Skidmore Fountain

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Here are a few photos of Skidmore Fountain, yet another of our local icons here in Portland. Like most local icons, the fountain has a quirky legend about it. As the story goes, when the fountain went in, Henry Weinhard offered to run a pipe down from his brewery, so the fountain could run with beer instead of water. The city fathers turned him down, to our eternal sorrow.

That's the story, at least. I've long suspected it was a publicity stunt, not a serious proposal to actually do it. I mean, we're talking a half-mile long, unrefrigerated, underground beer line. There's no way you could keep the thing sanitized properly. Sure, you could do a fountain full of beer, but it'd be sour, flat, spoiled, unpalatable beer. But then, maybe people's quality standards were lower at the time. Maybe it came out of the brewery already sour and flat, for all we know.

When the fountain was renovated a few years ago, the powers that be got everyone's hopes up briefly, implying that the fountain might run with beer for real for the grand reopening. Well, it turned out that, like the original proposal, this was just hyperbole and PR, and they actually gave out free beer next to the fountain. Now, I realize one should never whine about free beer, I mean, it's freakin' free beer, you know? But still, they got people's hopes up and then sort of dashed them, the bastards.

While I've never heard of anyone else doing a beer fountain similar to this, I understand that once upon a time, the historic Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Waikiki sported a pineapple juice fountain. Pineapple juice is very sweet and acidic, so if anything it's probably a lot harder on pipes and plumbing than beer would be. My mother stayed there once back in the 60's, and she insists that they had pineapple juice piped into every room, but I find that kind of hard to believe.

One other thing to point out -- people love this story because the idea of a beer fountain seems patently ridiculous, and everybody gets a nice giggle out of it. But it's not as absurd as you might think. For most of recorded history, up until the advent of chlorine and modern water treatment, it was a lot safer to drink beer than water, especially in cities. Beer can certainly go sour, but it's not going to give you cholera. Water from the local well? That's a roll of the dice every time.

So, well, that's about all I've got. I don't have a lot of photos of the fountain, and they're a bit repetitive, as you might've noticed. For some reason, I have trouble getting a handle on the thing, photo-wise. There've got to be other angles to take, but I always end up with statue, statue, spouting lion, spouting lion. I suppose I just need to slow down and stare at it a bit more, but in that part of town if you stop and stare for too long, someone will come along and want to sell drugs, or buy drugs, or just babble insanely, or try to steal your camera. Officer Friendly might get suspicious and want to search a few body cavities. Or maybe a MAX train will come along and hit you. There are a number of complicating factors, I guess that's what I'm trying to say here.

So mostly I'm not posting this to show off my cool, original photos of the fountain. Mostly I'm posting this as an excuse to talk (and think) about beer.

Mmmmmmm.... beeeerr....

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.

Pics: Bridal Veil Falls

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Since I'm raiding the Flickr archives again, here are a few pics of Bridal Veil Falls, in the Columbia Gorge. I did a post almost exactly a year ago about the scenic river overlook next door to the falls, but I never got around to posting photos of the falls themselves. So here you go.



I keep thinking I ought to go ahead and make another photo foray out to the Gorge and take some nice DSLR-o-licous pics of a few spots, Bridal Veil being one of them. But really, these photos aren't bad, at least as far as handheld photos with a compact digicam go.

Pics: Latourell Falls

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It's time to raid the archives again, it seems. I noticed yesterday that although I had a photoset about Latourell Falls, out in the Columbia Gorge, I'd never actually done a post about the place. It got a cameo in an semi-omnibus waterfall post, but that's all. Since this happens to be one of my favorite Gorge waterfalls, so it's time to rectify that a little.



The one thing I'm not going to attempt here is an exhaustive catalog of everything on the net that concerns Latourell Falls. There's no shortage of it, and you can probably search the net as well as I can (or almost as well -- my Google-fu is the stuff of legend in some quarters). More to the point, I just don't feel like doing it, so I'm not going to. It's right on the Gorge Highway, the first waterfall you encounter on your way out from Portland. Go see it for yourself, if you're that interested. Sheesh.



One minor pedantic bit: The falls are in Guy W. Talbot State Park, technically, although if you told people you were going to Talbot State Park, nobody would have any idea what you're talking about. Next door there's a second state park, George W. Joseph State Natural Area, which is only accessible by trail (hence the "Natural Area" bit). This second park is home to Upper Latourell Falls. It occurs to me that I don't think I've ever actually been to Upper Latourell Falls. I think I've just sort of never gotten around to it. So that may be a new TODO item for whenever the weather improves.

Willamette & Bryant

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So here's another of those little triangular nano-parklike bits I've been going on about lately, this time up in North Portland where Willamette Blvd., Bryant St., and Wabash Avenue meet up. You might be wondering why I keep doing this. I often wonder the same thing, quite honestly. I think it's because of the pure absurdity of the undertaking. Driving across town to track down one deservedly obscure non-place after another, taking a bunch of really mundane photos while I'm at it. Followed by a bit of research on the interwebs, mostly to verify that there's nothing much on the interwebs about the place, followed by writing about it as if it was a serious, legitimate topic, and voila, a new blog post is born. It amuses me, I guess.


This particular spot seems to be officially known as "N. Willamette & Bryant", as that's the name it appears under on various official maps of the city. I suppose that's really more of a description than a name, but hey. It's basically a leftover bit where the city's street grid collides awkwardly with the bluffs above the river. This parcel was just a little too small to build on, so it ended up as a ward of the state instead.

Or that's my theory, in case anyone cares. There's nothing much on the net about the place. For all I know, somebody donated it for the site of a huge equestrian statue of some long-forgotten pioneer-era politician. But then the funds were embezzled, and then a meddling historian uncovered the scandalous secret diaries, and to make a long story short, this little park is all that remains of the once-grand project. That's one (remote) possibility, anyway. Feel free to come up with your own alternate theory, if you like.

So the, uh, park is home to a few trees and shrubs, and TriMet stop #6260. The triangle does show up as a park on their map of the area.

The big feature here, though, is the view (or it would be, if it was sunny, which it wasn't when I visited). Across Willamette Boulevard, the bluffs drop sharply and (in theory) there's a nice view of Swan Island, the river, and the West Hills. The bluffs, incidentally, are also in public ownership, and seem to bear the official designation "Bluffs above Swan Island". Which again is more of a description than a name. That is, the chunk of public land is called that; the bluff itself is "Waud Bluff", as a commenter noted below. I guess the bluffs would be another spot worth visiting, if only I was a mountain goat or something. Which I'm not, as it turns out.

dreamer in the rain

Woods Memorial Natural Area

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Photos from a brief jaunt to Woods Memorial Natural Area, one of several large, but little-known, nature parks scattered around the hilly southwestern corner of Portland.

Woods Memorial is your basic forested canyon type of place. There's a bunch of these in town, and they're all basically variations on the same theme, so you'll have to forgive me if none of the photos show anything particularly unique to this one park. Which is not to say there's anything wrong with it; it's quite nice actually, and I'm sure it's nicer when the weather's better.

The cynic in me is quite certain that the real reason we have all these woody ravine parks around town is that the city always ends up with all the unbuildable bits nobody else wants. This particular park was donated, sure, but it's possible that happened after someone realized it was unbuildable and they might as well get a tax writeoff for it. I don't really know. The park sure looks unbuildable, at least.

The park's crisscrossed with trails heading off in all directions, so you could easily get lost if you don't have a map or know your way around. They seemed to be just out of maps on the day I visited, and I didn't know my way around, and I had a meeting at 10:30 and couldn't afford to get lost (as fun as that can be at times), so I didn't wander quite as far as I otherwise would've liked to. That might've been for the best, though, as it was also pretty cold that morning, and numb fingers tend to drop cameras, which would be Very Very Bad. Although it's also true that the shiny new Canon 50D is out now, and it offers a number of compelling technological advances over my old (as in year-old) 40D. So, you know, if I was somehow forced to buy a replacement, it wouldn't be all bad.

The city's vegetation survey page rates much of the place as having "Poor" ecological health, with a few areas rating "Fair" and others coming in as "Severely Degraded" (I'm not sure whether that's better or worse than "Poor"). And here's a recent invasive species report about ivy in the park. Although it hasn't completely taken the place over like it has in other areas around town, like Marquam Nature Park for example.

The US Fish & Wildlife Service has a doc about restoration efforts here that occurred back in the 90's. And I've come across at least one report of an elk sighting here. So I imagine the place can't be too degraded, if you get elk showing up now and then. Unless maybe they come to eat the ivy. I'm not really sure how that works.

Elsewhere on the interwebs:

• ExplorePDX has a trail map and a couple of pages on trail construction, with a few photos. The park also gets a mention in the site's "Jay Walk #5" through the surrounding neighborhood. If you ever think I tend to get a bit obsessive and pedantic at times here, I suggest you go to ExplorePDX and check out the pages on map errors. I always come away from that feeling that I'm relatively normal and well-adjusted in comparison, although I'm also pleased that someone's doing this, and I can see how one could easily get sucked in to that sort of undertaking. It's a slippery slope, I tell you.
• An old 1987 Oregonian article, "City May Have Money Tied Up In Land Holdings, mentions the park as a potentially surplus chunk of land the city could sell to raise money. I don't recall what sort of budgetary straits the city was in back then that would've put this idea in play, but it obviously didn't go far. The parks director at the time is quoted as saying the bureau doesn't have any surplus land, just undeveloped parks. This may explain why they now use the term "Natural Area" instead of "Park" for places like this, to convey the idea that the place has been left "undeveloped" on purpose, so (in theory) nobody at City Hall will get any funny ideas about selling the land to their greedy developer friends. Ideally.
• The park and a few others like it are explored in a post on Around the Sun, "Exploring SW Portland on Foot With Ten Toe Express".
• A cool photo in someone's portfolio on photo.net.

Wilsonville Railroad Bridge

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So here are a few photos of the Wilsonville Railroad Bridge, taken this morning along with the Boone Bridge photos I posted earlier. As you can see, I had a much better view of this one, and the photos kind of suck less, or at least I like to think so.



There's not much to say about it really; there's a Structurae page about it, and what appears to be an unfinished draft Wikipedia page too. The latter has a few more links, including an old photo courtesy of the Wilsonville library. That photo seems to be of a previous bridge on this spot, actually. I'd be happy to share the history of bridges on this spot and so forth, if only I could find it, but I haven't run across it yet. And neither, apparently, has the author of the embryonic Wikipedia page, as a lot of dates and vital stats are just X's for the time being.



There's a (probably unofficial) trail leading up to the railroad tracks, where it ends. All I can figure is that it's for people walking across the bridge. Which I assume you aren't technically supposed to do, similar to the situation at the Lake Oswego RR bridge. I considered it for a moment, just a moment, before chickening out, I mean, coming to my senses, like I usually do. There's even less of a walkway here than there is on the Lake Oswego bridge, and I expect this bridge gets substantially more train traffic. So I walked up and took a quick peek, and then scuttled off to the car. Hey, I saw Stand By Me; I know this is a bad idea.



North of here, this rail line will soon host our fair city's new WES commuter rail train. There's speculation that once the first bit is up and running, they'll want to extend the line further south, possibly even to Salem, so this bridge would have a bit higher profile than it does now (and would be even more risky to cross, too).