuse as part of a proposed extension of Gorge Trail #400 someday. Which still hasn't happened 40 years later. But at least this stretch of right-of-way remains available as an option, in case the state or the feds ever take a fresh interest in the idea and also find the money to do something about it. Or I suppose if the county found the money, since they still own the dormant road, or maybe Metro since they seem to have some level of actual money to spend on projects like this, unlike the other aforementioned agencies.

The 1981 article further points out that the closed road is a rare surviving fragment of the old Portland-Dalles (or Sandy-Dalles) Wagon Road, the Columbia River Highway's immediate predecessor dating back to the 1870s or so. So there may be some historic preservation value to this bit of road too, if people ever take an interest in saving parts of it like they've done in recent years with the early 20th century HCRH route. I suppose they could even bundle it into the current HCRH project, as that would provide another mile or so of trail where bikes don't have to share the old highway with cars. And in terms of scenic highlights, the Columbia River Images page about Shepperds Dell quotes an old Oregonian article about the falls, which mentions in passing that you could once get to the various upper tiers of Shepperds Dell Falls (most of which you can't see from the famous viewpoint along the old highway) via the old wagon road, so it sounds like there would be at least one point of scenic interest along the way if the trail ever becomes a real thing. Or two, if you count peeking over the top of Cruiser Falls here.

So all of that sounds great, but I have no idea what the present-day road is actually like. I haven't personally checked it out. I also haven't seen any reports of other people checking it out, or any recent photos from the area, so the road could be eroded and unsafe, or overgrown and impossible to follow, or who knows. There's also the inconvenient little detail that the right of way crosses a couple of private landowners' land along the way, and they may not necessarily agree with, or even be aware of, the legal status of the old road, and clearing that up in person is very much Not My Job, thank you very much.

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Footnote(s):

The closed road here is actually just one of several now-closed county roads or parts of roads in the general area. Here's a quick list of the roughly Gorge-area ones I know of that are either closed entirely or in part. The links go to pages at the Multnomah County Surveyor's office, as linked from their interactive map, and these rather austere pages in turn link to the original county ordinance creating the road, and the original survey map when one is available. Maybe you weren't aware that county roads even had numbers? I didn't until I stumbled across it a few months ago in a bout of mid-pandemic boredom. I don't think I've ever seen a road sign with a county road number on it. The system is really simple: Road numbers are chronological, and are just the order that a road survey was filed, or that concerned citizens filed a petition asking the county for a new road. The problem with this system is that if (for example) you ever need to reroute a stretch of road around an obstacle instead of over it, or through an obstacle instead of around it, that involves a new road survey and thus a new road number, and if these road numbers were widely used by the public you'd then have to update a bunch of maps and road signs too.

Incidentally, County Road 0001 was an early survey of Portland's Powell Boulevard, filed in June 1855 when the county was not quite six months old; eastside roads surveyed before December 1854 -- and there probably were at least a handful of them -- would have been filed as Clackamas County roads. Along with roads from various other distant places, as the "Clackamas District" of 1843 was a vaguely defined region including everything in the also-vaguely-defined 'Oregon Country' not part of one of the other three, more well-defined districts, which were sort of large versions of today's Washington, Yamhill, and Marion Counties. Everything else south to California, east to the Rockies, or north as far as the "54-40 or Fight" version of the disputed Canadian border was, in theory, Clackamas at one time. Though of course the existing native population was not exactly consulted on this matter.

Anyway, here's that list I mentioned:

• Road 481 / Rooster Rock Road, the one we explored in the Palisade Falls post
• Road 377 / Latourell Hill Road, another bit of old wagon road, which drops steeply from Larch Mtn. Road to the town of Latourell east of Latourell Falls and west of the famous figure-eight loops. I gather this was a very scenic but dreaded part of the journey to The Dalles, and one of the chief selling points of the new HCRH was that it rerouted traffic away from this stretch of road, adding switchbacks and the part that loops around the Vista House to create a more 'modern' route, without steep slopes and hairpin bends. Lidar says this road still exists, though nearby landowners have posted unfriendly No Trespassing signs around either end of it. Recreating the HCRH has a page about this road, and I've come across least one OregonHikers trip report about it. The road is still visible as a side road on the famous 1915 birds-eye map of the old highway from when it first opened. Said map even points out the location of "Goat Point", a long-forgotten scenic viewpoint along the now-obsolete old road, and includes a photo of the view from there toward Crown Point.
• Road 634 / Henderson Road, the very one I was talking about above.
• Road 566 / Latourell Falls Toll Road, which once connected a sawmill near the falls with the Brower & Thompson sawmill way uphill, near where present-day Brower Road crosses Young Creek. This was originally a private road and its right of way also included a huge log flume, believe it or not. The initial stretch of Alex Barr Rd, and the dead-end bit of NE Toll Rd. off Brower are surviving bits of this old road.
• Road 458 / Brower Rd. There's a long stretch of the original route of Brower Rd from Young Creek to Bridal Veil Creek & Palmer Mill Road, like the road currently does, but via a longer, more indirect route. From what I can tell this road was created in 1888 and closed to vehicle traffic sometime not long after 1899 and definitely before 1913. But the county has kept it on the books as a county road ever since, for reasons I'm not privy to. I don't know how much actual road remains out there in the forest, seeing as it hasn't been used as a road in over 120 years, and only operated as a road for 10 before that, but there's at least a small initial surviving piece of it near the (present-day) Brower Rd. - Young Creek crossing, about which another draft post is pending.
• Road 493, which branched off Road 458 and turned south, and continued due south for miles and miles all the way to the county line. This one was vacated back in the 1950s but there may still be remnants of it out in the forest somewhere.
• Road 550, which branched off 458 at the long-vanished mill town of Brower, then headed due east toward Larch Mountain, then turned south and contoured southeast-ish around the mountain, ending up somewhere deep in the forbidden Bull Run watershed. This is not the same road as the old abandoned Forest Service road NF-20, which contours around the mountain at a different elevation, sorta parallel to Road 550.
• Road 798, a short road off present-day Brower that was more of a driveway than a full-fledged road. Seems that when the county rerouted Road 458, they took away one landowner's only legal access to public roads, and he threw a fit about it, pestering the county to make things right and create him a new driveway across a neighbor's land. Not a public road anymore but it does exist and will show up in another post that's in the works.
• Road 625 / upper Palmer Mill Road, south of the bridge/intersection with Brower Rd. This is not the Palmer Mill Road you might be familiar with though, which runs along the side of Bridal Veil Creek, and is a Forest Service road (road # 1520-000) that the USFS has been trying to close and dismantle for years. The county road is uphill of the USFS one and runs roughly parallel to it, before ending up somewhere near the Palmer sawmill (hence the name) along with the long-gone town of Palmer. A surveyed but never-built continuation of the road would have turned sort of northeast from there and journeyed over to Multnomah Basin (but by a different route than the later Multnomah Basin Road), and then somehow switchbacked down to river level somewhere near or maybe east of the unofficial but well-known trail dubbed the Elevator Shaft, so called due to how insanely steep it is. After that taking roughly the same route as the present-day HCRH and ending at yet another sawmill near Elowah Falls. This was largely the Bridal Veil Lumber Company's idea, and would have connected three mills at enormous taxpayer expense. On closer inspection, the road petition turned out to be a sort of astroturfing campaign, as many of the petitioners for the new road turned out to be mill employees. Actual area residents strongly opposed the fantastical proposed road, saying it would be impossible to build, and would be useless if they somehow did find a way to build it, since a wagon road that's too steep for horses pulling a wagon kind of fails at being a wagon road.
• An unnumbered, isolated stretch of right-of-way near the headwaters of Mist Creek, specifically in township 1N5E, section 13, tax lot 800, if you understand surveying lingo. This puts it close to, but not intersecting, the Angels Rest Trail, close to the point where it switchbacks sharply uphill west of Wahkeena Creek. A township map of the area has an arrow pointing at it with the caption "1956-1798-22"; I'm guessing the first number is a year that this thing was created, but I don't know if represents a survey, a county ordinance, or something else entirely. I have no idea what purpose it was supposed to serve, but it seems to me that a stretch of road that doesn't connect to any other road is of limited usefulness at best.

Palisade Falls

Next up we're paying a visit to one of the Columbia Gorge's most seen but least visited waterfalls. If you're barreling along on I-84, as you pass the Crown Point area you might notice a waterfall tumbling down a cliff immediately east of the Vista House (unless it's late summer, when it usually dries up). That waterfall apparently doesn't have an official USGS-approved name, but often goes by "Palisade Falls", and is sometimes called "Crown Point Falls" for obvious reasons.

Until quite recently I thought Palisade Falls was completely inaccessible. There's no freeway exit for it like there is for Multnomah Falls. Nor is there a trail down to the top of the falls from the adjacent Vista House or anywhere nearby, and in fact the whole area above the falls is closed to all entry, with very stern but occasionally ignored No Trespassing signs seemingly every few feet. There also isn't a side road there, or an official trail that officially goes there, and I had never seen any photos of it up close, or even read about anyone going there. The only thing near the base of the falls is a railroad line, and it hasn't had an Amtrak route since 1997 when the Pioneer was discontinued, so I figured the only way to get a closer look would be to switch careers, join the Union Pacific Railroad, eventually get assigned to runs through the Gorge (which I imagine requires lots of seniority), and then catch occasional blurry glimpses of it while whooshing past at very-fast-by-USA-standards speeds.

A few weeks ago I was searching for something unrelated (and I don't recall what it was now) and ran across a 2016 OregonHikers forum thread with a couple of photos from right at the base of the falls, looking up. I'd wondered about this roughly since I was old enough to read a map, so it was a foregone conclusion that I was going to do whatever they did and go see for myself.

So the deal is that there is a trail there, or most of the way there. But it doesn't start where you'd think, and there is absolutely zero signage or any other indication that it goes anywhere interesting. If you're doing the standard tourist route along the old Columbia River Highway, Portland Womens Forum State Park is the place you stop for 5-10 minutes and take photos of the Vista House and the gorge, facing east. While you're doing that, directly behind you there's a locked gate, and behind it a gravel road meanders down toward the river. A trail detours around the gate, but no signs indicate where the trail goes, what it's called, or why you might want to go that direction, and I imagine upwards of 99.9% of visitors just ignore the whole thing. Turns out this is a very old road (by non-indigenous Pacific Northwest standards), connecting the park area (which then hosted the Chanticleer Inn restaurant) with the rail line down by the river; OregonHikers has a field guide page about the hike, calling it the "Rooster Rock Wagon Road". I gather it also went by "Chanticleer Point Wagon Road", I suppose based on which direction you were wagoning. It seems that passenger trains would let you off at a long-vanished station down below, and a horse-drawn wagon (or eventually a car) would ferry you up the hill for an amazing view and a chicken dinner. I'm going to guess the view was priced into the chicken dinner, because some things never change in the tourist business.

I'm not sure when the rail stop was discontinued, but the Chanticleer Inn burned in 1930 and was never rebuilt, which would have eliminated the road's main reason for being. Still, the mostly-disused road wasn't officially closed off until the late 1980s. (I have a very vague recollection of noticing when the gate went in, and not realizing there was a road there until that point.) In the intervening time, the road was a popular spot if you needed to dump a stolen car or a safe you'd just cracked, and remnants survive off to the sides of the old road, from the body of a 1949 Studebaker to the dashboard of a 70s Porsche 911. A few are visible from the road, while others require side trips; I wasn't there for the vintage auto/true crime history (and was kind of creeped out by it, to be honest), so this photoset is not a comprehensive catalog of everything that's down there. Another OregonHikers thread has photos of several of the cars and two safes, for anyone who's curious about that particular angle on the place.

What I do have are photos of the road/trail (since probably most people have never seen it), along with another unnamed waterfall you'll encounter on the way down & back. There are a few views of the Vista House around the top end of the trail, and views looking up at Crown Point and Chanticleer Point from the bottom of the trail, and a mysterious (and fortunately open) gate part of the way down, and eventually the trail peters out at the railroad tracks, where you're greeted by an ambiguous hardware-store-grade "No Trespassing" sign, and below it a painting of Portland's Steel Bridge painted on (I think) scrap metal, possibly from one of the junked cars uphill from here. The two seemed to be guarding a side trail to the west that I wouldn't have noticed otherwise; I heeded what I figured the sign was advising me about and didn't investigate further. On the far side of the tracks and just west of where the trail ends, a railroad service road covers the short distance over to I-84 -- I think, I didn't go any further in that direction -- and from there you can presumably make your way to the obscure & little-used Young Creek Trailhead along one of the Rooster Rock offramps. A page at Recreating the HCRH indicates the road we're on continued along to a salmon cannery near Rooster Rock before the freeway came along, and a WyEast Blog post has a few 19th century photos of the area, one of which shows Palisade Falls flowing into idyllic Echo Bay (now separated from the river by I-84 and renamed "Mirror Lake").

Anyway, here we are at the end of the trail, but there's no waterfall in sight, nor are there any obvious eastbound trails with signs saying "This way to the waterfall". Now what? Now you parallel the railroad tracks heading east for a bit, maybe 1000 feet to 1/4 mile or so. Not on the tracks, obviously, and further away is better, obviously, and what it boils down to is that I really don't want to be responsible for anyone getting smooshed by a train or tasered by security guards or whatever, so let's agree that the last leg of the journey involves dense GPS-jamming fog, a bit of handwaving, and a conveniently located personal jetpack that may or may not still be there when you visit.

Ok, so having landed next to the falls and set the jetpack aside to cool off for a bit, we can finally get a good look at the waterfall. You soon realize it's just a small stream that sort of burbles its way down the cliff face, and the steep V-shaped ravine above the falls (the off-limits No Trespassing area I mentioned) extends most of the way down from Crown Point so the falls aren't actually that tall either. Still, it's a pleasant spot, and -- more to the point -- it's a pleasant spot that nobody you know has ever been to (unless they're semi-adventurous and have a very specific hobby we'll get to in a moment), so by visiting you can obtain valuable Internet Points just like I'm doing right now. Note however that if you're doing this for Instagram, mere nature photos without people in them don't cut it anymore (ask me how I know this). As I understand it, full IG Internet Points are only awarded if you bust out some advanced yoga poses in front of the falls, or pose with an absurdly large gun, or maybe hike the whole way in a fursuit, or ideally all of the above simultaneously, while name dropping a long list of your brand endorsements and Patreon patrons. I'm not saying any of that is wrong, exactly, except for the gun part; it just seems like a lot of extra trouble to go to for a few more Internet Points, and if I was in that position it would quickly start to feel like a job, and a poorly paid one at that, with fairly bizarre hours and no benefits.

Enjoy the solitude and obscurity while you can, though; Palisade Falls may be less of a secret secluded spot someday, if current plans pan out. The Oregon State Parks Department adopted a new Master Plan for its Columbia Gorge holdings in 2015, and they have big plans for the old road. This is not the same thing as having money, blueprints, signed contracts, and a project schedule, but it's a start, I suppose. So the goal is to have an official route between Rooster Rock & the Portland Womens Forum viewpoint, based on the current route at least most of the way. They've broken it down into phases, phase 1 being official-ifying the road as far as the railroad tracks. It isn't clear what this would involve beyond putting up some signage and maybe a fence to keep people away from the rail line. Phase 2, which the plan implies is a distant-future, pie-in-the-sky vision, involves crossing the rail line in a manner acceptable to the railroad, and then onward to Rooster Rock. This is a separate phase because making railroads happy is expensive, and railroads hold all the cards thanks to 19th century federal laws. So the state will need a bridge over the tracks, tall enough to accommodate double or triple-stacked trains, or however tall the railroad supposes a future train might be someday, and enclosed so people can't throw anything onto the tracks. And the taller the bridge is, the more expensive it will be to meet ADA accessibility requirements, and on top of that there will be design requirements to satisfy due to being in a National Scenic Area, so it can't be ugly. To be clear, I am not arguing against any of these requirements, just pointing out there is a great deal of difference between just crossing railroad tracks, and doing so officially. Furthermore, the conceptual route maps in the master plan show the trail heading directly north to Rooster Rock after crossing the tracks, rather than east to the existing overpass at the Rooster Rock freeway exit. So this would seem to require a new pedestrian bridge over the interstate as well, though the plan doesn't mention this little detail. If I had to guess how this plays out eventually, I'd guess they'll route the trail over to the freeway exit, and build it in conjunction with replacing the existing 1950s or 1960s-era overpass (which is is bound to need replacing eventually, as nature bats last against midcentury rebar construction), so that part piggybacks on a freeway project, since there will always money for freeway projects.

The plan doesn't mention Palisade Falls at all, but it seems like the obvious candidate if you want the phase 1 trail to actually go somewhere, instead of just dead-ending at railroad tracks. I'm not the right type of engineer to be 100% certain of this, but it seems like there ought to be just enough space between the tracks and cliffs to build a nice official trail that isn't constantly pelted with falling rocks and also doesn't anger the gods railroad barons. It might even be possible to extend the trail around the far side of Crown Point and end up at Latourell Falls or points east from there. So that's suggestion #1. Suggestion #2 is that if you're rehabbing an old road, which is much wider than the typical Gorge trail, it would make sense to allow bikes on it, and ideally make sure it's usable by emergency vehicles. That last part might be my ongoing anxiety in the wake of the Eagle Creek fire, along with the global climate generally trending in a pro-fire direction.

Suggestion #3 is to remove the old cars. This may be an unpopular idea and I fully admit my personal biases here as a 1980s teenager, if you'll permit me to digress for a paragraph or so. Adults (including newly-respectable boomers) were absolutely convinced we were the coming doom of all that was good in the world. In particular, they were terrified of us turning 16 and semi-learning to drive, and inevitably denting the fenders of their precious BMWs. So we were made to watch roughly every single gory highway safety film ever made, including vintage pre-seatbelt ones with cars like the ones here. At least one of them was accompanied by a quadriplegic guest speaker whose message boiled down to "See? This is what happens if you ever drive drunk even once.", and who described his life-altering accident in excruciating detail. I had nightmares about it for weeks, and occasionally still do. I think we may have gotten an extra dose of vehicular doom awareness because my high school had a lot of rich kids (I was very much not one of them), some of them very much in the Brett Kavanaugh mold. I recall at least one instance where a classmate was given a Porsche for his 16th birthday by his parents, who then promptly decamped to their place in Palm Springs for the winter, leaving him to his own devices for several months. Their idea of responsible parenting involved getting him a Porsche 912, a short-lived model that looked exactly like a 911 but had an underpowered 4 cylinder engine and was slightly cheaper. Which I imagine meant everyone wanted to drag race you at stoplights, and you always lost. I suppose the school focused on the body horror angle because daddy's money and connections could make any legal unpleasantness go away, but daddy can't change the laws of physics or limitations of modern medicine. In short, I would be happier without the crashed vintage cars than with them, and thanks for listening.

Um, anyway, switching topics entirely, I'd mentioned earlier that there was one particular reason that your adventurous, outdoorsy friends might have been to Palisade Falls before. Every so often, not every winter but at least once every few years, the Gorge gets a serious cold snap, lasting from a few days to a few weeks. If it lasts long enough, waterfalls start freezing over, starting with the lower-volume ones like Palisade Falls where water runs down the rock face instead of launching outward from it. When this blessed event happens, the local ice climbing community (your more-outdoorsy-than-thou friend included) converges on the Gorge in a matter of nanoseconds, and the vertical wall of ice at Palisade Falls becomes the ice climbing route known as "Crown Jewel". Crown Jewel is popular due to its (relatively) moderate difficulty and its location as one of the closest ice climbing spots near Portland. I have never tried their sport, and let's be honest here, as a late-40s person without midlife crisis inclinations it's sort of unlikely I'll give it a try in the future. I do check up on them now and then because their geography of the Gorge is very different from anyone else's. Minor seasonal waterfalls that often don't even have official names become the, uh, crown jewels of their sport, like "Ainsworth Left" a few miles east of here in Ainsworth State Park, which is apparently so difficult that it was first climbed successfully in 2009 [???], and which is an otherwise unremarkable-by-Gorge-standards 700' cliff face the other 96% of the time when it isn't frozen.

In any case, here's a 2013 trip report with nice photos taken part of the way up the climb. One thing it mentions in passing, at the bottom of the post, is how to get to the falls during ice climbing season. I haven't seen any accounts about parking up above and hiking down; everyone parks at the Rooster Rock exit and heads directly to the frozen waterfall from there, and the most direct seasonal route involves hoofing it across frozen Mirror Lake. Which I suppose is something that doesn't worry you greatly if you're about to climb a frozen (and just barely frozen) waterfall that might "delaminate" (i.e. pop right off the rock face, taking you along for the ride) any minute. Another trip report from the same winter grumbles about being impeded by annoying stoners while trying to climb the falls. A Mazamas blog post from 2017 has mini trip reports from a few places around the gorge during a brief cold snap, Crown Jewel not included this time. And a 2014 OPB News piece speculates about what climate change means for the local ice climbing scene. (Spoiler: Warmer means less ice, and for ice-based sports this is a bad thing.). And finally, a mostly-unrelated Travel Oregon post that came up while searching the interwebs for "columbia gorge ice climbing". The author climbed Mt. Hood (where there was a great deal of ice), and went hiking in the Gorge the following day, thus satisfying the literal search terms if not the intent behind them. In any case, the post includes a lot of great photos he took along the way, so I figured I'd pass the link along even if it has nothing to do with the rest of this post. And with that, we're done here. I usually wrap these things up with a bit of is-it-worth-doing advice, but I'm not sure what to say this time. It was worth it to me as I finally got to satisfy a longstanding point of curiosity, but if you're coming into this cold it may not be quite as interesting. It does have one advantage in that it's a rare close-to-Portland trail that isn't swarmed with tourists during all daylight hours year-round, and a nice thing about having an obscure blog almost nobody reads is that I'm free to write about it without immediately ruining the place.

Dalton Point

Next up we're looking at a few photos from Dalton Point, a little state park in the Gorge right on the Columbia River. The park's built around a boat ramp, and I don't own a boat, so it's not somewhere I go regularly. I figured it might be good for some photos, since there are weirdly few places along the Oregon side of the gorge with river access, thanks to the big freeway right along the river's edge. You might think that would make this a popular park, but the handful of times I've been here it's always been empty or nearly so. It could be that I'm just never there at peak times, but the sorry state of the ramp and the parking lot make me think it doesn't get a lot of attention from anyone. The Oregon State Parks website doesn't even mention it, for whatever reason (though this isn't the first time I've run into this). Its location may work against it too; coming from Portland it's another 5 miles past Rooster Rock (which also has a boat ramp and a small marina), and (like Tunnel Point) only accessible to westbound traffic. Doubling back at the Warrendale-Dodson exit makes it an extra 18 miles versus going to Rooster Rock, which had better facilities the last time I checked. Not that I really minded the lack of other visitors; it's not something you encounter much in the Gorge anymore, and it was kind of nice, to be honest. Luckily nobody reads blogs anymore (present company excluded) so I can post about it here without the secret getting out.

There's an internet theory going around that Dalton Point is named for a "W. Dalton" who lived in the area circa 1889, and who also gave his or her name to nearby Dalton Falls. Neither Google nor the library's Oregonian database could tell me anything more about this person; I'm going to assume he or she was real because a myth would at least have an interesting story attached. I did find a few links about Dalton Point, at least, but it's not a long or particularly compelling history. It didn't appear in the Oregonian until the modern river-level highway went in, and at first (starting around 1961) there was just the occasional car accident, mostly people failing to negotiate a bend in the road and going into the river. I gather the highway didn't initially have guardrails through at least this part of the gorge, which would be a big, big problem on a wet, icy, or windy day. (Incidentally, while researching this post I did come across the one and only mention of Dalton Falls in the Oregonian on March 1st 1914, and it just relates to construction on the old highway.)

A Feb. 16th 1964 article about new boating facilities in state parks mentions Dalton Point briefly, saying the state was adding a shiny new boat ramp & parking lot, & paving an existing access road. After that, it showed up in the paper every so often when the state wanted to remind the public that a.) Dalton Point existed, and b.) there were assorted water things you could potentially do there. For example, a May 10th 1979 article about Portland-area boating said Dalton Point was a good place for water skiing. You probably wouldn't see this in a contemporary article, as water skiing has kind of fallen out of fashion in the last few decades. I tried it once, years ago; it's harder than it looks, especially if you wear glasses and are spooked about falling and losing them. Shortly after that article, a June 26th piece mentioned Dalton Point was going to get boat ramp upgrades as part of a larger gorge plan, full of improvements that largely haven't come to pass, like a "low level" trail from Lewis & Clark State Park in Troutdale out to The Dalles, trails connecting down to it from Portland Womens Forum & Crown Point, and a youth hostel(!) near Latourell Falls.

A Feb. 22nd 1987 article mentioned that Dalton Point was a low priority for windsurfing development, back when windsurfing was the hot new sport & the state saw dollar signs & wanted to promote it. I tried windsurfing once, years ago; again, it's harder than it looks. A month later, the paper pointed out that it was a great secret spot to fish for walleye, which instantly became untrue the moment it was published. So that's really about it, history-wise, other than the occasional road closure or abandoned vehicle.

Via my usual exhaustive Google searching, I gather Dalton Point is a good place to set off in a kayak. I've never tried kayaking; it looks really fun, though I suspect it just might be harder than it looks. It seems this is a good jumping off point to row over and climb Phoca Rock, a rocky island in the middle of the river (Phoca is a genus of seals that includes the ubiquitous harbor seal.), or get a close look at the Cape Horn cliffs on the Washington side. Or you can make it part of a longer trip: Here's someone's blog post about kayaking from Dalton Point downriver to Chinook Landing in Fairview, west of Troutdale. And here's someone else's tale of running into stormy conditions & submerged pilings here during a kayak trip from Idaho to the Pacific Ocean. That's... a long way, and more than the journey itself I find myself envying them having that much free time to spare, just paddling down the river and not having to stop now and then to hop on a conference call or whatever.

If you're in a tiny boat on the Columbia, you do have to worry about the occasional tugboat pushing a few barges. They don't turn all that quickly and they probably can't see you anyway. Luckily the NOAA nautical chart for this stretch of the river shows that the commercial shipping channel is way over toward the Washington side of the river in this area; it's called the "Fashion Reef Lower Reach", in case that ever comes up as a Gorge trivia question. (I have no idea where Fashion Reef is, or what's so fashionable about it.) The chart also tells us the water is up to 8 feet deep in the vicinity of the boat ramp (though I don't know what time of year they take water level readings), and there are a number of submerged pilings & other obstacles to look out for, which we already know from one of the links up above. Contrast this with Tunnel Point, which has nowhere to launch even a tiny boat, possibly due to river traffic plowing along just offshore. You could potentially get mowed down by a load of wheat right after getting in the water, if somehow you didn't notice the huge barges bearing down on you. (Note regarding the nautical chart link: NOAA's Chart No. 1 is a key to what the cryptic marks on all the other charts mean.)

If you don't like getting wet, it looks like there might be a way to hike downstream to Rooster Rock from here. I've been speculating about this but have never actually tried it; there's no official trail, I have never heard of anyone doing it, and I have no idea whether it's actually possible. You'd be right next to the freeway much of the way so it wouldn't exactly be a high-quality fun wilderness experience, either. You'd probably have the riverbank (such as it is) all to yourself, though.

One thing I wouldn't have expected prior to Googling the place to death is that Dalton Point is a significant nature spot, home to a variety of rare plants and insects. In retrospect it makes sense: There's very little riparian habitat left along the Oregon side of the gorge, since much of the shoreline is now just riprap supporting the freeway. So come spring and early summer, this is apparently a good place to come and see native wildflowers and insects. Some assorted links I came across on the subject:

• Wildflower Hikes at Dalton Point
• Rorippa curvipes at the Oregon Flora Image Project
• Impatiens capensis at the Consortium of Pacific Northwest Herbaria
• The July-August 2004 Northwest Native Plant Journal mentions it as an outstanding plant site.
• Also mentioned in the Summer 2004 Friends of the Columbia Gorge newsletter has a short list of native plants you might encounter here.
• A NorthwestJourney.com page says the Pale Swallowtail butterfly (Papilio eurymedon) may also be seen here.

Miscellaneous other Dalton Point(ish) items I ran across on the interwebs:

• It's mentioned in a recent book about the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area Act and how it's changed the Gorge in recent decades.
• State regulations allow seasonal waterfowl hunting, which is uncommon for state parks, but I haven't seen internet mentions of anyone actually doing so.
• Someone's photo from here
• A wedding at Wahclella Falls that I ran across while digging through the intergoogles. Basically unrelated, but awww.

Pics: Vista House from Portland Womens Forum

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A few of my attempts at the ur-prototypical Oregon tourist photo, "Vista House from Portland Womens Forum State Park".

I really don't see a need to do a full-on informational post about the place, since it's a contender for the least obscure location in the whole state. That's probably why I didn't bother doing a post about the place at all until now.

Then I was rifling through my photosets on Flickr and saw these, and figured, you know, these would look ok on the ol' humble blog, probably. So voila, here they are.

photo friday hits the road

Yep, it's time for yet another batch of flowers and berries and leaves, this time from a few spots around the Columbia Gorge. The first 5 pics are from along the trail at Hamilton Mountain, on the Washington side near Beacon Rock. The next two are from Portland Womens' Forum State Park, and the last is from the Vista House on Crown Point. All three places are most famous for their broad panoramic vistas, but we're sticking with the small stuff today, because it's always good to have a theme, or so I've heard.