Ok, the next waterfall we're visiting in our very slow walk up Multnomah Creek is Wiesendanger Falls, which has got to be the most-photographed of the bunch; it's taller and more impressive than Dutchman Falls downstream, and much more visible from the trail than Ecola Falls just upstream. And somehow it just has more of a classic Gorge waterfall look to it than the others, but don't ask me to explain what that means. It just does, ok?
The falls are named for Albert Wiesendanger (1893-1989), who devoted much of his 71 year career to educating the public about forest fires and how to prevent them, first as a ranger with the US Forest Service and later (after "retiring") as the head of the nonprofit Keep Oregon Green campaign. I am not entirely sure about this, but I may have seen one of his presentations in the late 70s or early 80s, either as a Cub Scout or during an assembly in grade school. I remember someone explaining how forest fires were pretty much the worst thing ever, and being shown movie footage of some scary forest fires, followed by tips on how to keep that from happening; but I don't know whether it was him or someone else trying to fill his boots. Scientists have since come to realize that not all forest fires are bad; some plants and some ecosystems depend on them, and sometimes a smaller fire now prevents a disastrous one later. But I still can't shake the visceral negative reaction I have when I see one.
The falls were only named officially in 1997, at the behest of the Forest Service. Per the usual federal policy you can only name things after people who've been deceased for at least five years and were significant somehow or had some kind of connection to the thing being named. (The exception, I guess, being members of Congress naming things after themselves or each other by legislative fiat, but that's a whole other post.) So I imagine the Forest Service getting this done in 8 years is really fast by federal agency standards. Prior to 1997 the falls went by... a variety of unofficial names, often lumping it together with Ecola Falls just upstream as a single waterfall. To be exact, this was once the lower half of what was called either "Upper Multnomah Falls" or occasionally "Double Falls", both of which are dumb names.
"Upper Multnomah Falls" is just begging to be confused with the upper tier of Multnomah Falls, or maybe Little Multnomah, or more recently a small and previously nameless falls upstream from Ecola that we'll get to in a couple of stops. Going by the few data points I have, this name was most popular in roughly the 1970s: Don & Roberta Lowe's 100 Oregon Hiking Trails (1969) just refers to "two upper falls" along Multnomah Creek, while their 70 Hiking Trails: Northern Oregon Cascades (1974) used "Upper Multnomah Falls", which continued through at least the 1988 2nd edition of 35 Hiking Trails: Columbia River Gorge, overlapping with other guidebooks' use of "Double Falls" here and "Upper Multnomah" further upstream. Which I'm sure wasn't confusing at all for anyone.
"Double Falls" seems to be a more recent invention; the earliest use I've found of it is in Gregory Plumb's Waterfalls of the Pacific Northwest (1983). I'm not sure the name was ever very common outside of that one guidebook series; it can't have helped that the name, is about the most generic name imaginable, second only to "Falls Creek Falls" (which Oregon has several of), and there's already a (locally) well-known Double Falls in Silver Falls State Park, and another near Tumalo Falls in Central Oregon, plus there's Triple Falls just down the road from Multnomah along Oneonta Creek, if you're the sort of person who's prone to off-by-one errors. So this would have been a big source of confusion if more people had used the proposed name, but I haven't really found any examples of that apart from the one guidebook. All I've come across are present-day people relaying that it was an old name that somebody else once used for the place. The closest thing to a historical use that I've found is a 1919 postcard -- a drawing, not a photo -- depicting Multnomah Falls along with Perdition Falls looking like a side-by-side twin of Multnomah's upper tier. (Perdition Falls is the seasonal waterfall to the left of the upper tier. It's usually somewhere between weak and completely dry, and only resembles the postcard image during or shortly after a major winter storm.) I also ran across someone using "Double Falls" to caption Upper McCord Creek Falls, but that's a whole separate confusion that doesn't concern us right now.
The name "Twanklaskie Falls" has sometimes been used here too, just for Wiesendanger Falls this time and not the pair, though it seems not to have ever been very popular either. One recent usage was in the "Best Hikes Near Portland" Falcon Guide (2009), maybe on the assumption that native (or native-sounding) names are likely newer and more official.. That's usually a safe bet, but not here. The only historical use of any variation on that name that I've seen is in an article titled "The Lesser Waterfalls Along the Columbia" in the December 1916 issue of Mazama magazine, which describes what's upstream of Multnomah Falls:
Before the construction of the Larch mountain trail but little thought was given to Multnomah Creek above the great fall. It had been practically inaccessible; but the new trail has made it easy to visit the upper courses of the stream. Just above the brink of the fall is a pretty cascade where the waters drop into a basin to gather themselves for the great leap into the river canyon. A short way above, a beautiful cascade is caused by a dyke of black basaltic rock that crosses the bed of the stream, and just above this the superb Twahalaskie fall is a thing of beauty. Other cascades and falls abound along the course of the stream, all of them unnamed.
Which to me sounds like he's listing off Little Multnomah, then Dutchman, then Wiesendanger, then sort of handwaving about the others. The page preceding the article has four captioned photos, including one of Ecola Falls labeled "Twahalaski" (no trailing 'e' this time), so it's possible that name was once meant to apply to both falls too.
The article goes on to complain about Starvation Creek Falls -- the name, not the place -- grumbling "May anathema be the lot of him who imposed this malphonious and unsuitable name on this beauty spot of creation.", and then veering off into a long discussion of the Mazamas' then-current effort to spruce up the official names of places around the gorge.
So I keep yammering on about whether a particular place name is "official" or not, but what does that mean exactly? This is where the US Board on Geographic Names comes in; it's a small and obscure federal agency within the US Geological Survey that does this and only this (more or less; see footnote), taking proposals from other agencies, state and local governments, and the general public, weighing the evidence, and deciding whether to sign off on the idea. A significant chunk of their work in recent years has involved erasing existing names that are now deemed racist or otherwise offensive. Which is a big job, this being the USA and all. Strictly speaking they just decide what names ought to be used across the federal government, but that tends to be an influential opinion, today rivaled only by whoever assigns the place names in Google Maps. But there are no individual penalties for using outdated or wrong names for things, so if -- for example -- your grandpa still calls the creek across his land "Drunk Irishman Creek" (after a pioneer of that description) even though the feds changed it to "O'Leary Creek" years ago at the behest of said Irishman's descendants, he's within his rights to keep doing that. At least so far as the feds are concerned. The O'Learys may be another matter entirely.
I bring all of this up because the story I keep seeing, and have repeated myself at least once, is that Wiesendanger and Ecola are the two waterfalls along this stretch of Multnomah Creek that have official, Board-certified names, while the others are just nicknames. This time around I wondered how I'd go about double-checking that, and came to find out that the US Geographic Names database is searchable. Which is not really surprising; it just didn't occur to me to check until now. So I ran a query for everything of type "Falls" in Multnomah County, and got back a surprisingly short list of just 15 results. Now, that database doesn't aspire to be a complete list of natural features, just one of names that have been approved by the Board, plus every waterfall at Eagle Creek and points east is in Hood River County and not included in this result set. So with that said, here's the full official list of everything that's officially official, since their database doesn't give out permalinks to query results: Bridal Veil, Coopey, Elowah, Horsetail, Latourell, Mist, Moffett, Multnomah, Oneonta, Tanner Creek, Upper Latourell, Wahclella, Wahe, Wahkeena, and Wiesendanger.
Notice anything missing from that list? No Ecola Falls there, just Wiesendanger. And as a fun bonus, the submitted GPS coordinates in the Wiesendanger entry point at the top of Ecola Falls instead. That might just be a mapping hiccup like some of other oddities on this list that I covered in a footnote. Or maybe -- and this is my personal guess -- the Forest Service intended the name to apply to both falls and it just sort of didn't stick. At all. As in I've never seen a single use of the name in that way. The dedication plaque below 'our' Wiesendanger Falls doesn't call it "Lower Wiesendanger" or mention anything about there being two tiers, and you can't see Ecola Falls from the plaque, and it seems to me that people drew a very reasonable conclusion about what the name applied to given those data points.
On top of that, "Ecola" is a very strange name to use here; it's one of several Chinook Jargon words for "whale" (per an 1863 dictionary), and all of the other place names in the United States using that name are clustered in a small area on the Oregon Coast around Cannon Beach and Seaside. If any whales had ever made it this far up Multnomah Creek -- maybe by leaping the falls downstream like an enormous blubbery salmon -- I feel like I would have heard about that before now. It's not that I don't like the name, because I do; I just don't know why it's used here, of all places, and not for something like the small unnamed waterfall that falls directly onto Crescent Beach in Ecola State Park, or another on Ecola Creek not far from one of the park's main parking lots. And yes, I'm going to copy and paste this whole paragraph into the Ecola Falls post once I get to it.
The board's annual Decisions on Geographic Names in the United States for 1997 has a brief item on each decision, organized by state. The Wiesendanger Falls item reads:
Wiesendanger Falls: falls, in Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, located 0.8km (0.5 mi) upstream from Multnomah Falls, 1km (0.6 mi) from the confluence of Multnomah Creek and the Columbia River; named for Albert Wiesendanger (1893-1989); Multnomah County, Oregon; Sec 18, T1N, R6E, Willamette Mer.; 45º34’25” N, 122º06’24” W; USGS map - Multnomah Falls 1:24,000 (Docket 366)
That was one of seven decisions for Oregon that year, none of which say a word about Ecola Falls, and like the database entry the given coordinates point at Ecola Falls. In theory, if I was more invested in this particular detail, I could maybe do a FOIA request for docket #366 from 1997 and wait for someone to maybe respond someday, and hope there's something in that file explaining what the name was meant to apply to, and further hope that the key details aren't redacted purely out of spite. I also tried checking with the Board's state-level equivalent in case they had more info online, but that was an annoying and completely useless dead end, so I moved that whole discussion to another footnote for anyone who's curious about that sort of thing, or just enjoys watching me complain.
So moving along, I did my usual rummaging through newspaper databases again for this post. First I was trying to figure out what (if anything) people actually called the waterfalls above Multnomah Falls, only to find that they largely didn't call them anything in particular or even reach a consensus around how many falls there were. But at least I found a few old photos of Wiesendanger Falls, and old news stories about the general area, some of which were kind of entertaining, so I kept those. Then I looked for any interesting biographic details or anecdotes about Wiesendanger himself. Mostly what I encountered was 70 years of him lecturing anyone who would listen about forest fires -- school groups, Cub Scouts, loggers, civic groups of all stripes, and so on, usually with the help of a slideshow or short film and often a harmonica. And if anything did catch on fire despite his efforts, he was always ready with a quote when local reporters called. While I'm impressed by that ability to stay on message relentlessly for decades on end, there's not much of an evolving storyline there, and you really only need a link or two over all of those decades to have it covered. But I did find a number of news items he was involved in due to his day jobs, first as the ranger in charge at Eagle Creek and later at Timberline Lodge, so I kept the maybe-interesting ones among those. I ended up sorting these two unruly piles of links into a sort of parallel timeline, with items about the waterfall as well as the person it would eventually be named for. So maybe this arrangement will make sense for people besides me, and maybe it won't; either way, it seemed like a good idea to me at the time.
As always, a list like this is greatly enhanced if you have a Multnomah County library card and active login creds, so you're able go look at the linked articles yourself instead of hoping that I'm paraphrasing them or quoting from them accurately. I'd love to include screenshots for some of the items, but the vendor behind the newspaper database makes expansive claims over the paper in its scanned, indexed, online form (as distinct from the original newspaper, which is either still owned by the Oregonian if dated post-1925, or public domain if older than that). It's not clear to me how fair use works under these circumstances and I don't want to get DMCA'd or worse, so I'm sticking with link-and-paraphrase for the time being. So I understand it's kind of frustrating when none of the links work, especially if you're not from around here and can't get sign up for a library card that makes the links start working. But I'm not sure how else to approach this without first becoming the sort of billionaire who can (and will) darken the skies with lawyers whenever the need arises. Anyway, let's quit with all the handwringing and just dive in.
Skipping forward to a few years before the old highway opened, March 1912 Oregonian article imagined a very different future for the land around Multnomah Creek, with the then-under-construction Multnomah Basin Road opening the area to modern agriculture, the forests giving way to orchards and open farmland, the falls along the creek being dammed for hydropower, and a modern road connecting down to the proposed Hood River highway somewhere around Oneonta Gorge. The article assures the reader that any crops grown in the Multnomah Basin area would not need to be irrigated from Multnomah Creek -- a thing that's always true until the first drought hits -- and that the proposed Oneonta road would be no worse than the existing road down Latourell Hill, which headed roughly straight downhill from present-day Larch Mountain Road to the little town down at river level by way of grades up to 20% and the occasional hairpin corner.
As it turned out, none of those grand plans happened, and the Multnomah Basin Road of 2020 is unpaved, and gated off to vehicle traffic at Palmer Mill Road, and leads only to the Trails Club's Nesika Lodge and the maze of trails around it. But if you believe in other timelines, or dimensions, or universes or whatever, there's bound to be one where the Multnomah Basin Irrigation District diverted the whole creek, and tour guides point out where the old falls and the lodge used to be, swept aside by the spirit of capital-P Progress. Another one began that way and then someone quietly bought out the farmers in the late 1940s and built the hyperexclusive Royal Multnomah Country Club, notorious for only desegregating in the late 1980s, for barring women from the golf course until the mid-2000s, and for how strange it is that trespassers keep 'accidentally' falling off the cliff where the falls used to be.
That same month, the Mazamas were busy with their big naming-and-renaming-things project that resulted in names like "Wahkeena Falls", "Elowah Falls", and so forth. There's no mention here of them proposing names for the falls above Multnomah, even though they obviously would have known of the falls' existence at this point. Maybe they were considered out of scope for the effort since they aren't visible from the new highway, then under construction. I have gotten the impression the main goal was to get nice, modern respectable names in place along the highway route ahead of the grand opening, in part to keep grizzled-Old-West-prospector-type names like "Deadman Creek" and "Devil's Slide Creek" (now Ruckel and Tumalt Creeks) out of the New York Times and all the tourist guidebooks. An ironic bit is that Tumalt Creek is where the enormous 1996 landslide happened, and smaller slides occur there regularly, so the previous name did actually convey useful information about the place in a way the present name doesn't.
And nothing about that effort prevents new unpleasant-sounding names from being coined later; as far as I know only suburban HOAs have that kind of power. Just a week ago an ODOT press release explained that the old highway had been blocked by a small landslide at "Mosquito Springs Creek", which appears to be the next -- or one of the next -- small creeks just west of Dalton Falls, which in turn is just west of Mist and Wahkeena Falls. I didn't see any other uses of the name beside the press release and related news stories, so I'm thinking maybe ODOT has internal nicknames for some of their common trouble spots, and the others are probably just as unflattering. I guess it's not a big deal unless they start putting those names on road signs. Or maybe that's exactly what we need to do, to help manage overcrowding. Maybe the crowded path up to Angels Rest becomes the Ticks-the-Size-of-Ducks Trail, for no good reason. Even the mundane Return Trail could become the Trail of No Return. I dunno, probably wouldn't work, but it's one approach we haven't tried yet.
- Faussettabout to go over Willamette Falls
- His overturned boat at the base of the falls, which reportedly scared many onlookers.
- Two photos of him in in bed recovering after the successful attempt.
A 1932 article about ginkgo trees generally, mentioning in passing that Wiesendanger had found some fossil ginkgo leaves found at Eagle Creek some years previously. The article mentions the unfortunate odor of the treee's fruit, and the fact that the trees in the Plaza Blocks were already there way back then, and aren't a recent introduction, which is something I'd wondered about for a while.
Incidentally, the Gorge isn't usually thought of as a hotspot for fossils, but they've been found in several places there, including a few sites along the stretch from Elowah Falls / McCord Creek thru Eagle Creek. You never hear about this because people are only interested in dinosaurs, and the Gorge has plant fossils from the Miocene epoch (roughly 5-23 million years ago) instead. Another reason you never hear about it is that that any fossil sitea with easy public access tend to be rapidly picked clean by souvenir hunters, which is why I wouldn't give out detailed directions to any of these sites if I had that information, which I don't.
So in lieu of that, here are a few links with general information on the topic, with the caveat that I'm not a paleontologist and this isn't a professional-grade bibliography. First, an old article in the November 1916 issue of "Mineral Resources of Oregon", later renamed to "The Ore Bin" and now called "Oregon Geology". As I understand it, some of the local fossil deposits technically count as coal, but not of a quality or quantity to be worth mining. So we kind of dodged a bullet there, if the state of present-day Appalachia is any indication. More recently, the September/October 1999 issue of the same magazine ran a paper on fossils found somewhere along a small stream between McCord and Moffett Creeks. The creek is now known as Metasequoia Creek (after fossilized dawn redwoods found there), as the paper's author proposed the name and shepherded it through the aforementioned naming process. As an odd twist, the paper's author was later profiled in a 2010 Portland Monthly article, having drifted into angry right-wing militia crankdom after a series of personal setbacks. A 1988 masters thesis by someone at Portland State analyzed Miocene volcanic rock found further east at Eagle Creek, and came up with a few possible locations where it might have come from.
In any case, I do kind of like the idea that a Jurassic Park reboot set here would be super chill, with long shots of forests of long-extinct trees, and the occasional volcano to spice things up.
Footnotes
The process I'm describing here is the job of the board's Domestic Names Committee, to be exact. There's also a Foreign Names Committee, which handles figuring out what foreigners call their domestic places, and how those names are spelled, and standardizing that across the federal government too. Which is a thing they do in conjunction with the huge but equally obscure National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which I gather counts as a three-letter agency thanks to that little hyphen in the name. So apparently if you need to pick up a thumb drive in a particular Moscow park, or you overhear insurgents talking about a specific valley in Afghanistan and want to send a drone there and not the next valley over where someone's having a huge wedding, the Foreign Names Committee plays a small but vital role in that process. A couple of other committees handle undersea names, and names in Antarctica, so that all of the bases are covered, or all the Earth-based ones anyway.)
Regarding a couple of the more obscure but official names on that list, Moffett and Wahe Falls are along Moffett Creek, east of Elowah Falls; we visited some bridges there a couple of years ago, but it'll be a while before the falls show up here (if they ever do) since there's no trail to either one and that whole area was burned heavily in 2017. As for "Tanner Creek Falls", that was an old name for Wahclella Falls, but the list gives different GPS coordinates for it, somewhere just upstream of Wahclella in a spot that's inaccessible without climbing gear. So it's either a map error or they applied an official name to one very obscure and well-hidden waterfall that almost nobody will ever see in person. Waterfalls Northwest has a Swaawa Falls and an East Fork Falls in that general area, so one or the other of them might match that description.
I thought I'd check the Board's state-level equivalent -- the Oregon Geographic Names Board -- to see if I could clarify the name situation any further that way. That sounded promising as the state board both originates name proposals and comments on ones that didn't come from them, so it's only natural that they'd have some sort of records I could poke through, burning a few hours or days in the process. Sadly this turned out to be a completely useless dead end instead, and I'm a bit annoyed about it.
The first thing to know is that although Oregon's board performs a governmental function, they aren't quite a government agency, and instead they're sort of run and supported by the Oregon Historical Society. That by itself isn't necessarily a problem, since this is a governmental function that needs a bunch of historians in the loop. The problem is that while they do have recent decision records online (here's the 2019-2020 edition for example), you won't find anything remotely like the federal search function. Instead, you are referred to the OHS-published book Oregon Geographic Names, 7th Edition, a 1000+ page volume (with accompanying CD-ROM) which came out in 2003 and has been out of print for years, and is out of stock in the OHS online store. That OHS page suggests that maybe you can find a used copy for sale, otherwise maybe your library has one. Which might work except that neither Powells nor Amazon has a single copy of the 7th edition for sale, while the 6th edition came out in 1992 and is too old to answer my questions. And if I did have a question that was answerable by an older edition, the few copies for sale on Amazon often run into the hundreds of dollars with a couple going for over $1k. And going to the library is a problem right now because pandemic. Wikipedia insists there's an 8th Edition in the works, now authored by the granddaughter of the book's originator, which is certainly an unusual sort of family business to be in. The citation for this is still a 2009 Oregonian article that said the next edition would be out in 2011, which seems increasingly unlikely as the year 2021 approaches. All of which would be fine if the book was just an ordinary reference book. But when it's the closest thing Oregon has to an official state publication, it's not a good look.
You might think somebody would have a scanned copy you could look at online, but you would be wrong there too. Google Books does have the A-L portion of an index of the 5th edition, from 1983, and the Internet Archive has a full copy of the 4th Edition (1974) that can be borrowed once for an hour if you create an account. Which I didn't, because 1974. I don't know for a fact that anyone's actively trying to keep the book off the net, but I have to say that it would look a lot like this if someone was. On the bright side, the first edition of the book was published in 1928 and so will enter the public domain in a mere two years, unless Congress extends it again.
