Saturday, October 24, 2020

Beaver Falls

Ok, next up we're doing the short hike to Beaver Falls, along a stretch of the old Columbia River Highway between Rainier and Clatskanie, on the way to Astoria. This waterfall is not exactly famous, and the surrounding area isn't touristy, and the present-day road doesn't look particularly significant, and this would be a prime opportunity for me to score some hipster points explaining how incredibly obscure everything is, if hipster points were a thing worth having. Right up there with listing off bands nobody on the planet has ever heard of, or chuckling when someone mispronounces your favorite artisanal goat breed, or whatever.

For readers outside the Northwest, or who aren't familiar with this ongoing occasional project of mine, here's a little background. The original Columbia River Highway was a major engineering project of the early 20th century, promoted as the region's first 'modern' road -- by Model T-era standards -- with one section heading east from Portland to The Dalles and points east -- including the famous tourist-clogged stretch through the Columbia River Gorge -- and another leg (the Lower Columbia River Highway) going westbound to Astoria and the coast. The highway was designed to showcase the region, wandering around the landscape in search of waterfalls and other scenery, with state-of-the-art concrete bridges, and walls and other structures built by Italian stone masons. Unfortunately as the only modern road in the area, and the only road at all in some areas, it made itself obsolete almost immediately thanks to induced demand & was replaced by bigger, better, faster, wider, straighter ultra-modern boring roads starting in the 1940s, with this stretch getting the treatment in 1955.

As with the eastern leg of the highway, the bypassed bits and pieces of the old road typically became lightly-used side roads or were abandoned entirely, and scenic highlights along these parts quickly faded into obscurity. But unlike the stretch through the Gorge, the surviving parts on the way to Astoria don't have road signs, or shiny new ODOT-funded bike paths, or glossy guidebooks, or really any publicity at all. But the roads themselves are still there, and the scenic bits that were there a century ago are still there, if you know where to look. The waterfalls are maybe not of the same scale or quantity as in the Gorge -- which is famous for a reason -- but fame draws crowds, and like a lot of people I'm all about avoiding crowds right now. Beaver Falls did get a brief bit of attention back in July when an Oregonian article covered it as one of several waterfalls that weren't barricaded off for the ongoing pandemic. Which actually was very useful information, since nobody seems to be tracking which destinations are currently open and which aren't across the region, and I'm not inclined to make the long drive without knowing that little detail.

I think I ought to start by explaining how to get there, or at least how I got there, and then I'll get to the trail and the falls themselves. The fastest and easiest way -- which is not what I did -- is to just stay on US 30 westbound past Rainier until the the turnoff for Beaver Falls Road at the tiny sorta-town of Delena, then stay on the road for another 3.6 miles. You'll see an unsigned parking lot on your left with room for maybe a dozen cars (this is a guess; I did not actually count the cars when I was there). GPS coordinates for the parking lot, not the falls, are 46.1038712, -123.1282997, if that helps at all.

As for what I actually did, I'd noticed that there was another stretch of the old highway starting in downtown Rainier, and I wanted to see what it was like while I was in the area. Rainier and Clatskanie are both right at river level, but there's a hill between them, and the Columbia bends north for a bit at that point and then back. So to go between the two towns you either follow the river several miles out of the way (like the railroad line does), or go over the hill, which is what both the old and current highways do. But while today's US 30 just goes directly up and over the hill and down the other side, the original route made several switchbacks ascending from downtown Rainier, and then followed Beaver Creek down the other side before bending south into downtown Clatskanie.

I haven't figured out how to embed a Google map with custom directions -- I could swear I've done that before, but now the embeddable map reverts to the default route on US 30, which I don't want -- but at least I can still make a link showing the old route, so you can see what it looks like in another tab. As you can see there, the old route (which now goes by "Old Rainier Road") starts south of 30, at the west end of downtown Rainier. By accident I actually turned off 30 a bit before the map does, and drove around in downtown Rainier a bit looking for where I'd planned to be, and ran across an unrelated historic bridge in the process, but didn't stop for photos & eventually found the turn I wanted. In any case, it climbs the hill via the switchbacks I mentioned, but unfortunately this stretch of the old highway clearly hasn't been paved in ages, and the forest around it is overgrown and starting to encroach on the road, giving that stretch a weird claustrophobic feel. Parts of the road have very old guardrails that might date back to the state highway days; these are in poor shape, unfortunately, and it's clear they've been crashed into a lot over however many decades they've been there.

A note at Recreating the HCRH says there was once a state highway wayside somewhere along this stretch (the "Ditto Wayside", named for local philanthropists), with a trail to some nearby springs. But there isn't a wayside or viewpoint here now, nor is there much of a view anymore thanks to trees growing over the last century or so. I even checked the Columbia County GIS system out of curiosity, in case it was still there somewhere but overgrown and forgotten, but it shows no public property nearby, so maybe the state unloaded it after the road stopped being a state highway.

At the top of the hill the road improves and you're in ordinary rural country for a while til you get back to US 30 at the tiny burg of Alston, with the next segment of old road just across the highway. The intersection is a little sketchy, but there's bound to be a gap in traffic eventually and then you can scoot across when nobody's looking. The road heads west from there as Alston Rd. for a few blocks, and then you have to merge onto 30 just for a few hundred feet or so before leaving it again at the Beaver Falls Road turnoff I mentioned earlier.

So however you got to Beaver Falls Road, one thing you'll notice on the way to the trailhead is that the road crosses and recrosses Beaver Creek several times on old bridges that look original to the century-old road, or at least inspired by the originals. Somewhere along that stretch, two miles upstream from Beaver Falls is where you'd stop to go look at Upper Beaver Falls, if only you knew where to stop. I wasn't sure where it was, exactly, so I skipped that side trip and continued on to the main event. The parking lot for the main falls was easier to find, since there were other cars there and a seasonal official sign next to the trailhead warning visitors about county forest fire rules. A blog post from February 2017 I ran across showed no such list of rules or any other sort of sign for the falls, so knowing you're in the right place might be a little harder in the off season.

From the trailhead, a short but kind of rocky trail leads down to the falls. I should point out that photos taken in August will not really do the falls justice; unlike falls in the Gorge, Beaver Creek doesn't have high altitude snowmelt feeding it in the summer, and it dwindles to a fraction of its winter and springtime volume. August is when I got the idea to go visit, and I sadly don't have a way to fast-forward us all to maybe mid-April 2021 so we can go see them then instead. And the additional tradeoff with waiting until next spring is that I gather the trail gets slippery and treacherous when wet. It also would've helped, photo-wise, if I'd stopped by at any time of day other than when the sun was directly above the falls and you have to bob and weave and shade your phone with one hand trying to keep both the sun and your hand out of your shot. All I can say to that is that I certainly wanted to take quality photos of the falls, but sleeping in on weekend mornings is also pretty great, and I feel like I struck a reasonable balance among several competing priorities. I may go back at some point to find the other waterfall upstream and maybe take some bridge photos if there's anywhere to park to do that. If I do that, I may give Beaver Falls another try too, and the upper falls too if I can find them.

I should point out herethat that although the wider world may have forgotten Beaver Falls, it's still a popular local swimming hole, and there were more people there than I would've preferred to encounter while hiking during a pandemic, and mask use was far from universal (ugh), though I obviously lived to tell the tale this time. The falls are about 50 feet high, with a deep pool at the base, and teens were jumping from the top of the falls while I was there. I suppose they've probably all done this hundreds of times and learned how from older teens, and almost nobody ever lands headfirst or hits a rock or tangles with the submerged car wreckage the Oregonian article insists is somewhere down in the deep pool below the falls. But it still stressed me out a little. I don't really have a rational basis for this, just a random worry someone might try an extreme new stunt for the first time just then and it would go badly, I guess. Everybody was fine; I just didn't stay as long as I would have, otherwise. Retraced my steps back to the parking lot, then continued along the remaining bit of old highway into Clatskanie, and got on present-day Highway 30 to head home.

For what it's worth, I did actually verify this is a county park and not just a traditional local trespassin' spot where the owner almost never shows up with a shotgun. I kind of like to double-check that sort of thing before encouraging random internet strangers to do something I did. It's not shown as a park on Google Maps, nor is it listed on the county parks website, so I figured it was at least an open question. So I checked the county GIS system again and sure enough, the system says it's called "Beaver Falls Park", 29.06 acres, with a map tax lot number of 7412-00-00601, in case anyone out there wants to triple-check my double-checking. I gather that the county classifies it as "unimproved" despite the trail and the parking lot, which may be why they don't really advertise that it exists, and why they stick to encouraging you not to set the forest on fire, and don't post any friendly "Welcome to Beaver Falls County Park, this way to the falls, lodge and spa that way." signage. The trail is surprisingly new, too; the county updated the master plan for its 24 parks in 2007, and putting in a trail was one of the suggested future improvements back then. In 2009 there was an ODOT-funded road project [doc] here, repaving this stretch of road, installing vintage-looking guardrails, and adding fencing so people could safely view the falls from the road. It doesn't mention anything about working on parking at the trailhead, or about a trailhead existing at that point, but I'm not sure whether that counts as a data point.

I kept reading that Beaver Falls was much more well-known decades ago, and faded out of public awareness after the highway was rerouted. Which stands to reason, I guess, but it made wonder whether the falls had ever been all that famous, and if so, what it had been like back in that era. So I took another dive back into the local library's historic newspaper databases to see if I could find anything interesting about the place, whether about the falls themselves, the highway and how it came to be, the doings of local residents in the Greater Beaver Falls metro area, that sort of thing. The finished product ended up as more of a story about the road than the falls, and to some degree about reporters who covered the new road, and various old cars they made the journey in.

Let me point out that "Beaver Falls" is not one of the easier keyword searches, so I might have missed a thing or two while wading through all the noise. The Northwest's early US settlers seem to have been a literal-minded, unimaginative bunch, so except for a few places where they decided to swipe an existing native name, places ended up with generic names like "Beaver Falls" and "Beaver Creek", along with Deer, Eagle, Salmon, etc. creeks. A Gnat Creek exists elsewhere in the northern coast range, and it apparently sports a few waterfalls too, though the name may cut down on the tourist trade. Other uncreative names include Whale Cove, Elk Rock, Wildcat Mountain, probably all named due to some early pioneer seeing an animal nearby. And when they didn't name a creek after an animal, they went with some mundane aspect of the creek: Big Creeek, or Deep, or Silver (as in whitewater); or Mill Creek if somebody built a sawmill on a creek before naming the creek; or if the first thing they noticed was a waterfall, Fall Creek, or maybe Falls Creek if they saw more than one. And then falls are often named after the creek, like Pup Creek Falls recently. The falls here have sometimes gone by Beaver Creek Falls. Fall Creek Falls is not uncommon, and elsewhere in the state there's a Falls City Falls, in which the falls are named for the town that's named for the falls. If another waterfall is found later and it needs a name too, it becomes Upper or Lower Animal Creek Falls. If the creek forks, you get stuff like North and South Falls at Silver Falls State Park, and yes, there's an Upper North Falls.

So the oldest mention of the 'right' Beaver Falls that I ran across was an April 2nd 1899 news item (predating the highway by roughly 20 years) relating someone's visit to the falls during a recent fishing trip. It describes the falls much as they are today, albeit with very different directions for getting there:

The falls are eight miles from Mayger's Landing on the Columbia River, and six miles from Beaver Station, on the Astoria railroad. The county road to Beaver Valley, in good weather, is passable for bicycles. From the end of the county road to the falls is about 1 1/2 miles on a poor trail, through the brush and in the bed of the creek.
The article was published as a small item on that day's Woman's Page. Much of of the rest of the page is devoted to 1899's most fashionable looks for Easter direct from New York and abroad, meaning lots of corsets and embroidery, and elaborate hats with feathers from the world's endangered birds.

The next mention of the Beaver Falls area came in 1909, as Columbia County voted on adopting Prohibition countywide. Voters rejected the idea (though it eventually passed statewide in 1914), with Clatskanie rejecting it narrowly and Rainier by a nearly 2:1 margin. At press time, results were not yet in for Beaver Falls and a couple of other then-remote precincts. The article states they were expected to vote majority-dry, though it's not clear how or why the writer would have known that.

Then we get to the origins of the old highway, starting with "Boulevard to Pacific Ocean Would Be Scenic Marvel", February 18th 1912. In which department store magnate (and future governor) Julius Meier explained in great detail how amazing it would be if there was a road to the coast -- which he insisted would be both practical and affordable -- and announced he was forming a lobbying group to bring this road into being. It seems that Clatskanie-area boosters were the ones who had first sold him on this route, and so Meier spent a large portion of the article explaining how their stretch of the Lower Columbia region would soon be densely populated and incredibly prosperous, perhaps a second Holland in the making. (Many wetlands along the river were being diked and drained for farming around this time, so there was a superficial resemblance). Toward the end he pointed out that Portland would need to kick in some cash toward the road, as Clatskanie had not, as yet, made a great deal of progress toward its destiny as a future Amsterdam-on-the-Columbia.

Meier apparently had enough pull with his fellow movers and shakers that the road was already in the works by October of that year, with the eventual route largely decided upon, including the route along Beaver Creek on the way to Clatskanie. In an October 13th 2012 article "Bowlby Opines on Highway Plan", highway promoters had invited Major H.L. Bowlby -- former Washington highway commissioner, and current head of the Pacific Highway Association, a "Good Roads" lobbying group -- to travel the proposed route and offer his expert opinions on the project. He was enthusiastic overall, with a few minor quibbles and some platitudes about listening to the locals while planning the final route. He went on to explain that these sorts of projects were usually financed with public bond measures and paid off over 20 or 30 years, and the proposed highway would likely need to do this.

County voters passed the needed bond measure in February 1914 by a vote of 1695 to 1162. The measure came to $360k overall (about $9,357,048 in 2020 dollars), with $260k of that dedicated to the new highway, and the balance spread around the inland parts of the county to try to win support for the measure. Which largely didn't work; the vote breakdown by precinct showed lopsided votes in favor from cities and towns along the proposed highway route -- the riverside mill town of Prescott voting 45 to 1 in favor, as an extreme example -- and lopsided votes against it elsewhere, with the inland town of Yankton voting 9 to 112 against the idea. The most historically significant detail of this election is mentioned in a brief aside: "A total vote of 2857 was cast, in most places the women taking an active part in the voting.". Women's suffrage had finally been approved by the state's all-male electorate in 1912, on the sixth attempt, so this special election would have been the first, or among the first, that did not disenfranchise a majority of the population. The article spent more words assuring voters that the county already had a project manager lined up and construction ought to begin in early spring.

Skipping forward a year, it turns out that Maj. Bowlby's 1912 visit had been more of a job interview than a consulting gig, and he'd landed the overall chief engineering job for the Portland-to-Astoria stretch of the highway. Unfortunately things were not going well. In an article "Columbia County Faces Road Crisis" (March 12th 1915), we learn that the project was substantially over budget, and the county was already running low on cash despite the earlier bond measure. The entire county court had recently been recalled and replaced because of the troubled project, and some residents were calling for Bowlby to be fired, largely from the south side of the county (St. Helens & Scappoose), which had not received a lot of new roadwork at that point in the project. The idea was that the south side already had adequate roads to Portland so the route of the highway would use them rather than building a new road, at least for the time being. Which to me sounds like the right decision, financially, but locals just saw construction being weighted heavily toward Rainier & Clatskanie and were jealous about it. The article includes a couple of grainy photos, one of a large rock wall similar to those on the more famous parts of the highway thru the Gorge, and another of some dignitaries looking at a completed section of road. These photos were in relation to a recent construction incident where some brand-new dry stonework along the road had collapsed. An assistant state highway engineer responsible for day-to-day operations blamed the collapse on contractors' use of cheap non-Italian labor.

He has a theory that the Italian workmen alone know how to build dry walls; that the art was handed down to them from the ancient Romans, whose walls in various parts of Europe remain standing after centuries of use.

The scandal stayed in the headlines over the next few days. In "Misunderstanding of Finances Cause of Columbia Road Crisis" (March 16th 1915), we learn more about how the county got itself into this pickle. It seems that one reason locals were so upset over cost overruns was that during the bond measure campaign, pro-highway advocates had promised, or at least strongly implied, that state government matching funds would pay for a big chunk of the project. It turned out, post-election, that pro-road advocates weren't actually authorized to make any such promise on behalf of the state, and precisely zero dollars arrived from Salem after county voters agreed to kick in their chunk of the tab. The article points out that the entire state highway department budget was only $240k per year at the time and the state simply didn't have that kind of money.

The March 16th article also has two photos; one of Beaver Falls, with a narrow wooden footbridge above it, and another of a modern concrete bridge over the creek. The footbridge above the falls would have been associated with a sawmill that operated above the falls until around 1917, when the local supply of trees worth cutting had been depleted. The original plan at the mill had been to build a splash dam above the falls: You build a temporary dam, let it fill with water and dump all of your logs into it until it's nice and full. Then you break the dam, and let the resulting flash flood wash your logs downstream to somewhere where you can collect them at your leisure. Which I guess could be a practical way to move logs around without building any roads or railroad tracks, assuming you'd done the math right and had stored up enough water to get your logs from point A to point B. The people behind this scheme had not done their math right, and promptly went bankrupt.

In any case, another article "Bowlby Crisis Now Delays Road Work" appeared the next day (March 17th 1915), rehashing the many complaints about Bowlby and his project. The primary ones being that the road was going to cost more than residents felt they'd been promised; that it was also taking longer than promised, in part due to fights with contractors and some ugly eminent domain battles; and that Bowlby was somehow overspending on surveying and design work. Apart from the eminent domain stuff, a lot of that sounds eerily familiar to me even though over a century has passed and I just make software and not highways. A new additional anti-Bowlby complaint was that the route of the highway through St. Helens would bypass the city center and instead run parallel to an existing rail line a mile outside town. Which seems like a fair complaint, honestly; bypassing the county seat and largest town that way does seem like a strange thing to do. However it's also undoubtedly the reason central St. Helens remains cute and historic today. So that actually paid off in the end, though there was no way the people of 1915 could have known that. The article largely stems from an interview with one of the county court members ousted in the earlier recall, so the listed complaints were not exactly coming from an unbiased obbserver.

So this project that was in familiar trouble was faced with the same eternal engineering tradeoff as every other troubled project since the beginning of time. You have three options: You can add resources -- more money, more workers, etc. -- but there was clearly no more money to be had just then; you can stretch out the schedule -- but the previous articles made it clear the public & authorities were already restless over how long it was taking; or you can satisfy the previous two constraints by just doing less -- cutting the scope of the project, or the quality of the finished product. One of the links above -- and I forgot to make a note as to which one -- indicated they'd found a few areas where they could save money and time by just not building a few stretches of the road at first, where there was an existing road they could make do with for now. I'm not sure what this was called in 1915; a more contemporary term is "value engineering", and in the software world you're delivering an MVP, or Minimum Viable Product. So they figured out what their MVP looked like: 1.) Given a sufficiently powerful contemporary car, you could start driving from Portland in the morning, and arrive at the beach in time for dinner. and 2.) Some nontrivial part of the road had to be new or improved, so voters could see they'd gotten some return on their investment. And I've been involved in enough of these things to know the implicit 3rd item: The missing parts you didn't have time or money to build or debug are just annoying enough that it shakes loose additional funding to finish the job. But not so annoying that people switch back to the train, or try a different road, or go with a competing software product. With all of that in mind, a big gala grand opening celebration was scheduled for August 1915, just a few months away.

The PR blitz for the new road ramped up weeks ahead of the big day. In a July 18th article, "Julius L. Meier One of the First to Urge Lower Columbia Highway", the paper offered a glowing -- even fawning -- profile going on and on about Meier's foresight in recognizing the need for the road, and his practical ability in organizing the pro-road campaign, and then went on and on about how much prosperity was coming now that the road was (supposedly) almost a reality. This was quickly followed by "Columbia Highway Beauty Described", August 8th, by Meier himself. Among the highlights he mentions are the stone work along the highway at Prescott Point, near Goble; the highway loops ascending Bugby Heights (formerly Bugby Mountain); and the view from the hilltop outside Rainier. Beaver Creek only got a brief mention in connection with the new highway eventually opening up the area to farming, since they ony wanted to talk about the finished parts of the road just then, and the Beaver Creek part was nowhere near being done.

The long-awaited grand opening was chronicled in "Columbia Highway to Sea Christened", August 13th, in which a 40-car convoy of dignitaries made the 135-mile journey from Portland to Astoria, and then down the coast to the ritzy resort town of Gearhart, in less than seven hours, not counting stops for grand opening ceremonies in various towns along the way, or for digging Meier's car (also carrying the governor and one of the state's US Senators) out of sand it had gotten stuck in further toward the coast. The stretch between Rainier and Clatskanie wasn't complete yet -- the article explains there were just a few bridges over Beaver Creek that weren't finished -- and the convoy had to use a steep, rustic forest road for that portion of their expedition.

Cadillac "8" Makes First Trip Over Highway to Sea, August 15th, a lengthy first-person account from a car The Oregonian sent out ahead of the big convoy. Strictly speaking the journalists were guests of the car's owner, and the paper didn't splurge on a new Cadillac for the occasion. The article raves about the car almost as much as the road. The article claimed Little Jack Falls (along a now-abandoned stretch of highway near Prescott, south of Rainier) was the only waterfall along the road, which would have been true at the time, as nearby Jack Falls tends to dry up in the summer. They had gotten lost heading west from Rainier, and then were unsure of the route again at Delena, so they may have been nowhere near Beaver Falls. The article makes it very clear that the road was still very much under constructon along much of its route, and they kept encountering road crews making frantic last-minute fixes ahead of the dignitaries' arrival.

"Reo Makes Astoria Run in Five Hours", September 12th 1915. This was by Chester A. Moores, the paper's auto editor -- who also wrote the recent Cadillac piece -- and covered largely the same trip as the previous articles. By this point a journey like this had already moved off the front page to the paper's automobile section, next to the car ads. Readers were reassured that you didn't to splurge on a Cadillac to get to the beach; the solidly middle-class REO was up to the job and could even take a turn at rescuing other motorists whose less-sturdy vehicles couldn't handle some downhill sections of the road. (A new REO touring car started at $1250 in 1915 dollars, about $32k now, while a new Cadillac "8" Type 51 started at $1975, roughly $51k in 2020 money). The article has a photo of Little Jack Falls (which the highway ran right at the base of) and another of the long climb up Clatsop Crest (formerly Bugby Heights), and describes the Clatskanie area as a miniature Holland. In other 1915 automotive news, remote starting of a car via the miracle of radio waves was being demonstrated for the first time at the Indiana State Fair: Every five minutes, crowds were wowed by a Model 83 Overland being started by a signal from the Overland factory five miles away, sent by a large and very stationary transmitter. So not exactly a practical device yet. Also the state highway department had issued a statement clarifying how the new auto registration laws worked, confirming that yes, in general you would have to pay the full $2 annual registration fee even if you'd owned the car for less than a year, although if you'd owned it for a month or less when the fees came due you only had to pay $1. And a Chigago gentleman named Otto Nordbo was seeking a car manufacturer to sponsor him as he proposed to drive from New York to San Francisco without eating. He claimed this would demonstrate just how safe modern cars were, and insisted that he knew what he was doing, as he had previously completed a 30 day fast, albeit without driving anywhere.

Moores made the trip again in August 1916, this time riding along with the local Kissel Kar dealer in a shiny new Hundred-Point Six. The car's big claim to fame was that it had both a convertible top for the summer (as seen in the article), and a removable hardtop for the rest of the year. Like many of the era's smaller car companies, Kissel fell on hard times in the Depression and stopped making cars in 1930, per an owners' club history. Moores's account pointed out a number of still-unfinished spots along the highway, but found nothing impassable along the way. Following local advice in Rainier, the adventurers took the longer river route west to Clatskanie, bypassing the whole Beaver Creek area.

Which brings us to a November 26th 1916 article, in which we learn that despite the grand opening, and all the assurances about just a few finishing touches remaining, the Delena-to-Clatskanie segment was still only half-completed over 15 months later, with nine (!) more bridges over Beaver Creek yet to be built. Project officials insisted the road would still be finished by mid-January, after scrounging up another $25k to pay for building it. Half of this money was a donation by Simon Benson, the Portland timber baron and philanthopist. The article explained the new road segment would pass perhaps four or five waterfalls and would be a new highlight of the highway when complete. This was followed by "Cut-Off Through Wonderland of Lower Highway is Now Being Completed Rapidly by Crews, who are Being Paid by S. Benson"December 10th. The article focuses on on Benson's recent donation, and the fact that he had once lived in a tiny cabin in the area when he was young, penniless, and just getting started in the logging industry, which is one of those rags-to-riches stories newspapers have always loved. It mentions he was planning to acquire the land around the old Oregon Lumber Company mill at Beaver Falls and donate it as a park. The article includes several photos, including one of the falls, which at the time were clearly visible from the (still-unpaved) road because the surrounding area had been clearcut quite recently. The article also mentions "Twin Falls" two miles upstream, which I think refers to today's Upper Beaver Falls, unless there's another waterfall upstream that everybody's forgotten about, which is also possible.

An August 1917 article, again by Moores, compared the Lower Columbia Highway to a route further south (present-day Highway 6) as ways to get to and from Astoria, by driving both in a shiny new Hudson Super Six. Moores claimed the Lower Columbia route was shorter -- which it might still be if you're headed to Gearhart -- but the route through the coast range was more scenic, which may also still be true when you aren't being tailgated by angry bros in Porsches, or stuck behind a lumbering RV. The article notes in passing that the Beaver Creek segment was still under construction at this point due to various unfinished bridges. A brief note on March 24th 1918 noted that the state had rejected a bid to build one of the planned Beaver Creek bridges for $6483.60 ($111,252.14 in 2020 dollars) and would go ahead and build it themselves instead.

Moores left the the paper in November 1917 to become private secretary to the governor; he had somehow found time to work his way through law school despite his day job driving all over the Northwest, and passed the bar exam in May. He later went into real estate -- his original beat at the Oregonian before the auto craze hit -- and later ran the Portland Housing Authority during WWII as it built the temporary shipyard housing at Vanport.

Meanwhile the vacant auto editor role, and the "Is the road finished yet?" beat, was taken over by L.H. Gregory, who spent a few years doing this early in his long career. Gregory continued the existing theme: Hitch a ride to Astoria and back in one of the year's hottest new cars, courtesy of a local dealership, take some photos, write another piece about current conditions along the road and any quirky stories or misadventures that occurred along the way. In that spirit, Gregory made the journey in May 1918 in a Series Nine Franklin Six -- Franklin being a small maker of quirky air-cooled cars out of Syracuse, NY. He announced that the road was open, even though they were on detour routes almost the entire distance west of Delena; no progress had been made on the long-delayed Beaver Creek bridges over the winter due to high water. I had to reread the article before realizing he meant the road was open for the season after being impassable all winter, not that it was complete. Gregory called the Franklin "a wonderful road car" and overall seems to have had a great time on this trip, marred only by his companions' complete inability to catch any fish anywhere along the way. (Incidentally, after Franklin went bankrupt in the Depression, the factory was taken over and made Carrier air conditioners until 2011, at which point the plant was demolished and the jobs shipped overseas.)

A June 30th 1918 article informs the reader that the journey to Astoria -- the other of Oregon's "two chief cities", as the article puts it -- could also be made in a Willys Six. The article starts boldly, announcing once again that that the road to Astoria was now open, but quickly gets to the qualifiers: It was not actually complete, despite being open, nor was it officially open yet, despite the grand festivities of summer 1915, and as it turns out "complete" did not necessarily mean the road had been paved or even macadamized (i.e. given the modern gravel road treatment.), though these gaps were no more than 7 or 8 miles and should be closed soon. The article advises readers to avoid the Delena-to-Clatskanie segment because the road right at Beaver Falls was still under heavy construction work, and motorists were being detoured around that spot on a steep, harrowing logging road. This detailed description of what not to do tells us that the writer's party did precisely what the reader is told not to attempt. We are also told the car's owner was a bit of a daredevil, and enjoyed driving around with a hole punched into his muffler to make his car sound faster. At a few points along the road, bystanders scattered as the car approached, and yelled and gestured as it rumbled by at 35mph. The Oregonian, as a family newspaper, did not record what these people were yelling.

"To Clatsop Crest, Lower Columbia Highway, in a Buick", April 20th 1919. In which the Gregory tagged along with a rep from the local Buick dealer, who had called in for advice on a nice Sunday drive, one that was obscure and people probably hadn't heard of, because Portland. They only went as far as Clatsop Crest, as the road continuing on to Astoria was known to be impassable when wet, which was a significant problem as Astoria averages ~191 rainy days per year, and ~18 rainy days in April. The Beaver Creek segment must have finally been open, at least, as the article included photos of both Beaver Falls and Little Jack Falls, the latter with the rep's shiny new Buick parked in front. Gregory mistakenly identified Beaver Creek as the Clatskanie River, but seemed to like what he saw, describing Beaver Falls as both a "Yellowstone Falls in miniature" and "a very baby Niagara", and stating that anyone who could drive by without at least stopping for ten minutes should be barred from the highway forever. The only mishap along the way came later near the Clatsop County line, as the car slipped off some wooden planks and sank up to its axles in deep mud, where a submerged plank full of nails ripped up one of the car's tires. A passing motorist noted that county officials had known about the mud pit since at least the previous November but had not done anything about it, speculating that it was "to show what could be done with a mudhole of that kind, or to spite Clatsop County, 100 yards away".

On August 31st, 1919, readers were treated to at least two accounts of driving to Astoria and back; in one article, two guys in a Mercer (a fast, sleek sports car by 1919 standards) set a new record, making it out to Astoria in 3 hours, 50 minutes, beating the old record by ten minutes. They were slowed down somewhat by two flat tires and what sounds like the same construction detour near Beaver Falls that the paper had complained about a year earlier. Seems that at this point the steep, harrowing logging road had a temporary road surface made of haphazardly laid wooden fence rails. In the second article, Gregory made the now-familiar journey once again, this time in a shiny new Chalmers, driven by the local Chalmers rep, along with their spouses and an artist from the paper who drew another route map for the article. In addition to the unpleasant detour, they also had contend with multiple black cats in the road -- which they gingerly shooed out of the way -- and then they inexplicably ran out of gas way out in the middle of nowhere, even though the Chalmers rep swore up and down that he'd filled the tank the night before.

From there we skip past winter again to February 1920, when paving was finally about to begin along the Beaver Creek section of highway. While paving work slogged along, Gregory did the Astoria run in June in another Franklin, and again in July in a Mitchell Scout. I'm not clear on whether that model would have been an infamous "Drunken Mitchell" -- the company wanted a more sleek and modern look, and angled the radiator by a few degrees, which scandalized the motoring public of 1920 for some reason. Having your car nicknamed "drunken" in the year Prohibition went into effect was probably not great from a marketing standpoint; the company backtracked in the next year's model, but the damage was done and they were out of business by 1923. Anyway, the July article mostly talks about the inland route to Astoria, today's OR 202, and laments that readers needed to go see it within the next couple of years as timber companies were already busy clearcutting adjacent forests right up to the road, with no laws on the books to stop them.

In the midst of all of this, a September 11th 1920 article discussed a proposal to buy Beaver Falls and the surrounding old mill site as a park. As I mentioned earlier, it's a county park now, and I've seen mentions of it being a park at least back to the early 1980s, but I still haven't figured out whether it's been a park for the entire time the road's been there.

"Hot Stuff Going Down on the Lower Columbia Highway", September 12th 1920, published exactly 100 years before I wrote this paragraph. In which Gregory hopped in a shiny new Hupmobile, piloted by the local Hupmobile dealer, to investigate whether the road was done yet. We're told that paving work along the route was nearly complete other than 7.5 miles of gaps here and there, and everything should be open by October 10th, weather permitting. It wasn't clear whether these gaps were the same ones mentioned in the June 1918 article. On the bright side, the under-construction bits closer to Astoria were open when road crews weren't working, and modern personal injury law was decades in the future, so drivers were free to take their chances on the freshly-poured asphalt between 9:30pm and 2:30am daily, and all day on Sundays.

You might have guessed where this was going, given the time of year and the "weather permitting" caveat. In "Paving of Lower Columbia Highway Nears Completion" (October 17th 1920), we learn that it was turning out to be the wettest winter in at least 35 years and it had rained almost nonstop for the previous month, and there were still 4.75 miles of highway left to pave, and of course October is just the start of the long rainy season in this part of the world. The article offers several more photos of the road, and another nice hand-drawn map, but not a new completion date.

That was followed by "Columbia Highway Now Open from Hood River to Astoria", November 14th 1920, which announced the road was finally complete for real this time, with almost no remaining gaps. It seems the state Attorney General had belatedly realized the Highway Commission had no authority to build roads within city limits, or to assist anyone else in any way in doing so, and ordered them to stop. Which left one block of gravel in Astoria, another at Hood River city limits, and the whole length of the road through Rainier. We know all this in detail because Gregory covered the whole route in a shiny new Jordan Six, driven by a guy with the local Jordan dealership. (Jordan was a small maker of upscale cars, largely remembered now for its revolutionary and occasionally scandalous auto ads. The firm cratered in the Great Depression, like a lot of the others we've met.) The article includes more photos, yet another cool hand-drawn map, and a "complete" list of key points along the road with their distances from Portland and Astoria. The list mentions Little Jack Falls but not Beaver Falls, which is odd but not unusual. It could be that because Beaver Falls had missed out on the big dignitary parade of 1915, maybe it had registered with everyone that there was exactly one waterfall along the lower highway, and Beaver Falls was not that waterfall, and there wasn't a second PR blitz in 1920 to convince people otherwise. Dunno.

In any case, with the completion of paving the "Astoria Or Bust" beat quickly stopped being newsworthy, and no further examples of this particular genre graced the Oregonian's pages. Meanwhile, Gregory moved over to the sports page, and remained editor and columnist there until his retirement in 1973. The Oregonian revisited the July 1920 excursion (the Mitchell Scout one) decades later on December 31st 1975 as part of their 125th birthday festivities. A 1976 article explained that the paper's original auto section had been discontinued during the Depression, and the paper's "go drive somewhere and tell us what it was like" columns were scaled back to a single weekly feature, which finally ended in 1974 with the Mideast oil crisis. In 1982 someone at the paper remembered or realized Gregory had briefly been their auto editor decades ago, and some of his original glass plate photos from 1919-1921 were exhibited at that year's Portland Auto Show.

The Oregonian did publish a captioned photo of Beaver Falls on May 7th 1922: "Beaver Creek in High Water Lends Beauty to Lower Columbia Highway"

- photo by Scott Attractive falls bordering highway short distance east of Clatskanie Tourists who travel the lower Columbia river in summer miss much of the beauty which winter and spring bring to this route. Beaver Creek, which parallels the pavement for several miles east of Clatskanie takes the steep grade in riffles, cascades and waterfalls, crossing and recrossing the highway. In winter the stream is quickly swollen with rains on the logged-off hills around it, but in summer it dwindles away to a small creek. Beaver falls, once the power site of a sawmill, but now a ruins, is oneof the most picturesque spots between Portland and Astoria. It marks the high limit which salmon trout and steelheads reach and in early fall and winter its lower stretches are favorite haunts of fishermen from the city.
The accompanying photo shows the same dam and bridge above the falls seen earlier when the mill was operating. Neither are there now, so we have the dam removal narrowed down to an, er, 98 year time window, but that's all the info I've got on that particular detail.

Mentions of Beaver Falls became quite rare after that. There's a 1934 article about the Howard triplets' 18th birthday. Seems they had been born at a logging camp near Beaver Falls in 1916, before the road was complete and it was still a fairly remote area. The triplets had 8 older siblings, the youngest just short of a year old, their mother was 40 when they were born, and they all weighed between 2.5 and 3.5 lbs at birth, were born without a doctor attending, and all survived to at least age 18. Which does actually seem kind of newsworthy, given the era. Because this happened in the early 20th century, there was this little tidbit:

Officials of the state fair board called on the Howards and tried to get their consent to exhibit them at the fair when they were only four months old but the mother refused.
One of the three lived to 1986 and still had a surviving sibling at the time.

In 1940, the WPA Federal Writers Project released Oregon, End of the Trail, a tourist guidebook covering the state's modern highways and what there was to see along them. The Rainier-to-Astoria segment still went down Beaver Creek at that point but didn't mention the falls at all. The Portland-to-Rainier segment did mention Little Jack Falls, so it's not clear to me beats why the guide mentions one and not the other.

I don't have a direct link for when Beaver Creek Road was bypassed, but Recreating the HCRH said it happened in 1955, referencing a 2008 book "Road of Difficulties - Building the Lower Columbia River Highway", which is out of print and Amazon doesn't have in stock, unfortunately.

After being bypassed, Beaver Falls largely fell off the radar, or at least it stopped being newsworthy in Portland. I did find one crime story from 1982 where campers near the falls were pursued and terrorized by a gang of drunk teenagers, causing one of the campers to fall off a 40 foot cliff. I couldn't find a followup story indicating whether the perpetrators were ever caught, or if a gang of drunk 50-somethings is out there to this day, lurking in the forest and preying on unwary tourists. Not the sort of story that makes readers want to visit the place, regardless.

And then nothing much in the paper until the article this summer, plus the handful of useful internet results I dredged up while putting this together, and now the post you're currently reading. Now, I'm not going to claim this here is the definitive page about the place, I mean, I've only been there once, for less than half an hour tops, did not interview anyone for this, etc., but I'm fairly sure this is the longest thing anybody's written about it in quite some time, largely because I kept finding interesting tidbits to add, and I don't have a grumpy chain-smoking editor to keep me from wandering off on tangents and yell at me to just finish the damn blog post already. In any case, this one was fun to write, and I hope it was at least mildly interesting to read.

Friday, October 23, 2020

Out of the Brambles

Ok, so today we're at the Lents/Foster MAX station to look at Out of the Brambles, the multicolored sculpture on the west side of the elevated train platform. (Recall that 'today' is a very flexible word here on this humble blog, this time even more than usual. We'll get to that in a bit.) This sculpture was created by Northwest sculptor Wayne Chabre, who longtime Gentle Reader(s) might remember from old posts about Connections at the Multnomah County offices on Hawthorne, and Second Growth at the Albina/Mississippi MAX station. His description of it, from a Wayback Machine copy of an old page about it:

A common theme during interviews of Lents community members was childhood memories of berry picking. Formidable defenses allow these fruiting vines to survive, reproduce and provide sustenance for animals and humans; berry plants also protect the earth under them, the water beside them, and the multitude of small animals and birds within their thickets. A symbol of tenacious nature, berries helped support the coming of civilization, and will remain to engulf and dismantle what we have built after our tenure on Earth. Berry vines are also a metaphor for life’s struggles: getting past the thorns to the fruits. Wild berries transcend the differences between all the cultures that have populated this area. They were revered and heavily utilized by Native populations, and have been loved, hybridized, cultivated and tended by each succeeding generation and ethnic group.

I had linked to the original page in a 2013 post about Lents Hybrids, the other art at the same MAX station. That and a post at a long-defunct neighborhood business blog were the only mentions I could find about it on the interwebs, and because 2013 was roughly a billion internet years ago -- internet years are still a thing, right? -- both links have long since gone stale. The vanished lents dot biz site went away years ago, was not archived anywhere, and the name now belongs to a shady domain squatter page, which is why I'm not linking to it. And since I didn't quote the relevant blog post of theirs at the time, I have no idea what they actually said about the art here. Oh well.

The rest of my notes for this post seemed to naturally fall into a rough timeline. Partly about the art itself, and partly the chain of events leading up to this post happening in late 2020 (which I realize might be completely uninteresting to everyone besides me):

  • The MAX Green Line opened on September 12th 2009. As part of the grand opening, TriMet created public art tour guides for the I-205 and downtown parts of the new line, which I treated as sort of a "gotta catch 'em all" todo list for a while. Note that both of those links are also Wayback Machine copies, again because link rot. At least they left the pages up until sometime in 2016, which I guess is a respectable amount of time.
  • Here are a few old posts from 2006-07 when they were busy building the downtown part of the new line. Not really relevant to anything in this post, but they came up in a search and 2006 is roughly 4 billion internet years ago, so I figured I'd work them in somewhere.
  • I finally got around to riding the semi-new line on July 2nd 2010. I know this because I thought I'd be hip with the latest social media technology and live-tweet my semi-thrilling adventures riding the train out to a suburban mall and back during a heavy rainstorm. While taking photos with a new Blackberry -- my first phone with a camera -- and posting them to a long-defunct add-on service called "Twitpic", which is why the photo links in that thread don't work anymore.
  • The page I quoted about Out of the Brambles gives a date of 2012, so it went in after the MAX line opened (and after my little 2010 snarkfest). I guess this would explain why it wasn't listed in the 2009 TriMet art guide. The other 2010 photos look dark and miserable enough that I suspect I would have skipped Out of the Brambles that day anyway, had it been there, since you can't see it without getting off the train.
  • On the other hand, the entire "Lents Town Center" area has been completely transformed in the years after I took those original photos. The Portland Development Commission -- the autonomous agency tasked with doing the thing they know not to call "urban renewal" anymore -- had dreamed of gentrifying this area for decades and finally got their wish, and the mishmash of parking lots and low-rise commercial buildings has been transformed into a few square blocks of apartment buildings -- unfortunately of uniform height and fairly nondescript style. So it might have been interesting to have a few 'before' photos for comparison, but it was raining that day and I didn't realize what was coming, so I don't. Oh well.
  • As for why it showed up after the line opened, my personal theory is that it wasn't part of the original plan, but when people got a look at the hulking grey concrete structure for the MAX platform, it was a lot uglier in person than in the early-2000s CGI that had sold people on the plan, and something had to be done. And Out of the Brambles does a great job in that respect, as the concrete train platform becomes just a neutral backdrop instead of the focus of attention.
  • A bit later I realized I could get a few public art posts out of those poor-quality Blackberry photos, and since it's the internet (and nobody's paying me to do this) I could just make some self-deprecating remarks about the photos instead of going back again to take better ones. So I spent a bit of time in December 2013 writing them up and tagged them all with "greenline" in case anybody wants to binge (briefly) on bad photos of circa-2009 public art. The Lents Hybrids post I mentioned earlier was part of this batch, and in putting it together I found that one long-gone blog post mentioning Out of the Brambles, and it went on one of my todo lists. Not as a super high priority, but as something to track down at whatever point I was in the area again and remembered to look at the right todo list.
  • Just for comparison, the Second Growth post happened around this time too. That post went from taking photos to hitting "Publish" in 5 days, which goes to show that I can sometimes get things done in a reasonable amount of time, so long as I remember not to forget, and prioritize (or misprioritize) getting them done ahead of various other professional and personal goals.
  • While putting this current post together, I realized Chabre made a couple of other things at the same MAX station, with their own separate names and everything, so two more todo items just went onto another list. Obviously there's no ETA on if or when those might show up here, but they definitely won't appear before this dumb pandemic is over.
  • I did check the library's database of Oregonian back issues, and found a few articles mentioning Second Growth (like this review) from around then when the MAX Yellow Line opened, or an entertaining interview from 2002. I don't see anything similar for Out of the Brambles, I think largely because the Oregonian no longer has the staff, or the spare column inches, or the inclination to publish stories about art these days.
  • Earlier in 2014, the Twitpic service either went out of business or was about to, so I had to go back and replace all my embedded Twitpics with Flickr copies of the same photos. I'd apparently had the foresight to make backups of my crappy Blackberry photos, or maybe I'd been warned this was coming, I don't recall now. Anyway, I re-uploaded them to Flickr this time and updated the affected posts, in yet another episode in the long twilight struggle against bit rot. The end of Twitpic was inevitable after Twitter introduced their own builtin photo sharing feature, but I was kind of sad to see them go, since embedding those photos in blog posts involved a completely unapproved kludge I'd hacked together somehow. I have no idea how it worked anymore, but I was just a little proud of it at the time.
  • Next we skip forward to July 2016, when I finally had a reason to be out in that corner of town anyway, namely to visit the new-ish Zoiglhaus brewpub just steps away from the MAX station. So if you don't care for this set of photos, I'm going to blame it on me starting to drift off into a pilsner-assisted schnitzel coma for the afternoon.
  • And then the hard work of writing a blog post began, by which I mean those photos sat around in Flickr for about a year, until I created a draft post for them in June 2017, saved it, and didn't touch it again until a few days ago. By which I mean mid-October 2020, in case other stuff comes up and I forget about this post again for another few years or whatever.

Sunday, October 11, 2020

Bliss Dance

You may have heard me grumble about my Drafts folder before here. Truth be told, a lot of these drafts are just a photoset and maybe a link or two, serving as more of a todo list reminder than an actual draft. Which is fine in theory, but the drafts I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about are the ones I tend to forget all about.

A weird side effect of this situation is that untouched drafts from a few years ago start to feel like they're from a different lifetime, or another parallel timeline, like the one here. We used to go to Las Vegas every now and then as a quick break from Portland: Stay in a swanky hotel for a few nights, see a show or two, maybe order room service, maybe feed a few dollars into a slot machine, and generally wander around staring at the sheer weirdness of the place, which was usually good for a fresh post or two here. Haven't been there since September 2016, though, which is when these photos were taken. Mostly the place just wasn't as interesting anymore, and it kind of felt like the point of diminishing returns had been reached for a while. It also didn't help that there'd been a spate of high-profile random shootings along the Strip -- this was before the big Mandalay Bay mass shooting in October 2017 -- plus it was becoming clear that roughly 100% of the local casino owners (i.e. the ones that weren't vast Wall Street conglomerates) were longtime Trump cronies and generous supporters of his campaign. If they were just mobsters it would be fine; bit of local color and all that. But if someone like Trump isn't an instant pariah in your industry, it makes me not want to give you another penny, at least not while he's anywhere near the levers of power.

So anyway, pivoting awkwardly from that to the actual subject of the post, here are a few photos of Bliss Dance, a ginormous sculpture by artist Marco Cochrane, which has a cool light show at night that I unfortunately have no photos of. It's currently located at the new-as-of-2016 "The Park" entertainment district, between the Park MGM (the former Monte Carlo) and the New York New York casinos. Before it was here, it spent a few years at Treasure Island -- not the casino, but the island in San Francisco Bay -- but it started to rust in the sea air and was removed in 2015. And prior to that it appeared at Burning Man 2010. Burning Man to Vegas is an unusual journey, but there are only so many places you can put a 40' statue that comes with a lightshow. New York or Miami might work, except for the sea air problem. Too big and flashy for the Northwest, too risquƩ for Texas, too everything for the Midwest, but it seems right at home in Vegas. For now, at least; at some point in the future the vast megacorp that owns the whole area is bound to want to "reimagine the space" based on whatever current trends happen to be, and I suppose the statue will need another new home at that point. Maybe by then the Smithsonian will be interested -- maybe they'll be tasked with adding a "What The Early 21st Century Was Really Like" wing to the American History Museum, and they realize Bliss Dance would be a perfect centerpiece for the new grand rotunda, similar to the taxidermied elephant in the Natural History Museum next door, or the battling dinosaur skeletons at the AMNH in New York. Who knows.

Kalakaua Ave. Bridge

So here's a photoset of Honolulu's Kalakaua Avenue Bridge, a 1929 Art Deco structure over the Ala Wai Canal at the ewa end of Waikiki. Hawaii is famous for a lot of things, but an abundance of interesting bridges to look at is not really one of them. On O'ahu there's the one here, and the Rainbow Bridge up in Haleiwa on the north shore, and... that's about it. BridgeHunter has a whole page of links for the island, but most of the others are either small and utilitarian, or aren't bridges at all; there are a few tunnels listed (like this one for example), which is not unusual for the site, but they also list the Koko Crater Trail, an abandoned railway that -- as cool and fun as it is -- is in no way a bridge or a tunnel.

In 2014 the state conducted a fairly exhaustive study of potentially-historic bridges around the state, because -- as the introduction chapter explains -- federal transportation money is tied to having done an evaluation like this, and a previous attempt in 2008 was incomplete and had not been done correctly, and an earlier effort in 1983-1990 was now outdated and its results had been inconsistent between islands. And this was at a time when the state was trying to lock down a few extra billion dollars from the feds for Honolulu's upcoming light rail system, so there was a lot riding on getting the job done properly this time. So the O'ahu chapter of the study comes to 451 pages (although this number again includes a few tunnels along with the bridges; no Koko Crater Trail though). The Kalakaua Avenue Bridge part starts on page 338 and explains that this overly-swanky bridge helped persuade people that Waikiki -- which had been a swamp a few short years earlier -- was now highly desirable real estate. We're told that the bridge originally had globe-shaped street lights at either end, but these had been removed at some unknown date, and despite this alteration the bridge had been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1985.

The study mentions elsewhere that there's another NRHP bridge over on the windward side of the island: The He'eia Viaduct (near He'eia State Park) dates to 1921, is 892 feet long, and (according to a 1986 history paper) was the longest bridge in the state for decades afterward. And I've been over it any number of times on a bus without noticing it. Was I really staring at my phone every single time passing through here? Or am I really that unobservant? Or both? In any case, it's on one of my many todo lists now, so I may pay it a visit at some point if the global pandemic ever goes away.

Saturday, October 10, 2020

Whaling Wall, Waikiki

Here are a few photos of Earth Day Hawaii, a 16-story whale mural on the side of a condo tower in Waikiki. This was painted for Earth Day 1995 by artist Robert Wyland, part of his Whaling Walls series of 100 murals painted between 1981 and 2008, including several others on O'ahu and elsewhere around the state. That weirdly comprehensive Wikipedia page notes that this one is #67 of 100, and classifies the murals that no longer exist as "EXTINCT" in all caps, including the short-lived one in Portland (1993-97), which was demolished along with the whole city block it was on to make way for today's Fox Tower. The one in Portland, Maine was at risk from redevelopment around 2014 but has survived so far, while one painted in Mexico City as part of the deal to free Keiko -- the famous orca from Free Willy -- apparently has not. The Waikiki one is only at risk from the hot tropical sun, and the mural was repainted in 2018 so it should be around for a few more decades at least.

Wednesday, October 07, 2020

unflashed

So one of the less fun things about having a blog -- or really any sort of website -- for almost 15 years is having to deal with bit rot periodically, which I just did again over the weekend. You might have seen that Adobe Flash will be officially dead, really most sincerely dead, on December 31st, unsupported by both Adobe and all major browsers. I absolutly approve of this given that Flash was a truly endless source of CVEs over the years; the problem was that there was stil a bunch of old Flash here for me to deal with. Back in the early years of this humble blog, if you needed to embed anything beyond a simple <img>, Flash was almost unavoidable. HTML5 didn't exist, Javascript wasn't up to the job yet, and building it with a Java applet or ActiveX control would have been even worse.

I've always tended to take more photos than will fit comfortably in a blog post, so it was a huge step forward when Flickr added an embeddable slideshow widget; I could just paste that in at the top of a post, embed a map below it, and voila, a long-running formula was born. And of course this new widget was Flash-based. They later replaced that widget with an iframe-based one in 2014, after Flash became nonessential and unpopular, and a couple of years after that they switched to a JS solution for better mobile support. Over time, Chrome and other browsers started turning Flash off by default, in anticipation of killing it off entirely someday, but I never quite got around to going back and un-Flash-ifying all my old Flickr slideshows. I had updated a few when I bumped into them, but were still about 200 of them left on posts in the 2006-2014 timeframe, and it just seemed like a huge hassle and I never got around to it. But like I said, Flash goes away entirely at the end of the year, and I gave myself a TODO item a few months ago to go rescue my poor decaying vintage content before then. I finally made some time over a much-needed staycation that wrapped up last weekend, so I think this long-running corner of the interwebs is now 100% Flash-free.

I figured I needed a way to at least semi-automate this update process so it wouldn't be quite as tedious, and I remembered a little tool I put together some years ago to help generate an embeddable Google map with placemarks for geotagged blog posts. The Map page for this humble log explains in more detail how that process works, which is still sadly not automatic after all these years. Speaking of which, I should probably update that map again while I'm thinking of it. Anyway, since I already had a tool that spoke Blogger's GeoRSS dialect, I figured I'd just adapt it to my new problem. The fastest & most automated way would have been to emit an updated GeoRSS file that I could just re-import over top of the existing blog. I couldn't quite persuade myself to trust that, though, so instead I just had it create a CSV file listing the posts with offending slideshows, along with some generated html for a non-flash replacement slideshow. So at least I only had to open each offending post, paste the new html onto the old slideshow, save, wash, rinse, repeat.

While I was doing that over the course of a few hours, it occurred to me that a lot of those old posts were kind of fun to go back and read, so I added an "unflashed" tag to all those posts I updated, as an easy way to go back and look at a bunch of them at a time. I dunno, I kind of like reminders from thatt distant pre-pandemic era when you could just go outside whenever you wanted, unmasked, and the president was not a malignant orange lunatic who still might kill us all sometime between now and Inauguration Day next year. I also figured this update was worth a blog post, partly due to the trouble I'd gone to, but mostly just to pat myself on the back for finally fixing something I'd been procrastinating over for years. Anyway, have fun & enjoy the old posts if you're interested, or morbidly curious, or whatever.

Wednesday, September 30, 2020

fireweed

A mural in downtown Portland on the old Postal Building on SW 3rd, between Washington & Alder, created by Swiss artist Mona Caron. Her page about the mural mentions there's another mural of a different PNW plant in the building's lobby, which I don't have any photos of. As the name suggests, fireweed is one of the first plants to reappear on burned-over land after a forest fire, so we'll be seeing a lot of these next spring.

Saturday, August 22, 2020

Waikiki Sunsets, March 2020

Here's a photoset from six months ago, just before the Plague Year(s) began. It was just a quick, pre-planned break between work projects, but now it feels like it happened a billion years ago, on the far side of the galaxy. Posting the photos now as a little memory of what the world used to be like.

Sunday, August 16, 2020

Pup Creek Falls

Next up, here are some recent (for once) photos from Pup Creek Falls and the Clackamas River Trail #715, about 16 miles east of Estacada. I had never been here before, or really anywhere along the Clackamas past Estacada. I'd heard there were trails and waterfalls in the area -- there's an entire website devoted just to waterfalls in the Clackamas watershed, with pages about Pup Creek Falls & the trail -- but I'd never gotten around to checking it out myself. But I wanted to get outside, and -- the key part -- do it safely during the ongoing pandemic, and the Columbia Gorge is still largely closed to the public, so I figured it was it was a good time for a visit.

If you squint at the first photo in the photoset, you can see a pair of tiny people just atop the lowest tier of the falls, for scale. One of them later made it up to the upper bench where the upper tier hits the rock face and flexed his biceps for anyone watching, while his lady friend stayed put and tried out a couple of yoga poses right at the edge of the cliff; I didn't get a photo of that part because I was too busy leaving so I wouldn't have to watch, just in case that played out the way I thought it might. Anyway, the Pup Creek Falls page at Waterfalls Northwest compares it to Winter Falls at Silver Falls State Park and has it as 237 feet high. So this is often said to be the tallest waterfall along the Clackamas River, though the Clackamas River Waterfalls site says Whale Creek Falls is taller at 261 feet. I'm just going to take his word for it, since getting to Whale Creek Falls is said to be highly technical and dangerous, per two threads at Oregon Hikers, while pages at Canyoneering Northwest and Ropewiki indicate it's also really hard if you start at the top (via rugged Forest Service roads) and rappel down and head downstream from there. So I think it's fair to say Pup Creek is the tallest waterfall in the area accessible to mere mortals like me.

Anyway, our trail runs for 8 miles along the south bank of the river between the Fish Creek and Indian Henry campgrounds. Pup Creek Falls is nearly halfway between the two trailheads and up an easy 0.2 mile side trail, so that an out-and-back trip from the Fish Creek trailhead (which is what I did) comes to 7.8 miles. The Oregon Hikers page linked above rates it as "moderate", I think because of both the total distance and the fact that the trail isn't flat. You're at river level at a few points along the trail, and at others you're a few hundred feet above the river, and fun part is that the grades are moderate enough that you don't always realize you're going from one to the other. You come around a corner and the river is right there next to you, and you could swear that just 5-10 minutes ago you just looking straight down at it from a sheer cliff. On the outbound (and upstream) leg of the hike I figured that it was partly due to the river dropping in elevation, since you'll see a lot of rapids on the river over the course of the hike. But it was like that on the way back too, so I concluded it was either weird forest magic, or (more likely) good trail design.

Actually I'm positive it's the trail design. A June 27th 1982 Oregonian article "A Treasure of a Trail" described the then-new trail, which had opened the previous spring, and interviewed one of the designers. Seems the design goals were to stay low enough that the trail could be open 95% of the year, outside of major winter storms, and provide river access for fishing, while hitting as many scenic highlights as they could squeeze in along the way, and also avoiding any grades they thought would be too steep. This involved several years of repeatedly hiking the 8 mile stretch, trying out different alternatives until they had a route they were happy with. The trail was their baby, they were proud of it, and wanted the world (or at least the greater Portland metro area) to come check it out. I dunno, I always love to see stuff like this. Incidentally, the US Forest Service job title for someone who does this is "recreation technician"; the Glassdoor reviews seem generally positive: Great location, great benefits, usually great coworkers, upper management not so much, and more cleaning toilets than they had expected. Some occasional fighting of forest fires.

All of that said, I'm currently a bit out of shape due to all the sheltering in place because of the stupid coronavirus. So the last 1.5 miles or so of the return trip were... not my favorite, and I was sore for a couple of days afterward, and happy that I hadn't tried doing the whole trail as a ~16 mile out-and-back. My thoughts inevitably turned to ways of shaving off part or all of the return trip. The 1982 article suggests a car shuttle, which works great if you're a party of at least two people, which I typically am not. The Oregon Hikers page also suggests taking a bike with you -- I imagine one of those folding travel bikes -- and riding back to the Fish Creek trailhead on OR 224. Which is downhill the whole way, but 224 is a moderately busy state highway with the occasional semi or log truck, so I don't know how fun or relaxing that would actually be.

So then I wondered about the river. The lower Clackamas river is famous as a place to bring an inner tube and have a lazy float down the river for a few hours, and it's infamous as a place to do this while polishing off a six pack or a couple of edibles and occasionally drowning. Turns out the upper Clackamas is a whole other story, as I should have guessed from all the whitewater and several kayakers I noticed along the way. Pages at American Whitewater, Whitewater Guidebook, & Oregon Kayaking explain that there are multiple Class III ("Intermediate") rapids along this stretch of the river, and overall it's supposed to be really fun if you know what you're doing, which I unfortunately don't. Show up with an inner tube and no prior experience, with or without a six pack, and your mileage is going to vary. I didn't see any specific discussion about anyone doing the trail + river combo here; I imagine you'd need a packraft or maybe a foldable kayak or something for this, small and light enough for the hiking leg, but sturdy enough for the the downriver part. A Packrafting.org forum thread speculated that the combo trip would be doable here, but I didn't come across anyone saying they'd actually done it. One annoying detail -- if you're mostly interested in the water half of the trip -- is that the stretch of river that's said to be the best part, whitewaterwise, is just downstream of the Fish Creek trailhead. Annoying because there's no connector trail along that stretch of river, so if you can't bear to skip that section, I guess you'd have to walk along the highway shoulder or something.

Now, if there was a trail along the lower Clackamas river (which there isn't, as far as I know), you could actually use a Portland city bus for your return leg, believe it or not. TriMet's bus 31 goes as far as Estacada, and as of last year even runs on weekends, so you could potentially do the whole trip without getting in a car. Some people tubing the river do exactly this for the upstream part of the trip, which isn't just convenient, it also keeps a few DUI drivers off the road, if they've cracked open a few cold ones during the float back. So it's a shame that TriMet's longest bus line is juuust not quite long enough to give you a lift to either of the Clackamas River Trail trailheads.

You might be wondering why TriMet goes to Estacada in the first place, given that it's a conservative small town way out past the edge of suburbia. There may be just enough commuters who rely on the bus now that they can't discontinue it, but how did it get started? The surprising answer is that it goes all the way back to the founding of the town in the early 1900s. The TL;DR version goes something like this: Streetcar company needs electricity & can't get it; builds dams along Clackamas River. Needs transporation for building dams; extends rail lines out to the dams. Needs to pay for those rail lines; builds a park behind one of the dams, invites tourists to visit by streetcar. A few towns grow up in the area including Estacada, the one town that has a nice modern hotel. Eventually, streetcar lines become bus lines, and then the bus company becomes TriMet, and here we are. Meanwhile the electricity part of the business evolves into today's PGE, the local electric company. I'm not sure whether there's been uninterrupted transit service to Estacada since the first interurban in 1906, and I'm not sure where one would check to figure that out. But at the very least, today's bus 31 has an absurdly long family tree, whatever the intermediate branches look like.

So I had to wonder whether there was ever a time -- even briefly -- when you could've hopped on a streetcar in Portland and ridden all the way to Pup Creek Falls. And... it's hard to say. The old rail line carried passengers to the park at Cazadero, upriver from Estacada, and old rail maps show at least two more passenger stops past that, one at something called "Clackamas Lodge" that I can't find much info about, and ending at the headworks for another of the hydro projects along the river, still a bit short of the Fish Creek area. Streetcars ended there, but the rail line itself continued on after that, carrying cargo & employees for the Oak Grove hydro project even further upriver, and I saw at least one link (which I can't find now) indicating that seemed to indicate passenger service had extended further east for a while, though it's possible they confused rail service with fare-paying passenger service. An old circa-1930 photo shows a rail line next to the tiny burg of Three Lynx, which even now is still a PGE company town, & is just downstream (and across the river) from the present-day Indian Henry campground. Meanwhile an Oregon Encyclopedia article indicates the old rail line was turned into present-day highway 224 sometime in the 1920s, which conflicts with the date on the photo, so who knows. So regarding my original question, I think the answer is 'no' in general, but 'maybe' for a while in the 1920s or 1930s if you had a friend at the railroad/electric company, and you were rugged and outdoorsy enough to get across the river without a bridge and then to the falls without a trail, since that was 50 years before today's trail came into being. Maybe there's a parallel timeline out there that's just like ours, except that the trail was built as a Depression-era CCC project, with cool 1930s CCC stonework but otherwise identical to 'our' trail, and they extended the interurban so you could ride out that far for a while, until it eventually faded away in the late 1940s. Or a timeline where the entire hydro project never happened, somehow, and the whole area has been a roadless protected wilderness since 1964.

Anyway, to sum up: Nice hike, interesting area I wasn't familiar with, a bit of fun local history, and it's been two weeks so I probably didn't catch the 'rona while passing people on the trail. Incidentally, trail etiquette has changed in the COVID-19 era. Instead of the cheerful hello and petting friendly dogs when passing people, masks go on the moment you see someone coming the other way, and you sort of mumble a "thank you" while facing sorta-away from each other. Overall it's weird and not something I want to keep post-pandemic, but I do really like the the mutual "thank you" part, like it's a little acknowledgement that we're all observing a shared social contract. But then, I haven't been around other human beings in person a lot over the last six months, so maybe I'm reading way too much into that. Dunno. Mostly I just want the pandemic to be over, and I'll work out whether August 2020 me was overreacting a while after that.

Saturday, July 25, 2020

Manana Ridge Trail

Ok, next up we're checking out another O'ahu hiking trail, the Manana Ridge Trail in Pearl City's Pacific Palisades neighborhood. The neighborhood is a midcentury subdivision up in the hills, essentially surrounded by steep cliffs on all sides, and the only road from the outside world comes from the next ridge over, which takes a steep dip into valley between them. Bus 53 was really not enjoying those slopes when I took it to & from the trailhead. A protip is necessary for the bus ride: The stop you want to get off at is called "Auhuhu St. & Komo Mai Drive". On the way there, there will be an announcement for a stop at "Komo Mai Drive & Auhuhu St." Do not get off here. It's a completely different intersection, and if you get off the bus here you've just added another mile of distance and 300 feet of elevation to your hike, for no good reason. Never ask me how I learned this interesting random fact.

Like a lot of ridge hikes, the trailhead is at the upper end of the subdivision, and the initial bit doubles as a service road for water & utilities. The trail was uncrowded (by O'ahu standards) the day I was there, and the other hikers seemed to be a mix of neighborhood residents, often walking their dogs, and young people headed for the swimming hole at Waimano Falls, which is off on a steep side trail down from the ridge. I wasn't headed for the falls that day and skipped the side trip, and I did not encounter a single other human being on the stretch of trail past that trail junction. I don't know how typical that is, but it was nice at the time. Another reason to recommend this hike is that the views are different than what you see on the various trails closer to central Honolulu or Waikiki. In one direction you're looking back at Pearl Harbor, and in another direction you have a view across Central Oahu toward the Waianae Range that roughly parallels the Ko'olaus.

A problem I keep running into, when dealing with posts that have been floating around in Drafts for a while, is that I don't necessarily have a razor-sharp memory of the whole excursion now, and I don't want to give out inaccurate directions for a place where going the wrong way means either a much longer and tougher hike than you were expecting, or a much shorter hike and much longer plummet than you were expecting. So instead of me trying to replay the whole thing from memory, here are pages about the trail at The Hiking HI and The Hiking Project, and several local blog posts about the hike. There are actually two Alltrails pages about it, the first covering a popular initial segment of the trail, and the latter covering the whole trip up to the Ko'olau summit. I seem to recall that I turned around somewhere between those two turnaround points, but I don't recall where exactly. I tend to make that call based on how fast I'm going through drinking water, and how much remaining daylight I have to work with, and whether any knees or ankles or other aging body parts need to turn around, and whether the weather seems sketchy where I'm currently at or where I'm headed.

In any case, if you get an early start and are feeling sufficiently hardcore, and obviously if you have transportation lined up, at the summit you can turn left or right and do a segment of the Ko'olau Summit Trail (which runs the entire length of the Ko'olaus and thus the island) and cut in on another ridge trail, ending up at a different trailhead in a different suburb. I think I'd like to try that at some point, but so far the best I've managed is just getting to the summit, on a different trail I haven't posted about yet, and first I'll need to get back in shape after being holed up at home for months trying to wait out the current pandemic, and even then I might talk myself out of it after watching a few of those alarming KST GoPro videos. In short, don't hold your breath waiting for those photos, as it's likely to be a while.

Sunday, June 28, 2020

Cape Horn Loop

Next up in the ongoing Columbia Gorge series (part of the larger "Places You Can't Go Right Now Because Pandemic" series), we're doing the loop trail at Cape Horn, on the Washington side of the river directly across from the Shepperds Dell / Bridal Veil area. If you've looked north from there, or from the viewpoint at the Vista House, you might have noticed a stretch along the Washington shoreline where sheer 200' cliffs and a waterfall drop straight into the river, and higher bluffs rise up behind them. That's the spot we're visiting now.

The links above describe the loop in detail so I won't duplicate all of that here. The short version is that you switchback up to the high bluffs and walk along the top for a while, with several dramatic viewpoints along the way. This amazing stretch almost became a gated subdivision for awful rich people back in the 80s, before an array of nonprofits and philanthropists stepped in and bought most of it. This part of the trail eventually dumps you out on a rural back road that looks like farm country anywhere in the Northwest, with no clues to what's right next door. You continue down a gravel road and then through a former farm as you start descending toward the river. This turns into switchbacks down through another stretch of forest with more scenic overlooks, including one directly over the west portal of the half-mile rail tunnel under Cape Horn. So I imagine that would be a fairly unique place to set up and do some trainspotting if that's your thing.

The trail doesn't get you all the way down to the river, because of the aforementioned sheer cliffs. So you continue right along the cliff edge for a while and end up at Cape Horn Falls. What looks like the base of a waterfall is merely the base of the middle of three tiers; the creek continues on down to the lower tier where it drops into the river, but there's nowhere to get a good look at that part along the trail, and I don't think there's any reasonable way to see that part up close without a boat. Where "reasonable" means "something I might consider doing". I say that because, like Palisade Falls, Cape Horn is a popular ice climbing spot when conditions are right, and I ran across a forum thread indicating that you can also get there by walking down some rich person's long private driveway to where it crosses the railroad, and then walking on the railroad tracks until you get to the icy cliff you're going to climb for fun. At least there's a narrow beach along the river at the base of the cliff, when the river level isn't too high, so you wouldn't automatically end up in a fast, icy river if you took a tumble, I guess.

Anyway, the falls are where this photoset ends, because I forgot to put my phone back in airplane mode at one point earlier in the hike and it happily drained itself to near-zero trying to find a cell tower. The rest of the trail is more hiking through the forest, and then ending up on another road, which doubles as the last 1.2 miles of the trail, taking you back to the parking lot. You might think that you could park at this lower trailhead and do a short hike over to the falls, but parking there is absolutely verboten and I gather very bad things will happen to you and your car if you do. So park in the official lot up the road, or take the bus, since the lot doubles as a park & ride for the Skamania County bus system. Which connects to C-Tran at Fishers Landing, so it's possible to do this without a car, if you can work around the limited bus schedule.

Like a lot of recent posts here, these photos are from a couple of years ago, which was actually the first time I'd visited the Cape Horn area. I was about to explain it away because the trail system has only been open to the public since 2004, so I couldn't have gone when I was a kid, or during an early-90s period of "Hey, I have a working car and my weekends are weekdays, explore all the things!" Then I remembered that 2004 actually was a long time ago, and this humble blog has existed since late 2005, and I just sort of didn't get around to it until the Eagle Creek Fire, when many places on the Oregon side of the Gorge either became less appealing or were (and still are) closed entirely. I think one reason I don't pay as much attention to stuff on the Washington side of the Gorge is that I don't like driving on SR14. Not because of the road itself, but because of the other drivers. On this particular trip, I was tailgated by a large pickup truck for the last couple of miles before the turnoff to the trailhead. I was already going a bit over the speed limit anyway but that wasn't enough for him, & he was close enough that I could see him angrily pounding his steering wheel and yelling, before having to grip the wheel again with both hands for yet another hairpin corner. Honked angrily when I braked for the turn and turned off. And sure enough, that truck had a huge Tr*mp bumper sticker on the back. As that was a couple of years ago, I imagine he's either in jail or a federal judge by now.

One sorta-interesting detail just occurred to me -- the name "Cape Horn" of course refers to its more famous namesake at the far southern tip of South America, which it sort of resembles if you squint just right. And apparently the name was in use as early as the 1840s, predating both the Panama Canal and any of the transcontinental rail lines that ended in Portland. So it's entirely possible that it was named by someone who had seen the original on their way here. Although let me add -- and any longtime Gentle Reader(s) out there may have heard me say this before -- that if there's a record of what it was called before pioneers showed up, I would happily support renaming it back, along with anything else named after faraway places or people with no ties to the region (e.g. Mt. Hood, Mt. St. Helens).

Sunday, May 17, 2020

Nu'uanu-Judd Trail

Ok, the next hike on the agenda is O'ahu's Nu'uanu-Judd Trail, just off the Pali Highway outside of downtown Honolulu. This was not one of my favorite hikes, to be honest, though it's not entirely the trail's fault. I picked this hike because it seemed fairly close to a bus stop, although that turned out to be more like 3/4 mile after taking the winding (and sidewalk-less) road into account. Which still doesn't seem that far, but it was also an unreasonably hot and humid day, without the usual tradewinds, if I remember right. Which is usually a clue that it's not an ideal day for hiking, but I was only there for a week and hadn't gotten out as much as I'd hoped, so I figured I'd give it a try and see how far I got.

Once you make it to the trailhead, the first section of actual trail is the Judd Trail, an easy and mostly-flat loop that involves a lot of tromping around a hot, humid, and dark forest, with no views to be had, unless changing from native forest to pine trees to bamboo and back counts as a view. About halfway around this loop, it intersects the Nu'uanu Trail, which switchbacks up through the same dark, humid forest to reach the top of a ridge, at which point it becomes another O'ahu ridgetop hike. So the plan was just to get up onto the ridge and go until I felt like turning around.

Along one of these switchbacks, I leaned forward to get under a low-hanging branch, and somehow managed to launch one of my water bottles out of my pack. It slowly rolled off the trail before I could grab it, and tumbled down the slope into some unreachable underbrush, never to be seen again. Which is the only time I have ever lost something while hiking, at least so far. After standing there blinking for a while, I realized I'd have to dial things back since I'd already used a lot of the other water bottle. I didn't want to give up halfway up the ridge, though, since the whole outing would feel like a waste of time if I did that, so I figured I'd turn around when the trail got up onto the ridge & stopped switchbacking.

So I did that, and took a couple of photos with bits of Honolulu skyline in the distance while I was there, though I they look more or less the same as Honolulu skyline photos I've taken elsewhere. I then turned around, retraced my steps, looked for my lost water bottle on the way down just in case (to no avail), did the remaining half of the easy loop, and wandered back to the bus stop, the end. I did have some water left at the end, so I could maybe have gone a little further than I did, but I was kind of sweaty and irritable at that point and just wanted to declare "Mission Accomplished" and go home.

Obviously my experience is not typical, and I gather from other people's photos and descriptions that I turned around before the scenery really improved. So maybe I'll go back at some point and have another go at it, though it's not exactly at the top of my revisit list. Anyway, here are some links from across the interwebs with more of a positive take on the place and the experience.

Thursday, April 30, 2020

Coyote Wall & the Labyrinth

Nearly everything is closed right now due to the global pandemic, and I'm holed up at home trying to make myself do things besides working and reading the endless bad news. So I'm going to try to put a dent in my endless pile of draft blog posts and unused photosets with some of this unstructured free time; it's obviously not a replacement for going outside, but it's the best available option at the moment.

So here's a photoset from last May, taken at Coyote Wall in the Columbia Gorge, on the Washington side a few miles east of White Salmon and Hood River. Coyote Wall is easily visible from Hood River & Interstate 84; it's the huge rock formation that looks kind of like a flat-topped desert mesa with sheer cliffs, but tilted maybe 20 degrees so that one end meets the river. I only recently realized the place had a name, which was around the same time I learned it has an extensive trail system that I knew nothing about. Turns out that officially there have only been trails here since 2011, when the Forest Service adopted a master plan for the area. Of course there were trails here before that, largely of the outlaw mountain bike variety, but apparently I wasn't part of the right rumor mills or whisper networks or insider cabals or whatever to have known anything about the place. Story of my life, really.

Anyway, if you go at the right time of year -- which I apparently did -- at some point while hiking endlessly uphill you'll hit the altitude where it's currently peak wildflower season. Which is truly amazing. I like to think some of the photos in the photoset approach doing it justice. To give you some idea, my original plan for the day was to do the Coyote Wall - Labyrinth Loop trail, but in reverse order to ensure I at least saw the Coyote Wall part if I decided to bail out early. Then after that I was going to cross the river and go to Rowena Plateau, a place I've repeatedly said is my favorite place in the Gorge and maybe my favorite anywhere, a strongly-held opinion dating back to 1990 or so, mumble-mumble decades ago. And I decided to punt on that whole leg of the trip and wander around here longer instead. Mostly I just wanted to stay longer here, but I had a gut feeling that doing both in the same day would lead to ranking them, and the old sentimental favorite might not win that one, and overall I'd be happier leaving them as separate and unique experiences. I am slightly embarrassed to report this, but while I was wandering around with all the sunshine and flowers there miiiight have been a brief "Sound of Music"-style twirl or two. I say "slightly" because there was no actual singing involved, just the twirl part. And furthermore, I am only telling you any of this because there's a global pandemic now, and everything's closed indefinitely, and I really miss going outside in any capacity. So yeah.

Eventually the trail brings you to a point where the steep slope levels off and the open grassy slope gives way to a mixed forest, and a few trails lead off in different directions. A lot of people turn around at this point, having gotten what they came for, and I probably would have been just fine doing that myself in retrospect, but the loop I was doing kept going, so I kept going, and the next bit was something called the "Crybaby Trail". My memory can be a little sketchy about these things, but my recollection is that this trail is slightly wider than a mountain bike tire, and it's laid out along the very edge of a cliff many hundreds of feet high, and on sunny days it attracts all of the world's snakes to come and sun themselves. Or to hide in bushes right next to the trail, for some of the more easily startled snakes. I may be exaggerating about the width of the trail, possibly. I may have mentioned once or twice that I have an occasional heights issue, or more exactly a not-having-anything-to-grab-onto-around-heights issue. Which I don't like, and I try to poke at it under controlled conditions when I can, in the hope I can get over it or at least mitigate it at some point. This hasn't worked so far, and I have to say the Crybaby Trail was my least favorite part of the adventure, but maybe next time will do the trick, whenever that turns out to be.

The Labyrinth part of the loop takes you through varied terrain to the east of Coyote Wall. Some additional open grassy areas, and sections of forest, and lots of rugged lava rocks, and at least one waterfall. I would probably have more to say about this part if a.) I hadn't just been where I'd just been (both the Julie Andrews part and the cliffside Well of Souls part), and b.) I had written this post in a reasonably timely fashion, when it was easier to remember more than a few key highlights. One key highlight I do remember from this stretch of trail was briefly glimpsing a pika, as it fled thinking I was some sort of horrible predator. I hear them all the time while hiking but I'm not sure I'd ever actually seen one before this one. So that was cool. The cute little squeak sound they make sounds exactly like a family dog's favorite rubber squeak toy when I was a kid. So when I hear pika calls I think I'll always have this mental image of a small dachshund eagerly playing fetch with a large squeaky rubber cheeseburger. Which was exactly as silly as it sounds.

In any case, it's time to wrap this thing up before the clock hits midnight, so I can keep the "at least one post per month since 2005" streak going for another 30 days. I had this idea at the beginning of April that I might have time to do more than one this month given all the working from home and avoiding all human contact and so forth. But it hasn't really worked out that way so far. I'm not sure whether that's because April 1st was just a few hours ago and there simply wasn't time, or because it was two billion years ago and I spent most of the month trying to evolve cell walls, followed by a rudimentary central nervous system. Both of these things seem equally true somehow. But I have high hopes for May. Got a shiny new vaguely-defined time period to work with, that's bound to make me incredibly productive and creative this time around. Please note how I am setting this joke up for future me as I try to finish another post with minutes to spare the evening of May 31st.

Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Wa'ahila Ridge Trail

In our next Hawaii hiking adventure we're having a go at Honolulu's Wa'ahila Ridge Trail, in the state park of the same name. This was actually one of the very first hikes I did on O'ahu, but the resulting blog post sort of stalled out in a half-written state and I sort of forgot about it, as there was always something newer to write about instead. Since I'm currently stuck back in Portland, holed up from the ongoing global pandemic, it seemed as good a time as any to dig up this post and try to finish it, as a little memory of what the outdoors were like in the Before Times.

Anyway, one of the things I really like about hiking on O'ahu specifically is that many trailheads are easily accessible by public transit, so you can just can hop on a city bus, take a fairly short ride to the edge of suburbia, and wander off almost immediately into a dense tropical forest. Once you're in the forest it quickly feels like you're a few hundred miles past the back of beyond, but then you come to to a break in the trees, and there's a view of downtown Honolulu a couple of miles away, and sometimes a subdivision a few hundred feet straight down from you in an adjacent valley, and you'll likely never be out of mobile phone range, and a lot of other hikers turn out to be neighborhood residents on their daily dog-walking route. But the illusion is still pretty convincing, or at least it still works on me.

So with all that introduction out of the way, here we are at Wa'ahila Ridge State Recreation Area, above the St. Louis Heights neighborhood, which meanders up the lower ocean-facing part of the ridge. City bus #14 goes from Waikiki to just outside the park entrance (the Peter St. & Ruth Place stop, #3994, to be precise). Or you could drive there, if you don't like public transit for some reason; unlike a lot of area trailheads, there's plenty of parking available, and nobody's glaring at you for being the millionth tourist parking in front of their house. The parking lot is within a large grove of introduced Norfolk Island pine trees, which give the area a cool, mountainous feel, although you're really not that high up and it's not that much cooler, but somehow it feels that way. Maybe it's just the power of suggestion, since you typically don't associate pine trees with tropical climates.

To a bit about geography. The Ko'olau Mountains are a long ridge along the east side of the island (the Waianae Range is a smaller and roughly parallel equivalent on the west side), with very different conditions on the two sides of the ridge. The windward side of the ridge is essentially a vertical wall (at least on s. part of the range), as seen here in the Ho'omaluhia Botanical Gardens post a few months back. The leeward, Honolulu-facing side is not as steep and has a series of side ridges projecting out sorta-perpendicular from it, with valleys between them, and suburbia sprawling out into both. Which subtracts from the wild nature aspect a bit, but works to our advantage with ridge trails in that you don't have to hike up from sea level if you don't want to.

The tops of these ridges are quite narrow, sometimes just wide enough for a trail, and sometimes even narrower than that, with sheer drops on either side of you. There's literally nowhere to put switchbacks to get up the steep bits, and nowhere to reroute the trail around them. So when the ridge undulates, so do you, and this sometimes involves scrambling over boulders or relying on (but not entirely trusting) ropes left by previous hikers. That said, it generally looks more scary than it actually is, so long as you stay on the trail, though I've had my doubts now and then when a strong crosswind picks up.

The Wa'ahila Ridge Trail is pretty typical in that it follows the ridge up to the point it joins the main Ko'olau ridge. At that point you can admire the view off to the windward side, and then either go back the way you came, or turn left or right, follow the Ko'olau Summit Trail over to the next ridge, and make a loop out of it. The KST runs the whole length of the Ko'olau ridge, and yes, hiking the whole thing in one go is a thing that exists, though doing smaller segments of it between ridge junctions is much more common. The junction point for Wa'ahila Ridge is one of the higher points along the Ko'olaus at about 2500 feet, and it somehow picked up the absurd name "Mt. Olympus". Absurd because references to Greek mythology seem incongruous here, and it had already been called Awaawaloa for centuries before some 19th century students at a local private high school decided to start renaming things. Which isn't an authoritative source of place names, if you ask me. "Olympus" isn't even a very original name. Wikipedia actually has a list of peaks named Olympus, and it seems there are 8 of them in Greece and thereabouts, and 7 on the US mainland, others in Australia and Canada, and an enormous one on Mars. In short, I'm sticking with the real name of the thing.

Not that we'll be needing that name a lot this time around. As Wa'ahila was the first ridge trail I tried, and I'd gotten a late start that day, and frankly because I was a bit out of shape, I had a more modest goal in mind: Go as far as the trail junction with the Kolowalu Trail (an insanely steep trail up the side of the ridge, now closed indefinitely due to landslides), and take a photo of the back of the official End Of Maintained Trail sign, I guess in the spirit of the rarely-sung 4th verse of This Land Is Your Land So yeah, that's another fun detail: A fair number of popular & well-known trails on O'ahu either do not officially exist at all, or like this one officially end well short of where everyone knows the trail goes. I think this is largely for liability reasons, plus I'm sure it holds down the cost of trail maintenance a bit. Oh, and sometimes things really are closed due to being unsafe, let's not forget that little detail. The problem is that while many of these restrictions are completely ignored, others are strictly enforced to a almost absurd degree, most notably at the legendary (and long-closed) Haiku Stairs, which at times has had police at the trailhead 24/7, handing out $1000 tickets for trespassing. And knowing which category a given place falls into can be a problem, for locals as well as outsiders; rules may suddenly be enforced after being ignored for decades after someone gets hurt, or a local property owner complains, or sometimes for no reason at all. (Ticketing hikers is also a nice, cushy make-work gig for a chronically overstaffed police department, but that's a rant for another time.) I have no specific advice to offer about this situation, but it's something to be aware of.

I do have some advice on what to bring with you, which is more or less the same advice you'll see from everyone else: It's usually going to be hot, so bring water. Also sunblock, and more water. I brought mosquito spray when I did Wa'ahila Ridge thanks to my earlier misfortune on the Manoa Falls trail, but didn't encounter a single mosquito there, and that's been my experience with other ridgetop trails since then. Valley trails are another matter entirely, and you absolutely will be eaten alive by the little bastards if you don't take precautions. Oh, also bring food. I like to bring a bunch of apple bananas along; they're small and easy to pack along, and they're a tasty local item you can't find on the mainland. Depending on the time of year, there might be strawberry guavas growing along the trail. They're edible and fairly tasty, but they're also about 80% seeds. As you eat one you end up spitting out seeds constantly, and you quickly realize why it's such a successful invasive plant here. It's kind of the Hawaii equivalent of the Northwest's invasive Himalayan blackberry bushes, overall. The "annoying bush that will scratch up your legs" part of the role is played by the local uluhe fern, and some people recommend wearing long pants if you'll be hiking through a lot of ferns, though I generally don't do that.

Normally I'd have more of a detailed description of the trail here, beyond what the trailhead and turnaround spot are like, but I neglected to write that part before this post stalled out in Drafts, and now it's been too long to remember that level of detail. I do remember there was one spot early on in the hike where you have to make your way down a slope that's essentially just a mass of very slippery tree roots, with no dirt for traction. There might have been pine needles on top of these tree roots, unless I'm thinking of a different spot on a different trail; it's been a while. Anyway, I didn't like that part, and you might not like it either, but there's only one place like that and it's fairly short, and you miss out on the good parts if you turn around at that point. Anyway, in lieu of more of a proper writeup by me about the trail, here are a few links I liked from around the interwebs about the place. They probably explain it better than I would have done anyway. Enjoy!