Moffett Creek Bridges

The next installment of the ongoing Columbia Gorge bridge project takes us to a set of bridges over Moffett Creek, between Elowah Falls and the Bonneville Dam / Wahclella Falls area. I'm treating them as a group because they're close together and a lot of my photos ended up with more than one bridge in them, but the main event here is the original Columbia River Highway bridge from 1915. Unlike the CRH bridges further west of here, this one was designed by Lewis Metzger, who also designed the bridge at Eagle Creek. This bridge is said to have been the world's longest "three-hinge concrete bridge" at the time of its construction. Not being a bridge engineer, I was curious what that meant, and found a very in-depth article explaining what a bridge hinge is for and how it works, if you're into that sort of thing. From that article I gather the old Moffett Creek Bridge was built with the bleeding edge advanced technology of its day.

Time and engineering moved on, though, and the old bridge was abandoned in place when Interstate 84 was built. It then sat abandoned for decades, brief glimpses of it visible from the new freeway bridges next door. It's now part of ODOT's pedestrian/bike Historic Columbia River Highway State Trail, which the state of Oregon has been slowly building in segments since the late 1990s. The segment from Tanner Creek (Wahclella Falls) west to Moffett Creek opened around 2000 (per an OregonHikers page about the bridge), and then the trail ended at the bridge for over a decade.

A new trail segment finally opened in 2013, winding its way under the adjacent I-84 bridges and along the freeway to the Elowah Falls trailhead. The I-84 bridges are the ones in the background of a lot of these photos. One dates to the 1950s, when the new highway was just US 30 and not an interstate yet. The other was built in 2009-2011 to replace an ugly 1960s bridge that didn't hold up to the elements as well as its older neighbors. The new bridge was built to the state's I-84 design guidelines, so it bears a strong resemblance to the replacement Sandy River bridge that was built around the same time.

Beyond the current and former road bridges, there are a few more bridges along Moffett Creek: An old railroad bridge further downstream that I don't know much about, and a small wooden bridge for Gorge Trail #400 just upstream. Apparently there's also a second trail bridge or crossing of some sort for the Moffett Creek Trail #430 much further upstream in a remote corner of the Gorge. I've never been there and have no photos of that one. Despite the name of the trail, it doesn't follow Moffett Creek upstream like the Eagle Creek Trail does. Moffett Creek unfortunately doesn't have a trail like that, even though there are a few waterfalls along the creek. I gather the state or the Forest Service thought about building a trail around the time the old highway went in, but it didn't happen then, and trail construction in much of the Gorge either happened in the 1910s or not at all, and that's why there isn't a trail a century later.

There also isn't a parking lot off I-84 (or at least not an official one) or a trailhead at Moffett Creek; I got here by walking from the Elowah Falls trailhead, on the new circa-2013 trail segment. It runs riiiight next to I-84 the entire way to Moffett Creek (except for a small detour at McCord Creek), with semis zooming by at freeway speeds just a few feet away, so I can't honestly describe this as a fun or enjoyable walk. I think this trail is mostly intended for cyclists, since bikes are banned on most Gorge hiking trails. If you aren't on a bike and you aren't doing this for the novelty, a better way here would be to take the trail to Elowah Falls and continue on along Gorge Trail #400 from there; when you get to Moffett Creek there's a trail spur over to the HCRH trail just before it ducks under the I-84 bridges. In any case, I turned around just after the old bridge, since that was what I'd come to see, and there's only so much walking next to freeway traffic I'm willing to endure in one go. However the Oregonian article about the trail opening points out that the new paved trail is not just a bike path; it's also one of the very few wheelchair-accessible trails in the Gorge, which is something I hadn't considered when I started grumbling about the ambience.

In any case, you can't get to the old bridge on either trail at the moment thanks to the 2017 Eagle Creek Fire, which heavily damaged the Moffett Creek area. It could be years before either trail reopens. I haven't been out to the Gorge since the fire, since I'm not sure I want to see the damage in person; instead I've been working my way through a big backlog of Gorge photo posts and remembering what it was like before the fire. I'm not sure whether this is actually helping or not, but it's what I've got, so it's what I'm doing.

I'd been to the Moffett Creek area exactly once before I took these photos, back in the early 90s when you had to rely on paper maps and vague directions in library books. A map suggested that if you followed the Gorge Trail east from Elowah Falls, there'd be one or more waterfalls along Moffett Creek somewhere vaguely upstream of the trail. I'd also read somewhere that there was a cool abandoned bridge, overgrown with weeds, somewhere in the vicinity. That sounded promising, so I went there based on this scant information and was unable to find either the falls or the bridge, which was sufficiently annoying that I didn't go back for a couple of decades.

I still haven't found the waterfalls, truth be told, and even now in 2018 the available information about them seems kind of sketchy and unreliable. There are photos proving there's more than one waterfall along the creek, along with evidence that the names "Moffett Falls" and "Wahe Falls" have been kicked around for over a century. And that's about where the consensus ends. It seems that one of them (and I'm not clear on which) was dubbed Wahe Falls by the Mazamas circa 1916, and then USGS maps called it Moffett Falls for decades, which Wahe partisans say was a big dumb mistake.

Which leads to the wider question of what makes a place name authoritative. In the Northwest, 1916 was around the heyday of white people giving places romanticized sorta-Indian names, and I haven't seen any evidence that local tribes actually called it "Wahe", or that anyone at all did before a few sentimental Victorians came along. And legally speaking, USGS names are supposed to be authoritative, even if they screwed up or didn't exactly follow earlier naming. I dunno.

There are all sorts of variations on the dispute: Two names for one waterfall, while the other goes unnamed; one is Moffett and one is Wahe, but nobody can agree which is which; one of the names is invalid, and you have either Moffett or Wahe, plus an Upper or Lower sibling, depending on which one you think is the main waterfall. I genuinely and sincerely have no opinion on the dispute. I have never been to any of them, have no photos of them, and have not needed to pick a name to use for a blog post title. If it comes to it, I might just go with GPS coordinates or something to avoid antagonizing anyone.

In any case, there's a Recreating the HCRH page about the waterfalls, and Waterfalls Northwest pages for them (dubbing them "Wahe Falls" and "Upper Wahe Falls"). WyEast Blog has a couple of posts with post-fire photos, with notes about maybe building trails to the falls someday. A few OregonHikers posts talk about hiking or bushwhacking up along the creek and visiting assorted waterfalls, while going the other direction a RopeWiki page has details about rappelling down Moffett Creek from the top. A Canyoneering Northwest page mentions the creek actually has eleven(!) waterfalls, if you have the technical chops to visit them all.

The Moffett Creek area pops up in the library's historical Oregonian database now and then:

• Early on the stories were all about planning and building the old highway, such as "Road is Feasible, Engineer Says" (January 9th 1910). The article explains that the highway (which it still referred to as a new wagon road) in this area would roughly follow the route of an older road or trail. The unnamed older route (as the Eagle Creek Bridge post explained) might have been the Dalles and Sandy Wagon Road, although it was located further up slope in many areas. Though the article goes on to mention that this older road appeared unfinished further east at Tanner Creek, so the old route could also have been some other road I'm unfamiliar with. The article doesn't explain how the older road crossed the creek here, whether there was a previous bridge on the site, or travelers had to find a flat spot to ford the creek. An archived ODOT page from March 2012 about the new trail includes a historic photo of the bridge under construction, which is the only one I've encountered.


• In the 1920s, the area hosted a 50 acre YWCA campground, with a few wood buildings that were probably somewhere near the bridge. The place was profiled in "Wauneka Appeals to Business Girls" (July 20th 1924). The first couple of paragraphs make it sound pretty idyllic.

  A book, an Indian blanket and a ferny spot beside the hurried little Moffett’s creek for the girl who is tired of typewriters and time-clocks; a climb up a mountain trail or a walk along the highway for her more energetic sister, are on the unwritten recreational programme at Wauneka, vacation camp of the Portland Y.W.C.A. on Moffett’s creek, 45 miles up the Columbia highway.
  
  There’s nothing to do but enjoy yourself, and sleep and eat and rest, at Wauneka, say the officials of the Y.W.C.A., whose only share in the proceedings is to keep excellent caretakers on the place in order to provide chaperonage, cooking and upkeep. There is no educational or any other sort of arranged programme, and the business girls who go there can do anything they please, within reason, except pick the ferns and flowers and wild greenery that keep Wauneka beautiful.

  I'm not entirely sure where this 50 acre parcel would've been. Possibly much of it is under I-84 now. The land's currently divided between the state (the "John B. Yeon State Scenic Corridor") and the US Forest Service. One of the state-owned parcels might include parts of the YWCA site, but I'm just guessing here. Incidentally, the state park's History/FAQ page explains that it's illegal to fly drones anywhere along the historic highway trail, as well as in most state parks through the Gorge, at least unless you get a special use permit (and it reads as if those permits are rarely granted). The rare exceptions to the rule being Dalton Point on the river, a few parks out near Hood River, and George W. Joseph State Natural Area, which is home to Upper Latourell Falls, but not the main falls. But I digress.

• There weren't many other mentions of the YWCA campground in the paper, so I don't know how long it was there, but there was at least one private residence near the bridge in the 1930s, per a small May 28th 1935 news item about the house being burglarized.


• November 19th 1953: The Forest Service bought a chunk of riverfront property that extended upriver from Warrendale/Dodson up to Moffett Creek. This land was the former site of a salmon cannery (which closed in 1934), some ruins of which were still around back then. Frank Warren (the plant's founder, and namesake of Warrendale) died on the Titanic.


• Moffett Creek largely vanished from the paper for several decades after that; this coincided with the present-day freeway going in. They didn't include a Moffett Creek exit on the new Interstate, so it seems the place largely fell off the radar until the 1980s. One exception was an October 10th 1971 article about the abandoned bridge, slowly being reclaimed by nature at the time.


• April 19th 1981: "Drive intensifies to preserve scenic gorge highway". A comprehensive survey was done after 1981 to figure out what was left of the old road and what could be saved, which at least was a first step. In passing, the article claims the old bridge was still the world's longest three-hinge concrete bridge at the time. I have no idea whether this is still true; I'm old enough to think of 1981 as "recent", but it really isn't anymore, and a lot of bridges have been built since then.


• September 7th 1982: "Scenic gorge route's tarnished gems being polished"


• August 19, 1987: "Highway options pondered", in which something along the lines of the present-day trail was one of the options. It obviously took a while; I think it was off the table for a long time until they figured out how to fund it via ODOT.

lee kelly sculpture at salishan

Ok, so here's another post that's been lurking in my Drafts folder for ages. During a summer 2014 trip to the Oregon Coast, I stayed at the groovy 60s hotel at Salishan for a few days, and (though I hadn't planned it this way) got a couple of blog posts out of it. The latter post was about a print on the wall in my hotel room, and in it I mentioned something about the hotel's developer being a big patron of the arts, both at the hotel & elsewhere. Among other things, he was responsible for the ginormous Lee Kelly sculpture along the Willamette river in the Johns Landing area, plus the 60s & 70s-era art all over the hotel grounds. Which brings us to the above photo. The sculpture pictured is in a courtyard outside the hotel's conference center, and as soon as I saw it I thought, hey, wait, I think I know who made that, and (for good or ill) I've tracked down a lot of his stuff over the lifetime of this humble blog. Unfortunately the courtyard was taped off for an event and I couldn't get any closer to it, and ended up with just the one photo.

I figured that would be fine, and I could just Google/Bing/Yahoo/Lycos it when I got home & flesh out the post from there. So I tried that, and... not so much. I found a 1981 Oregonian article about the hotel, which confirmed the thing is a Kelly, and said it went in around 1977... but it didn't mention what it's called. The usual procedure here is that I need to know a name, otherwise I don't have a blog post title, and untitled posts are stuck in Drafts limbo until that little problem gets sorted. But as far as I can tell that one little factoid doesn't exist anywhere on the interwebs. I tried again just now and all I found was someone else's photo of it, from a better angle but again without a name. I suppose I could have just called or emailed the hotel and asked them, like some sort of wild and crazy extrovert (who doesn't mind coming off as a weirdo), but I've come this far in the blog (non-)industry without resorting to, y'know, interacting with people, so why start now? Especially since there's a very good chance it's just called "Untitled" anyway. So this post has sat around in Drafts for close to four years now, which is a bit much. So I'm going to go ahead and declare a statute of limitations on unsolved minor mysteries that nobody else cares about, and post this anyway.

And hey, if you happen to know the answer, the comments are open. I actually just re-enabled anonymous comments as a goodwill gesture for the GDPR era. The new regulations don't actually require that, but I just wanted to emphasize that while Google/Blogspot and Flickr might do tracking stuff with cookies (and I have no control over that), I don't have access to that data and I personally don't track anything or anyone, and have zero interest in doing so. I also don't have or want anyone's email address, phone number, pager, fax, telex, etc., and wouldn't use them if I somehow had them (even if it would help with a blog post title). Hell, I've been known to repeatedly forget the names of coworkers I've worked with for years. I mention all this because my Blogspot dashboard was badgering me to do or say something official about GDPR compliance, so here you go.

Emerald Falls

Some months back I did a post about the Columbia Gorge's Gorton Creek Falls, a (relatively) un-touristy spot a few miles east of Cascade Locks. The photoset included one photo of Emerald Falls, a small (10' or so) waterfall along the way to the main event. I neglected to even mention Emerald Falls in the body of the post, but one of the many project rules here at this humble blog is that each waterfall gets its own post. (See for example, Munra Falls on the way to Wahclella Falls, and Shady Creek Falls along the main Multnomah Falls trail.) So here we are. I don't really have any fascinating tidbits to share here; I checked the library's Oregonian database & verified the phrase "emerald falls" has never appeared in the Oregonian, dating back to the paper's founding in 1861. Which is not really surprising, given that it's only ten feet tall and 43 miles away. I did find a couple of good blog posts about hiking to the main falls that mentioned Emerald Falls too, so I thought I'd pass those along.

One thing that kind of surprised me was how much art photography there is of this little waterfall. I imagine the deal is that, beyond just being photogenic, there are practical reasons it's popular. It's a short, flat walk along an uncrowded trail, and Emerald Falls is where the proper trail ends; after this point you're making your way along the streambed, scrambling over rocks and fallen trees most of the way. So if you're lugging a heavy pro tripod and expensive L glass (or whatever the Nikon equivalent is), this would be a good place to stop and shoot. Here are a few semi-randomly selected examples, all of which are better than my one brief attempt above: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15]. From these and other examples, we can derive some tips for getting a really good Emerald Falls photo, almost none of which I observed in mine.

1. Bring a tripod (or monopod, or Gorillapod, or whatever) so you can get the proper long exposure look. 1/8 second was as long as I could do handheld without blurry results, and the effect is not quite up to par here. It's not that I haven't known this detail for years; it's just that I dislike lugging a bunch of gear around, and am not enough of a perfectionist to do it anyway.
2. It didn't occur to me to climb down to creek level, but that appears to be the best spot to shoot from.
3. Wide angle lenses seem to be a popular choice. I do actually own one of those but neglected to bring it along, because gear lugging.
4. Go when there's plenty of water in the creek, i.e. not in late July when I was there.
5. There's fall color here if you go at the right time, I'm guessing probably mid-October. If at all possible, be at creek level, use that wide angle lens, and have a fallen leaf or two on rocks in the foreground. Or at least that's what people did in the photos I liked the most.

Unfortunately the Wyeth - Gorton Creek area was affected by the 2017 Eagle Creek forest fire, and the whole area has been closed to the public since then, so at the moment you can't do any of the stuff I just mentioned. As of mid-May 2018, the Wyeth campground is open, but the adjacent trails -- the only reason I know of for using the campground -- are still closed. A KATU story from a couple of weeks ago indicated that the east end of the burned area (which was less severely affected than the central area around Eagle Creek) might be reopened in the near future, but as far as I know we haven't arrived at the near future quite yet. A January OPB story indicated that some parts of the burned area may be closed for years. So we'll see. And it's not as if the burned areas are going to look the same now. In retrospect, if I'd known there was going to be a fire, I'd have put a little more effort into some of the old photos I took back then. Well, that and tried to warn the public about reckless teens with fireworks, only to be ignored, ridiculed, and possibly arrested, like all the other time travelers.

McCord Creek Bridges

One of the many ongoing projects involves tracking down historic bridges in the Columbia River Gorge. I kind of like this project because it involves making repeated trips out to the Gorge, but then stopping places and taking photos of things that nearly everyone else ignores. Many of the posts in the project come from in the surviving stretch of the old highway between the Vista House and Elowah Falls, more or less; for long stretches further east the route of the old road is directly beneath today's freeway, and nothing survives of the original. This is basically what happened at McCord Creek, the creek that flows over Elowah Falls. A century ago a tall and sort of spindly bridge was built to carry traffic over McCord Creek. Like many of the bridges along this stretch of the highway, it was designed by Karl P Billner. The bridge at McCord Creek was more utilitarian than most of the others, and it was maybe not Billner's most distinctive work, but it still bore a passing resemblance to his Latourell Creek bridge. The bridge was apparently tougher than it looked; it seems it was incorporated into first the US 30 highway and then Interstate 84 when they were constructed, and for nearly 80 years it carried traffic much faster and heavier than its designers could have ever imagined. As far as I know none of the other bridges from the old highway were reused as part of the new freeway, so I suppose it had that going for it. It was finally showing its age by the late 1990s, and the state concluded there was no way to bring it up to modern seismic standards, so it was demolished and replaced by a modern bridge in 1997-98.

The photoset above has a few shots of the replacement bridge, and ODOT has a better photo from an angle I wouldn't attempt, of workers doing a job I also wouldn't attempt. That bridge isn't the main point of interest in this post, though. In 2013 ODOT opened another segment of their Historic Columbia River Highway Trail. For those who aren't familiar with this project, it's not a trail in the same sense as, say, the loop trail around Multnomah & Wahkeena falls. It's more of a fancy bike path along I-84; it's several steps up from riding along the freeway shoulder, which people had been doing (completely legally) for decades before they started building the new trail. But if you're looking for a prime wilderness experience, this is probably not the trail for you. They're trying to reuse abandoned bits of the original highway where they can, but when that isn't possible the trail usually runs right next to the freeway. When they got to building the McCord Creek segment, it seems the 1998 bridge wasn't designed with room for a bike path, so the trail would need a new bridge of its own. Instead of building next to the freeway, the trail jogs south and away from I-84 for a bit to a spot where they could build a smaller and probably much less expensive bridge. They put a bit of design work into the new bridge, and it's done in a style that evokes the old highway's historic bridges but isn't quite identical to them. It has a bit more of an Art Deco look to it, as if they'd somehow continued building Gorge bridges into the 1920s and 1930s.

Beyond the two bridges shown here, there are a couple of others I should at least mention. There's a railroad crossing of the creek just north/downstream of the I-84 bridge; I can't really make it out in my photos, but I think it might be more of a culvert than a proper bridge. And upstream of here, Gorge Trail #400 crosses the creek near the base of Elowah Falls. An old OregonHikers thread has a very old photo of yet another bridge that crossed halfway up the falls, in the manner of the Benson Bridge at Multnomah Falls. It's too bad that's gone now, but I can see how a wooden bridge wouldn't last long in that spot.

Maricara Natural Area

Next up we're visiting SW Portland's Maricara Natural Area, 17 acres of forest in a quiet neighborhood west of Marshall Park. The city's description of it is fairly brief:

In fall 2010, 1,500 feet of new natural-surface trails and 2,600 feet of improved trails were opened. Located in a residential neighborhood, the site includes a wetland, protected stream, important native plant species, and an older second-growth forest.

I thought the park was quite nice, although doesn't look entirely natural yet; I gather volunteers went through and removed every single ivy plant and blackberry vine and other nonnative plant, and replaced them with ferns and oregon grapes. The effect is as if it was professionally landscaped to look like a natural forest, though I imagine that will go away after a few years. I didn't see a single invasive plant (of those few I recognize on sight), and I was looking. I think the lesson here is to not be on the wrong side of a Portland neighborhood association enlisted in a righteous cause. Or at least, I could swear I read that this is what happened, but I'm unable to find a link to back that up. Possibly I dreamed it, and it's just that the park was never overrun by the usual invaders in the first place, as unlikely as that sounds. The neighborhood association holds regular community ivy pulls just over in Marshall Park, if that's a data point.

For city park posts, I usually rummage around in the library's Oregonian database to see if anything interesting ever happened here. The park does have a slightly convoluted origin story, though I'm kind of a nerd about these things and it's hard for me to judge how interesting it's going to be to anyone who isn't me. But it's what I've got, so here goes.

Our story starts back in the 1950s, as suburbia was expanding, and the country was in the midst of a massive baby boom. If you're running a public school system, especially during a baby boom, one of your many jobs is to try to understand how many new schools you're likely to need over the next decade or two, and where you're likely to need them, and buy land accordingly before it gets prohibitively expensive. That happened here in 1956, the plan being that half of the land would go to a school, and the other half would become a park. You see this model all over the city (like at SE Portland's Sewallcrest Park); I think the idea was that playgrounds and ball fields are paid for out of the city budget, rather than by the school district, and could be used by adult softball leagues and so forth when the school wasn't using them. PortlandMaps indicates the northeast quarter of the park had already been platted out as a new subdivision called "Caravel Heights" before the school district bought it. Incidentally, the tax roll IDs insist the homes just east of the park are part of "Edgecliff", and to the north is "Boese Addition", while the SW corner of the park and the land south of it is "Galeburn Place". To the west is just "Section 29 1S 1E".

Anyway, two things were different in the case of Maricara Park: First, they obviously never built a school here. Second, although the area was part of Portland public schools, it was outside city limits & would remain so until the 1980s, so the park half ended up as part of Multnomah County's chronically underfunded park system. As far as I can tell, the county's idea of a park system involved buying or stumbling into random chunks of land in unincorporated parts of the county, and then doing absolutely nothing with these places for decades on end.

Finally in the late 1980's, after years of complaints and bad publicity, the county decided to get out of the parks business. This was around the same time the city of Portland began annexing surrounding unincorporated areas, so parks within the new city limits largely transferred to the city during the 1982-87 timeframe. The remaining ones mostly went to Metro, with one going to the city of Gresham, and another tiny one being sold off & probably developed. The city didn't immediately have any spare cash for the new parks, and several (like Maricara) remained undeveloped into the 2000s. The other half of today's park belonged to the Portland school district until 1999, when they finally accepted they were never going to build a school here, and Metro bought it with a bit of greenspace money. Oddly enough the east half of the park is still technically owned by Metro, but the city administers the whole park.

As for the name of the park, that seems to come from SW Maricara St., which ends at the west side of the park. The street name, in turn, has a slightly weird origin. It got its current name in August 1930; it seems Portland's postmaster asked the county to change the names of a few streets that had segments inside and outside city limits, which was apparently beyond the Post Office's ability to cope with. As the old saying goes, neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stayed these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds, but Portland street names were a whole other story. So the name was duly changed from Laurel Avenue. Which is weird because the only present-day street I see named Laurel is in the West Hills off Vista Ave., near Jewett Park, nowhere near here. The 1930 article neglects to mention where the name "Maricara" came from originally. I suppose it may have just been someone's name.

In any case, the city's park planning process finally got moving in the mid-2000s, and resulted in an extensive 2008 Habitat Management & Trail Plan for the park that roughly describes how it is today, and features a few photos of what it looked like back then. It includes a brief history blurb, complete with city ordinance numbers:

Multnomah County originally purchased the eight-acre property for a park, and transferred it to the City of Portland in 1988 (Multnomah County Order #88-117). Metro purchased the adjacent nine acres in 1998 from Portland Public Schools who had owned the site since at least 1958 (Ordinance #173252, April 14, 1999). PP&R accepted management of the Metro parcel, which is zoned as open space, in accordance with the Tryon Creek IGA (Ordinance #171795).

Around this time, the park was befriended by the "Friends Of" group for nearby Marshall Park, which is an outgrowth of the local neighborhood association. They now go by "Friends of Marshall & Maricara Parks". They have a few photos of the park's footbridge being built, and a list of birds reported from the two parks.

More recently, there was a small controversy here around some unknown person(s) adding "fairy doors" to trees around the park. The city disapproved, as this was not part of the Plan. City workers removed any "fairy doors" they saw, but they kept reappearing, and the Tribune spun it as mean city bureaucrats beating up on local artists and dreamers. The story eventually dropped out of the news without the public learning whether either side "won" the conflict.

The OregonHikers Maricara Loop Hike page includes a photo of a fairy door, for what it's worth. Also here are a couple of posts about the park from Exploring Portland's Natural Areas and The Nature of Portland; the latter has a few interesting plant and bird identifications. Speaking as a former Boy Scout, I feel like I ought to be able to identify plants and animals like that, since it was drilled into you that this was an essential outdoor skill. In my defense, though, that was a very long time ago, and I am fairly sure that many of these species had not actually evolved yet.

Dalton Point

Next up we're looking at a few photos from Dalton Point, a little state park in the Gorge right on the Columbia River. The park's built around a boat ramp, and I don't own a boat, so it's not somewhere I go regularly. I figured it might be good for some photos, since there are weirdly few places along the Oregon side of the gorge with river access, thanks to the big freeway right along the river's edge. You might think that would make this a popular park, but the handful of times I've been here it's always been empty or nearly so. It could be that I'm just never there at peak times, but the sorry state of the ramp and the parking lot make me think it doesn't get a lot of attention from anyone. The Oregon State Parks website doesn't even mention it, for whatever reason (though this isn't the first time I've run into this). Its location may work against it too; coming from Portland it's another 5 miles past Rooster Rock (which also has a boat ramp and a small marina), and (like Tunnel Point) only accessible to westbound traffic. Doubling back at the Warrendale-Dodson exit makes it an extra 18 miles versus going to Rooster Rock, which had better facilities the last time I checked. Not that I really minded the lack of other visitors; it's not something you encounter much in the Gorge anymore, and it was kind of nice, to be honest. Luckily nobody reads blogs anymore (present company excluded) so I can post about it here without the secret getting out.

There's an internet theory going around that Dalton Point is named for a "W. Dalton" who lived in the area circa 1889, and who also gave his or her name to nearby Dalton Falls. Neither Google nor the library's Oregonian database could tell me anything more about this person; I'm going to assume he or she was real because a myth would at least have an interesting story attached. I did find a few links about Dalton Point, at least, but it's not a long or particularly compelling history. It didn't appear in the Oregonian until the modern river-level highway went in, and at first (starting around 1961) there was just the occasional car accident, mostly people failing to negotiate a bend in the road and going into the river. I gather the highway didn't initially have guardrails through at least this part of the gorge, which would be a big, big problem on a wet, icy, or windy day. (Incidentally, while researching this post I did come across the one and only mention of Dalton Falls in the Oregonian on March 1st 1914, and it just relates to construction on the old highway.)

A Feb. 16th 1964 article about new boating facilities in state parks mentions Dalton Point briefly, saying the state was adding a shiny new boat ramp & parking lot, & paving an existing access road. After that, it showed up in the paper every so often when the state wanted to remind the public that a.) Dalton Point existed, and b.) there were assorted water things you could potentially do there. For example, a May 10th 1979 article about Portland-area boating said Dalton Point was a good place for water skiing. You probably wouldn't see this in a contemporary article, as water skiing has kind of fallen out of fashion in the last few decades. I tried it once, years ago; it's harder than it looks, especially if you wear glasses and are spooked about falling and losing them. Shortly after that article, a June 26th piece mentioned Dalton Point was going to get boat ramp upgrades as part of a larger gorge plan, full of improvements that largely haven't come to pass, like a "low level" trail from Lewis & Clark State Park in Troutdale out to The Dalles, trails connecting down to it from Portland Womens Forum & Crown Point, and a youth hostel(!) near Latourell Falls.

A Feb. 22nd 1987 article mentioned that Dalton Point was a low priority for windsurfing development, back when windsurfing was the hot new sport & the state saw dollar signs & wanted to promote it. I tried windsurfing once, years ago; again, it's harder than it looks. A month later, the paper pointed out that it was a great secret spot to fish for walleye, which instantly became untrue the moment it was published. So that's really about it, history-wise, other than the occasional road closure or abandoned vehicle.

Via my usual exhaustive Google searching, I gather Dalton Point is a good place to set off in a kayak. I've never tried kayaking; it looks really fun, though I suspect it just might be harder than it looks. It seems this is a good jumping off point to row over and climb Phoca Rock, a rocky island in the middle of the river (Phoca is a genus of seals that includes the ubiquitous harbor seal.), or get a close look at the Cape Horn cliffs on the Washington side. Or you can make it part of a longer trip: Here's someone's blog post about kayaking from Dalton Point downriver to Chinook Landing in Fairview, west of Troutdale. And here's someone else's tale of running into stormy conditions & submerged pilings here during a kayak trip from Idaho to the Pacific Ocean. That's... a long way, and more than the journey itself I find myself envying them having that much free time to spare, just paddling down the river and not having to stop now and then to hop on a conference call or whatever.

If you're in a tiny boat on the Columbia, you do have to worry about the occasional tugboat pushing a few barges. They don't turn all that quickly and they probably can't see you anyway. Luckily the NOAA nautical chart for this stretch of the river shows that the commercial shipping channel is way over toward the Washington side of the river in this area; it's called the "Fashion Reef Lower Reach", in case that ever comes up as a Gorge trivia question. (I have no idea where Fashion Reef is, or what's so fashionable about it.) The chart also tells us the water is up to 8 feet deep in the vicinity of the boat ramp (though I don't know what time of year they take water level readings), and there are a number of submerged pilings & other obstacles to look out for, which we already know from one of the links up above. Contrast this with Tunnel Point, which has nowhere to launch even a tiny boat, possibly due to river traffic plowing along just offshore. You could potentially get mowed down by a load of wheat right after getting in the water, if somehow you didn't notice the huge barges bearing down on you. (Note regarding the nautical chart link: NOAA's Chart No. 1 is a key to what the cryptic marks on all the other charts mean.)

If you don't like getting wet, it looks like there might be a way to hike downstream to Rooster Rock from here. I've been speculating about this but have never actually tried it; there's no official trail, I have never heard of anyone doing it, and I have no idea whether it's actually possible. You'd be right next to the freeway much of the way so it wouldn't exactly be a high-quality fun wilderness experience, either. You'd probably have the riverbank (such as it is) all to yourself, though.

One thing I wouldn't have expected prior to Googling the place to death is that Dalton Point is a significant nature spot, home to a variety of rare plants and insects. In retrospect it makes sense: There's very little riparian habitat left along the Oregon side of the gorge, since much of the shoreline is now just riprap supporting the freeway. So come spring and early summer, this is apparently a good place to come and see native wildflowers and insects. Some assorted links I came across on the subject:

• Wildflower Hikes at Dalton Point
• Rorippa curvipes at the Oregon Flora Image Project
• Impatiens capensis at the Consortium of Pacific Northwest Herbaria
• The July-August 2004 Northwest Native Plant Journal mentions it as an outstanding plant site.
• Also mentioned in the Summer 2004 Friends of the Columbia Gorge newsletter has a short list of native plants you might encounter here.
• A NorthwestJourney.com page says the Pale Swallowtail butterfly (Papilio eurymedon) may also be seen here.

Miscellaneous other Dalton Point(ish) items I ran across on the interwebs:

• It's mentioned in a recent book about the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area Act and how it's changed the Gorge in recent decades.
• State regulations allow seasonal waterfowl hunting, which is uncommon for state parks, but I haven't seen internet mentions of anyone actually doing so.
• Someone's photo from here
• A wedding at Wahclella Falls that I ran across while digging through the intergoogles. Basically unrelated, but awww.

Pittock Acres

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Next up we're visiting Portland's Pittock Acres Park, the West Hills park that's home to the (locally) famous Pittock Mansion. I'm not particularly interested in rich people's historic houses, and I visited mostly for the view and to check out some of the trails in the 54 acre park. It sits between Washington Park (& the Hoyt Arboretum) to the south & Macleay Park to the north, and the Wildwood Trail follows a winding path through the park, but it's not a place I've visited very often, so it was kind of a missing link for me, if for nobody else. It probably seems more remote to me than it actually is because I'm not interested in running across Burnside from Washington Park to get there, & that will all change when the promised footbridge over Burnside goes in.

So I drove there & parked, avoided the line to go inside, and took a few photos from the viewpoint. As far as views from the West Hills go, this is more or less unparalleled. It's worth going for the view, though you might want to pick a sunnier day than I did. Then I took the trailhead heading north toward Cornell, essentially this hike from OregonHikers.org except backwards, starting & ending at the top. I'd meant to also try the trail south to Burnside, but there was a winter-related trail closure, and I might have bailed that day anyway due to aging knees. So that part's still a TODO item, since I'm reasonably sure I've never been on that segment of trail.

Despite my lack of interest in rich people's houses, I have actually been inside, many years ago as a Cub Scout field trip. There was a guided tour, and I mostly remember velvet ropes, and being told not to touch anything, and a bathroom containing a fancy high-tech (for 1914) shower the guide called the "wettest shower in town". We learned all about how the house was built for Henry Pittock, the publisher of the Oregonian, who only got to live in it a handful of years before kicking the bucket. It does sort of amuse me that the place dates from a distant era when you could accumulate a vast fortune in local print media.

As you might imagine, the library's Oregonian archives don't lack for articles about the home of the paper's onetime publisher. I keep saying I'm just interested in the nature part of the place, but that's largely not what Pittock's newspaper cared about. I kept reading anyway and it turned out there were a few interesting anecdotes, at least more interesting than I was expecting, so that's probably going to be the bulk of this post, despite my initial intentions. (The photoset above is still mostly nature photos, though.)

So before the Pittocks moved in, this whole area was meant to be a ritzy subdivision called "Imperial Heights". That's not a place name you hear very often in 2018, because the Pittocks bought the entire area and built their house at the very top. There's a heavily graded area around the mansion, but the rest of the ~46 acres are steep forested hillsides that might have been unbuildable anyway, though PortlandMaps shows a couple of unused road rights-of-way through the present-day park, so I gather the developers at least planned to give it a try.

A July 1912 Oregonian article rhapsodized about the neighborhood & surrounding areas being platted out & developed. The article went on about the amazing views, and then points out that even more important is the invigorating atmosphere and freedom from dust and smoke, which was kind of a big deal back then. I recall seeing an urbanism theory from the early 1900s or so, and I don't remember where I saw it, that modern cities would naturally grow westward in the future. The idea was that people would keep moving west to live upwind of their cities' vast factories and their clouds of toxic black smoke. I don't know whether that was at play here. An October 1913 article includes a map of the area, showing old street names, and streetcar lines winding uphill from Burnside from the sorta-intersection of Macleay Blvd. & Tichner, which isn't exactly an intersection anymore due to rockslides and repairs in the 1990s.

In 1917, there was a brief vogue for demonstrating the power of your firm's powerful new automobile by showing it can make it up the hill at Imperial Heights or the hilly parts of Upper Hall Street. south of downtown. First it was doing so at all, and then doing so as fast as possible, which is to say that selling (and buying) cars hasn't changed at all over the past century.

• "Bad Grades Prove 'Pie' for Hudson", April 8th, in which the local Hudson dealer sent their star driver and a stock Hudson Super-Six up the hill at speeds averaging 20 MPH, reaching speeds as high as 35 at times, which would merit an expensive speeding ticket these days.
• "Steep Hills Scaled", April 15th, featuring a local Chandler dealer who made it up the hill while carrying multiple passengers, in front of witnesses and everything. At this point nobody but the Hudson had made it up Hall St.
• "Slow Race' Run Chandler Cars Creep Up Washington-Street Hill. Speed Under Four Miles Test Made May 6th. In which a new variant of the challenge emerged: Driving up the hill as slow as possible in top gear, without downshifting. This was staged as a race between two rival Chandler salesmen, with a box of cigars at stake, judged by the local dealership.
• Four-Wheel Drive Truck Powerful Duplex Freighter, With Capacity Load, Pulls Streetcar Up Grade. May 20th. In which a local truck dealer showed off the new Duplex 4wd truck by driving the hill while towing a streetcar. I wonder why the streetcar company agreed to that.
• "Automobile Salesmen Find Ideal Hill On Which To Test Cars For Every Kind Of Performance", September 23rd, in which we learn auto dealers have taken to using the hill to show off their new models. As an added attraction, at the start of the climb on Burnside (then called Washington St, as an extension of Washington downtown), there was a wide spot in the road where streetcars would turn to make the climb uphill. The photo with the article shows an equally steep road on the south side of Burnside, so I don't think this is the current Barnes Rd. route to the top of the hill. Could be Hermosa, or one of the now-abandoned rights-of-way in the present-day park. (find a streetcar map/reference, this should answer this q.) Anyway, this wide spot was used to show off a car's turning radius. If you tried doing a u-turn on Burnside today, you'd get hit, and cited for reckless driving, and you could weasel out of the charge with an insanity defense. You could also keep going west on Burnside to test out your car's springs on a really rough, poor quality road. Some would argue this is still possible. The article mentions people doing the hill climb at up to 40 MPH.

The mansion was there, recently built, and inhabited by the Pittocks while this was taking place. They can't have enjoyed the ruckus, as much as the wide-eyed coverage by his own newspaper hyped it. The fad didn't outlive 1917, but the Pittocks didn't have long to enjoy their renewed peace & quiet. Mrs. Pittock died in 1918, and Henry followed in 1919, a victim of the global flu epidemic. Their heirs owned the estate for decades after that, and it showed up in the news regularly in connection with high society teas and receptions and other tedious social events, which I won't trouble you with.

Then we get to the events leading up to the city owning the place. In 1959, the house was opened to the public temporarily as part of state centennial celebrations. This was arranged by Eric Ladd, a local restaurateur & antique dealer, who leased the house for the summer. Apparently nobody had lived in the house in years at this point, though Pittock heirs still owned it. Open for tours in the summer of 1959 as part of the state's centennial celebrations. A clue about Ladd's interest in the place came the next year when a grand estate sale was announced, and many furnishings and family collections were sold off. Huge estate sale in May 1960, sold off lots of original furnishings etc. An article previewing the sale mentioned that this might be the last time the public could see the house, as it might be torn down in the near future. The articles don't come out and say so, but it seems as though the family couldn't afford to maintain it & wanted to unload it quickly, and at a loss if need be.

Without going off on too much of a tangent, Ladd had something of a complex history with Portland's historic houses. He spent much of the 1950s demolishing old homes & selling off their salvageable pieces; after a few years of this, he started moving a few of the more noteworthy houses to the area of SW 20th (near the present-day 18th & Jefferson MAX stop), an area he called "The Colony". The whole city was engaged in demolishing its past back then, he was unusual in picking up some of the pieces. After his restored houses opened as an attraction, nobody talked about the earlier demolitions anymore. At one point he opened a restaurant in one of the houses, but closed it in 1960. In 1961 the city wanted to condemn some of his unfinished, stalled restorations. So he may have had money issues of his own at the point he got involved with the the big white elephant of Imperial Heights.

In 1963, the Pittock estate was proposed as the site of a new KPTV broadcast tower, which the city council rejected. The proposal was already in the works in November 1962, just weeks after the Columbus Day Storm. (The usual story is that storm damage caused the sale, but this seems to show there was already a deal in the works beforehand.) A January 1963 article mentions the station was looking at just using part of the estate and donating the mansion to the city. So that might have worked out in terms of preserving the house, but could have blocked the parts that are trails now.

The city eventually bought the estate in April 1964 following a fundraising campaign by local high society people.

After that it's mostly events & exhibits, which I won't bore you with, but I did come across a few items to pass along. You might have looked at the photos of the house and it's semi-secluded setting and think, why aren't they filming movies there? It turns out that there have been a few; it's just that none of them have exactly swept the awards at Cannes, if you catch my drift. I expect a Pittock Mansion film festival would be a real hoot.

The earliest record on IMDb is First Love filmed there in 1977. I couldn't find a First Love trailer on the net to embed here, but YouTube has the entire film uploaded in chunks labeled "clean edited version with provocative scenes deleted". Which sounds boring, although "provocative scenes" from that era often turn out to be sort of... problematic. So I dunno, I haven't watched either version, here's a playlist, make of it what you will.

Next up is Unhinged, a low-budget slasher film from 1982. That's not a genre I'm overly interested in & I'd never heard of this one before; the IMDb plot summary sounds identical to every other slasher movie ever: "Three college girls on their way to a jazz festival crash their car in the isolated woods during a rainstorm, and are taken in by a mysterious family in an old mansion. Little do the girls know, the family has a dark, murderous secret.". Anyway, the trailer's on the 'tubes if you're into this sort of thing:

This was followed a few years later by The Haunting of Sarah Hardy (1989), a spooky direct-to-basic-cable movie, in which the mansion -- at the risk of getting typecast -- again portrayed a spooky old dark house. Here's a vintage promo, because it's amazing what shows up on YouTube sometimes:

Now we get to the undisputed monarch of all Pittock Mansion films, the immortal Body of Evidence (1993), starring Madonna. Let me admit up front that is the only one of these movies that I have actually seen. I think I've mentioned this before, but I like to tell young hipster newcomers to Portland that Body of Evidence is an accurate documentary about early-90s Portland, all shoulder pads and fog machines and cheesy Enigma music. This is not actually true, of course; it's more of a cheesy 90s Skinemax movie that somehow acquired actors people had heard of, and ended up on the silver screen instead of late-night cable. With, somehow, worse acting and dialogue than its cable peers. It's one of the rare movies that genuinely falls into the so-bad-it's-good category, so you can enjoy it in that sense. Which is easier than admitting you had sort of an embarrassing Madonna thing in junior high, and never quite got rid of those CDs. I may have said too much; luckily nobody reads blogs anymore (present company excluded), so it's not like the secret's out, really.

As far as IMDb knows, no movies have been filmed here since Body of Evidence, undoubtedly because everyone realizes it can never be topped. Apparently there was an Amazing Race episode that finished here a few years ago, though; I can't find any clips of it online, but CBS has an extremely detailed episode recap.

One other thing caught my eye in the Oregonian archives, and I think I vaguely remember this one. There was nothing 1980s Portland loved more than a good moral panic, and moral panics about no-good teenagers were among the best of all. So here are a couple of articles from September 1986 about the park being a teen hangout spot, which was freaking out the neighbors. It seems the teens were at it again: Drinking, partying, cruising, playing bad 80s music loudly, fighting, carrying on, "lewd activities", and the like. It was all terribly scandalous, because 1980s Portland. Before long the mean no-fun grownups (who had certainly not done anything like this as teens in the 50s & 60s) cracked down and beefed up security, and the "crisis" sort of petered out, because teens only win these things in the movies.

magnolia trail, hoyt arboretum

march flowers (2018)

The cherry trees at NW 19th & Lovejoy (2018)

One of the ongoing traditions here at this humble blog involves a January visit to the corner of NW 19th & Lovejoy, in NW Portland, where a pair of cherry trees bloom ridiculously early every year. The weather's usually terrible, and virtually every other flowering plant is at least a month out from doing anything, but these two trees bloom like this every January. I'm not a huge fan of winter, so every year I go back to see this first hint of springtime. The most convincing (if mundane) theory I've heard is that they're a winter-blooming variety (which is something that exists) and this is perfectly normal tree behavior as far as they're concerned. It doesn't explain the maple trees down the block that haven't quite lost their leaves yet, but I'm willing to believe there's also an odd variety of maple tree out there. One that sneers at our puny Northwest winters and thinks this all just an endless New England October. It could be that all the trees along this block of 19th were all planted decades ago by someone who couldn't stand the sight of bare trees in winter, such that spring arrives on the south end while autumn still lingers on the north. It could be, in other words, that sufficiently advanced botany is indistinguishable from magic.

If you follow the first link above, it goes to past years' posts from the same location and time of year. The earliest one's dated 2010, but the 2012 post insists I'd been doing this for at least four years already, which I guess would make this the tenth anniversary, if only I had some idea why I'd said that. I don't seem to have posted anything here about the place in 2008 or 2009, or even uploaded any Flickr photos from there. I suppose I could have gone & visited them without taking any photos, though that really isn't my way, now or back then. Still, I must have had some reason to believe I'd been doing this for a while already; it's just that I can't recall what it is just now. So I'm going to claim those first two years as semi-apocryphal visits and call this the tenth anniversary, even though I also skipped a few years here and there in the middle. Hey, blogging isn't an exact science, ok?

I didn't do a post last year, for one thing, though I did go and take a few photos. The first blooms last year came right after a huge snow and ice storm. Heavy ice had broken a number of limbs off the trees, and the trees were marked off with caution tape. The blooms also came just days after the inauguration of old whatsisname, who I won't name since I'd rather not attract his followers here. That was kind of a traumatic event, and I just didn't have the heart to post photos of broken trees under those conditions. It could have worked as a good (if heavy-handed) metaphor for the times, but I simply couldn't bring myself to do it, so I didn't. I feel like that's a reasonable extenuating circumstance, and one I hope to never repeat, if at all possible. In any case, they're on Flickr here; I changed them from private in case anyone's curious.

The 2014 and 2015 editions went straight to Instagram, in an attempt to stay hip & current with all the cool-kid apps and whatnot. There hasn't been an interesting (to me) new cool-kid social media app in the last couple of years, so I guess I'm back here for the time being.

You might notice that the photos are a bit more bloomed-out than previous years. I ended up making three trips this time; the first two were cut short due to having to run for a streetcar. Everyone knows there's never a streetcar around when you need one, and it turns out that if you think you'll want a streetcar ten minutes from now, it will come almost immediately and you'll have to run for it. It's uncanny. Anyway, I went back until I got photos I liked, because tradition, and the photoset leads with those. The earlier so-so ones are toward the end of the photoset in case anyone really insists on seeing the very first ones. I dunno, it's possible someone might, so they're here just in case.

Golf Junction Park

The next obscure Portland place we're visiting is tiny Golf Junction Park, on the south edge of Sellwood next to the fancy golf course. It's basically just a small grassy area next to some railroad tracks, with an old passenger railcar parked nearby. (And these photos are kind of old, so I can't promise the railcar is there right now.) A 2011 Sellwood Bee article explains that this spot was once an important railway junction, with Portland streetcars heading south to Oregon City and east beyond Estacada from here. As it was located next to the country club's original clubhouse, "Golf Junction" was an obvious, if unimaginative name for the place. (Though for what it's worth the country club's official history page for that era explains they were also really into polo back then, not just golf, and they hosted a lot of high society teas and whatnot.)

Golf Junction is not exactly a city park; the land's owned by the railroad next door, and leased in perpetuity by a group connected to the Sellwood neighborhood association, which sort of is and sort of isn't part of city government. This group has maintained the park on and off since the park was created in 1996. The park has the aforementioned railcar, though it doesn't seem to be open to the public, and apparently there's a history plaque somewhere nearby that I didn't notice or get any photos of. And that's about all there is to see here. Until the mid-2000s there were old streetcar barns just north of the tracks, but (as a Greetings from Portland post explains) they were torn out to make room for townhouses, with the last bit vanishing in 2012. Oddly enough the electrical substation across the street is historic too; at one time the Portland Traction railroad here was part of the same company as today's Portland General Electric, and the substation was built here to help power their electric streetcars. The streetcar lines just happened to run out to the PGE dams at Willamette Falls and Cazadero (east of Estacada). The much diminished present-day line now dead ends at the OLCC warehouse in industrial Milwaukee, not far from here.

The park is barely outside Portland city limits; just to the north, the rail line & SE Ochoco St. (where it exists) mark the boundary between Multnomah & Clackamas counties, and to the east SE Andover St. here marks the Portland city limit around Garthwick, a little piece of the city that spills over into Clackamas County. (The park's uninformative Clackamas GIS entry is here, for what it's worth.) The Garthwick subdivision was announced in 1914, promoted as an exclusive faux-Tudor subdivision next to the swanky golf course. Ads noted it was outside city limits back then & not subject to Portland or Multnomah County taxes, and promised there'd be chains at the two gates to the neighborhood so it could be closed off from the outside world. The gates are still there, albeit without chains. The ads ran for the next decade and change, so it seems as though the lots sold more slowly than expected. I imagine this was partly due to the long commute; the Sellwood Bridge didn't exist yet, and streetcars of the era weren't famous for being speedy.

From the library's Oregonian archives, here's a July 1979 reminiscence about the old days, riding the interurban line out to the Cedarville Park complex in Gresham for picnics and fishing. (Nearby is the only surviving station on the former rail line.) The railroad wouldn't abandon that stretch of the line for another few years, and the article includes a few photos of what it looked like before becoming today's Springwater Trail. One photo includes a very 1970s-looking guy jogging next to the tracks, as a little foreshadowing of the line's future.

Madrona Park

Next up we're paying a visit to North Portland's Madrona Park. I really do try not to say "you probably haven't heard of it" (and I was avoiding the phrase before it was cool), but this really is a pretty obscure one. It's due north of the Skidmore Bluffs, on the far side of the Going St. road cut, and it has sort of a view of the river from the south end of the park, and there's a small playground and a couple of basketball half-courts at the north end, and those have an unusual origin we'll get to in a bit. The rest of the park is just overgrown brush and trees, though. Supposedly the park's named after a particular madrona tree somewhere in the park, but I don't think I have any photos of it. Or at least there aren't any "This way to the famous madrona tree" signs, so who knows? The city's 2016 guide to official heritage trees doesn't mention any trees here, so maybe it isn't all that special, or the tree just isn't there anymore.

Since the scenery isn't that remarkable, we'll do like we often do here & play amateur historian for a bit. The city notes the land for the park was donated by Amos Benson, son of timber baron Simon Benson. You might know the elder Benson as the namesake of Benson bubblers, Benson High School, the Benson Hotel, Benson State Park at Multnomah Falls, the Simon Benson house on the Portland State campus, and probably a bunch of other things I'm forgetting. Though not as famous, Amos did pretty well for himself too, and a huge historic house of his can be seen next to the new city park at N. Polk & Crawford. So you tend to assume the donation was another act of noble civic-minded philanthropy, but that's not quite what happened.

To get the full story, we have to dive into the library's Oregonian newspaper archives again. Here's the September 16th, 1921 article on the donation of the park. It describes the park's semi-accidental origins:

This property and a few acres north of it was purchased by Mr. and Mrs. Benson from the Portland Gas & Coke company at the time that the county board of commissioners was endeavoring to locate the Greeley-street extension through the property. The gas company began litigation to stop the roadway and the property was then acquired by Mr. and Mrs. Benson for the sole purpose of permitting the roadway to be constructed without the delay that would ensue as a result of any legal battle.

The tract which has been given to the city is a sightly one, overlooking the river and Swan Island. It connects with the proposed boulevard system extending around the city, and is a valuable acquisition in that it will give a park to a section that now has no recreation spot. No playgrounds will be installed, it was announced.

Park Superintendent Keyser noticed the tract and its desirability as a park site. He conferred with Mr. Benson and as a result the donation was made.

Benson owned the land rather briefly before the big philanthropic gesture. Here's a September 14th 1917 article about the proposed Greeley extension, in which Benson is described as a major promoter of the project. Benson, it seems, had no interest in the area except for his precious road, and he quickly pawned the surplus land off on the city as soon as they expressed an interest in the place.

Wanting the land is not the same thing as having plans for it, and it appears the city never had any ideas around what to do with the park beyond not installing a playground. A 1933 guide to city parks said the park was undeveloped but had views over the city airport, which was still on Swan Island at that point. The park's next appearances in the news were due to repeated citizen complaints. A 1937 complaint to the city council stated that the park was continually being torn up by cars, spraying dust everywhere. Then there was another complaint the next year, possibly by the same person, informing the city that the park hadn't been cleaned since 1933 & was overrun with poison ivy. Neither article indicates the city promised to do anything about the park's condition, and the string of complaints seems to end at two, so either the original complainant gave up in 1939, or his annual complaints stopped being newsworthy.

The park itself rarely figured in the news over the next couple of decades, but for a while after World War II the surrounding neighborhood sometimes went by "Madrona Park", I guess that being the sort of name that sells real estate (such that Seattle has a Madrona park & neighborhood of its own, which I had to weed out of search results). It inspires thoughts of nice respectable real estate, on nice level land, laid out in a nice conventional grid. Which is doable in this part of North Portland, but not without a little unsavory help. In 1947 the Oregonian explained how the city used garbage to fill in uneven terrain in the Madrona Park area and other eastside neighborhoods. The article begins “Some of Portland’s best families are living on old potato peelings, coffee grounds, and egg shells.”, which is a pretty great lede. It goes on to explain that improving the landscape with garbage is being done scientifically, not randomly, so there's no cause for concern. I'd never heard of this before, so at some point the city must've stopped bragging about this scientific feat. I was also surprised not to see any angry letters to the editor complaining about the paper hurting property values by publishing this, or wondering if doing this was safe; it would be decades until anyone thought to ask how buildings on top of garbage would hold up in an earthquake. For those of you who don't have a local library card & can't get to the original article, here's a list of spots around town that got the scientific garbage treatment between 1923 and 1947. Some of the intersections listed don't exist today, but presumably did back then:

• Guilds Lake (now industrial NW Portland), the original site, used until the entire lake was filled in.
• A former gravel pit at NE 33rd & Fremont
• Marquam Gulch, now Duniway Park
• A gravel pit around 37th-38th Avenues & Klickitat & Siskiyou Streets, in the ritzy Alameda neighborhood. You can actually kind of see this one in Google Maps if you turn on terrain view, since it has an even slope stretching over several blocks instead of a steep bluff like the rest of Alameda.
• Another old gravel pit south of Rose City Golf Course at NE 65th & Tillamook, a few blocks from one of the painted intersections I like to track down now & then.
• 20th & 21st, Belmont & Yamhill, now Colonel Summers Park
• Penn St. gulch, to provide a road to the Swan Island airport. I'm guessing this is today's Going St. but I'm not entirely sure.
• A sand pit somewhere in St. Johns.
• A gulch at Alberta & Greeley, which would put it right under an Adidas building just north of Madrona Park here (the park, not the neighborhood).
• A gravel pit at Alberta & 39th, which I think puts it under the Alliance High School campus.
• A gulch in Overlook park.
• lastly, the old Mt. Hood Railway cut at 90th & E. Burnside, probably under the religious school that was built there shortly thereafter.
• The article explains that all future garbage would be sent to the new St. Johns Landfill, which operated until 1991 and is meant to become a park someday.

The park did make another brief appearance in the news in in the summer of 1952, when it hosted one of 3 municipal forest fire lookouts to keep an eye Forest Park across the river, in response to a huge forest fire that had occurred there recently. In other parts of the state, old fire lookouts have been converted into amazing AirBnB rentals, but probably nothing that cool ever existed here.

1964 saw the one big change that's happened to the park over its history, when the city leased a chunk of it to Bess Kaiser Hospital next door for use as a parking lot. Curiously I have not been able to find a single news item about the original lease deal, and not for lack of searching. It's possible they kept the deal really quiet, since since turning parks into parking is rarely a popular move. It's also possible the database search feature is missing links here and there, which I already had grounds to suspect. At some point in the 80s or 90s, I'm almost positive there was an article about city workers coming to look for Madrona Park & not being able to find it, and realizing the part they were looking for was under a parking lot. It would have been easier to lose track of a park back then, in an era of paper records & no GIS systems. I could have sworn the article was about Madrona Park, but no such article shows up in search results no matter how I query for it, so either the search feature's broken or I'm broken, either of which is possible.

By 1968 the hospital wanted to expand further and offered to buy the whole park outright for $33,000. The city turned them down this time, admitting the park was lightly used but was part of the plan for a "Willamette Crest Greenway" connecting Overlook Park to the University of Portland. Most of this land is in public hands now, but it's been 50 years and the proposed greenway hasn't quite happened yet. It still sounds like a good idea, though.

The hospital closed in the late 1990s, and the campus was bought by Adidas in 1999 to be rebuilt as their new North America headquarters. It seems strange now, but less than 20 years ago the paper described the surrounding neighborhood as "struggling". I was about to say this was recent, because 1999 doesn't seem that long ago to me, but I suppose it kind of was. The city's lease arrangement continued with the new neighbors, though the parking lot became basketball courts and a playground, and apparently there is or was a skate park somewhere in the area too.

Which brings us to the present day, and now you know the complete history of yet another weird and unimportant place in Portland, or at least you know a few random anecdotes about it. Plus there's a chance you can now tell your fancy rich friends that they live on garbage, which is always great.