Sunday, June 10, 2018

Mordock Park, Johnson City OR

Our next lil' adventure takes us out to the wilds of suburban Clackamas County, where we're visiting the lone city park in the tiny town of Johnson City, Oregon, pop. 566. The park's a cute little grassy area on the town's only lake, and I think the Flickr slideshow of it came out pretty well, but to be perfectly honest the park was the hook to go visit this... unusual small city. The peculiar thing about Johnson City is that its city limits are precisely the boundaries of the Johnson Mobile Estates mobile home park. All residences in town are mobile homes, all residents are renters, and the only property owners are the grandchildren of the city's founder, who willed it into being back in 1970.

Ever since I first read about the place, I've been intrigued (as an ex-poli sci major) about how the arrangement works: You have a mayor and city council and all the trappings of a 500-or-so person small city, but the city is also one family's private property, and they're the sole landlord of everyone in town. Even the city's park and the lake belong to the owners, not the city government. So (as I often do) I rummaged through the library's Oregonian newspaper database, hoping to see how this situation had worked out in practice. I was not at all surprised to see it's led to several ugly conflicts over the years, and here I am to share the gory details. So this post might get me banned from the city after it goes live, but hey, I've already got my photos, and I'm not really in a hurry to go back anyway, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

The trailer park (originally called "Johnson's Mobile City") first appeared in the paper in May 1959, in a small classified ad. Similar ads run regularly after that, and there's nothing that makes it stand out from any other trailer park. A December 1961 ad suggested that readers might like to come see the "largest Christmas tree", and check out a shiny new trailer space while they were there. The place doesn't appear to have figured in any actual news stories until the idea of incorporating as a city came up.

The first mention I can find about incorporation was an October 15th 1968 editorial against the idea, which condescendingly called it an "amusing little news story". Early articles (like this one) insisted on putting the city's name in scare quotes. The Oregonian was highly amused by the very idea of mobile home residents trying to exercise self-government; as far as I know the paper's never turned down a single chance to sneer at poor and working class people in their entire 150+ year history. The county commission agreed that incorporation was a silly idea and vetoed the original 1968 petition, but the would-be city fought all the way to the state Supreme Court and won after a two year battle. An April 1970 article on the upcoming incorporation vote mentioned that most of the people who had signed the 1968 petition had since moved, it being a mobile home park and all. The article noted, bemusedly, that, "The only reason given for incorporation was desire of the residents to control their own affairs." The article also explains that at some point during the long legal battle, state law had been changed to prevent any more Johnson Cities from happening, but legislators didn't move fast enough and Johnson City itself was grandfathered in.

Despite all the sneering from the state's paper of record, the new city incorporated in June 1970 by a 49-10 vote; the Oregonian rolled out the scare quotes for "Johnson City" one last time to mark the occasion. When asked about his plans, Delbert Johnson (the city's founder and namesake, as well as the trailer park's owner & sole proprietor, and owner of the city's sole permanent house) explained he didn't want to run for mayor or city council as it would "keep him tied down". The article mentions that as a city, it was now eligible for a cut of the state's gas, cigarette, & alcohol taxes, intimating without evidence that this might have been the ulterior motive. After the big election, the city existed quietly for the first couple of years, popping up in the news once when it got a small branch library in June 1972.

The first big newsworthy conflict popped up in April 1973, when surrounding areas outside the new city got the idea they might like to be incorporated too. The new laws to prevent another Johnson City appeared to also prevent them from incorporating as a new city of Clackamas, so someone had the bright idea that they could just annex themselves to the existing city instead and then rename it.

Cities normally like this sort of thing, since it means more residents and an expanded tax base; in this case it would have expanded the city's population 15-fold, and ended the city's odd single-landowner situation. But Johnson City was not a normal city, and Delbert hated the proposal & instructed Ralph Goode, the trailer park's 29 year old assistant manager (who just so happened to also be the city's mayor) to stop supporting it. Goode then quit the assistant manager job, but was looking to stay in town so he didn't also have to resign as mayor. One of the articles mentions that on top of everything else, the city council was meeting in Johnson's basement at the time. The council meetings must have been awkward.

Things got even more tense from there. On May 2nd, the Oregonian reported that the city council had unanimously rejected annexation, after Johnson presented a petition against it signed by 150 of the city's 170 residents, who also happened to be his tenants. Mayor Goode held out hope the annexation could go forward anyway with enough signatures from people in the proposed annexation area, and questioned whether people really had a choice to sign, since only 10 of them showed up at the council meeting. Goode resigned as mayor a week later and announced he would leave town as soon as possible, due to death threats he'd received over the annexation controversy. Also resigning were the city's police chief, city council president, and the temporary city recorder (who was also Goode's sister in law).

A remaining council member was chosen as the new mayor by secret ballot (which was apparently forbidden by the city charter), and two new council members were sworn in over the phone by the city attorney. An article the next day pointed out that the city's personnel moves were almost certainly illegal, and the fact that they had held three council meetings and one budget meeting over the course of an hour and twenty minutes was highly unusual.

In a May 9th article, "Johnson City controversy continues", ex-mayor Goode pointed out that any state funds (like gas, cigarette, & alcohol taxes) the city received were, by definition, going to improve Johnson's private property, and suggested maybe this wasn't ideal. Johnson insisted he was powerless where the city council was concerned, as he had no formal role & merely spoke up at council meetings from time to time. He admitted that incorporation had saved him money on the park's sewer situation, but insisted everything in town was fine, just "perking right along". That was the end of the proposed city of Clackamas, and the land surrounding the city remains unincorporated as of 2018.

(Quick trivia note here, the woman who replaced Goode as mayor had once been a traveling evangelist with Oral Roberts (yes, that Oral Roberts) during the 1940s and 1950s, according to her 1993 obit)

The city was in the news again briefly in January 1975 a former Johnson City cop was shot while trying to rob a Clackamas bank. Johnson was quoted saying "I don't think he'd rob a bank".

Another controversy arrived in March 1978, when the council proposed a new zoning ordinance that would prevent Johnson from redeveloping the city into a shopping center. Johnson's son pointed out that if his father really wanted to build a shopping center, he could just evict everyone and do it. The article mentions that Johnson had raised rents back in January, leading to two failed rent strikes. Johnson had told residents he might just kick everyone out and subdivide the land if they didn't pay up, which led to suspicions that he was planning to do that. The son mentioned his father planned to sue the city if the ordinance went forward. So the council killed the idea on a 4-1 vote a week later, also voting to expel the one holdout from the council. Who also got an eviction notice from Johnson around the same time, because democracy.

Local politics quieted down for a couple of decades after the shopping center incident, and we next heard from the city when Johnson passed away in April 1985. His obit described him as "flamboyant". At some point after 1978 he had moved to Las Vegas and started a jojoba oil plantation in the California desert, leaving his kids to run the city.

The city's 1994 municipal elections got a bit touchy. A husband and wife were running for two of the three city council seats, competing with two other candidates, and the city was also set to vote on a proposed charter amendment that would prohibit spouses or relatives from serving on the council at the same time. Voters elected the husband and the two other candidates, and approved the charter amendment, which was a somewhat awkward outcome. An article just after the election chuckled at the odd little city, interviewing a few locals & a co-owner. The article mentions that one of the city's main revenue sources, other than money from the state, was cat licensing fees. Seriously. Dogs were (and apparently still are) illegal in the city because they might attack the geese in the park.

In August 1996, city residents were up in arms about a proposal to ban skateboards, rollerblades, etc. from hilly streets of the city, which just happened to include the street in front of the mayor's trailer. An angry city council meeting followed, with residents largely opposing the idea & saying the city should have other priorities. The article mentioned that as the city now lacked a police force, the mayor would be in charge of issuing fines and confiscating skateboards and rollerblades.

Just over a month later, residents filed a recall petition against the mayor, claiming he'd been abusing his authority for years. One resident said the skateboard ban was the last straw. In October, the recall passed by a vote of 101 to 63. The council member who took over as temporary mayor insisted Mayor Lang had been "set up" by another council member (who happened to be the husband in the awkward 1994 election), and the whole thing was a personality conflict that had gotten out of hand. The recall came just a week before the regular 1996 general election for council seats, which again featured four candidates vying bitterly for three seats, plus an organized write in campaign, and a Byzantine set of scenarios around who would get to be mayor, depending on whether the county certified election results before the next city council meeting.

An article after the election said the Johnson City races were still too close to call, as 42 votes separated the four candidates, and there were still a bunch of write-ins to tally. The Oregonian didn't seem to publish a follow-up explaining how this fascinating saga turned out in the end, though a 1997 article mentioned that one of the recall campaigners was now a council member.

The city made the news occasionally through the 2000s. A July 2000 article chuckled again at the weird tiny city. Like the similar 1994 article, it related the same business about cats and dogs as before, and mentioned that as far as anyone knew it was the only 100% mobile home city in the entire United States, and therefore probably the world. The city celebrated its 30th birthday in September 2000; local citizens and a Johnson grandson talked fondly about the city's colorful history, although the article doesn't get into details of exactly how colorful it got at times. The warm fuzzies didn't last long, as the park's management company published 17 pages of strict new tenant rules in 2001. Residents were upset about this, and formed a tenants' association after their unique city government refused to get involved. I couldn't locate a follow-up article to see how this one turned out.

Despite the occasional drama, being a city council member apparently left plenty of time for hobbies. In 2004, a Johnson City councilman was arrested for moonlighting as an anti-graffiti vigilante, painting silver circles over other taggers' work. His big mistake seems to have been venturing beyond his city limits in search of graffiti; Portland Police nabbed him doing his thing in the Buckman neighborhood. They decided to charge him with many counts of vandalism, since legally his motive was irrelevant, and the paint he was using was actually harder to remove than the usual graffiti paint.

2006 saw another bout of resident anxiety about the owners selling or redeveloping their fair city, due to a recent rash of other mobile home parks closing and being turned into subdivisions or minimalls. The Johnsons again insisted they had no plans to do this anytime soon, and state law has since been changed to make it a little harder to just abruptly push everyone out of a trailer park.

A 2013 Tribune article concerns the city thinking about joining the surrounding Clackamas River water district, so that residents could vote in water board elections. Apparently a previous water board had tried to block selling water to Johnson City for reasons the article doesn't make clear. It seems that Johnson City had spent the previous few decades largely opting out of countywide and special district services, like the water district, which is ironic as many of these districts were created after the state made it hard to incorporate new cities. Among the various things they opted out of, Johnson City residents were (and are) the only people in the entire tri-county area ineligible for Clackamas County library cards; even Multnomah & Washington county residents could get them, thanks to reciprocal arrangements, but not Johnson City, so locals would have to get by with just the tiny honor system library inside city hall. Johnson City also opted out of the North Clackamas parks district, so hopefully Mordock Park here (named after a longtime mayor) addresses everyone's recreational needs.

County & special district services are normally funded through property taxes, so I imagine the deal is that the city's sole property owners didn't want to pay more, even though any tax hike could just be passed along to residents as a rent hike. An Oregon League of Cities doc I ran across indicated the city received no property tax revenue at all in FY 2011-2012, and I imagine this is true every year, meaning the city also doesn't levy any property taxes of its own. I suppose trying to tax your landlord would be a great way to get evicted.

One thing the city does have, though, it its own municipal court (something the City of Portland doesn't have), with a single part-time judge who's also a judge for Gladstone, Happy Valley, and Lake Oswego. A 2006 profile of Judge Ringle mentioned he'd been in this role for the city of Gladstone since 1965 (before Johnson City even existed), making him the state's longest-serving judge. He was also interviewed for a 2010 issue of the Oregon State Bar magazine. He sounds like a decent guy in the interview so I'm going to forego any Valkenvania jokes, not that anyone would get them anyway.

I am, however, puzzled by what (to me) looks like an obvious missed opportunity. The city has few sources of revenue outside of grants from the state and cat licensing, but it does have a municipal court, and it's maybe 1/8 mile east of I-205, separated only by a small nature preserve. I'm surprised they didn't pull the same trick as the city of Coburg (a bit north of Eugene) did with I-5, annexing a narrow strip of land out to the freeway, plus a stretch of the freeway itself, and then setting up an infamous speed trap, so infamous that one conservative website proclaimed Coburg the "Worst Little Town in America". While not winning any popularity contests, the traffic ticket business came to be up to 80% of the city's total revenue before the state stepped in and reined them in a bit. I suppose the taboo about annexing land beyond the trailer park is so strong they just won't do it even to rake in a massive pile of cash. Please note that I am not proposing the city actually do this, just saying I'm surprised they passed up the chance. A great 2014 Washington Post article explains how small cash-strapped cities across the St. Louis metro area came to depend on traffic fine revenue, and how that contributed to abusive and racist policing in cities like Ferguson. So yeah, if you happen to be an elected official in Johnson City and you're reading this, please don't even think about this idea; in fact, you can just forget you saw this entire paragraph, if you don't mind.

The adjacent nature preserve I mentioned above is the Wetland Conservancy's Hearthwood Preserve. I'd intended to make the visit a twofer and get some nature photos too, but this turned out not to be possible. The info page describes the place:

Hearthwood Preserve is the headwaters of Clackamas County’s Kellogg Creek. The wetland is a very dense willow, red osier dogwood, elderberry and Oregon ash scrub shrub wetland. Being the headwaters of Kellogg Creek, the 16 acre wetland plays an important role in cleaning the water as it heads down to it's confluence with the Willamette River in Milwaukie Oregon. The vegetation on this preserve is so dense that is creates a barrier for people to enter making it extremely valuable habitat for wildlife in this area. TWC has planted native trees such as Red Alder, Western Red Cedar and Oregon White Oak along the periphery of the property and continues to manage for invasive species such as Himalayan Blackberry.

In short, the place is not set up for visitors and there's no way in, therefore no photos and no blog post about it. So I reluctantly crossed it off my big todo list.

While I was putting this post together, I remembered a recent Quartz story that touches on company coal towns in Appalachia. Johnson City is not quite the same thing, of course, but the whole town is a business, and that business is to be its residents' landlord (and occasionally employer, as noted in the history section up above). That's just weird. The more usual company town model in the Northwest was the company timber town; I remember when Valsetz was bulldozed & burned by its corporate owners a bit over 30 years ago. Gilchrist was the last company timber town in Oregon, and its houses were sold to residents some years ago, but a few other company towns still exist, like PGE's tiny burg of Three Lynx, in the Cascades SE of Estacada.

Another fun model (if I can go off on a tangent for a moment) is the incorporated "shell" city with almost no residents, like notorious Vernon, CA. One family and its cronies ran the city for decades and somehow neglected to hold elections for most of that time, as the city evolved into a virtually tax-free and regulation-free industrial dystopia. The state tried to forcibly abolish the city a few years ago but somehow a deal was made and they've promised to clean up their act somehow. An entire season of True Detective was set in a thinly fictionalized version of the City of Vernon a few years back. Elsewhere in the LA metro area, City of Industry also has many businesses and almost no residents (hence the name); it doesn't have the same ugly reputation as Vernon, and when it makes the news it's generally about strippers [link is a safe-for-work news story about state labor laws] rather than Superfund sites. Oh, and then there's Colma, just south of San Francisco, a city made up almost entirely of cemeteries, with 1500 living residents and 1.5 million dead ones.

So... yeah, on that cheery note, back to the Portland area. Johnson City isn't the eastside's only tiny city; Maywood Park (pop. 752) is right on I-205 next to Rocky Butte, surrounded on all sides by the City of Portland. Back in 1967 it was part of unincorporated east Multnomah County when residents banded together to try to block construction of Interstate 205 through their neighborhood. Incorporation succeeded, but the reason they did it turned out to be a lost cause. Still, there's very little chance they'll be absorbed into Portland anytime soon, as their property taxes are significantly lower, and merging would make them just another part of the outer Eastside that city hall's forgotten all about. I haven't visited their fair city yet because despite the name, they don't actually have any city parks. The only real public space they have is, ironically, part of the I-205 bike path. And other than the unusual history and low taxes, the place looks like any other midcentury subdivision, so anyone who's looking for a Monaco or Caymans-style exotic tax haven is bound to be disappointed. I have this occasional idea it would be fun to engineer a bitter civic rivalry between Johnson City and Maywood Park, but I have no idea how one would go about it.

SW Capitol Hwy./Bertha Blvd. Viaduct

This humble blog's ongoing bridge project isn't just about Columbia Gorge bridges, though I've been doing a lot of those lately. I started out with Portland-area bridges; I think the Morrison Bridge was the first of the bunch, and I did all the (Portland-area) Willamette bridges after that, and then the Columbia ones, and then some on the Sandy, Clackamas & Tualatin Rivers, and things just sort of got more and more esoteric from there. In general this humble blog doesn't aspire to be a new-Portlandy hipster website, but I think I'm rather good at finding things You Probably Haven't Heard Of. For bridges, this is often guided by ODOT's 2013 Historic Bridge Field Guide, in which the agency listed a bunch of bridges it felt were historically significant, often for technical reasons only a bridge engineer would care about. This is nice if you're looking for blog material, because you can just point at the guide and shrug and say the experts think this bridge is important, and who am I to argue? This policy has led to visiting some really obscure stuff, like the Ochoco St. Bridge, the Denver Ave. - Columbia Blvd. bridge, and the half-viaduct at NW Melinda & Maywood. A couple of those posts turned out to be interesting to work on, even when the subject matter wasn't particularly photogenic. In my defense, I didn't make the trip just to look for this bridge; I was in the area to track down the nearby Sasquatch Brewing pub (which I hadn't been to before), & then realized there was an item on my big TODO list nearby, and it seemed like a good idea after a couple of beers, so here we are. (This isn't a beer blog, for the most part, but I do recommend the pub; good food, good beer.)

So on that note, here we are in the Hillsdale neighborhood to look at an old overpass at the messy intersection of Capitol Highway, Bertha Blvd., Bertha Ct., Beaverton-Hillsdale Hwy., & SW 18th Ave. I had sort of assumed it dated to 1950s car mania, back when freeway-style intersections were supposed to be the bright future of getting around town as fast as possible. Turns out it's quite a bit older than that. Here's the blurb from part 4 of the historic bridge guide (which is organized alphabetically by county & split into 5 pdfs):

Description: Seven reinforced concrete girder spans with small curved haunches
Significance: This bridge is one of the few remaining segments of the original route of the Capitol Hwy, later superseded by the West Side Highway. The bridge originally crossed over the Oregon Electric Railway. Widened with two additional girders in 1929, the bridge retains its early feel though the use of a replica of the original decorative railing. A short staircase provides pedestrian access to the underside of the bridge.
Character Defining Features: Decorative railing, Location
Alterations: A 2011 rehab project included repairs to the concrete and replaced the remaining 1915 railing with a replica.

I realize "small curved haunches" is a technical engineering term, but I still kind of giggle at it. I bet bridge engineers giggle too, at least while they're undergrads.

Anyway, the passenger rail line was ripped out & replaced by Bertha Blvd. in the 1930s, and when that happened they just kept the existing bridge over the railroad, like what happened at SW Barbur & Multnomah. Note that ODOT goofed & got the railroad wrong; the trains that ran through Hillsdale were the Southern Pacific's Red Electric service, and the Oregon Electric was a competing company that crossed the West Hills further south.

A few historical items from around the interwebs:

  • The Multnomah Historical Association has a 1920 photo from Capitol Highway looking toward the bridge.
  • A circa-1932 photo showing the old rail line.
  • A SWTrails page about walking the Red Electric Trail, which slowly being pieced together from parts of the old interurban right-of-way.
  • A SW Connection article about present-day remnants of the city's passenger rail history. It mentions in passing that the Bertha stop (and thus the present-day boulevard) was named for the wife of a railroad executive. The stop wasn't called "Hillsdale" like the neighborhood because it sounded too much like Hillsboro, the line's ultimate destination. Inattentive riders have an uncanny way of getting off at the wrong stop; I know this is true, having done so on MAX a few times.
  • A HistoryHunters.net page with facts about the old rail line, and photos showing what a few parts of the old right-of-way look like today.

And then there's a 2015 OregonLive story about the 1920 Red Electric train collision on the old interurban line, in which eight people died and over a hundred were injured; nearly a century later it's still the worst public transit accident in Portland history. The article begins with people waiting at the Bertha stop, but the collision happened further south along the line, somewhere near present-day Stephens Creek Nature Park. The Multnomah Historical Association page has a page all about the wreck, with (fortunately non-gory) photos.

The old Bertha rail station was located around where the Watershed at Hillsdale senior housing complex is now. Before that was built circa 2007, the land sat empty for several decades; it seems it was a contaminated brownfield site, and an Oregon DEQ filing from the construction approval detailed the various uses the site had gone through over the years. First a rural dairy farm, then an interurban rail stop, then a gas station/garage/junkyard, which is where the contamination came from. The study found additional contamination that turned out to be goop from an old dry cleaning operation seeping downhill and ending up here. Yuck.

I don't have any photos from under the bridge because the Capitol/Bertha/Bertha/Beaverton-Hillsdale intersection is not really a fun place to walk around; the streets are busy and congested, and the crosswalks (and sidewalks) are few. But there's at least one improvement in the works nearby. The aforementioned Red Electric Trail project will soon have a new segment through here, detouring west around the busy intersection, partly on the unused right-of-way for a SW Dakota Street that only exists on paper. The planned trail segment isn't that long, but it needs to cross a deep gully next to Beaverton-Hillsdale, so a shiny new footbridge is in the works. They're aiming to make it at least reasonably photogenic, so if I'm in the area again once it's done I might need to stop and take a few photos.

Moffett Creek Bridges

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • In the 1920s, the area hosted a 50 acre YWCA campground, with a few wood buildings that were probably somewhere near the bridge. The place was profiled in "Wauneka Appeals to Business Girls" (July 20th 1924). The first couple of paragraphs make it sound pretty idyllic.
    A book, an Indian blanket and a ferny spot beside the hurried little Moffett’s creek for the girl who is tired of typewriters and time-clocks; a climb up a mountain trail or a walk along the highway for her more energetic sister, are on the unwritten recreational programme at Wauneka, vacation camp of the Portland Y.W.C.A. on Moffett’s creek, 45 miles up the Columbia highway.

    There’s nothing to do but enjoy yourself, and sleep and eat and rest, at Wauneka, say the officials of the Y.W.C.A., whose only share in the proceedings is to keep excellent caretakers on the place in order to provide chaperonage, cooking and upkeep. There is no educational or any other sort of arranged programme, and the business girls who go there can do anything they please, within reason, except pick the ferns and flowers and wild greenery that keep Wauneka beautiful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday, June 02, 2018

lee kelly sculpture at salishan

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

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

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

Saturday, May 19, 2018

Emerald Falls

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

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

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

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

Tuesday, May 01, 2018

McCord Creek Bridges

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

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

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

Monday, April 30, 2018

Maricara Natural Area

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, April 29, 2018

Dalton Point

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pittock Acres


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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