Ok, next up are some photos from the Hoapili Trail along the desolate and volcanic south end of Maui, just down the road from the Kihei/Wailea/Makena area -- and I think it may be a continuation of that road. The trail is a former royal road from the early 19th century, and where the parts further north were paved and widened and eventually surrounded by golf courses and surf shops, apparently nobody has wanted or needed a better road than this south of La Perouse Bay over the last two centuries, so it's survived in its original form and now serves as a rather unique hiking trail. I was kind of impressed by it as an engineering feat: They managed to build a largely flat and ruler-straight road across an endless lava plain of fist-sized rocks, strictly with manual labor and no modern construction gear. I mean, it's still made with fist-sized rocks; there's nothing that can really be done about that. In several sections of the road to the trailhead, you can see where the state tried to sort of just pave over top of the piled lava rocks, and the resulting road is not fabulous. So expect sore feet after hiking this trail, and expect to not go as far or as fast as you usually would on a flat trail. On the other hand, the trail itself is a unique experience, and it offers great views of the lava fields trailing down from the south face of Haleakala, along with four of the other major islands (Hawaii, Kahoolawe, Lanai, & Molokai) as well as the tiny island of Molokini. The navigational light shown on the trail map is just that, an automated light, not a picturesque lighthouse or anything. It's useful as a landmark to stop and turn around at, in an area without a lot of landmarks, but you aren't going to get a viral Instagram photo out of it, or at least I didn't. I did attempt sketching the island of Kahoolawe on a cool tablet computer I bought recently, only to be reminded I never could draw worth a damn, and I'm not any better at it on eInk than I am on paper. Oh well.
Tuesday, April 30, 2019
Sunday, March 31, 2019
'Iao Valley
Here's a photoset from 'Iao Valley in the West Maui Mountains. It's kind of an amazing place: Lush green canyon, impossibly steep hills, clear rushing stream flowing through it. Apparently if you visit on a rainy day (which is most of the time), there are also a few waterfalls cascading down the sides of the canyon. The only disappointing thing is that there isn't much of a trail system here; there's a short paved path around a small garden of tropical plants, and 133 stairs to a small viewpoint with a view of 'Iao Needle.
Oh, and at the viewpoint there's a fence, a stern sign warning you to not go beyond this point, and an obvious trail leading off into the forest behind it. I've got a few photos of the sign but sadly didn't go any further; it's not that I'm intimidated by official signs, rules, and regulations, and I've hiked enough in Hawaii to know that these signs are usually just a CYA move on the state's part, because they're scared of getting sued if anyone gets hurt. I kind of wanted to hop the fence and keep going, but there were lots of other tourists there, and it seemed like most were there with small children (who seemed to enjoy running up and down the steps, to much adult dismay). And, well... I couldn't quite bring myself to blatantly violate The Rules in front of someone else's kids, being a bad example and corrupting the youth and whatnot. Maybe next time I'll go earlier, to avoid the crowds. Supposedly there isn't that much to see on the "secret" trail that you wouldn't have seen already on the official mini-trails; mostly I was looking to stretch my legs a bit after a 6 hour flight from Portland.
In keeping with my new policy of trying to post new photos sooner, these were taken the day before yesterday; I'll try to get to yesterday's photos (from the Hoapili Trail on the south side of Maui) later, but first I'm off to go drive up Haleakala and see the volcano, and I'll try to get to those photos within a day or two as well.
Thursday, February 28, 2019
Angels Rest - Devils Rest Loop
Today's outdoor adventure is a photoset from when I did the Angels Rest - Devils Rest Loop back in late December. The photos are in roughly reverse chronological order because the weather was truly miserable in the morning, the first time I went by the Angels Rest viewpoint. Nothing but fog, wind, and rain then, and that continued for the trip further uphill to Devils Rest, which is a weird pile of mossy rocks in an area of dense, misty forest. More fog and rain on the trip east, and then down the seemingly endless switchbacks down to the top of the Wahkeena Falls area. It may have started clearing up along the lower trail back to Angels Rest from there; I was getting a bit tired at that point, and had forgotten there was another stretch of seemingly endless switchbacks -- this time going up -- gaining 500 feet or so in a fairly short distance, on a trail I had misremembered as basically flat. So that part was kind of... unwelcome.
By the time I arrived back at Angels Rest the weather had finally cleared up and suddenly the view was incredible. And then my phone decided to drain itself from 60% to 0% in a few short minutes, as punishment for trying to share the amazing view on Instagram or Twitter, I forget which. Maybe both. And -- I am not exaggerating -- not ten seconds after my phone keeled over, a huge bald eagle soared right over me, with a pair of (I think) ravens close behind trying to scare it off. I would've led this post with that if I'd gotten a photo of it. Oh well.
Which brings us to the last bit, the way back down from the viewpoint to the parking lot. I'd figured that would be easy and probably boring since I'd done the same stretch of trail in the morning on the way up. But no, even in the dead of winter the trail attracts enough visitors that it gets churned up into a slippery pudding by late afternoon. So I slowly and gingerly made my way downhill and managed to avoid slipping and taking the quicker way down. This was after 3pm and as it was late December, it was getting rather late in the day, so I was surprised to encounter a lot of people heading the other direction. I mean, I'm sure the sunset from Angels Rest that evening was phenomenal. But I have no idea how any of those people got back downhill afterward in the dark. There wasn't anything on the news the next day about rescue/recovery operations in the Gorge, so it must have all worked out somehow. I'd love to know the secret to pulling that off, if there is one. Crawling down on all fours with night vision goggles, maybe? Beats me.
Anyway, the hike was amazing; the view at the end was amazing; the windy and rainy and foggy parts in the middle and even the unexpected switchbacks were amazing; the mud at the end was, ok, we won't discuss that part any further, but overall the whole thing was amazing and I'll happily do it again, maybe next time on a sunnier day with a later sunset.
Thursday, January 31, 2019
keepalive (january 2019 edition)
Ok, so I have 40 minutes to put some sort of blog post together to avoid breaking the at-least-one-post-per-month streak dating back to December 2005. I had meant to post some recent hiking photos (which I have quite a few of), but I couldn't seem to find enough time for the writing part, so here we are. As is often the case when I post these 'keepalive' posts, most of my waking moments are once again devoted to an Important And Very Stressful Software Project, this time one that's supposed to ship in just a couple of weeks if the stars align properly and the river don't rise. If you just come here for the photos and don't like waiting for me to type some words about them, may I direct you to my most recent (or most recently-created) Flickr photosets, where there's plenty of scenery to look at and basically zero complaining. Or at least that's true at the moment. Future photosets will push the current ones off the page and at some point someone will click that link and be mildly disappointed by whatever happens to be there at that point. Can't be helped, sorry. That's why you're supposed to click the links while they're still fresh.
Anyway, I have lots of recent material waiting as soon as I have time to do something with it. This year I'm trying (or I intend to try) to post new stuff ahead of old stuff, rather than sending things to the back of the Drafts queue to wait in line behind forgotten half-finished posts that have been there since... yeah, no, let's not even look at the dates on some of those drafts. Anyway, I'm down to 9 minutes to keep the streak alive, and I can't think of any substantive topics to yammer about that would fit within less than that, and I don't feel up to explaining the one thing I learned today (how to mount a Solaris NFSv4 share to an AIX box, in order to verify how ACLs behave or misbehave there) so I suppose it's time to hit that big orange Publish button again. Here goes...
Monday, December 31, 2018
2018: The Year in Instagram Cat Photos
I had almost forgotten that, per recent tradition, I'm supposed to wrap up the year here with some Instagram cat photos. Upon checking IG I realized that I'd pretty much used it exclusively for vacation photos this year and had posted precisely one cat photo. However the recent tradition specifies photos, plural, so I dug out a recent one and added it a few minutes ago. He highly recommends that particular brand of catnip banana, btw, and he's not just saying that in his role as a globetrotting celebrity and Instagram #brandfluencer.
Multnomah-Wahkeena Loop, July 2016
The previous post showed what the Multnomah-Wahkeena Loop trails look like now. It just so happens that I did the same hike back in July 2016, so here's another photoset showing what the area used to look like before the big forest fire. Granted this is also a comparison of July and December photos, and the latter would seem rather grim in comparison even without the stumps and ashes. Still, this is the closest thing I've got to an apples-to-apples comparison, and I imagine that most viewers will enjoy these photos more than the previous set. I know I certainly do.
Multnomah-Wahkeena Loop, December 2018
Back on November 23rd, several popular trails in the Columbia Gorge reopened for the first time after the Eagle Creek Fire. So a couple of weeks ago I did the 4.9 mile Multnomah-Wahkeena Loop trail to see what the area looks like now. Some parts were surprisingly ok, with signs of a "good" forest fire that swept out underbrush and let the trees survive. Other areas were kind of grim and spooky, notably along the Vista Point trail above Wahkeena Falls. The most positive spin I can come up with is that some parts of the Gorge now look like vintage postcard views of the area from a century ago, around the time the historic highway was built. Back then it was due to logging rather than fire and a changing climate, but the visual effect is more or less the same. In an old post from 2014, I pointed out that rock formations around the Gorge tend to have silly melodramatic Victorian-sounding names ("St. Peter's Dome", "Pillars of Hercules", "Bishop's Cap", "Thor's Crown", etc.), and explained my theory that the names reflect the era when there was the least vegetation around to obscure all the weird rocks. So maybe that should be the tourism plan for the next few years: In our lifetimes there may never be a better time to nerd out over Gorge geology, so come see some cool rocks before the forest grows back. Hey, it's worth a try.
There's one experience I want to relate that the photos don't capture. Imagine placing your hand on a tree for support, at a steep or tricky spot in the trail. You've hiked this trail regularly since you were a kid, so you've likely put the same hand on the same spot on the same tree dozens of times. But this time your hand comes away covered in charcoal. To me this was the most upsetting part, more than any of the images. After the first time, I tried to avoid touching anything scorched, not really because of the charcoal; it just felt wrong somehow, verging on unclean. As in, you don't want to touch it for the same reason you don't touch the body at a funeral. Obviously you can't catch a disease from a burnt tree, and you won't be assaulted by angry relatives of the deceased; it just evokes a visceral reaction that some sort of line is being crossed that shouldn't be crossed. It's odd: The very same wood, burnt in a campfire, would be cozy, a source of warmth and happy memories. But when it's burnt and still standing amidst a forest of other burnt trees, and bits of it are rubbing off and marking you as you pass... well, it was more unsettling than I had expected.
Friday, November 30, 2018
some vacation photos
Consider my situation:
- It's the end of the month, and the rules say I have to post at least once a month, and I've kept it up since, er, 2005.
- I have a drafts folder full of unfinished posts, none of which are ready to post, otherwise I would have done it already.
- I'm in this no-posts-yet situation in part because I was on vacation for a reasonable chunk of the month, and spent a lot of that taking photos, some of which turned out ok.
Given these circumstances, I'm going to go ahead and post a slideshow of assorted vacation photos, without researching & writing a whole long blog post about each place I visited. I mean, those will show up here too sooner or later, but I'm not going to give even a rough estimate of when that might happen. So, briefly, here's what's in the slideshow: Everything's from the island of O'ahu, with locations including Makapu'u Point & its lighthouse; Ulupō Heiau, an ancient Hawaiian temple in the middle of suburban Kailua, now weirdly surrounded by churches; Kawainui Marsh, a large & scenic wetland area that I'm told is habitat for native Hawaiian birds, although I don't think I saw any; Waikiki Beach, mostly around sunset; and assorted brewpubs, restaurants, and food trucks here and there around the island. Oh, and Santa Claus riding in an outrigger canoe on a parade float, as one does.
Perhaps I'm showing my age here, but I sometimes wish Flickr slideshows had an option to make vintage slide projector sounds between photos, as if you were looking at these in your aunt & uncle's rumpus room in 1978, trying to stay awake because these have been going on for over an hour. And occasionally a slide is upside down, or there's a slot without a slide and it blinds everyone, and your little brother somehow gets a huge glob of gum in the shag carpet, which will never really come out, and most of the grownups are smoking and it's gross. I can't simulate the full classic vacation slideshow experience, unfortunately, but I did shuffle them randomly and then reorder them a bit, as if Uncle Steve had dropped the slides on the floor partway thru his fourth glass of jug Chablis and failed to reassemble them properly. So with that vivid image, enjoy the slideshow!
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
Civic Drive Iris
So next up on our ongoing public art tour is Civic Drive Iris, a kinetic sculpture at Gresham's new-ish Civic Drive MAX station. TriMet's description:
Civic Drive Iris, 2010, by Pete Beeman is a colorful, kinetic sculpture that functions as a landmark for the new Civic Drive Station. Artwork was funded primarily by the Portland Development Commission.
- Tall, brightly colored sculpture evokes a blossoming flower or radiating sun
- Hand crank invites pedestrians to interact with sculpture
- Turned crank causes sculpture top to illuminate and simultaneously expand and contract like an iris valve
To be honest I just sort of stumbled across this one. I was trying to solve an annoying software problem at the office, and decided to go for a walk and think about it (which works surprisingly well). But I felt lazy that day & decided to go ride the train and think about it instead, so I did (no bright ideas, though, unfortunately). Eventually I got off at this new stop to turn around & go back, thinking it was the downtown Gresham stop, which it isn't. So I saw the art, thought "hey, at least I get a blog post out of this", and searched the interwebs when I got home, which is when I realized it was kinetic and had a crank I could have tried out. I was about to claim there was no longer a crank and grumble about vandals, but the photos insist there really was a crank & I just didn't see it somehow. I'm just not getting any better at this "noticing basic things" business, apparently. Anyway, this is the third Beeman kinetic sculpture we've visited on our neverending art tour, the others being Pod, the big stainless steel wavy thing across the street from Powell's, and Waving Post at the SE Fuller Road MAX station.
Monday, September 17, 2018
Basket of Air
So next up on the grand tour we're taking a peek at Basket of Air, the sculpture in the center of the Hoyt Arboretum's new bamboo garden. The RACC description explains:
Artist Ivan McLean spent a few of years in the southern Philippines as a member of the Peace Corp and used this experience to inform his sculpture, which sits in the middle of the Hoyt Arboretum’s Bamboo Forest. The sculpture’s posts mimic the basic segmented structure of bamboo while the central sphere, a form often explored by McLean, reflects the idea of bamboo baskets he encountered during his travels.
While in the Philippines, “I built a nipa roofed house with various types of bamboo used as structural members or woven into the wall panels. During my travels I also watched in awe as workers created scaffolding rising hundreds of feet around modern buildings in Hong Kong and then a short time later hiking for days through bamboo forests in Northern Thailand and staying with families in simple homes made from the ubiquitous plant… I was constantly impressed by how skilled people were in using bamboo to build a variety of objects, including baskets.”
We've seen a couple of other McLean sculptures here previously: work previously seen here: Flying Salmon in 2014, & Rational Exuberance back in 2012. (The latter one was relocated north of the Fremont Bridge a year or two after I posted about it). I snarked a little about the salmon one, it being something of an overused motif in Pacific Northwest art. I feel I may have been unfair; undoubtedly the customer (an upscale, super-Northwesty grocery store) insisted on salmon. Salmon have the unique ability to be both an eco-feel-good regional icon and a delicious meal at the same time. Maybe not exactly the same time, but you know what I mean.
In any case, since we're more or less on the topic of bamboo forests, here's a fight scene from House of Flying Daggers (2004):
Sunday, August 12, 2018
Saturday, August 04, 2018
Millikan Way MAX art
Ok, so this next public art post is about the Millikan Way MAX station, which has sort of a STEM theme due to the old Beaverton Tektronix campus next door. I took a couple of photos when I was there a few years ago, figuring I could grab a quotable blurb about it from one of the usual places, and poof, there's your blog post. And then the search came up empty, and this post sank to the bottom of the Drafts folder and didn't get a second glance for ages.
TriMet's art guide for the westside Blue Line merely says the station as a whole was designed by the "Westside design team", and describes a few of the features, without listing titles or artists for most of them:
Trees, wetlands and the nearby Tektronix campus inspired the Westside design team artists’ theme of nature bumping up against high technology.
- Brick patterns on the systems buildings suggest coniferous and deciduous trees
- The songs of local birds are etched in bronze plaques along the trackway
- Clusters of leaves, seeds and pine cones are sandblasted in 30 locations in the plaza
- Test patterns and mathematical symbols on graph paper are created in terrazzo
- Christopher Rauschenberg’s "Time Window<" documents the view from the shelter in 1994
This whole thing seemed unusually vague; I finally understood why after I found a 1998 Oregonian article reviewing the art for the Blue Line's grand opening, back when that was something newspapers did. Millikan Way just gets a brief mention in the article, grouped with a few others: "Beaverton Transit Center, Beaverton Central, Millikan Way and Beaverton Creek: These four stations embrace nearly all the cliches of 90s public art, from photographs etched on the shelters, to cosmic allusions and navigation devices integrated into the paving patterns."
The article explains that MAX stations east of 185th don't have freestanding art because the feds prohibited federally funded projects from buying art during the initial phase of the project, until the rules changed in 1995. It doesn't explain when the earlier rules were put in place, but I suspect that came out of the Mapplethorpe/Serrano culture wars of the late 80s and early 90s. The pre-1995 rules had a small loophole in that they didn't prohibit you from hiring artists for your design team, and then having them do decorative pavers, designs on brick buildings, themed benches, etc. and classify it all as design rather than capital-A art. So that's basically what TriMet did, and I suppose this is why we aren't told exactly who designed what.
In discussing "cliches of 90s public art", the Oregonian piece mentions "The Kudzu Effect (or: The Rise of a New Academy)", a brief and snarky 1996 article by Joyce Kozloff. It lists ten contemporary public art cliches, which seem as contemporary now as they were in 1996; her names for them give a bit of the flavor of the article:
- It’s a Small World
- Junior High School Science Project
- Junior High School Geography Project
- The Artist/Architect Collaboration (also known as the The Two’fer)
- Kids “R” Us
- Heal the Earth Project
- The Artist/Writer Collaboration
- The New Age Observatory (also known as Son et Lumière)
- Transgressions and Interventions
- Triumphal Arch to Nowhere and Domestic Obelisk
Kozloff explains this style as a reaction to the arts community being besieged by angry fundies. I suppose the idea was that upbeat and inoffensive art might placate the Moral Majority goons, or at least they'd go yell at somebody else for a change. Which worked, in a away, in that you rarely see them hollering about art anymore. Although now they won't shut up about Trump's divine infallibility and all the races, religions, and other groups they want to wipe off the face of the earth. I am unsure that this is a real improvement.
Sunday, July 01, 2018
House for Summer
This captivating installation of birch trees, part of the City of Portland’s public art collection, has been pruned and shaped to take the form of a house, a house that changes with the seasons and is a reflection of the shelter of the forest canopy. House for Summer is a prime example of the work Lessick has done over the past three decades investigating the imagery and metaphor of plants.
There were various festivities to mark the 30th anniversary, and Lessick had a solo exhibition at a NW Portland gallery to coincide with the event.
I took these photos in summer 2017, vaguely around the big birthday, but I was kind of busy and didn't get around to posting them immediately. This may have actually been the same trip where I sat down on a bench and planned out a big software project that took most of the year between then and now to complete, which would be why I've been so busy lately. In any case, I didn't get the post up right away, and the weeks dragged out, and then the seasons changed a few times, and it didn't seem right to post about nice summery things in the dead of winter. So here we are about a year later, which is actually quite fast by my recent standards. (Luckily nobody relies on me as a source of breaking news.)
I took a peek to see if I could find any news articles from when House for Summer went in, and found a dedication photo from July 15th 1987. A July 10th arts page blurb mentioned that there'd been a couple of prior season-themed houses in the series:
Helen Lessick has installed, or rather, planted another in her series of house installations. Lessick has been playing with the idea of home for a while now. Her “Venus Fly Trap (House for Spring)” was part of last year’s Inside/Out series at the Portland Art Museum, and “Metallic House (House for Winter)” was shown recently at Marylhurst College.
The blurb went on to mention that Lessick planned to plant clover inside the house the following summer to "help delineate inside from outside", though it looks like wood chips play that role now. In October 1991 there was a House for Autumn made of hay at the Bybee-Howell House on Sauvie Island. That article mentions a prior House of Fire ("a metal frame engulfed in gaseous flames") and Waterhouse (with "walls formed from a sprinklerlike contraption").
More recently, the Oregonian did 20th anniversary article about the house in 2007, which was actually within the lifetime of this humble blog. I had already done a few public art posts by then, but somehow I didn't notice or clue in about this one. The article mentions that birch trees usually only live to 20 years or so, and implied that that would be the end of House of Summer, but here we are a decade later, so either the trees magically lived longer, or these are not the original trees. The photos of it in someone's 2013 blog post appear to be about the same size as now, but it's hard to tell.
The Nevada Museum of Art (Reno, NV) has a collection of materials about the project including annual photos from the beginning thru at least 2011. Which I guess would be kind of interesting, but I can't point you at them since they're 35mm slides in a box in Reno.
Saturday, June 30, 2018
Powell Park
[View Larger Map]
Next up on the grand(ish) tour we're visiting SE Portland's Powell Park along Powell Blvd between 22nd & 26th. It's your basic neighborhood park with a playground and ball fields, of the type I usually don't go out of my way to visit, though it does have an early 20th century gazebo for picnics & concerts, which I guess is a (mildly) interesting architectural feature. Longtime readers might remember I used to live nearby in the Brooklyn neighborhood back in the 90s, so this used to be one of my local neighborhood parks, but it wasn't the closest one and I didn't visit that often. To be honest, this post exists largely because I was in the area anyway, fetching drive thru from the Burgerville across the street, and I snapped a couple of photos while waiting for a traffic light without actually stopping & getting out. So with that out of the way, let's skip right ahead to our usual grab-bag of historical and news items:
- The park started appearing in the Oregonian in the mid-1920s, although the articles talk about the park like it had been there for a few years already. It was probably still fairly new because a lot of the early news items are budget and construction stuff. A June 1, 1924 story concerns the city hiring the lowest bidder to build bleachers for the park's baseball fields, which cost $1483 in 1924 dollars. That's about $21,281.38 in today's dollars (per the BLS calculator). A couple of years later (Sept. 12 1926) the city parks chief asked the council to fund a variety of construction projects. For Powell Park, the request was for "Flag pole, $100; apparatus, $5000; move handball court, $400; three fountains, $225; 20 lights, $2500". (The park doesn't have any fountains now, unless maybe drinking fountains count.) The next day, the city council considered a request for $1067.11 to build a "comfort station" in the park, which might mean the present-day gazebo.
- An August 14, 1931 item notes the park would be hosting a concert full of Sousa marches and other popular tunes that evening. Beyond the marches, the program featured various things like a Stephen Foster medley and some arranged excerpts from a comic opera, and it ended with the Star Spangled Banner, which had just been adopted as the official national anthem 5 months earlier, believe it or not. A couple of now-obscure pieces I was able to find on Youtube sound exactly like the background music for 1930s cartoons: Boccalari's "Dance of the Serpents" (not to be confused with Debra Paget's Snake Dance), and M.L. Lake's "Slidus Trombonus", which the paper describes as a "trombone comedy". No jazz, though. By 1931 all the cool kids wanted to listen to the devil's infernal jazz music, even in stodgy old Portland, so I imagine this was a wholesome families and oldtimers sort of event.
- With a few rare exceptions (like the previous news items), nearly every mention of Powell Park in the Oregonian has been in the sports section, concerning city baseball and softball leagues of all ages and skill levels. For a bit of the typical flavor, here's a July 28th 1940 sports page, in which local baseball leagues take up nearly the entire page. Local sports being a big deal back then, the top story in the Oregonian that day related to local soap box derby races, a sport that later fell into a decades-long decline until Portland hipsters revived it as a drunken ironic activity for 20-somethings. Meanwhile a smaller news story explained that the Nazis were bombing England. Additional WWII stories below the fold concerned the Axis marching into Romania and Ethiopia, and bombing Malta. So the paper's priorities might seem a tad... skewed. But then again, it's 2018 and Trump's burning everything down, and here I am writing about a marginally interesting city park, and I can't quite bring myself to do otherwise, and you're here reading this post, and I appreciate the company. It feels like it helps, somehow. The people of 1940 would not have known or used the phrase "self-care", of course, but I think I understand why they did what they did.
- In another rare non-baseball item, in August 1970 a big rally was held here as part of the People's Army Jamboree, an antiwar protest coinciding with the national American Legion Convention in Portland. This was one of several rallies around town, including one at Duniway Park, but overall the event had lower turnout than envisioned, thanks to Vortex 1, a state-sponsored hippie music festival out at McIver State Park near Estacada. The state guessed correctly that most hippies would choose a party over a protest if given the choice; meanwhile US troops stayed in Vietnam for another three years. I mean, a massive rally in Portland probably wouldn't have changed the course of the war anyway, but now we'll never know, will we?
- Here's an odd September 27th, 1977 article detailing points of interest along SE Powell out to where I-205 is now. As a harried commuter in modern 1977 Portland, it was your lot in life to be stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic all the way home to your Gresham split-level ranch. So the Oregonian offered up a list of mildly interesting semi-landmarks along the way if you were up for a little sightseeing. The article mentions the canceled Mt. Hood Freeway a couple of times; I don't know if the article was aimed at disgruntled suburbanites who weren't getting their (temporarily) speedy new freeway after all, or what. But oblique grumbling that doesn't get around to the real point is a very Portland thing. Incidentally, if the sights (including some restaurants, a nursery, and a cheap motel) didn't hold your interest as a professional commuter, the adjacent Scott's 88 Centers ad offers a Fall Value Days special on 8-track tapes starting at $1.88. Though it neglected to specify which 8-track tapes.
- A September 2002 Willamette Week item had a hearty chuckle about a planned weed potluck at the Powell Park gazebo. As it turned out, the activists behind it were merely a decade or so before their time. Sure, public consumption is still technically not legal, but it's probably just a matter of time at this point.
- The gazebo was gated off circa 2013, supposedly to thwart homeless people trying to use the (formerly) public restroom. The city, unsurprisingly, took the opportunity to require reservations to use the gazebo & charge for the privilege. The city proposed doing the same thing at Colonel Summers Park; I'm not sure whether that came to pass, but it usually does. I ran across two neighborhood blog posts grumbling about the unpopular new policy.
