Ruckel Creek Falls expedition

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Today's adventure takes us out to obscure Ruckel Creek Falls in the Columbia River Gorge. Despite its obscurity it's quite easy to get to, once you know how. Ruckel Creek is far overshadowed by Eagle Creek and its many waterfalls just to the west, and this waterfall is really not all that big by Gorge standards. So it's overlooked, but not really unfairly overlooked. On the other hand, if you've been to all the better known waterfalls in the area and you're in the mood to track down one you've never seen before, this is one of the easier ones to do. And then you can tell people about the obscure waterfall you found and thus obtain valuable street cred, if you're into that.

The easiest way to get there is to park at Eagle Creek and walk east. There are two ways to do this: There's a flat asphalt bike path that begins next to the fish hatchery, which runs right next to I-84 for part of its length. The path is actually a repurposed & repaved segment of the old Gorge Highway, including the original bridge over Ruckel Creek circa 1914 or so. The path continues on to the town of Cascade Locks. So don't be totally surprised if you come across joggers or kids on bikes. Actually you could park in Cascade Locks and walk from there. That way would be a couple of miles longer and kind of monotonous most of the way, but you wouldn't need to buy a Forest Service day pass to park, and you could grab an ice cream cone at the East Wind on the way back. But I digress.

There's also a trail that winds around along the edge of the Eagle Creek campground for a bit before dumping you out on the aforementioned bike path. If you want this to feel a little more like a real hike, by all means take the trail, but it's really not all that scenic. If you're just trying to get to the waterfall, you might as well just take the bike path the whole way.

Finding the falls from the path ought to be easy, but for some reason there are no signs for the falls, and there's no official trail to the base. So I'm going to reveeal the semi-super, semi-secret trick for finding the falls.

First, as you're walking along the path, you'll come across a grassy meadow. If you come to the bridge over Ruckel Creek, you've gone too far. You can look down from the bridge and see the top of the falls, but to get to the base you'll need to backtrack a little. In any case, you're looking for an unexplained & unmarked turnout off the path that looks like this:

The above photo is pointing west, just past the turnout. The turnout is where you leave the path and go cross country for a bit. Which sounds vastly more adventurous than it really is. You just need to walk to the far end of the meadow until you come to the edge of the forest. There's no real trailhead here, but if you can find a spot that looks like the next photo, you've found one of the unofficial trails. There may be other entrances, and this one may not look the same when you visit.

Your best bet is to bring a GPS gadget along. You're looking for something in the vicinity of GPS coordinates 45.644810, -121.919522 (i.e. the green arrow on the embedded map). This is the location of the trail, not the location of the waterfall itself.

If you can find the sorta-trailhead, just follow the trail downhill from there. If you can't find it, don't worry. Once you're in the woods you ought to be able to hear the falls, so just walk toward the sound. The falls are going to be downhill and should be on your right. If you find the creek first, just follow it upstream. I don't have exact coordinates for the waterfall itself as I couldn't get a GPS fix there, but it really shouldn't be hard to find.

So there you are, in front of Ruckel Creek Falls in all its glory. If you're up for a real challenge, it seems this is not the only waterfall on Ruckel Creek. There are a number of others (the exact count varies) and several are significantly taller than this one. But getting to them involves bushwhacking through rough terrain. Which I may or may not get around to at some future date.

All of these other waterfalls are even more obscure than the one we're visiting here, and there's a lack of agreement on what their names ought to be. In particular, it's not clear whether this one is "Lower Ruckel Creek Falls", or whether that name applies to one further upstream leaving this one without a proper name. But I've also seen this one called simply "Ruckel Creek Falls". I'm going to go with that in the name of simplicity.

Elsewhere on the interwebs, you can find more info about the falls at Ash Creek Images and
Waterfalls Northwest, and lots of info about all the waterfalls on Ruckel Creek at Oregon Hikers Field Guide.

reflected, congress center

More photos of buildings reflected in other buildings. This time the building doing the reflecting is downtown Portland's shiny but otherwise forgettable Congress Center tower. It's your standard-issue generic late 70s International Style office tower. In fact it's one of the tallest buildings in town, but quite honestly I'd never paid any attention at all to it until just now. It could be anywhere in the world, but unfortunately it ended up here.

I think this building illustrates what annoys the public so much about architects. They speak in the arcane jargon of their field, loudly declare each other (and themselves) the biggest geniuses in history and revolutionaries to boot, and then they turn around and build stuff like this. At least it's extremely shiny, so there's that. I suppose the shininess is to protect office workers from the excessive sunshine they'd be getting if the Congress Center had landed in Phoenix or Houston or Atlanta instead of here. Anyway, if you want to know more about it, there's more info at Emporis and SkyScraperPage.com.



There's one small distinguishing detail down at street level, a little Beaux Arts-ish gazebo over the stairs to a subterranean fondue parlor. The gazebo is a recycled bit of the previous building on the site, the historic Congress Hotel. Yes, go ahead and giggle at the name. I'm giggling too. We're all twelve years old here at this humble blog. Anyway, the link goes to an interesting piece at Portland Architecture about the old building. One commenter says of it "The stories the old-time reporters and copy editors would tell about it, though! You'd think half the illegitimate kids in Puddletown started with a gleam in someone's eye in the Congress bar.". So I'd imagine we're not the first to ever giggle like twelve year olds at the name.



The name is not explained in the article, but I have a theory. Or a notion, at any rate. There was once a Congress Hotel in Chicago as well, and like the Portland one it sported a restaurant called the Pompeiian Room. It could be a pure coincidence, but it's not completely absurd to wonder if the two were connected somehow, whether by ownership or by imitation. Unlike the one in Portland, the Chicago hotel still exists, as the (non-Pompeiian) Congress Plaza Hotel. Edna Ferber's 1917 short story "The Gay Old Dog" mentions the Chicago hotel while describing the tale's protagonist:

He bought a car. Naturally. A glittering affair; in color a bright blue, with pale-blue leather straps and a great deal of gold fittings, and special tires. Eva said it was the kind of thing a chorus girl would use, rather than an elderly businessman. You saw him driving about in it, red-faced and rather awkward at the wheel. You saw him, too, in the Pompeian Room at the Congress Hotel of a Saturday afternoon when roving-eyed matrons in mink coats are wont to congregate to sip pale-amber drinks. Actors grew to recognize the semibald head and the shining, round, good- natured face looming out at them from the dim well of the theater, and sometimes, in a musical show, they directed a quip at him, and he liked it. He could pick out the critics as they came down the aisle, and even had a nodding acquaintance with two of them.

And, in any case, the name of the Chicago hotel is no mystery at all, as it's bordered to the north by Congress Parkway. So if my notion is correct, the Congress Center is named, indirectly, after a street in downtown Chicago.

Why I didn't go for a birthday swim...

Box jellies! The authorities don't actually forbid you from going in the ocean when the jellies are swarming, but if you get stung I suspect they roll their eyes and make fun of you (the clueless tourist) for ignoring all the warning signs. I didn't chance it. I've gone mumble-mumble years without being stung by a single jellyfish, and I don't feel I'm missing out on an essential life experience here.

More about box jellies from the Hawaiian Lifeguard Association and the University of Hawaii's Pacific Cnidaria Research Lab.

Happy Malasada Day!

A few photos of the malasadas we had in Honolulu. A malasada is a traditional Portuguese-Hawaiian deep fried pastry, similar to a donut without a hole. Leonard's Bakery, where we got these from, is sort of the canonical choice for malasadas, and it was a short walk from our hotel.



I'm posting the photos now because apparently it's Fat Tuesday today, or "Malasada Day" as it's known in Hawaii. The traditional idea, as I understand it, is that you're supposed to use up all your remaining butter and eggs and oil and so forth before Lent, and that means a big party with lots of tasty deep fried goodness, and then everyone wakes up the next day and it's 40 days of sackcloth and ashes and self denial and silly religious nonsense. The modern-day idea is that the next morning everyone wakes up with empty coral pink malasada boxes and it's time to go get more.



People often say Hawaii is generally a few years behind the mainland when it comes to trends and so forth. I don't know if that's generally true or not, but I did notice that nobody seemed to be selling bacon-wrapped malasadas. I'm quite certain that would be a license to print money, so maybe the "add bacon to everything" trend simply hasn't arrived in Hawaii yet. It's the only plausible explanation I can think of.

crocus buds (white)

crocus buds (orange)

crocus buds (purple)

More photos from the pot of crocuses out on the balcony. They're starting to come up in different colors now, so I've got a bit more variety to work with. This time we've got a bit of extension tube + vintage lens macro business. I probably ought to have included some pocket change or dice or jellybeans or something for scale so you can see just how tiny these flowers are. But that always makes for a weird composition, plus it just didn't occur to me at the time that scale would be an issue. So you'll have to take my word for it that these flowers are not very big. Or just go find some crocuses budding out and see for yourself. Or whatever.

Bull Run Powerhouse

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Today's adventure takes us back to the Bull Run River, last seen in our visit to the Bull Run River Bridge. I made the trek out to this old bridge because it was built with recycled parts of the original Burnside Bridge. And now this post will help explain why, a century ago, the city of Portland saw a need for a bridge way out here in the middle of nowhere. The key is this derelict building just downstream from the bridge. This is the historic Bull Run Powerhouse, a remnant of PGE's now-defunct Bull Run Hydroelectric Project. You might note there's no actual dam here; the dam was on an entirely different river, and water from it was piped underground to the powerhouse here. Meanwhile much of the Bull Run River's original water was, and still is, diverted away to be Portland's drinking water supply. Give solid practical reasons all you like, but I'm still going to believe civil engineers were just showing off when they designed that arrangement.

The photoset would probably be far more exciting if I'd managed to get inside somehow, but I didn't. I wasn't quite interested enough to try sneaking past the barbed wire fence around the place and the security cameras that might still be working. Plus it's been a while since my last tetanus shot. Plus I was there to see the bridge, and the powerhouse

What to do with the building? I haven't seen anyone propose this, but I can't possibly be the first person to see this building and think "McMenamins". They've become the default answer for preserving historic buildings, particularly weird and unwieldy ones. And they've already done at least one other power plant somewhere on their Edgefield campus, so clearly they're the experts on this sort of thing. I mean, beerwise I'd be happier if some other brewery took it over instead. A hotel of the non-brewing variety would be acceptable as well, in a pinch.

This post has been floating around in the drafts folder for a while, primarily because I ended up with a big batch of varied and interesting links to pass along. Taking a pile of raw sources and building a semi-coherent blog post around them is always the hardest part, and I've been procrastinating about that for months and months now. So I think what I'm going to do this time is just sort the links into categories and let you, the Gentle Reader, explore as you see fit.

History

• PDXHistory: "Bull Run - The Town That Time Forgot"
• OpenSpaces: "Going, Going Gone: Reflections on the Retirement of the Bull Run Hydroelectric Project"
• Oregon Historical Society: Bull Run Dam Construction
• PGE's Bull Run Little Sandy Flume Railroad

Preservation

• SaveBullRun.org: SaveBullRun.org
• OregonLive: "98-year-old Bull Run Powerhouse set for preservation"
• OregonLive: "Bull Run River A tour for creatives leads to a new exhibit", in which several painters had a look at the old powerhouse.

Environment

• "The Bull Run River-Reservoir System Model", a paper by a civil engineering professor at Portland State that discusses ways to better manage the old hydroelectric system to improve salmon habitat short of removing dams. Which is kind of a moot point now.
• PGE: Salmon and Steelhead Runs and Related Events on the Sandy River Basin — A Historical Perspective
• Oregon Magazine: "The Old 'Bull' of Bull Run", profiling a longtime Bull Run conservation activist.
• Daily Journal of Commerce: "Bull Run dam removal poses engineering challenges"

Photos

• Wikimedia photo showing the powerhouse from the bridge.
• two photos of the river, much better than the ones you see here.

Other

• USGS: "Virtual Inspection of Cableway, Bull Run River near Bull Run, OR"