don't know why there's no sun up in the sky....

A few pics of this afternoon's meteorological thrills, chills, and spills. Enjoy...

Even more VuPoint toy camera goodness

Yep, it's time for another batch of pics from the VuPoint keychain digicam I picked up for $14.99 a while back, taken mostly around Jamison Square in the Pearl.



I guess if we're going to pick nits, the price is really $14.99 plus the cost of a computer, plus the price of an image manipulation app unless you use a free one. The VuPoint usually overexposes stuff, so I ran most of these through GIMP (which is free). I don't think that counts as cheating, really. Besides, I restricted myself to darkening the pics a bit with the Levels tool, and sometimes boosting color saturation with the Hue-Saturation tool, but other than that they're exactly as the camera spit them out.



Previous batches of VuPoint pics here, here, and here.



The stuffed animal you see here is Firefox schwag I picked up at OSCON. This was taken with the wide-angle doodad I picked up for my real camera. I don't think the wide angle is very obvious with this photo though. You can also see how noisy the VuPoint's photos get in dim light situations, like indoors at night. And this isn't even close to the worst example. What I think it's probably doing is boosting the ISO sky high to compensate. Your expensive digital camera could do that too if it wanted to, but perfectionist types out there would complain about the noise if it did, and besides, your fancy camera has one of them newfangled "flash" thingies, and the VuPoint doesn't.

Metzger Park: Kingdom of the Spiders

View Larger Map

You can always tell it's fall by all the spiders. Huge freakin' spiders, everywhere you look. I ran across these particular huge freakin' spiders down at Metzger Park, near Washington Square. The place has got to be prime habitat for gigantic spiders, at least for the moment.

If my spider field guide is right, these beasties are nothing but common garden spiders. Just inordinately well-fed ones.

Taking photos of spiders is a challenge with my puny little point-n-shoot camera. Its autofocus is arachnophobic, so spiders always end up as blurry blobs in front of nice sharp backgrounds. Manual focus was an afterthought when they designed the camera, and you have to twist a knob and press a couple of buttons to turn it on. Then you get a postage stamp sized region on the LCD that shows you what the camera's focused on, or it does if your target's big enough, and you squint a bit, and you're lucky.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that these are merely intermediate results in my continuing quest to take a decent photo of a spider on a web, similar to the third-rate squirrel photos I post here now and then. Focusing properly is one big issue. Another is that the little bastards just won't hold still for the camera. All you have to do is breathe on the web a little and they run away. I suppose it'd be a lot more worrisome if the spiders didn't run away. If a spider ever stands its ground, itching for a fight, I think I'll be the one running away, thank you very much.

The spiders are only one of the park's many horrors. Ok, maybe I'm overstating that, but they did film part of a stupid horror movie here back in 1992. I've never actually watched Dr. Giggles, but I have it on good authority that it's a truly rank piece of filmmaking, wretched even by filmed-in-Portland standards, and that's really saying something.

The Kingdom of the Spiders bit in the title refers to another cheesy horror movie I haven't seen (yet), this one starring the one, the only, William Shatner. I'm probably harming my bad movie street cred by admitting to two such movies I haven't seen in the same post, but hey.

If you're in the mood for a bad Shatner movie, and you can't quite stomach Star Trek V, may I recommend the Shat's singular work in White Comanche. Ok, not precisely singular, in that he plays twin half-breed Indians, one good (and "civilized"), the other psychotic, peyote-mad, and evil through and through. It's a real hoot. Trust me on this.... But I digress.

I suppose you could count zombies as the park's third horror, since the mall's just a short drive away. C'mon, you've seen 'em too. Waddling from a Suburban to a waiting table at the Fatcake Cheesery, devouring everything in its path. Splattering blood and gore everywhere during a frantic 3% off sale at Nordstrom. Oh, the horror of it all!

So anyway, I'll get to the park itself in a minute, if you're still interested. But first some flowers. Yes, there's more to the place than freakin' humongous spiders and crappy horror movies. Honest.

Before anyone complains, I realize I'm being patently unfair to the place, and I'm sure the park is in reality a perfectly nice and pleasant, if unremarkable, spot. I do realize that. It's just that with the spiders, and the horror movie thing, certain themes begin to suggest themselves. And, y'know, Washington County's extracted a fair chunk of tax money out of me over the years (although not at present), and my taxes went to support the park all that time, and this is the very first bit of enjoyment I've ever gotten from the place. So I think I'm entitled, don't you?

As longtime Gentle Reader(s) of this humble blog must've noticed by now, I have this occasional and rather silly hobby of tracking down local parks, monuments, greenspaces, and so forth, and taking some photos and writing a few words about them here. C'mon, I already admitted it was silly, and I saved it for the end, so you have to admit I still have some sense of perspective. C'mon. Please?

I'd been mildly curious about Metzger County Park for a while, and I happened to be in the area, so I thought I'd take a peek. I don't expect anyone other than me to find this intriguing, but Washington County has exactly two county parks: The huge one out at Hagg Lake, and this one. All other parks on the westside are either city parks, or part of the Tualatin Hills park district. So the place is kind of an anomaly in a bureaucratic sense, but other than that it looks like any other neighborhood park. I suppose it just happened not to be within an incorporated city or the Tualatin Hills district boundaries, so the county ended up with the job somehow. I recall reading some years ago that the county wanted out of the parks business, and wanted either the state or Metro to take over Hagg Lake. I imagine they also wanted to unload Metzger Park on someone else too, but so far they've still got both of them.

I wasn't entirely accurate earlier when I said there were two parks. Technically there's at least one more county park, a place called Rippling Waters Park, located on Gales Creek way out past Forest Grove. If you need another little bit of trivia you'll probably never be able to use, I've got more of the story here, although (as usual) no definitive answers. For what it's worth, that same post also mentions Multnomah County's sole remaining county park, a nano-sized one it kept after handing all the others over to Metro. See? I told you it was a silly hobby. Possibly even a stupid one. Although not as bad as trainspotting, though. Man, those guys are dweebs.

I'm afraid the photos I've got here will give you an unbalanced idea of the place. It's not just forests and flowers and titanic bloodsucking arachnids. There's also a grassy lawn for picnics, some tennis courts, a play structure, and a 60's-era community center building with some roses around it. Nothing here to go out of your way to see, really. Oh, well. Curiosity satisfied. Mission accomplished.

McIver State Park foray

I usually start these out by saying "today's adventure takes us to...", but I probably shouldn't this time. I've gotten the distinct impression that basically everyone in town except me goes to McIver State Park all the time, and has done so for years. Ok, I might be exaggerating a little, and just everyone on the eastside has been going there for years. Here's a map -- the park is the V-shaped green bit just west of Estacada:

So apologies in advance if I'm going on about your home away from home here. I grew up in Aloha, and we didn't head out to Estacada all that often. Basically never, in fact. I vaguely knew there was this large green blob on the map next to the Clackamas River, but I'd never been there and didn't know anything about the place.

Ok, that's not strictly true, I did know the park had hosted the Vortex I hippie festival, I mean, "Biodegradable Festival of Life", back in 1970. Which I know because this city's thick with nostalgic boomer types who can't seem to STFU about the 60's, just like the way their parents go on and on about World War II every chance they get. I swear, if I'm 50 years old and you ever hear me waxing nostalgic about the early 90's, insisting they were the Golden Age of music and culture or whatever, you can just go ahead and slap me silly.

Of course there's a flip side to all of that. The only thing more tedious than people waxing nostalgic about the 60's are those prim bow-tie-wearing cultural-conservative twits on FoxNews whining about how the 60's ruined everything and must be "undone" somehow, at all costs. So don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not one of those people. It's just that poking fun at hippies is fun, easy, and mostly harmless. They probably won't even notice, much less care.

I think knowing about that festival colored my expectations of the park. I really didn't expect it to be scenic at all, I just figured it'd be a large open space where a few hundred thousand stupid hippies could squat in the mud and trip out to an endless procession of cheesy jam bands. I wouldn't have guessed there'd be high cliffs overlooking the Clackamas River. That doesn't seem very hippie-friendly if you ask me. Possibly that was the whole point. As the oldtimers love to remind us, the festival was organized by the state's Republican governor to lure the city's disaffected war-protesting youngsters away and keep 'em "sedated" while the American Legion convention was in town. If a few hippies decided gravity was a bummer, man, and tried to fly away off the cliffs, hey, even better. Oddly the festival seems to have gone off without any reported fatal incidents. Although it's entirely possible some random hippie just wandered off and disappeared and hasn't been missed by anyone for nearly 40 years. It wouldn't surprise me.

I've never been into the whole psychedelic thing, but I did take a couple of cool/weird infrared photos at the park. I think they're probably groovy enough for our present purposes.

A couple of links about Vortex I from out on the interwebs, before we move on:

• "Vortex I or why there was no Vortex II", from someone who was there.
  
• And a brief reminiscence by someone who lived nearby. Her reaction is mostly "ugh".
• The PSU Vanguard's book review of ""The Far Out Story of Vortex 1", a recent book about the festival.
• A recent post on the book's author's MySpace page noting that there's also a Vortex I documentary, and it's showing at the Clinton St. Theater this very evening (9/20/07). I don't believe in fate, but that's a rather amusing coincidence. Although I don't actually plan on attending.

So enough about hippies, dammit. At one overlook above the river there's a plaque honoring Milo McIver, once chairman of the state highway commission, the predecessor of today's ODOT. The plaque was executed by Avard Fairbanks, the same sculptor who did the Campbell Memorial plaque at Portland Firefighters' Park.

As fate would have it (if I believed in fate, that is), I was just down at Powell's Technical a couple of hours ago, and right there in the store's free bin was a book with Mr. McIver's name on it. I figured it was appropriate so I grabbed it, even though 90% of it consists of boring trigonometric tables. If that strikes your fancy, or you simply need to build yourself a standard highway spiral, ODOT has the current 2003 version of the book (or at least part of the book) here [PDF].

Heading up the state highway commission obviously commanded a great deal more honor and respect than it does now. Besides McIver, you might also recognize the name Glenn L. Jackson, as the I-205 bridge in east Portland is named in his honor.

So about the park itself. There's an upper area with the cliffs, a large picnic area, and such, and there's a lower part down by the river. There are actually two ways down to the river but I only checked out one of them; if you haven't noticed yet, this is not really a comprehensive post about the park's amenities. I didn't play any disc golf, or camp, or fish, or look for bats, or go horseback riding, or float down the Clackamas River on an inner tube, carrying a six-pack. Although I saw a few people doing that and it looked like fun. Fashionable Portlanders sneer at the practice, figuring that it's something trailer-trash people out in Clackamas do, so therefore it's bad and couldn't possibly be any fun. I hadn't really given it a lot of thought before, but it was a hot day, and the river was very cold, and I can see the attraction. Haven't actually tried it, I'm not real keen on the whole "getting plastered and falling in the river and drowning" thing, although I understand that's an optional part of the experience.

So basically I just wandered around with a camera for a couple of hours looking for photogenic stuff. I think I've mentioned before that the state parks department has started an annual photo contest, with the winning photos appearing in the next year's Oregon State Parks calendar. So I spent the day looking for material, here and at Bonnie Lure, the other state park near Estacada, with a side trip over to Fearless Brewing (which I mentioned before here). I later discovered my poor little camera doesn't have enough megapixels to qualify, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have used any of these pics even if they'd been eligible. But at least I'm getting a blog post out of the adventure, which I guess is something. And besides, there's always next year.

PS, here's a heron I saw down by the river. Besides loading up on additional megapixels, I think I'll need to look for a telephoto lens with a little more oomph to it. I know I've sung the praises of "digital zoom" before, but it's really no substitute for having a proper long, if rather Freudian-looking, lens at one's disposal.

still technically summer

...although you wouldn't know it by looking outside. Autumn is fine and all, don't get me wrong, I just wish it hadn't started back in early August. Well, that can't be helped now, so we might as well make the best of the new season. Which means another round of that September-November mainstay, photos of Leaves Changing Color and subsequently Fallen Leaves. If you find a good example of either and take a halfway-decent photo, people will read all sorts of things into it, like they do with flowers budding out. I'm not sure whether this is because the subject matter is inherently deep, or because it strikes a chord in the human psyche, or simply because it's cheating somehow. I'm inclined toward the latter explanation, because a.) I'm a cynic, and b.) it's just too easy for it to be transcendent, or deep, or meaningful. You just point the camera at the leaf and press the little button, and poof. Anyone who says there's anything more complicated going on is trying to sell you something.



Every year about this time I find myself feeling oddly energized and restless, as if I ought to be out frantically gathering acorns, or chopping firewood, or filling the cellar with hearty root vegetables. Mmmm.... potatoes.... tater tots.... But I digress.



It's possible this humble blog will metamorphose again in the near future, as it tends to do every so often when I get to feeling restless. I have this nagging feeling I've been too carefree and frivolous for the past, oh, I'm not sure quite how long it's been, but the last few months have been pretty heavy with the flowers and waterfalls and so forth, and I feel as though I'm creating the wrong impression. In my heart of hearts, I know this is quite the serious, intellectual blog I've got here, but I admit that fact has rarely been in evidence of late. So we'll have to see. I may try another Logical Week of Monomedia, seven consecutive posts with no photos, videos or whatnot; the previous one wasn't entirely successful, so it looks like a challenge. I like a challenge, now and then, but I've never been very good at living within arbitrary restrictions, even self-imposed ones.



However, the semi-promised metamorphosis isn't happening just yet. Energized or not, I'm still too lazy to take up that particular challenge at the moment. This is the point in this post where I search around for filler material, since I have more photos than I have paragraphs. And this time I really don't have very many photos, by recent standards. So to stretch the material a little, why don't we call it a paragraph and move on to the next? How about it?



Ok, here's that next paragraph I promised you, and I have high hopes for it. The above & below photos are of leaves gnawed by... something. They aren't precisely Leaves Changing Color, much less Fallen Leaves, but I thought they had a certain appeal about them, and here they are. Well, that's about it for this paragraph, and I really think it turned out well, all things considered. So I think we can call it a day after a few brief closing remarks or something.



... hmm... Safari locked up on me while finishing the last paragraph, and I had to kill -9 it, and now I've lost my train of thought, and I no longer have any idea whatsoever about what kind of closing remarks I had in mind earlier. So I think I'll end this like a art French film, since I'm trying to elevate the tone of this humble blog and all:

FIN

Somewhere Near Dalton Falls

View Larger Map

Today's scenic adventure takes us to Dalton Falls, out in the Columbia Gorge yet again [map]. Or at least I think this is Dalton Falls. I could be wrong. It's a highly obscure waterfall that doesn't show up on most maps, and there's no road sign announcing it, even though its base is almost right next to the scenic highway. Oh, and did I mention the falls dry up in the summer? Thus driving out to go search for them isn't foolproof either. In short, what you're reading is what I've been able to piece together and deduce so far. Think of it as a progress report. I'm pretty sure I found the right place, or at least the immediate vicinity of the right place, but I always strive for accuracy here and I'd hate to get the facts wrong. So all I'm claiming right now is that I was somewhere near the falls, and "near" is a very flexible word, you know.

The map link above takes you to WikiMapia this time instead of the usual Google Map. WikiMapia be the only map on the interwebs that gives even a rough idea of where the falls are, and the only reason WikiMapia has them is because I added them. I figured out the location with the slick USGS Topo maps at BackCountryMaps. The USGS maps indicate the falls are at "roughly" 45.57088383381129 latitude, -122.14350700378418 longitude. (I don't know how many of those digits are actually significant.) Before anyone complains, yes, the box on the map includes the parking lot, and the lower cascade, but the main falls are just outside the box. I fat-fingered the box when I drew it and now I can't figure out how to resize the damn thing.

So here's essentially all the useful info I found on the net about Dalton Falls, and there isn't much of it:

>

• The page about Dalton Falls from the Northwest Waterfall Survey is the best source of info I've run across. I'd never even heard of them before running across this page.
• Here's a fantastic photo of the falls. The same photographer has a large collection of nice waterfall photos here. I know I tend to apologize for the quality of photos here a lot. Sometimes I'm just being modest and I'm secretly kind of proud of them. But this time I really do have to apologize. How about we all agree today's photos serve a purely documentary purpose, since they aren't very artistic, or even all that visually interesting. And this is after going over them with GIMP, trying to mitigate various exposure and color issues and not always succeeding. You'd think it'd be really hard to take a third-rate photo of a frozen waterfall. In my defense, I'm pretty sure there was shivering involved. Taking a nice photo is great, but taking a mediocre photo really fast and getting back inside the warm toasty car is even better, or at least I was quite certain it was at the time.
• A great page about the Gorge, which includes pics of some "unnamed seasonal waterfalls" in the Gorge. I think some of them are of Dalton Falls, or at least of the place I've rightly or wrongly concluded is Dalton Falls. Others are of Mist Falls, and the falls near the Vista House (which I've seen called "Crown Point Falls" before -- here for example -- although I think it's an unofficial name.)
• The falls get a quick mention in this excerpt from the 1954 book History of Wasco County, Oregon, by William H. McNeal. McNeal raves on and on about the Gorge.
  
  

  
  SHEPHERD'S DELL [sic] was called "the playground of the fairies!" Bridal Veil Falls has no comparison! Coopey and Dalton Falls would be outstanding in any place as would Eagle's Rest! Waukeena Falls and Multnomah Falls are internationally known! Simon Benson gave them to the state as a park! Multnomah Falls is called "the Queen of all American cataracts;" its drop is 870 feet! Some say, "its too beautiful to be real," others say, "a dream garden falls".
  

• OregonWaterfalls.net has a mislabelled photo that's actually of nearby Mist Falls. I'm sure it's Mist Falls, because I've been there, and this is what it looks like. The confusion is understandable, since both falls are very, very obscure, and are just down the road from one another.

There's a gravel parking area at the falls. There's no sign saying what the parking is for, so in the summer you tend to get curious people stopping to look around and getting confused. When the falls aren't running you have some high mossy cliffs next to the scenic highway and that's about it. In my Mist Falls piece, I mentioned there was a larger parking lot a short distance west of the tiny one at Mist Falls, and I didn't know what it was for at the time. Then I saw the Waterfalls Northwest piece, and went back through the archives and found a few instances where I took pics of the falls (I think) without knowing they had a name. Or at least, looking back, I'm pretty sure I took the photos in the general vicinity of Dalton Falls. It's been a while, and I could be wrong in a couple of cases. They basically look right, though, so if I'm wrong, I'm not all that wrong.

Getting there is like getting to Mist Falls. If you're going east and get to Wahkeena Falls (or Mist Falls for that matter, if you can recognize it), you've gone too far east. If you're going west and see the Angels Rest trailhead parking lot, you're too far east. There's some sort of silver box containing railroad equipment at the parking lot, across the street from where the falls are. I don't know how common these boxes are, there may be others all over as far as I know -- so regard this as a necessary but not sufficient condition for finding the place. I'm afraid I didn't get a pic of the parking lot this time, but you might not need one. Either the falls are flowing, in which case you ought to be able to see 'em from the road, or they aren't flowing, in which case there's really no reason to stop at all, that I'm aware of.

As far as I know, the parking lot only gets you access to the base of the falls, which is practically right next to the road. I haven't heard of of any trails going further uphill. If they exist they'd have to be quite steep and thrilling, since you'd likely be hiking them in the winter or spring while the falls are flowing.

Updated 1/9/2021: A couple of addenda to this very old post:

• As I mentioned in a nearly-as-old post in 2008, Dalton Falls is also right next to the old highway's milepost 31 (the post includes a photo of the falls and the milepost, so there's no mistaking it.). So that ought to be a more specific clue than the ones I mentioned above.
• The Northwest Waterfall Survey page I mentioned earlier (link updated) now explains that the name "Dalton Falls" seems to have originally been applied to a different waterfall on the creek immediately east of Angels Rest, which has since picked up the unofficial name "Foxglove Falls", named after a couple of nearby trails. One possible clue in favor of this theory is that the alluvial fan from that creek extends out into the Columbia as Dalton Point, which we visited back in 2018.
• Recreating the HCRH expands on that discussion at length and proposes calling the falls shown in this post "New Dalton Falls".
• A March 2020 WyEast Blog post digs even further into this situation, and proposes names for all the other seasonal falls between Angels Rest and Wahkeena Falls (with included aerial photos of most of them), I guess on the theory that names don't hop around as much if there isn't a vacuum that seems to need filling. The author keeps Dalton Falls on the present-day creek, but splits it into two, Dalton Falls being the tall falls you can see from a distance, and Lower Dalton Falls being the shorter one right up next to the old highway.
• Per the map from the previous item, I think the creek that's home to "Cordial Falls" (the next one west of Dalton) is the same one ODOT called "Mosquito Springs Creek" in a recent press release about a landslide. And west of there by a watershed or two, I think one of the more minor spots he just called "Falls" may be the canyoneering location known as "Devil's Whisper".
• Complicating matters slightly more, there is actually an officially-named Dalton Creek nearby, but it's a minor tributary of Young Creek, which then flows northwest and forms the falls at Shepperds Dell. The USGS coordinates for the creek are due south of the east-of-Angels-Rest creek, so my personal theory is that a data entry error may have crept into the USGS database, either for the 1986 database entry or the 1964 state map it's based on. Just changing the latitude of the official 'source' coordinates from 45.525N to 45.565N moves that point to almost right on the rim of the watershed for that creek. On the other hand, the mysterious "W. Dalton" who's believed to be the namesake of all these places might have been enough of a local bigwig at the time that several unconnected places were named for him or her.
• The naming situation is much clearer for the rocky overhang the falls go over, as it turns out this is a popular local rock climbing spot known as "The Rat Cave". So if you can't find the milepost for whatever reason, like maybe someone stole it to sell on eBay or something, but you do see the overhang, and there's climbing hardware attached to the underside of the overhang (like in this OregonHikers thread), that could be yet another a clue that you're in the right place.