quest, infrared

various fountains, infrared

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How to walk the Marquam Bridge, or part of it, and hopefully not die

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If you read this humble blog semi-regularly, you might've noticed I keep inflicting this goofy bridge-walking project on you. I've already done one post about the Marquam Bridge, but it didn't involve any footwork, so I couldn't really count it as "done", because them's the rules. The Marquam carries I-5 over the Willamette, and it's normally a vehicles-only bridge except for one Sunday morning each year when they close it for the Portland Bridge Pedal. I didn't quite do last year's event, and I almost didn't do this one either. As I explain rather relentlessly here, I'm not much of a joiner, and I don't usually go for collective tribal undertakings like this. But I had a project to complete, and I figured I could use it (or abuse it) for my own ends.

In my St. Johns Bridge post, about a year ago, I said, and I quote:

This whole bridge series is kind of a silly idea, the more I think about it. Just a few days before my incredible St. Johns adventure, the bridge was part of the huge Portland Bridge Pedal, in which tens of thousands of people biked or walked across it and most of the other bridges around town. Which rather puts a damper on my usual shtick about how weird and unusual it is to walk across the bridge. I actually considered signing up for the non-pedaling version of the bridge pedal, for the unusual opportunity to walk across the Fremont & Marquam, presumably without dying, but I didn't get to it. As I've mentioned before, I'm not much of a joiner, really, and I don't usually go for big group activities like that. Plus it involves getting up wayyy too early on a Sunday morning, which is another thing I'm not real big on. So maybe next year, or not.

This year I signed up for the non-pedaling version. And yes, the whole project is still kind of a silly idea, and no, I'm quite certain I don't want to know how many bridge posts I've done since I said that the first time. For those who haven't been following the score on the ongoing bridge project, which would be basically all of you, I expect, I've already covered all the other Willamette bridges, so I was really only interested in the Fremont and the Marquam, the two that aren't open to foot traffic any other time.

The one complication with the non-pedaling version is that the Marquam wasn't on the official menu. The plan was strictly across the Fremont, and back across the Steel, and the return leg didn't really interest me. I live and work downtown, I can pop across the Steel anytime I want. So when the crowd got to the Steel, I turned aside and moseyed down the Esplanade instead. I figured that to check off the Marquam I'd have to improvise a little. So I wandered down to the Central Eastside exit ramp where riders were getting off the bridge, put the big lens on the camera, and just walked up the bridge the "wrong" way like I was supposed to be there and knew what I was doing. Nobody batted an eye. Carrying a fancy-looking camera is a fantastic way to bluff your way into stuff. It's right up there with wearing a suit -- although the two aren't interchangeable. Wandering up onto the Marquam in serious business attire would get you a lot of weird looks, I expect.

The one downside is that I got there about the time they were trying to wrap things up. I was part of the way across when a couple of cop cars drove by, making sure everyone was either off or heading toward the exit. I figured that was a good time to turn around, although they didn't actually say anything to me. Possibly they too assumed I was supposed to be there. Possibly they figured I had a walkie talkie and would know when they were about to open the thing back up to cars and semis and whatever. Maybe I could've kept going, or at least stayed until someone actually shooed me off the bridge, but that wasn't really the point. I took some unusual photos of the bridge, and from the bridge, that I couldn't have taken any other way, and I think I basically got the flavor of the thing, if you can call it that. So I'm going to go ahead and declare Mission Accomplished on this baby. Having a vast swath of the bridge all to myself for a few minutes, that was an unexpected and rather eerie bonus. I've seen more than my share of post-apocalyptic B movies. An empty freeway is usually a sign that a zombie apocalypse is underway. Or if not that, the there's been a global nuclear war, and gangs of maniacal Australian punk rocker / biker types are fighting over the ruins. Looking at the Marquam, both of these seem entirely plausible. The best outcome would be if the punks and zombies showed up at the same time and decided to fight it out, giving you an opportunity to slip away unnoticed.

flowerslide

I only just realized you can embed Flickr slideshows here, not just individual photos. Apparently this feature has been available, officially, for almost a year now, and I didn't notice until today. This ought to come in handy, since copying & pasting lots of photo links quickly becomes an annoying chore.

So here's a slideshow as a quick experiment, showing everything I've tagged with "flowers" over the years. That comes to some 808 photos at the time I'm posting this, so it should be good for hours of entertainment, unlike most things I post here...

Chimney Park expedition

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Today's adventure takes us north again, to remote little Chimney Park, just off Columbia Boulevard up toward the top end of North Portland. This is pretty much the far edge, or slightly past the far edge of "inhabited" North Portland; everything north of here on the peninsula is either industrial or wetland, and just across Columbia Boulevard is the former site of, well, I'll get to that in a moment.



I've been meaning to do a post about this park for a while now, because the place a fairly curious history. Or more precisely, the weird building in the middle of the park has a fairly curious history. The sign out front calls it the Stanley Parr Archives Center. Until next year, this remote, obscure location is home to the city government's central archives. It's a fairly sturdy-looking building, but surprisingly it wasn't built for this purpose. Some years ago, right across Columbia Boulevard was the old St. Johns Landfill, and the archives building was once the city garbage incinerator. Seriously. I am not making this up. Ironic! The jokes basically write themselves. Insert yours here, if you like.



Up until a few years ago, the building used to have a tall chimney (hence the name of the park) left over from its career as an incinerator. Eventually the powers that be decided the thing wasn't safe and tore it down. So no actual chimney in Chimney Park. Doubly ironic! Or at least kind of peculiar, or something.

A while back the Tribune ran a Stumptown Stumper explaining the name, so naturally they included a photo with the old chimney, if you're curious what it looked like. The book Vanishing Portland includes an aerial photo of the incinerator, circa 1940.

The Center for Columbia River History has a few pages about the history of the landfill, starting here. And here's an Oregon DEQ page about the park, detailing what they know about chemical contaminants at the site, presumably holdovers from the incinerator days. If I'm reading it correctly, it sounds as though the area really hasn't been tested that extensively. Which is surprising considering the whole incinerator thing. Maybe people figured it was better not to know. Knowing this sort of thing tends to get very expensive.



The place originally got on my radar for a separate and unrelated reason, though. Many maps of Portland show the park being home to something called the "Portland Public Astronomy Center". I'd never heard anything else about the place other than seeing it on maps, so naturally I was curious. It seems that back in the 70's there was a serious proposal to put telescopes here for public use, but it never actually happened. So it's curious that it continues to show up on new maps all these decades later.

Haven't been able to find out very much about this "public astronomy center" thing, which I guess is understandable since it never actually existed. I did run across a 2004 Rose City Astronomers newsletter that includes an obit for a guy who spearheaded the effort. And references to two documents the city has about the proposal -- the documents aren't online, but they are available in... wait for it... the city archives. Ironic!



I probably ought to mention the one thing that actually brings visitors to the park, the one thing that interests the general (i.e. non-geeky, non-pedantic) public, which is that much of the park is a designated off-leash dog area. I'm not really into the whole large dog thing, myself, but I understand that a lot of people are, so I figured I ought to mention it. The city has a PDF map of the off-leash area, and there are pages about it at Portland Pooch and BringFido, plus a post on Javafoto. So there you have it.



I mentioned earlier that the archives are moving soon. In fact they'll be moving downtown to PSU next year some time. While we're on the subject, which we sort of are, here's a rather fascinating interview with the City Archivist, and a photo inside the archives with an assistant archivist.

No word yet on what's next for the building after the archives hit the road. This being Portland, the obvious answer -- to the point of being a cliche -- is to turn it into a McMenamins. Which isn't a terrible idea, although considering it's in the middle of an off-leash dog area, maybe a Lucky Lab would be more appropriate (plus I like their beer better). Mmmmm..... beeeeeer.....

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But wait, there's more! While I was meandering around taking the photos you see above, I realized that the lawn was full of dandelions, and I thought I'd try to take some ultraviolet photos of them. They didn't really turn out all that well, and I didn't think they merited a post of their own. But I figured I might as well tack a couple onto the end here. Consider them an intermediate result in an ongoing effort to maybe-someday get a result I'm happy with. As for what they're supposed to look like, check out here and here. Clearly, I have a way to go yet. I suspect I may have to abandon any notion of doing this without a tripod, for starters.

inframisc.

Some recent experiments with "color infrared". Which involves taking a regular IR photo in a color mode rather than the usual monochrome, which gives you an all-red photo, not that interesting at this point. Step 2 is to have GIMP try to auto-correct exposure and white balance, which leads to the lilac-colored trees and orange sky you see here. The fact that the colors are consistently this way suggests there's some physical basis behind the color differences (although not the colors themselves, obviously), but I have no idea what that might be. Step 3 is additional tweaking to exposure, color saturation, etc., as needed, until it looks nice. Or at least until you feel you've had some manual input into the process, I guess.

blue heron, laurelhurst pond