Munson Creek Falls

View Larger Map

Today's adventure takes us to Munson Creek Falls, a few miles south of Tillamook where the Coast Range meets dairyland. It's a surprising place to find a 319 foot waterfall, at least if you're accustomed to Columbia Gorge waterfalls.



The falls are a state park, so there's a fairly large and visible sign for the turn off US 101 (which is a left turn if you're heading south from Tillamook). But the road you'll turn onto doesn't look like a road to somewhere you'd want to go. It's paved, at first, but it's quite narrow and is in very poor condition, with ginormous potholes all over the place. There are houses on either side of the road, and as far as you can tell you're just driving around on some random rural road out in dairy country.

(Technically the place is a "state natural site" rather than a "state park". I'm not sure what that's supposed to indicate, but my gut feeling is that it means they aren't going to spend any state money improving the road anytime soon.)



Once you're past the last houses the road turns to gravel, and it looks like you've wandered onto a random Forest Service road in timber country. It's not any wider than the paved portion, and there are a few big potholes here and there, including one in the middle of a bridge (!), but for the most part the gravel part of the road is in better condition than the paved portion. It's effectively a one lane road most of the way, so you need to watch for oncoming traffic. I didn't encounter any log trucks, but it definitely looks like a road where log trucks are a serious possibility, so pay attention.



There are also a couple of intersections to keep an eye out for. The route to the falls is clearly marked (so long as nobody monkeys with the signs), at least. There's no cell service out here to distract you while you're driving (at least if you're a T-Mobile customer like me), so you'd have to work at it a bit to get lost, unless you planned on using Google Maps for directions. If you do manage to get lost somehow, I have no idea where you might end up if you take the wrong turn.



It's a short drive, at least, and pretty soon you'll end up at the parking lot for the falls. From the lot it's an easy 1/4 mile walk to the falls viewpoint. The trail itself is well maintained, in much better shape than the road, and almost as wide. You still won't be right next to the falls at the viewpoint, and there's a railing with a sign saying it's super dangerous, prohibiting you from taking a step further. In practice you can go a bit further ahead without heroic efforts, but the view of the falls is actually better back at the viewpoint. And if you're carrying a mini-tripod like I was, the "none shall pass" fence at the viewpoint is a good place to set up and start taking longer exposures of the falls (which is what you do to get the classic silky water effect people often do with waterfalls).



Speaking of photos, the main problem I ran into was that, on a sunny day, the foliage in the foreground was bright, while the falls remained in shadow in the background. I expect this happens a lot in this location, so getting exposure and colors right can present a challenge. A cloudy day might be an asset in this case, which is nice since the coast has no shortage of cloudy days.

Thor

The occasional tour of Transit Mall art continues with Thor, yet another of the original 1970s pieces, now located at SW 6th & Taylor. This is one of my favorites from the original crop, with an interesting and pleasant shape & texture to it. TriMet's Green Line Public Art Guide is, as usual, quite terse in its description of the thing:

Melvin Schuler, Thor, 1977, Copper on redwood

.



The redwood part is not obvious from looking a it, so I assume it's somewhere under the copper plating. I'm not sure why it's redwood, specifically, since nobody can see it. I'm inclined to blame it on the 70s, when everyone wanted to make everything out of redwood because it was "natural". Pencils, hot tubs, groovy rustic furniture, and apparently abstract sculptures too. Then the 80s came along and people (myself included) looked at all the stumps and went "oh crap", and there were protests and lawsuits and on and on. But I digress.



As is often the case with 70s Transit Mall art, there's almost nothing on the net about Thor. Portland, OR Daily Photo has a post about it, obviously with a couple of photos. A forum thread at AskART includes a couple of people saying how much they like Thor. And a couple of references show up in the library's Oregonian Historical Archives:

An article on the front page of the Metro section on September 20, 1977 includes a photo of Thor being installed at its original location between SW Washington & Alder. An October 9, 1977 editorial about the controversial crop of new Transit Mall art mentions it briefly:

Look at the copper-sheathed work by Melvin Schuler between Alder and Washington. See the curve and balance and accent, the melding of shape into shape? Or do you see an off-balance rock about to crash upon you?

And that's about all I've got on this one, I'm afraid. If you know any interesting stories or anecdotes about it -- even completely fictional ones you made up just now -- feel free to share 'em down in the comments.

Thx. Mgmt.

crows, se 8th & yamhill

irises, tanner springs (may 2011)

boat name win

no admittance, east burnside

hops, may 2011

curb, sw 10th

Sunshine, Willamette River

A short video clip with the sun reflecting off the river. It's not something you see very often in this part of the world.

backlit tulips

late cherry blossoms, se stark

more tulips

wildflowers, wahclella falls

Some wildflowers along the trail to Wahclella Falls, which is out in the Gorge near Bonneville Dam. I do have photos of the falls as well, and you'll see them as soon as I get around to sorting through them all, whenever that is. I didn't get as many useful flower photos, so this post was much easier to put together than the falls one is going to be. And why did I need a new post all of a sudden? It turns out I've been Reddited, as part of a thread about "Favorite Portland Blogs" (in which this humble blog inexplicably got a mention). As is inevitably the case, when this occurred the top post here was about a cheesy old monster movie, not Portland-related at all. So I figured I ought to put together something a little more local and topical in case anyone actually shows up here.

If I was wrong and you'd really prefer to read about a crappy monster movie or two, just scroll down a bit, or click here.

Anyway: Thx for visiting. Mgmt.

The Hideous Sun Demon

The second half of tonight's crappy movie double feature is The Hideous Sun Demon (1959). It's an interesting movie in its own way, sort of a film noir-ish journey through the seedy underbelly of 1950s Los Angeles, with a protagonist who occasionally turns into a big scaly lizard monster.

He's minding his own business, you see, toiling away as an obscure atomic scientist, when an accident turns his life upside down. Which, his boss says, is the result of working with unusual isotopes while nursing a killer hangover. "Whiskey and soda mix, whiskey and science don't", he says. Our hero, you see, is a complete lush, and is about to become the ugliest mean drunk ever.

We don't actually witness the atomic accident in the movie. The filmmakers obviously didn't have the budget for that. Instead we get wooden actors on a cheap set discussing the horrible thing that just occurred to our hero offscreen. This happens more than once in the movie, and -- other than the sun demon suit itself -- there are no special effects in the film. On the bright side, a low budget also meant that they generally filmed on location rather than a sound stage or studio back lot, streets weren't closed off, etc., so you do get an interesting slice of the real 1959 LA with this movie.

Anyway, those unusual isotopes work their magic, and our hero soon discovers that exposure to the sun makes him temporarily "revert" to a reptilian form. The doctors say it's bound to get progressively worse over time until eventually he's all sun demon, all the time. 50s creature movies always had to toss in a sciency-sounding reason for whatever's going on, and this one is actually less stupid than most: We're briefed on the well-known (but long abandoned) theory that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", and we're told that the isotopes have made the process reversible, so his cells periodically revert to their embryonic, reptilian stage. Complete fiction, obviously, but fiction cooked up by someone who paid attention in freshman biology. So there's that.

After he gets the bad news, our hero's life understandably goes off the rails -- even further than it already was. He quits his job, staggers around drunk in his isolated mansion (and how did he afford that swanky place, anyway?). He loses touch with coworkers, including a secretary who has a thing for him. She's nice and respectable and our hero never pays a moment's attention to her, even before he turns into a monster. He only goes out at night. He drives around in his flashy MGA sports car, and he hangs out in sketchy dive bars. He gets sorta-involved with Trudy, a Marilyn Monroe-sorta-lookalike nightclub singer who does the worst fake piano playing act you'll ever see in a movie. By "sorta-involved", I mean a not-at-all-ambiguous one night stand on the beach, which is something you usually don't encounter in 1959 movies. And the next morning he runs off and abandons her there because he's turning into a sun demon again. And later he shows up at the club wanting to see her. Naturally fisticuffs ensue with her mobster boyfriend and a few of his henchmen. Our hero ends up in pretty bad shape, and Trudy takes him in to nurse him back to health, or something. Mobster boyfriend shows up again & hauls him outside -- into the sun -- planning to finish the job. But round 2 is Sun Demon Smackdown time, and our hero makes short work of the mobster. Trudy sees him out the window, screams as he runs off (since she had no idea he was a hideous sun demon), and promptly vanishes from the film, never to be seen or heard from again.

A lengthy police chase ensues, into a strange landscape of pumps and tanks and oil derricks, and he offs a dog and squishes a couple of rats during the chase, because that's just how sun demons roll. Eventually he learns, as we do, that sun demons aren't bulletproof, and he plummets to his doom from atop a giant oil tank.

It turns out that the oil & gas scenes at the end of the movie were filmed in Signal Hill, California, which at the time was a major oil producing area near LA. Based on the photos I've seen, the landscape was even more surreal than what you see in the movie. The Wikipedia article has a panorama from 1923 that's just astonishing. There really, seriously, were tidy suburban houses and giant oil derricks all sandwiched together cheek by jowl. As the story goes, oil was discovered in Signal Hill right around the time the area was being subdivided and sold off for early suburban development. Many prospective homeowners decided there was more money in drilling for oil than in living here, and up went another derrick, even if there were suburban tract houses all around it. Imagine what it would have been like to grow up there.

Anyway, the key thing to understand about the movie is that our hero was already a drunk and kind of an asshole before he ever turned into an atomic monster. And everything that happens to him -- at least up to the point where he does in the mobster with his bare hands -- could just as easily have happened to him if he was a plain old non-reptilian boozehound on a downward spiral. It's a safe bet that the whole "sun demon" thing is a metaphor, and not exactly a subtle one.

The 50s were big on this sort of thing, movies about male anxiety and the awful things that happen if you stray from the straight and narrow for any reason. The Incredible Shrinking Man is probably the best of the lot, and The Manster is pretty entertaining, and there are countless others. The Hideous Sun Demon is far from the best, or the most entertaining, but you could probably get a term paper out of it if you needed to. Or a drinking game. Or both, most likely.

The Astro-Zombies

Tonight's crappy movie is The Astro-Zombies, a 1968 creature flick with John Carradine as the Mad Scientist, Wendell Corey as a CIA investigator, and Tura Satana as, well, Satana. The plot seems simple enough: Mad scientist creates ridiculous-looking creature. Creature goes on a berzerk killing spree, as creatures often do. Unlike most creatures, this one uses a machete, thus providing a bit of very unconvincing late-60s gore. The creature is also solar powered via some sort of crystal thingy on its forehead. At one point it's getting dark and the creature's running low on juice, so it grabs a flashlight, holds it to its forehead, and makes a run for the secret lab.

Meanwhile, a team of boring good guys in suits and Ms. Satana's team of international baddies go looking for the creature. Wendell Corey's character heads up the good guys, and whenever he speaks you can tell he's extremely drunk. This would be hilarious, except that Corey died of cirrhosis of the liver shortly after this film was completed. Actually it's still hilarious, it's just that laughing about it isn't very nice. A further odd detail is that Corey, a conservative Republican, was also on the Santa Monica, California, city council at the time he starred in The Astro-Zombies. Ahh-nold, eat your heart out.

There are basically four independent sorta-storylines going on in the movie: The Feds, the international baddies, the MS & assistant, and the creature at large. You never see John Carradine outside the lab, and nobody meets up until the very end of the film, which must have really simplified shooting the thing. It also makes for a distinct lack of drama; you can fast forward through the Carradine bits without missing anything at all, as he spends the whole film mumbling technobabble at his assistant and doing precisely bupkus. The Fed bits aren't overly thrilling either, and you can fast forward through them without missing a lot of essential plot twists. In fact it's fair to say, generally, that the less of the movie you actually watch, the less confused you'll be. You may as well stick to the creature parts, because the creature is a hoot, and the parts with Tura Satana slinking around being cruel to various people, which you don't want to miss, because, duh. Oh, and be sure to watch the title sequence & credits, which involve wind-up toy robots for some reason.

Anyway, after various semi-thrilling adventures, various characters arrive at the secret Carradine lab, and both he and the international baddies get theirs, and justice prevails. Believe me, this is as comprehensible a plot summary as you're going to get anywhere on the Interwebs. A review at Bad Movie Report goes into way more detail, and confesses to being utterly mystified by the movie. And that's coming from someone who's seen way more crappy movies than I have. If the pros can't make head or tail of the thing, what hope do the rest of us have?