double overlook

A few more photos from the eastern Columbia Gorge. First a few from the Rowena overlook, just across the street from the Tom McCall Preserve.

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And a few from the Memaloose overlook, a few miles further west.

The McCall Preserve at Rowena

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A few photos from the Nature Conservancy's Tom McCall Preserve at Rowena, out in the east end of the Columbia Gorge. This may be my favorite spot in the Gorge. It may be one of my favorite spots, period, but explaining why is difficult. I don't think I've ever convinced anyone. I could go on about the wind in the grass, sheer basalt cliffs, and so forth, but most of eastern Oregon is basically like that. There's something else I can't put my finger on. I don't mean that in a mystical mumbo-jumbo sense. It just means it's something I haven't figured out just yet. If it comes to me, I'll let you know.

So for now I'll proceed under the assumption I haven't convinced you. And really I'm not sure I want to convince too many people about the place. Present company excepted, of course. Feel free to visit, O Gentle Reader(s), but don't tell anyone else about it. They'll all show up at once and ruin the silence and desolation. They'll probably stand around with their cellphones yakking to their brokers, or whine that there's no Starbucks nearby, or drive all over everything in their gigantic SUVs, or demand guardrails for the protection of small children and large dogs. They'll ruin everything. In short, it's best to take a Tom McCall sort of attitude about the place.

So the preserve is a desert plateau high above the Columbia River, pretty much the last place you'd expect to find a wetland area. But the preserve hosts a couple of small ponds, with frogs, lilypads, trees, the whole works. You can see one of them in the top photo, right above the cliff. Here are a few closeups of one, including a couple of infrared pics.

One of the many trails around the plateau. Here's a decent page about hiking the area, although I'm not sure that's necessary. It's hard to get lost here, being mostly flat and treeless. But if you do, the plateau's surrounded by cliffs on three sides, roughly, so there's only one way on or off. In the worst case, you could just find any cliff and do a wall follower algorithm and you'll get back to the entrance eventually, probably.

When you do see people discussing the McCall Preserve, it's often about spring wildflowers. I've never actually visited when the plateau was in bloom; there were a few tiny blue ones being whipped around in the wind, but that was it. I've seen some photos, though, and I think I may have to go check the place out in April or so. A few good wildflower galleries can be found here, here, and here.

Looking southwest, with the tip of Mt. Hood in the distance.

The road past the preserve is an eastern bit of the old Gorge Highway, and it crosses over a narrow part of the Rowena Dell on another of those great, photogenic bridges they built back then. I don't want to sound like one of those old coots who insist everything was better back in the Good Old Days, because that would be stupid. I'm sure modern bridges are built to a high standard of technical excellence and so forth. They just aren't as photogenic, generally speaking.

Disk #4

Here are a few photos of Disk #4, a small and unassuming sculpture tucked away in a corner of NE Portland's Peninsula Park, just north of the rose garden. I can't find anything on the net about this beastie, so the plaque is all I know about it:

I don't have any strong feelings about the sculpture itself, although it has a number of attributes I admire in public art: It's relatively small, inoffensive, not in anyone's way, and the Feds paid for it instead of local taxpayers, courtesy of the Comprehensive Employment & Training Act, or CETA. From what I've heard, CETA was a large and basically unsupervised pot of money with no strings attached, and you could get funded for just about anything if you had a good grant writer. I kind of miss those 70's-era warm-n-fuzzy, overly generous government programs; now it's just bluenosed control-freak Calvinism all across the political spectrum, and your only choice these days is whether you want a red nanny state or a blue one. Feh.

During the Reagan years, CETA was replaced by something called the Job Training Partnership Act, authored by the one and only Senator J. Danforth Quayle. Which is really all you need to know about that.

In any case, I didn't stop and dally at Disk #4 because of its overall aesthetic merits, or lack thereof. Overall, I don't really have a strong opinion about it one way or the other. But like most bronze sculptures, it has an interesting surface texture. The day I took these was one of the summer's many bright overcast days, with that ugly blue-grey light you generally can't do anything with, photo-wise. That light made for some interesting reflections off the warm bronze of the sculpture, though. I think this is the first time that light's been useful for anything. And even then, it's only just useful, I wouldn't call it great or anything. I'd meant to do a post about the park as a whole, but these are the only photos I got that didn't totally suck. Seriously. Not even the roses came out ok. Bloody weather.

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Stonehenge (III) : Mt. Hood

Mt. Hood as seen from Stonehenge. Hence the title.

Stonehenge (II) : B+W

More Stonhenge pics, this time in glorious black-n-white. It's a good place to look for interesting shadows, and when you're doing that, color is not an asset.

(Okayyy, fine, before anybody gets all pedantic about it, I do realize that a b+w photo from a digital camera is actually a desaturated color photo, using a Bayer filter and interpolation and all that fun stuff. Sheesh. Get a life.)

Stonehenge (I)

A few photos from Stonehenge, way out in the east end of the Columbia Gorge near the Maryhill Museum. I took these way back in June, right around the summer solstice, so I was kind of expecting there'd be hippies or something. No luck with that, just a few random yokels and obese tourists.

This Stonehenge was built as a World War I memorial. I'd heard that all the time, but I never understood the connection until recently. Sam Hill, the guy who built the thing, was a Quaker and a pacifist. At the time, some archaeologists claimed the original Stonehenge had been a place of human sacrifice, so Hill created this replica to point out that "humanity is still being sacrificed to the god of war." Fair enough, except that the archaeologists were wrong, or at least contemporary archeologists don't believe the place was used that way. Which kind of invalidates the entire premise of the memorial. Oops. Still, the guy's heart was in the right place... I think. On the "sacrificial altar" there's a plaque which reads:

"To the memory of the soldiers and sailors of Klickitat County who gave their lives in defense of their country ... in the hope that others inspired by the example of their valor and their heroism may share in that love of liberty and burn with that fire of patriotism which death alone can quench."

Yikes! That doesn't sound very pacifistic, if you ask me, unless it's meant in the Stephen Colbert sense. And I tend to doubt that. The rural Northwesterners of 1931 weren't known for their subtle sense of irony. So I imagine the plaque was either a misfire, or it was someone else's idea.

assorted seasonal indicators

Fall foliage, Ankeny Park (& vicinity), downtown Portland.




A rainbow from the big storm on Saturday. It wasn't a great rainbow, so I tweaked the photo in GIMP to enhance the colors a bit. I tried to get a pic of the infrared part of the rainbow too, but that just didn't come out at all. Oh, well.




Snow on SW 8th, next to Ankeny Park & near Tugboat Brewing. It hasn't snowed here yet; a nearby snowboard shop brought it in for some kind of event on Saturday, and it's still melting a few days later.






A couple of your basic Leaves Turning Color photos.




If it's fall, it's time for a new crop of college students. Many of them honestly believe they invented the old detergent-in-the-fountain trick.




My neighborhood is full of weird little beetles around this time every year. They don't seem to do anything, they just sit around motionless for a while and eventually disappear when the weather gets really cold. I'm not sure what the point is, really, but right now they're everywhere.