Ok, next up are some photos from the Hoapili Trail along the desolate and volcanic south end of Maui, just down the road from the Kihei/Wailea/Makena area -- and I think it may be a continuation of that road. The trail is a former royal road from the early 19th century, and where the parts further north were paved and widened and eventually surrounded by golf courses and surf shops, apparently nobody has wanted or needed a better road than this south of La Perouse Bay over the last two centuries, so it's survived in its original form and now serves as a rather unique hiking trail. I was kind of impressed by it as an engineering feat: They managed to build a largely flat and ruler-straight road across an endless lava plain of fist-sized rocks, strictly with manual labor and no modern construction gear. I mean, it's still made with fist-sized rocks; there's nothing that can really be done about that. In several sections of the road to the trailhead, you can see where the state tried to sort of just pave over top of the piled lava rocks, and the resulting road is not fabulous. So expect sore feet after hiking this trail, and expect to not go as far or as fast as you usually would on a flat trail. On the other hand, the trail itself is a unique experience, and it offers great views of the lava fields trailing down from the south face of Haleakala, along with four of the other major islands (Hawaii, Kahoolawe, Lanai, & Molokai) as well as the tiny island of Molokini. The navigational light shown on the trail map is just that, an automated light, not a picturesque lighthouse or anything. It's useful as a landmark to stop and turn around at, in an area without a lot of landmarks, but you aren't going to get a viral Instagram photo out of it, or at least I didn't. I did attempt sketching the island of Kahoolawe on a cool tablet computer I bought recently, only to be reminded I never could draw worth a damn, and I'm not any better at it on eInk than I am on paper. Oh well.
Tuesday, April 30, 2019
Sunday, March 31, 2019
'Iao Valley
Here's a photoset from 'Iao Valley in the West Maui Mountains. It's kind of an amazing place: Lush green canyon, impossibly steep hills, clear rushing stream flowing through it. Apparently if you visit on a rainy day (which is most of the time), there are also a few waterfalls cascading down the sides of the canyon. The only disappointing thing is that there isn't much of a trail system here; there's a short paved path around a small garden of tropical plants, and 133 stairs to a small viewpoint with a view of 'Iao Needle.
Oh, and at the viewpoint there's a fence, a stern sign warning you to not go beyond this point, and an obvious trail leading off into the forest behind it. I've got a few photos of the sign but sadly didn't go any further; it's not that I'm intimidated by official signs, rules, and regulations, and I've hiked enough in Hawaii to know that these signs are usually just a CYA move on the state's part, because they're scared of getting sued if anyone gets hurt. I kind of wanted to hop the fence and keep going, but there were lots of other tourists there, and it seemed like most were there with small children (who seemed to enjoy running up and down the steps, to much adult dismay). And, well... I couldn't quite bring myself to blatantly violate The Rules in front of someone else's kids, being a bad example and corrupting the youth and whatnot. Maybe next time I'll go earlier, to avoid the crowds. Supposedly there isn't that much to see on the "secret" trail that you wouldn't have seen already on the official mini-trails; mostly I was looking to stretch my legs a bit after a 6 hour flight from Portland.
In keeping with my new policy of trying to post new photos sooner, these were taken the day before yesterday; I'll try to get to yesterday's photos (from the Hoapili Trail on the south side of Maui) later, but first I'm off to go drive up Haleakala and see the volcano, and I'll try to get to those photos within a day or two as well.
Thursday, February 28, 2019
Angels Rest - Devils Rest Loop
Today's outdoor adventure is a photoset from when I did the Angels Rest - Devils Rest Loop back in late December. The photos are in roughly reverse chronological order because the weather was truly miserable in the morning, the first time I went by the Angels Rest viewpoint. Nothing but fog, wind, and rain then, and that continued for the trip further uphill to Devils Rest, which is a weird pile of mossy rocks in an area of dense, misty forest. More fog and rain on the trip east, and then down the seemingly endless switchbacks down to the top of the Wahkeena Falls area. It may have started clearing up along the lower trail back to Angels Rest from there; I was getting a bit tired at that point, and had forgotten there was another stretch of seemingly endless switchbacks -- this time going up -- gaining 500 feet or so in a fairly short distance, on a trail I had misremembered as basically flat. So that part was kind of... unwelcome.
By the time I arrived back at Angels Rest the weather had finally cleared up and suddenly the view was incredible. And then my phone decided to drain itself from 60% to 0% in a few short minutes, as punishment for trying to share the amazing view on Instagram or Twitter, I forget which. Maybe both. And -- I am not exaggerating -- not ten seconds after my phone keeled over, a huge bald eagle soared right over me, with a pair of (I think) ravens close behind trying to scare it off. I would've led this post with that if I'd gotten a photo of it. Oh well.
Which brings us to the last bit, the way back down from the viewpoint to the parking lot. I'd figured that would be easy and probably boring since I'd done the same stretch of trail in the morning on the way up. But no, even in the dead of winter the trail attracts enough visitors that it gets churned up into a slippery pudding by late afternoon. So I slowly and gingerly made my way downhill and managed to avoid slipping and taking the quicker way down. This was after 3pm and as it was late December, it was getting rather late in the day, so I was surprised to encounter a lot of people heading the other direction. I mean, I'm sure the sunset from Angels Rest that evening was phenomenal. But I have no idea how any of those people got back downhill afterward in the dark. There wasn't anything on the news the next day about rescue/recovery operations in the Gorge, so it must have all worked out somehow. I'd love to know the secret to pulling that off, if there is one. Crawling down on all fours with night vision goggles, maybe? Beats me.
Anyway, the hike was amazing; the view at the end was amazing; the windy and rainy and foggy parts in the middle and even the unexpected switchbacks were amazing; the mud at the end was, ok, we won't discuss that part any further, but overall the whole thing was amazing and I'll happily do it again, maybe next time on a sunnier day with a later sunset.
Thursday, January 31, 2019
keepalive (january 2019 edition)
Ok, so I have 40 minutes to put some sort of blog post together to avoid breaking the at-least-one-post-per-month streak dating back to December 2005. I had meant to post some recent hiking photos (which I have quite a few of), but I couldn't seem to find enough time for the writing part, so here we are. As is often the case when I post these 'keepalive' posts, most of my waking moments are once again devoted to an Important And Very Stressful Software Project, this time one that's supposed to ship in just a couple of weeks if the stars align properly and the river don't rise. If you just come here for the photos and don't like waiting for me to type some words about them, may I direct you to my most recent (or most recently-created) Flickr photosets, where there's plenty of scenery to look at and basically zero complaining. Or at least that's true at the moment. Future photosets will push the current ones off the page and at some point someone will click that link and be mildly disappointed by whatever happens to be there at that point. Can't be helped, sorry. That's why you're supposed to click the links while they're still fresh.
Anyway, I have lots of recent material waiting as soon as I have time to do something with it. This year I'm trying (or I intend to try) to post new stuff ahead of old stuff, rather than sending things to the back of the Drafts queue to wait in line behind forgotten half-finished posts that have been there since... yeah, no, let's not even look at the dates on some of those drafts. Anyway, I'm down to 9 minutes to keep the streak alive, and I can't think of any substantive topics to yammer about that would fit within less than that, and I don't feel up to explaining the one thing I learned today (how to mount a Solaris NFSv4 share to an AIX box, in order to verify how ACLs behave or misbehave there) so I suppose it's time to hit that big orange Publish button again. Here goes...
Monday, December 31, 2018
2018: The Year in Instagram Cat Photos
I had almost forgotten that, per recent tradition, I'm supposed to wrap up the year here with some Instagram cat photos. Upon checking IG I realized that I'd pretty much used it exclusively for vacation photos this year and had posted precisely one cat photo. However the recent tradition specifies photos, plural, so I dug out a recent one and added it a few minutes ago. He highly recommends that particular brand of catnip banana, btw, and he's not just saying that in his role as a globetrotting celebrity and Instagram #brandfluencer.
Multnomah-Wahkeena Loop, July 2016
The previous post showed what the Multnomah-Wahkeena Loop trails look like now. It just so happens that I did the same hike back in July 2016, so here's another photoset showing what the area used to look like before the big forest fire. Granted this is also a comparison of July and December photos, and the latter would seem rather grim in comparison even without the stumps and ashes. Still, this is the closest thing I've got to an apples-to-apples comparison, and I imagine that most viewers will enjoy these photos more than the previous set. I know I certainly do.
Multnomah-Wahkeena Loop, December 2018
Back on November 23rd, several popular trails in the Columbia Gorge reopened for the first time after the Eagle Creek Fire. So a couple of weeks ago I did the 4.9 mile Multnomah-Wahkeena Loop trail to see what the area looks like now. Some parts were surprisingly ok, with signs of a "good" forest fire that swept out underbrush and let the trees survive. Other areas were kind of grim and spooky, notably along the Vista Point trail above Wahkeena Falls. The most positive spin I can come up with is that some parts of the Gorge now look like vintage postcard views of the area from a century ago, around the time the historic highway was built. Back then it was due to logging rather than fire and a changing climate, but the visual effect is more or less the same. In an old post from 2014, I pointed out that rock formations around the Gorge tend to have silly melodramatic Victorian-sounding names ("St. Peter's Dome", "Pillars of Hercules", "Bishop's Cap", "Thor's Crown", etc.), and explained my theory that the names reflect the era when there was the least vegetation around to obscure all the weird rocks. So maybe that should be the tourism plan for the next few years: In our lifetimes there may never be a better time to nerd out over Gorge geology, so come see some cool rocks before the forest grows back. Hey, it's worth a try.
There's one experience I want to relate that the photos don't capture. Imagine placing your hand on a tree for support, at a steep or tricky spot in the trail. You've hiked this trail regularly since you were a kid, so you've likely put the same hand on the same spot on the same tree dozens of times. But this time your hand comes away covered in charcoal. To me this was the most upsetting part, more than any of the images. After the first time, I tried to avoid touching anything scorched, not really because of the charcoal; it just felt wrong somehow, verging on unclean. As in, you don't want to touch it for the same reason you don't touch the body at a funeral. Obviously you can't catch a disease from a burnt tree, and you won't be assaulted by angry relatives of the deceased; it just evokes a visceral reaction that some sort of line is being crossed that shouldn't be crossed. It's odd: The very same wood, burnt in a campfire, would be cozy, a source of warmth and happy memories. But when it's burnt and still standing amidst a forest of other burnt trees, and bits of it are rubbing off and marking you as you pass... well, it was more unsettling than I had expected.
Friday, November 30, 2018
some vacation photos
Consider my situation:
- It's the end of the month, and the rules say I have to post at least once a month, and I've kept it up since, er, 2005.
- I have a drafts folder full of unfinished posts, none of which are ready to post, otherwise I would have done it already.
- I'm in this no-posts-yet situation in part because I was on vacation for a reasonable chunk of the month, and spent a lot of that taking photos, some of which turned out ok.
Given these circumstances, I'm going to go ahead and post a slideshow of assorted vacation photos, without researching & writing a whole long blog post about each place I visited. I mean, those will show up here too sooner or later, but I'm not going to give even a rough estimate of when that might happen. So, briefly, here's what's in the slideshow: Everything's from the island of O'ahu, with locations including Makapu'u Point & its lighthouse; Ulupō Heiau, an ancient Hawaiian temple in the middle of suburban Kailua, now weirdly surrounded by churches; Kawainui Marsh, a large & scenic wetland area that I'm told is habitat for native Hawaiian birds, although I don't think I saw any; Waikiki Beach, mostly around sunset; and assorted brewpubs, restaurants, and food trucks here and there around the island. Oh, and Santa Claus riding in an outrigger canoe on a parade float, as one does.
Perhaps I'm showing my age here, but I sometimes wish Flickr slideshows had an option to make vintage slide projector sounds between photos, as if you were looking at these in your aunt & uncle's rumpus room in 1978, trying to stay awake because these have been going on for over an hour. And occasionally a slide is upside down, or there's a slot without a slide and it blinds everyone, and your little brother somehow gets a huge glob of gum in the shag carpet, which will never really come out, and most of the grownups are smoking and it's gross. I can't simulate the full classic vacation slideshow experience, unfortunately, but I did shuffle them randomly and then reorder them a bit, as if Uncle Steve had dropped the slides on the floor partway thru his fourth glass of jug Chablis and failed to reassemble them properly. So with that vivid image, enjoy the slideshow!
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
Civic Drive Iris
So next up on our ongoing public art tour is Civic Drive Iris, a kinetic sculpture at Gresham's new-ish Civic Drive MAX station. TriMet's description:
Civic Drive Iris, 2010, by Pete Beeman is a colorful, kinetic sculpture that functions as a landmark for the new Civic Drive Station. Artwork was funded primarily by the Portland Development Commission.
- Tall, brightly colored sculpture evokes a blossoming flower or radiating sun
- Hand crank invites pedestrians to interact with sculpture
- Turned crank causes sculpture top to illuminate and simultaneously expand and contract like an iris valve
To be honest I just sort of stumbled across this one. I was trying to solve an annoying software problem at the office, and decided to go for a walk and think about it (which works surprisingly well). But I felt lazy that day & decided to go ride the train and think about it instead, so I did (no bright ideas, though, unfortunately). Eventually I got off at this new stop to turn around & go back, thinking it was the downtown Gresham stop, which it isn't. So I saw the art, thought "hey, at least I get a blog post out of this", and searched the interwebs when I got home, which is when I realized it was kinetic and had a crank I could have tried out. I was about to claim there was no longer a crank and grumble about vandals, but the photos insist there really was a crank & I just didn't see it somehow. I'm just not getting any better at this "noticing basic things" business, apparently. Anyway, this is the third Beeman kinetic sculpture we've visited on our neverending art tour, the others being Pod, the big stainless steel wavy thing across the street from Powell's, and Waving Post at the SE Fuller Road MAX station.
Monday, September 17, 2018
Basket of Air
So next up on the grand tour we're taking a peek at Basket of Air, the sculpture in the center of the Hoyt Arboretum's new bamboo garden. The RACC description explains:
Artist Ivan McLean spent a few of years in the southern Philippines as a member of the Peace Corp and used this experience to inform his sculpture, which sits in the middle of the Hoyt Arboretum’s Bamboo Forest. The sculpture’s posts mimic the basic segmented structure of bamboo while the central sphere, a form often explored by McLean, reflects the idea of bamboo baskets he encountered during his travels.
While in the Philippines, “I built a nipa roofed house with various types of bamboo used as structural members or woven into the wall panels. During my travels I also watched in awe as workers created scaffolding rising hundreds of feet around modern buildings in Hong Kong and then a short time later hiking for days through bamboo forests in Northern Thailand and staying with families in simple homes made from the ubiquitous plant… I was constantly impressed by how skilled people were in using bamboo to build a variety of objects, including baskets.”
We've seen a couple of other McLean sculptures here previously: work previously seen here: Flying Salmon in 2014, & Rational Exuberance back in 2012. (The latter one was relocated north of the Fremont Bridge a year or two after I posted about it). I snarked a little about the salmon one, it being something of an overused motif in Pacific Northwest art. I feel I may have been unfair; undoubtedly the customer (an upscale, super-Northwesty grocery store) insisted on salmon. Salmon have the unique ability to be both an eco-feel-good regional icon and a delicious meal at the same time. Maybe not exactly the same time, but you know what I mean.
In any case, since we're more or less on the topic of bamboo forests, here's a fight scene from House of Flying Daggers (2004):
Sunday, August 12, 2018
Saturday, August 04, 2018
Millikan Way MAX art
Ok, so this next public art post is about the Millikan Way MAX station, which has sort of a STEM theme due to the old Beaverton Tektronix campus next door. I took a couple of photos when I was there a few years ago, figuring I could grab a quotable blurb about it from one of the usual places, and poof, there's your blog post. And then the search came up empty, and this post sank to the bottom of the Drafts folder and didn't get a second glance for ages.
TriMet's art guide for the westside Blue Line merely says the station as a whole was designed by the "Westside design team", and describes a few of the features, without listing titles or artists for most of them:
Trees, wetlands and the nearby Tektronix campus inspired the Westside design team artists’ theme of nature bumping up against high technology.
- Brick patterns on the systems buildings suggest coniferous and deciduous trees
- The songs of local birds are etched in bronze plaques along the trackway
- Clusters of leaves, seeds and pine cones are sandblasted in 30 locations in the plaza
- Test patterns and mathematical symbols on graph paper are created in terrazzo
- Christopher Rauschenberg’s "Time Window<" documents the view from the shelter in 1994
This whole thing seemed unusually vague; I finally understood why after I found a 1998 Oregonian article reviewing the art for the Blue Line's grand opening, back when that was something newspapers did. Millikan Way just gets a brief mention in the article, grouped with a few others: "Beaverton Transit Center, Beaverton Central, Millikan Way and Beaverton Creek: These four stations embrace nearly all the cliches of 90s public art, from photographs etched on the shelters, to cosmic allusions and navigation devices integrated into the paving patterns."
The article explains that MAX stations east of 185th don't have freestanding art because the feds prohibited federally funded projects from buying art during the initial phase of the project, until the rules changed in 1995. It doesn't explain when the earlier rules were put in place, but I suspect that came out of the Mapplethorpe/Serrano culture wars of the late 80s and early 90s. The pre-1995 rules had a small loophole in that they didn't prohibit you from hiring artists for your design team, and then having them do decorative pavers, designs on brick buildings, themed benches, etc. and classify it all as design rather than capital-A art. So that's basically what TriMet did, and I suppose this is why we aren't told exactly who designed what.
In discussing "cliches of 90s public art", the Oregonian piece mentions "The Kudzu Effect (or: The Rise of a New Academy)", a brief and snarky 1996 article by Joyce Kozloff. It lists ten contemporary public art cliches, which seem as contemporary now as they were in 1996; her names for them give a bit of the flavor of the article:
- It’s a Small World
- Junior High School Science Project
- Junior High School Geography Project
- The Artist/Architect Collaboration (also known as the The Two’fer)
- Kids “R” Us
- Heal the Earth Project
- The Artist/Writer Collaboration
- The New Age Observatory (also known as Son et Lumière)
- Transgressions and Interventions
- Triumphal Arch to Nowhere and Domestic Obelisk
Kozloff explains this style as a reaction to the arts community being besieged by angry fundies. I suppose the idea was that upbeat and inoffensive art might placate the Moral Majority goons, or at least they'd go yell at somebody else for a change. Which worked, in a away, in that you rarely see them hollering about art anymore. Although now they won't shut up about Trump's divine infallibility and all the races, religions, and other groups they want to wipe off the face of the earth. I am unsure that this is a real improvement.
Sunday, July 01, 2018
House for Summer
This captivating installation of birch trees, part of the City of Portland’s public art collection, has been pruned and shaped to take the form of a house, a house that changes with the seasons and is a reflection of the shelter of the forest canopy. House for Summer is a prime example of the work Lessick has done over the past three decades investigating the imagery and metaphor of plants.
There were various festivities to mark the 30th anniversary, and Lessick had a solo exhibition at a NW Portland gallery to coincide with the event.
I took these photos in summer 2017, vaguely around the big birthday, but I was kind of busy and didn't get around to posting them immediately. This may have actually been the same trip where I sat down on a bench and planned out a big software project that took most of the year between then and now to complete, which would be why I've been so busy lately. In any case, I didn't get the post up right away, and the weeks dragged out, and then the seasons changed a few times, and it didn't seem right to post about nice summery things in the dead of winter. So here we are about a year later, which is actually quite fast by my recent standards. (Luckily nobody relies on me as a source of breaking news.)
I took a peek to see if I could find any news articles from when House for Summer went in, and found a dedication photo from July 15th 1987. A July 10th arts page blurb mentioned that there'd been a couple of prior season-themed houses in the series:
Helen Lessick has installed, or rather, planted another in her series of house installations. Lessick has been playing with the idea of home for a while now. Her “Venus Fly Trap (House for Spring)” was part of last year’s Inside/Out series at the Portland Art Museum, and “Metallic House (House for Winter)” was shown recently at Marylhurst College.
The blurb went on to mention that Lessick planned to plant clover inside the house the following summer to "help delineate inside from outside", though it looks like wood chips play that role now. In October 1991 there was a House for Autumn made of hay at the Bybee-Howell House on Sauvie Island. That article mentions a prior House of Fire ("a metal frame engulfed in gaseous flames") and Waterhouse (with "walls formed from a sprinklerlike contraption").
More recently, the Oregonian did 20th anniversary article about the house in 2007, which was actually within the lifetime of this humble blog. I had already done a few public art posts by then, but somehow I didn't notice or clue in about this one. The article mentions that birch trees usually only live to 20 years or so, and implied that that would be the end of House of Summer, but here we are a decade later, so either the trees magically lived longer, or these are not the original trees. The photos of it in someone's 2013 blog post appear to be about the same size as now, but it's hard to tell.
The Nevada Museum of Art (Reno, NV) has a collection of materials about the project including annual photos from the beginning thru at least 2011. Which I guess would be kind of interesting, but I can't point you at them since they're 35mm slides in a box in Reno.
Saturday, June 30, 2018
Powell Park
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Next up on the grand(ish) tour we're visiting SE Portland's Powell Park along Powell Blvd between 22nd & 26th. It's your basic neighborhood park with a playground and ball fields, of the type I usually don't go out of my way to visit, though it does have an early 20th century gazebo for picnics & concerts, which I guess is a (mildly) interesting architectural feature. Longtime readers might remember I used to live nearby in the Brooklyn neighborhood back in the 90s, so this used to be one of my local neighborhood parks, but it wasn't the closest one and I didn't visit that often. To be honest, this post exists largely because I was in the area anyway, fetching drive thru from the Burgerville across the street, and I snapped a couple of photos while waiting for a traffic light without actually stopping & getting out. So with that out of the way, let's skip right ahead to our usual grab-bag of historical and news items:
- The park started appearing in the Oregonian in the mid-1920s, although the articles talk about the park like it had been there for a few years already. It was probably still fairly new because a lot of the early news items are budget and construction stuff. A June 1, 1924 story concerns the city hiring the lowest bidder to build bleachers for the park's baseball fields, which cost $1483 in 1924 dollars. That's about $21,281.38 in today's dollars (per the BLS calculator). A couple of years later (Sept. 12 1926) the city parks chief asked the council to fund a variety of construction projects. For Powell Park, the request was for "Flag pole, $100; apparatus, $5000; move handball court, $400; three fountains, $225; 20 lights, $2500". (The park doesn't have any fountains now, unless maybe drinking fountains count.) The next day, the city council considered a request for $1067.11 to build a "comfort station" in the park, which might mean the present-day gazebo.
- An August 14, 1931 item notes the park would be hosting a concert full of Sousa marches and other popular tunes that evening. Beyond the marches, the program featured various things like a Stephen Foster medley and some arranged excerpts from a comic opera, and it ended with the Star Spangled Banner, which had just been adopted as the official national anthem 5 months earlier, believe it or not. A couple of now-obscure pieces I was able to find on Youtube sound exactly like the background music for 1930s cartoons: Boccalari's "Dance of the Serpents" (not to be confused with Debra Paget's Snake Dance), and M.L. Lake's "Slidus Trombonus", which the paper describes as a "trombone comedy". No jazz, though. By 1931 all the cool kids wanted to listen to the devil's infernal jazz music, even in stodgy old Portland, so I imagine this was a wholesome families and oldtimers sort of event.
- With a few rare exceptions (like the previous news items), nearly every mention of Powell Park in the Oregonian has been in the sports section, concerning city baseball and softball leagues of all ages and skill levels. For a bit of the typical flavor, here's a July 28th 1940 sports page, in which local baseball leagues take up nearly the entire page. Local sports being a big deal back then, the top story in the Oregonian that day related to local soap box derby races, a sport that later fell into a decades-long decline until Portland hipsters revived it as a drunken ironic activity for 20-somethings. Meanwhile a smaller news story explained that the Nazis were bombing England. Additional WWII stories below the fold concerned the Axis marching into Romania and Ethiopia, and bombing Malta. So the paper's priorities might seem a tad... skewed. But then again, it's 2018 and Trump's burning everything down, and here I am writing about a marginally interesting city park, and I can't quite bring myself to do otherwise, and you're here reading this post, and I appreciate the company. It feels like it helps, somehow. The people of 1940 would not have known or used the phrase "self-care", of course, but I think I understand why they did what they did.
- In another rare non-baseball item, in August 1970 a big rally was held here as part of the People's Army Jamboree, an antiwar protest coinciding with the national American Legion Convention in Portland. This was one of several rallies around town, including one at Duniway Park, but overall the event had lower turnout than envisioned, thanks to Vortex 1, a state-sponsored hippie music festival out at McIver State Park near Estacada. The state guessed correctly that most hippies would choose a party over a protest if given the choice; meanwhile US troops stayed in Vietnam for another three years. I mean, a massive rally in Portland probably wouldn't have changed the course of the war anyway, but now we'll never know, will we?
- Here's an odd September 27th, 1977 article detailing points of interest along SE Powell out to where I-205 is now. As a harried commuter in modern 1977 Portland, it was your lot in life to be stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic all the way home to your Gresham split-level ranch. So the Oregonian offered up a list of mildly interesting semi-landmarks along the way if you were up for a little sightseeing. The article mentions the canceled Mt. Hood Freeway a couple of times; I don't know if the article was aimed at disgruntled suburbanites who weren't getting their (temporarily) speedy new freeway after all, or what. But oblique grumbling that doesn't get around to the real point is a very Portland thing. Incidentally, if the sights (including some restaurants, a nursery, and a cheap motel) didn't hold your interest as a professional commuter, the adjacent Scott's 88 Centers ad offers a Fall Value Days special on 8-track tapes starting at $1.88. Though it neglected to specify which 8-track tapes.
- A September 2002 Willamette Week item had a hearty chuckle about a planned weed potluck at the Powell Park gazebo. As it turned out, the activists behind it were merely a decade or so before their time. Sure, public consumption is still technically not legal, but it's probably just a matter of time at this point.
- The gazebo was gated off circa 2013, supposedly to thwart homeless people trying to use the (formerly) public restroom. The city, unsurprisingly, took the opportunity to require reservations to use the gazebo & charge for the privilege. The city proposed doing the same thing at Colonel Summers Park; I'm not sure whether that came to pass, but it usually does. I ran across two neighborhood blog posts grumbling about the unpopular new policy.
Sunday, June 24, 2018
Second Multnomah Creek Bridge
The next stop on our grand tour is a bridge the Oregon Hikers Field Guide calls the "Second Multnomah Creek Bridge", where the Larch Mountain Trail #441 crosses Multnomah Creek a bit upstream of Multnomah Falls. I suppose they count going upstream, so the Benson Bridge counts as the first one, this is the second one, and then there are third, fourth, and fifth bridges further upstream along the trail, and yet another along a different trail along the same creek. After I took the photos here I branched off onto the Wahkeena Trail #420 and don't have any photos of the bridges further upstream, at least not yet. In related news, I think I may expand the Gorge bridge project to trail bridges in the area. It's true that most of them aren't that amazing or unique, but I think of it as a little extra motivation to get out more and go a little further. Although this obviously has to wait until the area reopens after the big Eagle Creek Fire, and nobody knows when that's going to happen.
Other than the OregonHikers link above I couldn't really find anything else about this bridge. If you look closely you can see it's built around a corrugated steel pipe, with stone added along the visible parts to make it blend in with the bridge piers, which look older. If I had to guess I'd say it dates to maybe the 80s or 90s, just based on the amount of moss growing on it, but I'm just guessing here. The lack of info is a shame because I'd really like to know how they got the pipe up here. It seems too big to go on an ATV or to be carried up the trail by a work crew. A helicopter seems more likely, but I didn't see any old news articles to that effect, so who knows?
Up until the late 1990s this spot was a major trail junction. Where the Larch Mountain Trail continues upstream, the Perdition Trail branched off and headed due west toward Wahkeena Falls, making a shorter and easier loop than the Wahkeena Trail one. At one point along the Perdition Trail there was a long wooden staircase, which burned in an October 1991 forest fire. The Forest Service built replacement stairs out of concrete, to prevent the new ones from suffering the same fate, but they washed out a few years later, I think during the 1996 floods. At that point they just sort of shrugged and wrote it off. The trail is still there but it's been marked as officially closed for over 20 years now and no longer appears on official maps of the area. Despite that, a lot of people still know it's there, and hikers regularly wander past the closed signs and occasionally need rescuing. Legal says I have to tell you not to do this, and I personally haven't been on it since I was a kid, long before the closure. And of course the whole area's closed due to the big fire, so I suppose the Perdition Trail is currently double closed, so if forest rangers catch you there they probably feed you to Bigfoot or a forest Sarlacc or something. I do remember the old trail was pretty scenic in parts, so if they ever get around to fixing & reopening it (like a couple of forum threads speculate about), I'd consider that a great use of federal tax dollars. I mean, imagine what you could do through the entire Gorge for the price of a single F-35. I mean, along with improving health care, schools, and housing, obviously.
One fun thing I ran across, searching for info on this little bridge, was a reminder that the trails around this area are all quite old. "Following the Trails Above the Columbia" (in the August 28th 1921 Oregonian) explores the familiar Multnomah-Wahkeena loop, featuring all the same sights as it does today. The only difference I see is that there wasn't a Return Trail #442 yet, so in those days you had to walk along the highway between Multnomah & Wahkeena Falls and hope nobody ran you down in a Model T.
In other vintage motoring and travel news, that article was immediately followed by a news item about the California car dealers' association planning a huge party in Tijuana, from a more innocent time when people announced that sort of thing in the newspapers:
These two days will be gala ones in the exotic town of whirring wheels, dancing señoritas, snapping castanets, and hot tamale cabarets, according to the announcement of the San Diego County Auto Trade association.
It is the latter organization that is going to stage this party (or “fiesta” as one says in Española) and the members are urging their fellow members from far and wide to come and partake of the unvolsteaded enjoyment that will be offered in six-cylinder style.
The cutout of joy will be wide open and their will be no speed limit on jazz whatsoever — the two days will be devoted to a “reg’lar” high jinks, according to U.S. Grant, president of the San Diego trade dealers.
"Unvolsteaded" is the key detail here. That was a cute way of saying the Volstead Act -- federal Prohibition legislation -- was adamantly not in force south of the border.
Um, anyway, a September 7th 1915 article about the grand opening of the new highway includes a brief mention of excited crowds hiking the trail loop, so the trail is at least that old and there would've been some sort of bridge here back then. The article spends more time on the main event, a grand picnic at the base of Multnomah Falls or somewhere thereabouts, with bands, speeches, and wholesome athletic events, because that's what people did for fun in 1915. The article even lists event winners for posterity; there were a few categories of 50 yard dash, plus picnic staples like a three legged race, a sack race, a wheelbarrow race, and a tug-of-war. There was also a "ladies' nail-driving contest, three nails", a pie-eating contest -- Helen Hidenrieck won the girls' division by virtue of being the only entry -- and a "fat men's race". That immortal event was won by one B. Ruella, with G.W. Long placing second. No third place was announced because "judges could not decide in the scramble".
Wahkeena Falls Bridge
Ok, our next stop on the ongoing Gorge bridge project is the old footbridge at Wahkeena Falls, which (like the Benson Bridge at Multnomah Falls) went in around the same time as the old Columbia River Highway. The highway's National Historic Landmark nomination mentions the footbridge as a contributing structure. It says the bridge was built in 1914, and was designed by Karl P. Billner, who also did the Benson Bridge and most of the highway bridges along this stretch of the road, including the boring one over Wahkeena Creek that we just visited a post or two ago. The nomination doc goes on to describe the bridge:
This rubble masonry footbridge is 46 feet long and 8 feet wide and contains a semi-circular barrel arch with a 14-foot opening. The masonry guard walls, with concrete caps, continue east and west of the bridge for some distance. Simon Benson paid for the bridge's construction, as he did for the Multnomah Falls Footbridge.
As with the Benson Bridge further east, it seems this was built while Benson still owned the land here. He owned the waterfalls and decided they needed bridges, and started throwing money around to make it happen. Thanks to being rich and powerful, Benson even managed to borrow the highway's bridge engineers -- who must have been rather busy already -- to do the design work for these bridges too.
There isn't a whole lot else about this one on the interwebs, and a lot of the links just repeat the same source material (kind of like I just did above), but here's what I've got. The library's newspaper database didn't have anything worth sharing, but the Library of Congress has a half-dozen or so vintage photos as part of its Historic American Engineering Record collection, and there are a couple of Waymarking pages about it, and it shows up on Columbia River Images and Recreating the HCRH page.
Saturday, June 23, 2018
Wahkeena Creek Bridge
In the previous post about the Horsetail Creek Bridge I mentioned something about my projects having a long tail of things I have to do for the sake of completeness, and this post may be one of those. The Wahkeena Creek Bridge at Wahkeena Falls is a nondescript little concrete bridge that ordinarily nobody would care about, but it's an original 1915 bridge on the historic Columbia River Highway, so by virtue of that it counts as a historic structure. I had frankly never paid it a moment's notice until I started this bridge project. And later when I remembered to take a couple of photos of it, I promptly forgot I had them. BridgeHunter, a site run by people who are wayyy more obsessed with this bridge stuff than I am, bends over backwards to make it sound interesting in their page about it:
The Historical Columbia River Highway crossing at Wahkeena Creek is one of the earliest examples of a concrete slab bridge in Oregon. The bridge consists of a concrete slab deck resting on stone masonry abutment walls.
It also mentions that this was designed by Karl P. Billner, who designed a number of other more significant things along the old highway, like the Benson Bridge at Multnomah Falls, and the Shepperds Dell and Latourell Creek bridges. Billner wrote an article for the February 1915 Engineering and Contracting about a number of his bridges in the Gorge; the Latourell one was obviously his pride and joy and he largely focuses on it, but he has shorter items about some of the others where an interesting problem had to be solved, like fitting the Multnomah Viaducts into a cramped space, or bridging over a creek and multiple log flumes at Bridal Veil. He doesn't mention Wahkeena Creek at all. The description above says concrete slab bridges were a shiny new technology in 1915, and Billner was known for doing innovative stuff with concrete, but he must have known his other bridges were more interesting. Maybe this one just didn't fit in the article word limit and was cut for length.
When doing bridge posts, I usually look in the library's Oregonian newspaper database for interesting historical tidbits, which helps a lot when a subject isn't really inherently compelling. I did that again this time and came up with zilch. It doesn't look like this little bridge has ever been newsworthy over the last century and change. I did find one old photo of it at the Library of Congress, but it doesn't look that old, maybe 1950s or 1960s. And the highway's National Historic Landmark nomination mentions this bridge briefly as a "contributing structure" but doesn't have anything interesting to say about it. Again, I'm sure it wouldn't count as historic if it was somewhere else.
I did find one interesting and semi-related thing while searching the library database, so now we're going to forget about the bridge itself and wander off on a tangent. So here's a May 1987 story about Parasimulium crosskeyi, a species of primitive black fly that only lives in the Columbia Gorge, in a limited range roughly from Wahkeena Creek east to Starvation Creek. The article profiles a PhD student who had made it his study creature and had recently made the first sightings of female P. crosskeyi flies here at Wahkeena Creek. It seems they spend the first part of their lives in the "hyporheic zone", meaning they live in mud beneath and along the sides of a streambed, where stream water mixes with groundwater. The adults wash out of the mud, spend a little time flying around and making new flies, and the circle of life repeats itself etc. etc. One positive bit is that (unlike more highly evolved black flies) they don't have piercing mouth parts, and are thought to feed on plant nectar instead of chomping on people. Which is always a good thing in any insect.
The article ends on a note of concern; the researcher failed to find any flies the day the reporter showed up, and he was concerned as the Forest Service had recently run bulldozers along the stream, right through prime P. crosskeyi habitat, with unknown consequences. Earlier the article had explained that the fly might be eligible for an endangered species listing due to its tiny range. I couldn't leave the story hanging there, not knowing if the feds had wiped out a defenseless little bug, so I searched around to find a more recent (2000) paper about it, indicating it was still around as of almost two decades ago. Most of the papers about it date to the 1980s, though. I'm not a biologist, but I understand this happens a lot with smaller and less charismatic species: Research happens in fits and starts when someone takes an interest and manages to find funding, and tails off when they retire or move on to greener pastures & none of their students wants to take over. Then nobody looks again for years or sometimes decades.
To give some idea of how little is known about these little creatures, here's the 1985 description of the related species Parasimulium stonei, by the same discoverer as P. crosskeyi. The latter was discovered first & the paper explains in great detail how the two are different. Toward the end it mentions someone found a specimen that might be P. crosskeyi near Corvallis, and speculates that it might inhabit the Columbia and Willamette rivers too and it just hasn't been noticed yet, since black fly populations along major rivers were little studied and poorly understood, and probably nobody had ever looked for them outside the Gorge. Although elsewhere in the article it notes that collection sites (other than the oddball Corvallis one) have all been on streams with waterfalls, and wonders if "[t]he presence of a waterfall might reflect some ecological requirement, such as a marker for adult swarming behavior."
You might think there would be a photo of everything on the internet by now, but I couldn't find a picture of P. crosskeyi anywhere; the closest thing I've found are a couple of technical drawings of related species, a wing and part of the head. This isn't a lot to go on if you're looking to identify these beasties on sight; all I can say is that if you're visiting the area & maybe standing next to the creek to check out the ugly bridge, and you're holding a bouquet for some reason, and a tiny black fly tries to nom on it, you just might be helping to preserve an endangered species.
Horsetail Creek Bridge
Next up in the Gorge bridge project we're visiting the Horsetail Creek Bridge, right next to Horsetail Falls & the falls parking lot. A brief description of it at its BridgeHunter page explains that the design is nothing special but the decorative bits are ok:
One of two nearly identical reinforced-concrete girder trestles on the Historic Columbia River Highway and one of four extant structures on the route that have a distinctive cap and arch concrete guard rail system. Historic American Engineering Record, HAER ORE,26-TROUT.V,1M-
The three other structures mentioned are nearby, namely the Oneonta Creek Bridge and the East & West Multnomah Viaducts, all of which are Karl P. Billner designs that we've visited here already. Meanwhile ODOT's historic bridge field guide asserts this bridge is historic, but only describes it briefly as "three 20-ft reinforced concrete slab spans". (Please note that if these descriptions leave you wanting to go see the bridge for yourself, you'll have to wait, since -- as of June 2018 -- the whole area is still closed due to the 2017 Eagle Creek Fire.)
With that, it's time for the regular bridge post feature in which I dive into the Multnomah County Library's historical Oregonian database to see what the newspaper had to say about the place way back in the mists of time. I don't pretend to be doing a comprehensive historical accounting when I do these; mostly I'm mining the database for interesting nuggets and anecdotes, since almost nobody wants to read a post of nothing but bridge engineering minutiae. So here we go.
- I don't usually bother with traffic accident articles here, but it seems like the Horsetail Falls area had more than its share early on. Here's a very early one where a rear end accident flipped a car on the bridge in March 1917, when the highway had been open less than a year. I'm not sure how the physics of that would work, even with the spindly top-heavy cars of 1915, but ok. More notably, another collision in February 1927, was blamed on spray from the waterfall forming ice on the bridge, which can easily happen since the two are right next to each other. Like the old highway's other design flaws, the designers thought it would be cool and scenic to put the road right at the base of the falls, with no thought to possible complications.
- A lot of the retro-looking stonework around the base of the falls only dates to 1986, which -- I will have you know -- is not old. I don't recall exactly what it was like when I was a kid in the late 70s; but long before that there were a series of businesses at the base of the falls. Circa 1920 or so, Horsetail Falls was home to the Jack o'Lantern Roadhouse, which claimed to offer "Dainty, delicious and appetizing light lunches served. Come once you’ll come again and keep coming." I only see newspaper ads for it for summer 1920, so I'm not sure how long it was in business. I imagine it was gone by in June 1928, as someone else wanted to set up an ice cream shop or hot dog stand or bbq joint (the announced plans were a bit vague) at the falls, and various authorities objected. It seems the falls were privately owned at the time and everyone acknowledged the landowner & the stand guy were within their rights, but people still wished they wouldn't. The paper is unclear on how this turned out, and my incomplete understanding is that a lot of businesses along the old highway went out in the 1950s and 1960s. Some bought out & demolished by the state in the name of beautifying the route, and I imagine others went out of business after I-84 bypassed them and took away much of the road's traffic.
- In August 1923 there was a proposal to light the falls at night along with Multnomah & Wahkeena Falls. It turns out this actually happened for a while at Multnomah Falls, ending when the lights were destroyed in a winter storm in January 1969 and never rebuilt. I have no information about whether there were ever lights at Horsetail or Wahkeena Falls.
- The highway was blocked by a giant boulder here in February 1949, & the paper printed a sequence of photos of the thing being dynamited by a small work crew, without the benefit of modern common sense safety gear. Gentle reminder that people who long for the good old days before OSHA are idiots.
- A tract of nearby forest land was purchased by a timber company in July 1953, with the goal of swapping it to the Forest Service for land outside the scenic area. I mention this because of an strange and terrible idea buried in the article; it's unclear whether this was a contemporary proposal, or whether the writer just dreamed this up, but either way I'm glad it never happened:
Its becoming a part of the public preserve will make more feasible a road up the Oneonta trail, which would cross the Oneonta near a triple falls and approach the upper Horsetail falls before descending again at Ainsworth state park on the old Columbia highway.
As far as I can tell there's only one other bridge along Horsetail Creek. Which is something I always check, because all of my projects here end up with a long tail of things I do largely for the sake of completeness, and I need to know what completeness entails. So the other bridge is a nondescript railroad bridge just downstream/north of here, which may show up here at some point despite being nondescript. After that, the creek flows through wetlands and into Oneonta Creek, which passes under I-84 through a big concrete pipe and then flows into the Columbia. (I've actually been through said pipe, but that's a story for a whole other blog post). And upstream of here, the Horsetail Falls Trail #438 doesn't need any bridges, since it gets to the other side of the creek by going behind Ponytail Falls. Much further upstream, the Horsetail Creek Trail #425 crosses a couple of forks of the creek; it's a long sorta-backcountry trail through the Hatfield Wilderness, so I imagine you just ford the creek when you come to it. I've never hiked that trail and am not 100% sure, but it stands to reason.
Updated: Turns out the secret pipe to Oneonta Beach is not as secret as I thought; there's a Curious Gorge page about it, which means it's also in their hardcopy guidebook. It also turns out the pipe has changed since I was last there; a summer 2013 Forest Service project reworked it and the nearby wetlands area to make it less hostile to baby salmon. It makes sense in retrospect, but I hadn't realized the wetlands at the foot of Horsetail & Oneonta Creeks are largely artificial, created when I-84 was built on fill out into the river, and the state did a rather poor job of it back in the 60s. A 2015 article about the project said things were looking up as of then. The plan was to monitor it for four years afterward (i.e. thru 2017), but I haven't seen any more recent updates about how things turned out.
Wednesday, June 13, 2018
Makawalu Vortex
The next Honolulu public art we're visiting is Makawalu Vortex, at the UH medical school complex in Kaka'ako. This was created by local artist Jerry Vasconcellos, and it's pretty new, installed in 2013 & dedicated in June 2014.
The Public Art Archive blurb. I always like to quote these descriptions verbatim, because paraphrasing can be pretty hard sometimes.
MAKAWALU VORTEX is a metaphor of gathering energy in the presence of scientific exploration. Makawalu translates literally as “eight eyes,” encouraging all to look with multiple perspectives including spiritual, physical, temporal, and environmental. Stone pathways draw energy in a vortex towards the source, gathering focused knowledge, spirit and vision before radiating it outward.
All One
Next up we're taking a peek at All One, an abstract sculpture on the Kapiolani Community College campus, created by Vermont artist Kate Pond. It's one of a series installed around the world, from Scandinavia to New Zealand, beginning in the early 1990s. Each sculpture included a time capsule, set to be opened in 2015, the year of Pond's 75th birthday. When the time came, she traveled around the world opening time capsules one by one, including the Honolulu one in November 2015. A July 2014 Burlington (VT) Free Press profile described the upcoming global tour, along with an upcoming retrospective bus tour to be held around the Burlington area.
"Bear and Cubs", Honolulu
Next up we're taking a peek at the little Bear and Cubs sculpture at Alakea & Hotel in downtown Honolulu. The Public Art Archive blurb about it:
Benjamin Bufano, born in San Fele, Italy in 1886, immigrated with his family to the U.S. when he was three years old. He worked in the studios of several N.Y. artists before traveling and studying around the world. A philosophy evolved out of Bufano's travels: "Art is the peoples one world--one color, one race. It is the only universal language spoken. Cherished by every people or race on earth, it is the basic alphabet of human communication" "Bear and Nursing Cubs" is a gift to the State of Hawaii from the Nielsen Collection.
Bufano was a well-known Italian-American sculptor based in San Francisco, who worked a lot with stylized animal themes. Bears seemed to be a particular favorite of his, and there are a number of other Bear and Cubs sculptures besides this one, done in various materials. A quick search brings up several others, mostly around the Bay Area: At the UCSF campus in San Francisco; a museum in Oakland; a park in Piedmont; outside a Kaiser clinic in Fremont; another museum in Englewood, CO; a whole Bufano sculpture garden at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore; and one at the recently restored sculpture garden at the Oregon Zoo.
The Oregon Zoo one has suffered a bit of wear and tear, with several decades of kids climbing over it. Apparently they're in the middle of giving it replacement ears now. As for the Bay Area versions, the Piedmont & Oakland bears appear in a couple of posts in a blog about Oakland-area geology. Which is kind of a tangent, but geologists walking around and explaining stuff that's hiding in plain sight is always an interesting subject, if you ask me. Also here's a recent SF Chronicle article about where to find Bufano sculptures around the city, and there are at least 58 of them out there, by one count.
Gate of Hope
Next up on our Honolulu public art tour is Gate of Hope, an enormous orange-red sculpture on the University of Hawaii Manoa campus, created in 1972 by sculptor Alexander Liberman. The Public Art Archive link above describes it:
Standing thirty feet high in front of the Engineering Building and painted bright red with an industrial epoxy finish, 'Gate of Hope' was fabricated of three-eights inch thick plates, cut, rolled, welded and installed by the Hawaiian Welding Company. The work is formally integrated with the precise geometry and the primary color accents of Holmes Hall, while its configuration changes dramatically with the observer's moving viewpoint.
A campus public art tour brochure just says of it: "Red-orange painted steel sculpture refers to engineering principles that allow people to build complex structures." That brochure dates to 1998 so it's bound to be outdated; there's probably a newer guide out there, but this is the one I could find a PDF of. That's probably fine for our needs since it's not like the sculpture has changed over time, although they did repaint it back in 2016.
This isn't the first Liberman sculpture to appear here; he also created the vastly smaller (but same-colored) Contact II in Jamison Square in Portland's Pearl District. That post mentioned Gate of Hope in passing as one example of the large scale Liberman usually worked at, and noted that his signature color seen here is actually a cadmium red. Wikipedia says the cadmium compound used in pigments is not all that toxic, at least by cadmium standards, but you're still probably better off not licking the art.
Waiola
When I go back to an ongoing project I haven't touched for a while, I usually do one of these intro paragraphs to remind Gentle Reader(s) that the project exists, and maybe give an update on where it stands now. Public art around Portland was (if I remember right) the very first project I took on here; I'd moved downtown just before starting this thing, and the blog was part of exploring my new surroundings, at least when I wasn't getting worked up about Bush Jr. and Iraq and so forth. I've spent a lot of time in Honolulu over the last few years, and I quickly noticed the city was full of art too, including a lot of cool abstract stuff from the 1950s thru 1970s. So I did a bunch of art posts for a while, but eventually moved on to other projects, and anything I hadn't covered already ended up in Drafts while I went on about murals or Columbia Gorge bridges or something.
So with that introduction out of the way, our next stop on this revived project is Waiola, a groovy 60s fountain at Honolulu's vast and ever-expanding Ala Moana Mall. The mall has a lot of vintage art from that era and publishes their own Art Walk guide, which has a blurb about it:
George Tsutakawa’s Waiola, Hawaiian for “Living Waters,” honors the many cultures of the Pacific Basin living harmoniously in Hawaii. The structure of the statue stems from the Tibetan Obos, expressing the joy, humility and man’s desire for harmonic balance between space and matter.
Tsutakawa was on the art faculty at the UW in Seattle, and it turns out Portland's Lloyd Center Mall once had an outdoor fountain of his, which apparently was removed during one of the mall's many remodeling/rebranding efforts. I mentioned all this once before in a post about Na Manu Nu Oli, a fountain of similar vintage by a different artist, located outside a downtown office block. It seems that years ago a local newspaper's art critic compared the two fountains and explained why Waiola was better, which is a thing newspapers used to do back when they had money and employees. I also ran across a TikiCentral thread about Waiola, with a bunch of vintage photos of it & other Tsutakawa fountains. Yeah, the link goes to an entire website devoted to Tiki stuff, with argument-prone forums and everything; go for the midcentury art history, stay for the drink recipes.
