Kuliʻouʻou Ridge Trail

Switching gears a little, here's another post from my (somewhat smaller) backlog of Oʻahu hiking trails. This time we're visiting the Kuliʻouʻou Ridge Trail, just west of the Hawaiʻi Kai area ^[1]. If you only have the time (or inclination) to do one ridge trail on Oʻahu, I think this is the one I would recommend, of all the ones I've tried so far (including Waʻahila Ridge, Manana Ridge, Nuʻuanu-Judd, and a few others I haven't posted yet). It's sort of a concentrated version of those others: You still get the full ridge trail experience, while expending a bit less time and less effort overall. Specifically, the trail gets you to the top of the Koʻolaus and back in around 4.3 miles, versus the usual 6-10 mile roundtrip you often see elsewhere, and the summit point where you turn around at is a bit over 2000 feet up versus the usual 2500-or-so, and you get to that altitude without doing a bunch of endless up-and-down stretches first. There's also more shade here than a lot of ridge trails, and not a lot of wind or exposure except right at the very top. But it's no cakewalk, either; it's still pretty steep and challenging in parts, and you still obviously need to bring food, water, and sunblock, and watch your step, and just generally not try anything stupid. Remember all of that and you'll probably do fine. Which is a very long-winded way of me saying that I made it to the top on this hike, and didn't on the others I mentioned, therefore I like this one better. Some additional blog posts and such about this hike can be found at Unreal Hawaii, Oahu Hikes and Trails, This Way to Paradise, and The Katie Show Blog, and many other locations around the interwebs.

The one area where this hike loses a few points is around getting here by bus, I guess due to being located way out in the 'burbs. The nearest bus stop is out on Kalanianaʻole Highway, and from there you have to hoof it through a sprawling subdivision just to get to the trailhead. This adds another 1.3 miles each direction to your total distance, and the additional distance is just not very interesting, and there isn't a lot of shade to be had, but at least that part is basically flat. If you're getting there by car, be aware that there's limited parking at the trailhead, and the trail's increasing popularity has been causing the usual tensions with local residents in recent years.

There is technically another official trail here: The Kuliʻouʻou Valley Trail starts at the same trailhead but continues up toward the back of the valley instead of switchbacking up onto the ridge. I tried this after doing the main trail just to see what it was like, in case it turned out to be a secret gem I needed to go on and on about. No such luck this time, though; I thought the trail was fairly pointless, but if you've got a hankering for an extra 1.4 miles of thrashing around in underbrush with no interesting views of anything along the way, maybe you'll enjoy it more than I did.

As usual there's a whole web of unofficial trails in the area too. None of which I have actually tried (so far), so please take this section with one or more grains of salt. Having said that, it may not look like it, but the summit point here doubles as a junction with the fabled/feared Koʻolau Summit Ridge Trail, which (as the name suggests) runs along the top of the mountains for the full length of the island, around 45 miles total. While it's possible to through-hike it end-to-end, a much more common thing is to go up one side ridge, do a stretch of KSRT, and then come down another ridge. And eventually cover the whole trail that way, by doing bits and pieces of it segment by segment. One popular route that starts and ends here is the so-called Kuli'ou'ou Ridge Loop Trail, where you continue left/north from the official summit over to (and over) Puʻu O Kona -- a high point along this stretch of trail at ~2200 feet -- and then descend via the next ridge over, ending up in the same valley where you began, so you don't need a second car parked somewhere else if you came by car. Somehow this loop is only .3 miles longer than the official out-n-back route; I gather that this is partly because the unofficial route on the west-side ridge doesn't have any switchbacks, and is steep and muddy and sketchy and hard to follow in parts. So another popular route just extends the out-and-back over to Puʻu O Kona and sticks to the nice maintained trail for the ascent & descent parts (examples with photos via The Hiking HI, Hik3beast, Kenji Saito, and Oahu Hikes and Trails.) The last link is part of a set of late-1990s hiking web pages that haven't really changed since then, which is kind of amazing. It mentions that the current ridge trail route is not really that old, or at least it wasn't old yet as of 1998, and the original trail used to start somewhere at the back of Kaʻalakei Valley (the next valley to the east) before the current trail was built. Before anyone goes hunting around for it, that old route is probably not accessible anymore since the whole area where it would've started is now part of a big senior assisted living complex.

An extra twist on the Puʻu O Kona out-n-back involves somehow setting up camp on that stretch of KSRT and spending the night up there, so that you're up there in time for sunrise photos. A few other miscellaneous trail variations I ran across include two routes to the Kuliʻouʻou summit that begin over in Haha'ione Valley, the next one to the east past Kaʻalakei. These both involve an obscure junction with the main trail that I don't recall noticing (which ought to spice up your return trip a bit), and sneaking across private property to get to and from that junction. Or if that's too mainstream , a route that goes up the aforementioned & unmaintained west ridge route and drops you off in Haha'ione Valley behind a gate that's signed "Government Property - No Trespassing". For a different change of pace, here's a page about only taking the ridge trail as far as the picnic area partway up, but doing so by mountain bike.

Or, for people who want to do something truly extreme, Pu'u O Kona is one of the few places along the Koʻolaus where it's (barely) possible to start over on the windward side and climb up and over the mountains. If you look at a terrain map of the area, you might notice that the windward side of Puʻu O Kona has a pair of, I hesitate to call them side ridges exactly, but sort of projecting fins so that that bit of windward side isn't just a 2000 foot vertical wall like it mostly is elsewhere. This spot has picked up the name "Bear Claw", and the two fins are simply called the left fork and the right fork, and people have climbed both of them; here's a video of an ascent of the right fork, for anyone who's curious what that looks like. The video description suggests popping a Dramamine before watching, if that gives you any idea. Personally the only kind of bear claw I have any interest in experiencing firsthand is of the pastry variety, and Yelp says Liliha Bakery makes the best ones on the island. I gather the ridge trail here is the standard way down after climbing either of the Bear Claw forks, so if you really want to impress people I suppose you could do the ridge trail and then claim to have done half a Bear Claw, and cross your fingers that nobody asks which half.

So I guess this is the point where I direct your attention to a Civil Beat guest column from a few years back about the state's ever-increasing number of hiking fatalities and expensive rescues, and what the state ought to do about it, but hasn't yet and probably won't. As part of a larger point about inadequate trail signage, the author mentions that his wife and child had recently taken an unsafe wrong turn at Kuliʻouʻou Ridge because it wasn't clear which way was the correct route. I recall that this was confusing in a few spots, so that's something to be aware of. I mean, overall this isn't the most dangerous trail but things do still happen now and then; just over a week ago a hiker had to be airlifted out after slipping and possibly breaking an ankle on the way down. He also makes a point about the state trail website being inadequate, lacking canonical difficulty ratings or any information at all about unofficial trails, not even explaining where a trail goes or how it changes beyond the official end of trail sign that everyone ignores, the resulting void being filled unevenly by social media. Present company included, I suppose. He points at a French mountaineering website as an example of what he'd really like to see here. And yes, it's a good site, very clean and logically organized. The obvious problem here is that French mountaineering websites aren't shaped by the vagaries of US personal injury law, which incentivizes you to limit your own liability above everything else, even if that outcome is less safe overall. There's an especially egregious example of that just before the very top of the Kuliʻouʻou Ridge. Right at the top of the trail, immediately before your very first glimpse over the summit to Windward Oʻahu, an official sign informs you that it marks the official End Of The Trail, and you need to turn around right there at that very spot and go home right this instant. Nobody ever does this. I am a fairly risk-averse person, and I rolled my eyes and walked right past this sign just like everyone else does. If you keep going, before long there's a point where you really do stand a good chance of plummeting off a two thousand foot cliff, but you have to use your own judgement on exactly where that point might be, because the state officially washed its hands of you back at the end-of-trail sign. Whereas if they put up some guardrails -- maybe even something nicer, like a steel or concrete viewing platform so visitors aren't standing on bare dirt (which turns to slippery mud when wet) -- then legally they'd be inviting people to go right up to those guardrails and they'd end up liable for any dumb life choices that visitors made after that. Someone stands on top of the guardrail and takes their very last selfie, you're at least going to end up in court over it, arguing whether the railing should have been flat on top for safety or rounded to discourage people, and even if you win the case and keep winning cases like it, it's going to be prohibitively expensive to keep this up in the long run.

So when you see me using phrases like "Legal says I have to tell you not to do this", that's the sort of landscape I'm trying to navigate here. And please understand I'm not implying that you, personally, were about to do the thing I told you not to do; that warning is for the second-after-next person to stumble across this page, who -- just between us -- is a complete blithering idiot, with no instinct for self-preservation and without a single atom of common sense, and who might just decide to go sprinting off the cliff here because I didn't explicitly say not to, or I didn't explain that there have been exactly zero miraculous rescues of falling people here in recorded history, whether by Superman, or Neo, or gigantic eagles, or Bruce Willis and his taxi, or Mr. Spock in antigravity boots, or whatever. Or maybe now that I've added those particular warnings, the problem would be that I didn't specify that I am not writing this on Opposite Day, and it also is not Opposite Day whenever the aforementioned idiot happens to read this. And so on. You can try to guess at all the absurd things someone might try, or what their bereaved next-of-kin and their hotshot lawyers might put in front of a jury, but you'll never think of all of it. And if it looks too much like you're trying to be serious and authoritative, you just might be taking on even more liability that way. So with that in mind, here are a few more important safety tips to consider, with a somewhat varying degree of usefulness and tongue-in-cheek-ness:

• You will keep seeing warnings about how slippery the mud is here. I'm not a soil scientist and don't know why it's like this, but it is. If you're the sort of person who learns best by doing, maybe try a wet valley hike like Manoa Falls first before tackling something with any altitude to it. Which is a much lower-stakes way to get a sense of what the local mud is like; you can fall down all you want without plummeting off of anything. Just keep an eye out for flash floods, and dengue-carrying mosquitoes, and leptospirosis cooties and whatnot while you're doing this, and you'll be fine, probably.
• I think I've mentioned before that you'll sometimes run across a bit of trail that's just wall-to-wall exposed tree roots, and that those roots offer essentially zero traction. There are a few spots like that here too, along with a somewhat more unusual hazard: A stretch of the lower part of the trail here passes through a large grove of some kind of nonnative pine tree, and the whole forest floor -- and the trail -- are covered in a thick blanket of pine needles. Which is weirdly soft and quiet and kind of nice to walk on just generally, but on a slope it's not exactly a reliable source of traction and sure footing. And sometimes it's pine needles on top of slippery wall-to-wall tree roots, which is just ridiculous and deeply unfair. So watch your step. How the pine needles stay in place on top of those roots without sliding away is one of the great unsolved mysteries of the jungle, I'm afraid. This whole situation does remind me a little of a certain dimwitted ex-president who insisted states needed to rake their forests to prevent forest fires. So although that might actually be a non-terrible idea here and there, I feel like we should hold off for now just so he can't take credit for it.
• I have been encouraged, offline, to add a plug for tetanus booster shots to my list of safety tips. This was partly as a gentle reminder that I'm overdue for one myself. When you see references to tetanus shots, that's usually how it goes: Person was behind on their shots, and needed to get one just in case after being stitched up for some kind of dumb injury. And I have an occasional running joke here about various things being so rusty or dirty that you can get tetanus just by looking at them. So I feel like I ought to point out that the disease itself is seriously bad news. A child in Oregon caught it in 2019 after a forehead gash, was hospitalized for two months with the full range of nasty tetanus symptoms, and nearly died, all because his parents were (and still are) antivaxxers. Which brings me to a broader point, if at all possible never let an antivaxxer make health care (or other) decisions on your behalf. Given the way conspiracy thinking tends to infect a person's whole worldview, I wouldn't trust an antivax plumber to plumb my house correctly. They could turn out be a cholera denier who will hook your water up to the city sewer system and vice versa because it's "more natural" that way.
• If you saw my bit about the second-to-next visitor who's going to head straight for the cliff and you immediately wondered about bringing a parachute, I already googled that for you and it's kind of a mixed bag. I didn't see any mentions of people just flat-out base jumping the drop, which I think is because you'd be jumping into the prevailing winds, which will try to blow you into the cliff, or up and back to where you jumped from, more or less. I am absolutely not joking about that part, by the way: Here's a 2011 news clip where a very experienced paraglider pilot was carried up over the Koʻolaus and ended up somewhere around the Pearl City / Manana Trail area. In a similar incident from 2009, the pilot ended up somewhere on the way to Wahiawa, believe it or not. Both pilots were fine, and the experience of being sort of catapulted up and over a mountain range is probably extremely awesome, let's be honest here. Though probably even more so when you -- and your friends down on the ground helplessly watching you -- understand what's about to happen. Please note, however, that the prevailing wind situation also makes this spot, or any other Koʻolau summit, an exceptionally poor place to scatter ashes -- think that one scene in The Big Lebowski -- unless you and your fellow mourners want to go home with a lungful of Uncle Morty.
• If you're keen to avoid dangerous stuff, you'll want to look at this from a broader perspective: Back in 2016, the Civil Beat folks set conventional wisdom aside and ran the actual numbers and figured out that the single most dangerous tourist activity in Hawaiʻi is not hiking, or climbing, or surfing, or paragliding, or bungee jumping; it's actually snorkeling, particularly at Hanauma Bay, usually due to a combination of overexertion and underpreparedness. This is not really a hiking safety tip; it's more that if you're reading this post and paying attention to safety tips, I feel like I should mention the big underappreciated one people don't know about. So don't snorkel, it's not worth it. Or at least don't try it for the first time here, in the open ocean, under the hot sun, while trying to learn how by reading the packaging on your convenience store snorkel kit.
• I hate to follow a statistical item with an anecdotal item, but there's a phenomenon I've noticed that I've never seen concrete numbers about. I can't keep track of how many accidental-demise news items I've seen that mention the victim had moved to Hawaiʻi just a few months to a year ago, and was out there living their best life every day when tragedy struck. Now, Superbad gags aside, a Hawaiʻi state ID is a powerful tool around these parts, unlocking steep discounts everywhere and sometimes letting you bypass long tourist lines and so forth altogether. I know of several Oʻahu hikes where the trailhead's located inside a gated subdivision, but the HOA will let you in to explore their trails if you can show a local driver's license at the gate. A state ID does not automatically make you good at local outdoor stuff, though, and it can't repel sharks or jellyfish, or anything like that. I mean, go ahead and live your best life obviously, don't let me talk you out of it. I mean, who knows; if you believe in fate or destiny or whatever, maybe it's been set in stone from day one that in this particular lifetime you get to wrap things up with 4-6 months of amazing tropical bliss and then some sort of blameless accident that won't hurt very much, and then you get to come back as a dolphin or a sea turtle next time around, just for a little variety. I'm not a professional theologian and am not 100% clear on how that stuff works, so again: Who knows. I suppose there would be vastly worse destinies to have, all things considered.
• Remember that noping out is always an option. If you followed the "Hanauma Bay" link earlier, you'll see my brief tale about trying to learn snorkeling by doing the exact things I just told you not to do, and let me point out that this was long before the Civil Beat study, and I had no idea that it was a particularly dangerous thing to try. I soon concluded that breathing through the little tube and keeping it clear of seawater was actually kind of difficult and tedious, and I wasn't enjoying it, and wasn't likely to start enjoying it soon, and noped out. The Nu'uanu-Judd Trail post is another lively tale of noping out, that time after losing my remaining unopened water bottle. And there are others, and there will be others in the future. If you aren't mushing across the Alaskan tundra to get a vaccine to Nome, or skiing cross country across Norway to stop Nazis from getting the Bomb, you have the right to pull the plug at any time for any reason or no reason at all, and not apologize to anyone for it, even when that fin-and-mask kit cost over $20 and the store doesn't do refunds.
• Maybe I'm just more clumsy or disorganized than the average hiker, but I can only think of a couple of times over mumble-mumble years of hiking where I've been close to taking a bad tumble, and it always involved being thrown off balance and yanked backwards or sideways when something of mine randomly got snagged on underbrush -- a loose cord from a jacket or hoodie, a long dangling strap on a backpack, that sort of thing. Safety tip writers never seem to lecture you about minimizing your snaggable surface area. Until now, I mean. Based on this, I have to conclude that either a.) This never happens to anybody besides me, or b.) This happens all the time, and somehow I am the only survivor. Either way, keep an eye on those dangly bits and don't snagged, ok?
• One thing the usual safety tip lists do include is to tell someone where you're going. Now, I will admit this is something that doesn't always come naturally to those of us who were kids in the 1970s. It was more of a "get on your bike and go, try to be back in time for school tomorrow" thing back then, and I am only slightly exaggerating. If you resemble this description too, this is your gentle reminder that your joints aren't getting any younger, and if you think you feel old now, just wait til you blow out a knee slipping on a tree root, and you've fallen and you can't get up, and nobody knows where to look for you. Texting or tweeting or IG-ing a photo from the trailhead should do the trick. Or -- and it pains me to say this -- if you're somewhere that has cell service the whole way (and trails on Oʻahu generally do), I suppose you could just livestream the whole thing, and try to keep an entertaining running commentary going for the whole 4-5 hours while wheezing your way up the the hill, remembering to stop and plug your sponsors regularly and whatnot. That way, when you slip on a tree root and blow out a knee, and are lying there writhing in pain among the mud and pine needles, you also get to deal with trolls from across the globe mocking you and accusing you of faking it. But at least you aren't alone, I guess.
• Did I mention the trail's haunted? No? Well, the trail's haunted. At least according to local rumor / legend / message board. The person relating this tale describes hiking up the ridge on a foggy day, and getting terribly lost and muddy in the process. Eventually the hapless party encountered a nice elderly Japanese lady, who just sort of appeared out of the fog, dressed up kind of like a worker on an old-time pineapple plantation. She gave them directions when asked, saving the day. The clincher detail proving she was a ghost was that there was no visible mud on her shoes, which normally would be impossible. I'm awarding partial credit here for trying to adapt Occam's Razor to local conditions, but my personal experience with Oʻahu mud is that it will happily stick to ghosts just like it sticks to everything else. (Never ask me how I know this.) Clearly the only way to pull this off would be find a dry place to stand, teleport in directly to that spot, provide the needed directions while remaining perfectly still, and immediately teleport back out without ever touching any mud. So yeah, I'm not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens. So watch out for aliens.

---

footnote(s)

1. I had seen the word "Kuliʻouʻou" spelled a few different ways, both with and without ʻokina characters, so I figured I ought to double check on that, which led me to the official Hawaii Board on Geographic Names website. It turns out they have a whole big project devoted to putting the ʻokina and kahakō symbols back where they belong, and they have a guide covering the place names they've sorted out so far. A UH page on Hawaiian spelling includes an example of why you can't just drop the unfamiliar characters, as English speakers are always tempted to do: "pau" means "finished", while "pa‘u" is "soot", "pa‘ū" means "damp", and "pā‘ū" is "skirt". That page also points out that using an apostrophe character for the ʻokina is not really correct, and suggests several rather clunky ways of getting the correct Unicode character, including finding the word you need in an online dictionary and just copying and pasting from there. The Board on Geographic Names has a more recent page on the subject, with an explanation on how to add a Hawaiian keyboard layout to Windows 10, which is what I did. That layout swaps in the ʻokina in place of the regular apostrophe character, and just using the ʻokina everywhere instead of apostrophes is also wrong, so you need to toggle layouts back and forth if you want to write a blog post in English that contains a few Hawaiian place names. All of which is a long way of saying that I've looked this post over a few times and I think I've gotten the names right, but spell check doesn't flag this as an error and I may have still missed a spot or two. And before anyone starts shrieking about this being political correctness run amok or whatever, that's not it at all; the deal is that I was a spelling bee nerd back in grade school and I still hate getting words wrong, even when it's a simple typo, and getting somebody else's place names wrong because doing it right is kind of tedious just sort of doesn't sit right with me.

Cruiser Falls

Ok, time for another installment in our now-unseasonal tour of seasonal Columbia Gorge waterfalls. This time we're visiting one I tracked down along the old Columbia River Highway, about midway between Latourell Falls and Shepperds Dell, on a long stretch where the highway runs right along the base of a long row of bluffs averaging maybe 100' high, while the north/downslope side features a few farms and assorted houses. During the wet part of the year, every few dozen to hundred feet or so, a small seasonal creek tumbles over the bluff, forming a small waterfall; as far as I can tell nobody has ever bothered to make a list of these, or dream up names for any of them, or the creeks they're on. If any of you were following this weird little blog back in 2014 you might recall a post I did about one of the more prominent seasonal falls in this area -- albeit with photos I took in 2011, because some things never change around here. (Google Maps has recently started calling that particular one "Huerta Falls" for some unknown reason, which I guess is sort of an exception to the general absence of names.) It's not that the area is boring exactly, but for almost everyboy it's just a stretch of scenery you drive through on your way to one of the major visitor attractions, someplace that has an official National Scenic Area sign.

If you've been to this humble corner of the interwebs before, you might have guessed that the word 'almost' was the operative part of the last sentence, and you would be right again. While I was putting together last January's Palisade Falls post, I came to realize that a.) "ice climbing" is a real sport that exists, b.) when the Gorge freezes (which is increasingly rare, because climate), Palisade Falls is kind of a big deal in that community, and c.) in general, many of the, uh, hottest ice climbing spots are minor or seasonal waterfalls that largely get ignored when they aren't frozen. That sounded directly relevant to my interests, so I filed it away as something to investigate further during the next wet season. Then I spent the intervening months looking for places where I could get outside without meeting a single other human being or any of the microbial nasties they might be superspreading, and also without buying a massive 4WD vehicle and driving 200 miles past the back of beyond, and then being stuck with said vehicle the rest of the year too, fetching groceries and so forth at 4 miles per gallon while bystanders sneer and wonder what I'm compensating for. It occurred to me that tracking a few of these falls down in an unfrozen state would fit my requirements nicely, while also allowing me to once again write about an obscure thing nobody's ever heard of, and land a top search engine result for a thing that probably nobody will ever search for. The problem was that I didn't have a list of these very obscure spots, because obscure, nor did I have any idea where to find such a list if one existed.

I eventually came to realize that the canonical guide to local places that freeze in just the right way is a chapter in Tim Olson's Northwest Oregon Rock, one of a series of Northwest climbing guidebooks. The book's companion website has sort of an overview of the subject here, but most of the relevant info isn't available anywhere online, so I went ahead and bought the book. I'm not actually planning on dangling off any overhanging cliffs -- icy or otherwise -- by my fingertips anytime soon, unless the only alternatives are even worse. But the author did a great deal of that as part of researching the book, so sending a little business his way seemed only fair.

So, per the book's "Columbia Gorge Ice" chapter, the waterfall shown above doubles as a climbing route called "Cruiser" when it freezes. Which I gather is a common climbing term for something that's (relatively) straightforward and nontechnical that can be climbed quickly. Having searched high and low, this appears to be the only name anyone has ever given it. The point of all of this is that I needed a title for this post, so I figured the falls needed a nickname, so here's a new rule of thumb I dreamed up: If it needs a name and all it has is the nickname "Foo" from when it freezes, or dries up, or picked up a name from some other very niche reason, it can go by "Foo Falls". As in, the falls that become "Foo" when they freeze or dry up or whatever. So "Cruiser Falls" it is, I guess. At least it's better than "seasonal falls, columbia gorge", which is what I titled the 2014 post. Which was accurate, but as a general naming scheme it scaled up rather poorly.

Getting to Cruiser Falls is not complicated. The only place to park nearby is a mysteriously large parking lot on the westbound side of the highway, almost directly across from Huerta Falls (a.k.a. "Water Heater" as the ice climbing folks call it -- look for the rusty tank at the base) There are no signs explaining what this parking lot is for, or why you might want to park there. If you look closely a small unofficial sign calls it "Oasis", which is a name but not an explanation. It kind of looks like a trailhead parking lot, but without any trails that start there, official or otherwise. Per a page at Recreating the HCRH, it turns out that's not what it is at all, and it's actually restaurant parking for a long-departed restaurant; the page includes an old photo of the building, which went by a couple of names in its day including "The Dell" and "The White Elephant". At one point decades ago there were a lot of little roadside cafes like this along the old highway, but I gather they generally either went out of business after I-84 opened, or were purchased and torn down as eyesores, in an effort to make the old highway look more remote and natural. Which, I understand the motivation behind doing that, but it's also no fun to realize you need coffee and can't get any without driving west back to the Vista House or Corbett, or east all the way to Cascade Locks, or wait around and hope a parking space opens up at Multnomah Falls someday. So I don't think it would be the end of the world if they at least allowed a coffee stand or a couple of food trucks in a few spots here and there. A thing that will never happen, but I think we could really use here, would be a few German-style "mountain huts" out at the far ends of various long or difficult trails, so when you get to the top of Larch Mountain, or Mount Defiance, or Wahtum Lake at the far end of the Eagle Creek Trail, there's a large stein of an ice-cold pilsner and a platter of sausages and fondue and sauerkraut waiting for you, and maybe a nice spot for yodeling into the hills later if you're so inclined. (I mean, I'm not saying we absolutely have to copy the entire concept down to the menu, I'm just saying it's a time-tested model, and it wouldn't really be authentic without the sauerkraut.) But, er, I digress.

Anyway, I have never seen the Oasis lot anywhere close to full, seeing as there's officially nothing to do there, and nowhere obvious for you to go on foot from there. What you want to do is park there and walk west along the shoulder of the highway for a few hundred feet, maybe a tenth of a mile. If you pass any driveways, you've gone too far. On the south side of the road, look for a sort of east-facing ramp climbing up and away from the highway. It'll be overgrown with brush so you may not notice it immediately -- here's a Street View link that shows what it looked like in July 2019, in case you want to try finding it there first before trying it in real life. (I don't know whether it's even running right now in this hot, dry summer of 2021, though you can go a few Street View steps west and see the creek was running at the same time of year two years ago. If you missed the ramp the first time and are backtracking, there's a similar west-facing ramp for traffic coming the other direction. If you look at the area on the state LIDAR map here, you can see the two ramps join after a short distance and form what looks like an old, long-abandoned road or driveway. This track does a couple of tight switchbacks uphill and then fades out at a flat area that might be the foundation of a long-gone home or barn or other structure. I don't have any further info about what might have been here, and it's all a bit academic anyway since a.) the possible homesite and beginning of the west-facing ramp seem to be juuust over the state park boundary onto someone's private property, although this isn't marked by any signs that I noticed, and b.) there's a big patch of devil's club right in the middle of the west-facing ramp, almost as if it had been planted there intentionally. These two things may not be completely unrelated.

Anyway, after making your way up the east-facing driveway an obvious use path heads uphill toward the falls. So obviously someone besides us knows about this place, and visits often enough that the trail isn't eaten by the forest. The trail turns into a talus slope before long, but finding your way from there is not a big deal, as you ought to be able to hear or see the falls at that point. The route is kind of steep but short, maybe just a few hundred feet to the falls, but steep enough that your calves might remind you of this little mini-hike the next day. Especially if you've been holed up at home for the last year because pandemic. Overall it kind of reminds me of a miniature Mist Falls: You park at the site of a long-vanished early 20th Century business; the waterfall is a short distance from the road, but you may not be able to see it fro there; summer is not prime viewing season; and you get to it with a short but steep slog up a talus slope.

After you've had a look at the falls and taken some photos, unfortunately all you can really do at that point is retrace your steps and head back to the Oasis lot (or wherever you stashed your bike if you arrived that way). There's no trail up to the top of the falls, nor is there a trail over to the next falls, or viewpoint or whatever, to the east or west. You're on State Park land at the base of the falls, but another property boundary seems to run right along the top of the bluff, as if the state bought the minimal amount of land to protect the parts you can see from the road. So probably no trail to the top here anytime soon. In theory they could probably route a trail along the base of the bluff, next to the highway, to at least keep climbers out of the road in case the Gorge ever freezes again. But I gather the state has only owned land here since the late 1970s -- I say 'only' because I remember the late 1970s and therefore it was not very long ago -- and the Gorge as a whole essentially had one big burst of trail construction in the years before and after the old highway opened in 1916, so any place that was in private hands a century ago missed out on the one and only bite at the apple there's been (so far). Which of course comes down to money, or the lack thereof at any time since the late Wilson or early Harding administration. That's the main reason there's no trail here, and why there isn't one at Mist Falls, or a trail up Bridal Veil Creek to the middle and upper falls there, or anything at Moffett Creek, and any number of other places.

In particular, the stretch of Gorge from Angels Rest west to about Portland Womens Forum largely belongs to various state parks, with bits of Forest Service and private land here and there, and it seems like there ought to be a trail or two connecting the various major attractions (Portland Womens Forum / Chanticleer Point, the Vista House, Latourell Falls, Shepperds Dell, Bridal Veil, & Angels Rest, plus Rooster Rock & Dalton Point along the Columbia.) Unfortunately much of this block of parkland was assembled piece by piece starting in the 1950s, and typically there was just enough money to buy the land and not enough to do anything new with it, so no such trail was ever built.

It's not as if there haven't been grand plans over the years. The Gorge Trail #400 -- the east-west connector between a bunch of other trails -- was a late 20th century addition to the trail network. Long stretches of it already existed under other names, but the notion of hiking the Gorge more-or-less end to end did not really occur to anyone until well after the 1910s and 20s. The present-day trail stretches between Angels Rest and Wyeth in two segments, with a long gap west of Elowah Falls where the trail was never rebuilt after an enormous landslide in 1996. A third, very obscure piece of the trail starts at Lewis & Clark State Park at Troutdale and peters out randomly in the woods a few miles east of there (which is a whole other unfinished blog post.) This sort of hints at the original goal of the project, a continuous trail between Troutdale and Hood River, or maybe The Dalles, or points east. It seems like a trail from Chanticleer Point to Angels Rest ought to be the lowest-hanging remaining fruit of the wider project, but even that hasn't been enough to get the thing funded.

There was even a specific (potential) route picked out at one point, in the early 80s before the Trail 400 effort lost steam. If you look at a regular map of the area, say Google Maps, you'll see a couple of minor side roads heading uphill from the HCRH. Alex Barr Rd. is a steep, lightly used single-lane gravel road, but it eventually connects through to the web of rural roads further up and to the south, with homes, farms, horses & cows, even a few clearcuts, and you can easily get to Larch Mountain Road from there. Further east, Henderson Road is just a short access road up to Bridal Veil Lakes, a private event venue more or less above Shepperd's Dell. However if you look at a map that shows official property boundaries, say, a current county survey map, you'll see a few additional roads in the Bridal Veil area that don't appear on ordinary maps, one of which is a mile-long continuation of Henderson Rd. to the west so that it connects to Alex Barr Road, and runs above the full length of the Shepperds Dell bluffs.

That section of Henderson Road (aka County Road 634) doesn't appear on most maps because Multnomah County closed it to motor vehicle traffic back in 1981^[1]. But they explicitly did not vacate the right of way entirely, as they wanted to keep their options open for reusing it someday. Namely for reuse as part of a proposed extension of Gorge Trail #400 someday. Which still hasn't happened 40 years later. But at least this stretch of right-of-way remains available as an option, in case the state or the feds ever take a fresh interest in the idea and also find the money to do something about it. Or I suppose if the county found the money, since they still own the dormant road, or maybe Metro since they seem to have some level of actual money to spend on projects like this, unlike the other aforementioned agencies.

The 1981 article further points out that the closed road is a rare surviving fragment of the old Portland-Dalles (or Sandy-Dalles) Wagon Road, the Columbia River Highway's immediate predecessor dating back to the 1870s or so. So there may be some historic preservation value to this bit of road too, if people ever take an interest in saving parts of it like they've done in recent years with the early 20th century HCRH route. I suppose they could even bundle it into the current HCRH project, as that would provide another mile or so of trail where bikes don't have to share the old highway with cars. And in terms of scenic highlights, the Columbia River Images page about Shepperds Dell quotes an old Oregonian article about the falls, which mentions in passing that you could once get to the various upper tiers of Shepperds Dell Falls (most of which you can't see from the famous viewpoint along the old highway) via the old wagon road, so it sounds like there would be at least one point of scenic interest along the way if the trail ever becomes a real thing. Or two, if you count peeking over the top of Cruiser Falls here.

So all of that sounds great, but I have no idea what the present-day road is actually like. I haven't personally checked it out. I also haven't seen any reports of other people checking it out, or any recent photos from the area, so the road could be eroded and unsafe, or overgrown and impossible to follow, or who knows. There's also the inconvenient little detail that the right of way crosses a couple of private landowners' land along the way, and they may not necessarily agree with, or even be aware of, the legal status of the old road, and clearing that up in person is very much Not My Job, thank you very much.

---

Footnote(s):

The closed road here is actually just one of several now-closed county roads or parts of roads in the general area. Here's a quick list of the roughly Gorge-area ones I know of that are either closed entirely or in part. The links go to pages at the Multnomah County Surveyor's office, as linked from their interactive map, and these rather austere pages in turn link to the original county ordinance creating the road, and the original survey map when one is available. Maybe you weren't aware that county roads even had numbers? I didn't until I stumbled across it a few months ago in a bout of mid-pandemic boredom. I don't think I've ever seen a road sign with a county road number on it. The system is really simple: Road numbers are chronological, and are just the order that a road survey was filed, or that concerned citizens filed a petition asking the county for a new road. The problem with this system is that if (for example) you ever need to reroute a stretch of road around an obstacle instead of over it, or through an obstacle instead of around it, that involves a new road survey and thus a new road number, and if these road numbers were widely used by the public you'd then have to update a bunch of maps and road signs too.

Incidentally, County Road 0001 was an early survey of Portland's Powell Boulevard, filed in June 1855 when the county was not quite six months old; eastside roads surveyed before December 1854 -- and there probably were at least a handful of them -- would have been filed as Clackamas County roads. Along with roads from various other distant places, as the "Clackamas District" of 1843 was a vaguely defined region including everything in the also-vaguely-defined 'Oregon Country' not part of one of the other three, more well-defined districts, which were sort of large versions of today's Washington, Yamhill, and Marion Counties. Everything else south to California, east to the Rockies, or north as far as the "54-40 or Fight" version of the disputed Canadian border was, in theory, Clackamas at one time. Though of course the existing native population was not exactly consulted on this matter.

Anyway, here's that list I mentioned:

• Road 481 / Rooster Rock Road, the one we explored in the Palisade Falls post
• Road 377 / Latourell Hill Road, another bit of old wagon road, which drops steeply from Larch Mtn. Road to the town of Latourell east of Latourell Falls and west of the famous figure-eight loops. I gather this was a very scenic but dreaded part of the journey to The Dalles, and one of the chief selling points of the new HCRH was that it rerouted traffic away from this stretch of road, adding switchbacks and the part that loops around the Vista House to create a more 'modern' route, without steep slopes and hairpin bends. Lidar says this road still exists, though nearby landowners have posted unfriendly No Trespassing signs around either end of it. Recreating the HCRH has a page about this road, and I've come across least one OregonHikers trip report about it. The road is still visible as a side road on the famous 1915 birds-eye map of the old highway from when it first opened. Said map even points out the location of "Goat Point", a long-forgotten scenic viewpoint along the now-obsolete old road, and includes a photo of the view from there toward Crown Point.
• Road 634 / Henderson Road, the very one I was talking about above.
• Road 566 / Latourell Falls Toll Road, which once connected a sawmill near the falls with the Brower & Thompson sawmill way uphill, near where present-day Brower Road crosses Young Creek. This was originally a private road and its right of way also included a huge log flume, believe it or not. The initial stretch of Alex Barr Rd, and the dead-end bit of NE Toll Rd. off Brower are surviving bits of this old road.
• Road 458 / Brower Rd. There's a long stretch of the original route of Brower Rd from Young Creek to Bridal Veil Creek & Palmer Mill Road, like the road currently does, but via a longer, more indirect route. From what I can tell this road was created in 1888 and closed to vehicle traffic sometime not long after 1899 and definitely before 1913. But the county has kept it on the books as a county road ever since, for reasons I'm not privy to. I don't know how much actual road remains out there in the forest, seeing as it hasn't been used as a road in over 120 years, and only operated as a road for 10 before that, but there's at least a small initial surviving piece of it near the (present-day) Brower Rd. - Young Creek crossing, about which another draft post is pending.
• Road 493, which branched off Road 458 and turned south, and continued due south for miles and miles all the way to the county line. This one was vacated back in the 1950s but there may still be remnants of it out in the forest somewhere.
• Road 550, which branched off 458 at the long-vanished mill town of Brower, then headed due east toward Larch Mountain, then turned south and contoured southeast-ish around the mountain, ending up somewhere deep in the forbidden Bull Run watershed. This is not the same road as the old abandoned Forest Service road NF-20, which contours around the mountain at a different elevation, sorta parallel to Road 550.
• Road 798, a short road off present-day Brower that was more of a driveway than a full-fledged road. Seems that when the county rerouted Road 458, they took away one landowner's only legal access to public roads, and he threw a fit about it, pestering the county to make things right and create him a new driveway across a neighbor's land. Not a public road anymore but it does exist and will show up in another post that's in the works.
• Road 625 / upper Palmer Mill Road, south of the bridge/intersection with Brower Rd. This is not the Palmer Mill Road you might be familiar with though, which runs along the side of Bridal Veil Creek, and is a Forest Service road (road # 1520-000) that the USFS has been trying to close and dismantle for years. The county road is uphill of the USFS one and runs roughly parallel to it, before ending up somewhere near the Palmer sawmill (hence the name) along with the long-gone town of Palmer. A surveyed but never-built continuation of the road would have turned sort of northeast from there and journeyed over to Multnomah Basin (but by a different route than the later Multnomah Basin Road), and then somehow switchbacked down to river level somewhere near or maybe east of the unofficial but well-known trail dubbed the Elevator Shaft, so called due to how insanely steep it is. After that taking roughly the same route as the present-day HCRH and ending at yet another sawmill near Elowah Falls. This was largely the Bridal Veil Lumber Company's idea, and would have connected three mills at enormous taxpayer expense. On closer inspection, the road petition turned out to be a sort of astroturfing campaign, as many of the petitioners for the new road turned out to be mill employees. Actual area residents strongly opposed the fantastical proposed road, saying it would be impossible to build, and would be useless if they somehow did find a way to build it, since a wagon road that's too steep for horses pulling a wagon kind of fails at being a wagon road.
• An unnumbered, isolated stretch of right-of-way near the headwaters of Mist Creek, specifically in township 1N5E, section 13, tax lot 800, if you understand surveying lingo. This puts it close to, but not intersecting, the Angels Rest Trail, close to the point where it switchbacks sharply uphill west of Wahkeena Creek. A township map of the area has an arrow pointing at it with the caption "1956-1798-22"; I'm guessing the first number is a year that this thing was created, but I don't know if represents a survey, a county ordinance, or something else entirely. I have no idea what purpose it was supposed to serve, but it seems to me that a stretch of road that doesn't connect to any other road is of limited usefulness at best.

Keanes Creek Falls

Ok, next up we're visiting another see-it-while-you-maybe-still-can seasonal Columbia Gorge waterfall. The first one of these was Crusher Creek Falls, which you can catch a brief glimpse of along I-84 while going somewhere more interesting (let's be honest here). This time we're visiting one you can catch a quick glimpse of along the old Columbia River Highway while going somewhere more interesting, honestly, though I do have a fun bit of history to pass along this time. Recall that my goal in this little project was to visit places where I wouldn't run into anyone else or (more importantly) any viruses they might be superspreading at the time. My point of view is that it's better to visit a fourth-rate destination and have it all to yourself than go to a crowded first-rate one and then drop dead and maybe take a bunch of people with you. It still astonishes me that this is a controversial idea, but as we've seen over the last year, millions of people, and entire states, and certain major national political parties violently disagree. As in literally violently. But I digress.

As scenic highways go, the Columbia River Highway gets off to a slow start, and tourists who haven't done their homework are bound to wonder what all the fuss is about until the big reveal at Chanticleer Point. The initial part of the road heading south and east from Troutdale closely follows the Sandy River at a low elevation, with steep 100'-200' bluffs set back a bit from the river. Right along the highway is largely residential, almost suburban, with a handful of scattered businesses, while the land atop the bluffs is a sort of plateau, agricultural and roughly flat, or at least flat enough for tractors, and part of that land is drained by a number of small creeks that tumble off the plateau on their way toward the Sandy, at least during the wet season. Several of these appear right to the highway, as kind of a seasonal preview of what things are like along the highway a few miles east. I've tried counting them a few times under the right weather conditions and usually come up with 5 along the stretch between Glenn Otto and the Stark Street Bridge, plus/minus about 2 depending on how wet it's been recently.

Beyond idly trying to count them while driving, I'd never really paid them much attention, and it doesn't appear anyone else has either. They largely don't have names, there aren't signs for them, or official parking to stop and look, or trails to the top, or anything like that. And let's be honest, nothing along here really holds a candle to what you'll see at Latourell Falls and points east, so the lack of attention is understandable. So a few months ago I was looking through the USGS Geographic Names database for a different blog post, as one does, and noticed that exactly one of the streams through this area has an official, federally-recognized, taxpayer-funded geographic name. And on looking up the GPS coordinates of Keanes Creek on the state LIDAR terrain map, there was obviously a vertical drop of at least a few tens of feet from the point where the creek tumbled off the bluff. I came up with a height of about 45' from the map, but I always seem to overestimate heights that way and I can't say this looks 45 feet high to me -- though the top's obscured by brush, so there may be another 5 feet or so of it we can't see here. The most important detail here is that it's the one waterfall on the creek, and the creek has a name, so -- per the rule of thumb I mentioned in the last post -- it can automatically go by "Keanes Creek Falls". Which matters because I can't exactly do a post about it without a title. Or more to the point, I could do that but without a name nobody will ever stumble across this post as a search result.

The USGS database tells us basically nothing about the name, merely saying dates back to at least 1964, when the name appeared on a state watershed map. A 2016 county survey map included a number of earlier maps for context, and one (unfortunately undated) map (4th image in the doc) shows the surrounding area being owned by a "Thomas Keane", so it may have been "Keane's Creek" at some point and then fell victim to the strict USGS policy against apostrophes -- an FAQ page of theirs indicates that nobody knows when or why this rule came about, but they've only granted five exceptions to it since 1890. I can at least tell you that it's the only creek by this name in the United States, although another Keanes Creek does exist in a mountainous corner of the Australian state of Victoria, and there's a Keane Creek in far northern Alberta.

None of those details make for a very interesting story, so I tried searching the library's Oregonian database for the name "Thomas Keane" to see if any fun leads came up. If we stick to local people and events there isn't a lot of material there: A man by that name broke his arm in a car accident in 1911, and there's a 1921 obit for someone by that name, who may or may not be the same gentleman as the first item, and he -- or they -- may or may not be the same guy from the survey map. Somewhat intriguingly, the obit was followed up by a 1923 classified ad trying to contact the executors of his estate, regarding a letter from a Richard Keane of Queensland, Australia. But that particular loose end stops there, and we can only guess at whether the letter ever found its destination, or what the letter was about. Perhaps the two long-lost twin brothers had a childhood pinky-swear deal to someday name creeks after each other, and it happened as agreed but neither one ever learned whether the other had held up his end of the deal. Or at least that's one of many possibilities.

Of course you don't have to live here to own land here, and a few other Toms and Thomases from around the globe had cameos in the local paper over the years, several of whom would make for a more interesting origin story than "named after a farmer who once owned the land here":

• A famous Irish actor of the late 19th century; an 1891 article noted that a local theater ensemble had recently hired someone who had once worked with him, which either tells us he was a very big deal, or that our local theater scene was not.
• A notorious New York gambler, circa 1950
• A Chicago mob figure who got whacked in 1923, during a gang war over control of the illegal beer trade, because Prohibition.
• Also in Chicago, a multimillionaire city alderman (and prominent member of the Daley machine) who went to Club Fed for mail fraud in 1974. He appeared in the Oregonian via a lot of cynical Mike Royko columns over the years, like this one from 1973 (while he was under indictment) and a later one in 1982, just to pick out a couple.

The reason I'm throwing all of this at you is that the falls are directly across the street from the the site of a once-notorious roadhouse-slash-dive bar that I do have some links and anecdotes about, and it would really tie this post together if somehow the creek and falls were named after someone a bit more... colorful, let's say. The chain link fence in the first photo surrounds what's left of Shirley's Tippy Canoe, which burned to the ground in January 2020 in a fire authorities described as "suspicious" at the time (though no further news on that front has come out since then). A 2008 profile of the old place's last owner notes that it had long been a notoriously rough biker bar, until she took over and gave it the family-friendly treatment, even bringing in Guy Fieri to have a look at the place for his Food Network show in 2018.

News stories about the fire say the Tippy Canoe dates back to the 1930s, but it seems to have first appeared in the Oregonian in 1946, in an article about the Oregon Liquor Control Commission changing its mind and granting the owner a liquor license for a "Dine and Dance" establishment. Which was a specific category of liquor license back then, and is a term you still see on a few historic bar signs. As I understand it, if you served dinner and offered a dance floor with live music afterward, the state figured you were a high class joint and could be trusted to serve mixed drinks, instead of just beer and wine.

The Tippy Canoe next showed up in the news in 1948, when its liquor license was suspended for 60 days "on the ground that a liquor sale had been made there", meaning shots as opposed to mixed drinks. Which was highly illegal at the time because reasons.

Next up we have a 1951 story in which the bar's owner publicly denied that a sympathetic OLCC agent had tipped him off about an upcoming inspection. It seems that the OLCC agent and several others had been fired for this and other alleged offenses and it all ended up in court, which was embarrassing for everyone involved. The owner related that he had, however, been visited by several OLCC agents employing one of the agency's time-honored stings: The agency liked to hire agents who either were or looked like they might be underage, to see if various establishments checked ID like they were supposed to. However the would-be enforcers succumbed to the siren song of the Tippy Canoe's pinball machines, and after downing three or four beers while playing decided to try to cheat the machine. This got them 86'd, at which point they revealed they were important government agents on an undercover mission. Which must have been hilarious. The presence of pinball machines in a drinking establishment was scandalous in itself in 1951, as they were seen as (and sometimes were) thinly veiled slot machines. And furthermore, it was widely understood that the Portland-area pinball trade was controlled by the local mafia outfit. You might think this would be a long and juicy scandal the papers could milk for weeks or months, but it just sort of fell out of the news after this, almost as if some sort of backroom deal had been made.

This all sounded very familiar, and then I remembered Portland Exposé (1957), a low-budget film noir that I wrote about back in 2007. The movie was set in Portland, with at least some exterior shots filmed here. I haven't rewatched it in years, but I remember thinking the outside of the hero's roadside bar was either the Tippy Canoe or the nearby (and similar) Tad's Chicken 'n Dumplings. In the movie, the hero allows a few pinball machines into his bar and quickly gets roped into all sorts of underworld shenanigans, before agreeing to wear the world's most obvious wire for the feds. Using exterior shots of a place widely known to offer such illicit entertainments in real life may have been a little wink at local audiences. Maybe that even counted as product placement, I dunno.

The OLCC semi-liberalized some of its vast galaxy of arcane rules in 1953, finally legalizing shots, the very thing the Tippy Canoe had been busted for in 1948. The Tippy Canoe promptly applied for one of the new "liquor by the drink" licenses and got one. The article goes on to explain that the OLCC also lightened up on advertising rules a bit, legalizing the words "bar" and "barroom", and allowing the use of brand names and sports scenes (but only noncompetitive sports). Other phrases like "saloon", "tap room", and "club privileges" were to remain strictly forbidden. And while it's fun to chuckle at the state's 1950s uptightness, I should point out that you couldn't advertise happy hour drink specials until 2017. If remember right, "saloon" and several common phrases like "happy hour" and "ladies night" were technically forbidden until quite recently, though the ban was not always strictly enforced.

The city's Mafia era tapered off after the 50s, but the Tippy Canoe remained a rough spot long after the mobsters relocated to Vegas. For instance, here's a 1966 item about someone arrested there for assaulting a deputy sheriff. In 1979 the bar's liquor license came up for periodic renewal, and it just so happened that the current Multnomah County chair was a former deputy sheriff, and during the hearing he reminisced about being assaulted by a patron there while on duty, many years ago. The best part is that he was not the deputy from the previous item, and this was just a thing that happened there now and then

In 1982, a couple wanted to buy the place and take over and be the next of a seemingly endless string of owners. The county sheriff opposed licensing them due to multiple rule violations at a bar they'd owned in Oregon City. The county commission disagreed and let them go ahead and have a go at running the place. After that it was mostly just live music listings, and then it closed and sat empty for a number of years in the 90s, before the family-friendly 2000s revival and the 2020 fire.

As for what's next, the site was recently (as in mid-April 2021) purchased by the couple behind the Sugarpine Drive-In at Glenn Otto Park (which I am a huge fan of). It seems they plan to rebuild here, while referencing the original restaurant's midcentury heyday.

So yeah, none of that really relates to the waterfall we're supposedly looking at, so I'm going to have to make a few things up for the sake of a better story. I'd love to be able to tell you this is the only waterfall in the state named for a shadowy mob figure, or spread a rumor about a mysterious safe deposit box key that may still be hidden behind the falls. It would even be fun to explain how 60s bikers often used the falls to get the excess blood and gore out of their gear after a good bar fight; this may have actually happened, as far as I know, but nobody else is going to explain how -- as late the mid-1980s -- you could make a lot of money panning for gold teeth below the falls. Or how I know all of this because our local enchanted nature spirits (naiads, dryads, hesperides, etc.) like to grab a few beers and talk shop after a long day dealing with tourists, and you can kind of eavesdrop if you're in the right place at the right time. And how the one who lives in Keanes Creek always has the best stories, though they all begin with "Long time ago, back in the day..."

Crusher Creek Falls

Ok, so somehow we're four months into 2021 already, and most of April has been unseasonably warm in Portland, with several days over 80 degrees. It occurred to me that maybe I ought to hurry up finish up a few draft posts I have about seasonal waterfalls before they dry up entirely for the summer, so they might be useful to someone now instead of waiting until the next wet season. Frankly I have no idea whether any of my posts are useful to anyone; over the years I've sort of accepted that the niche this humble blog has settled into is around having the top search engine result on all sorts of peculiar things nobody on earth will ever search for, and few will stumble across by accident. Which would've been a terrible business model if I'd ever had any notions about this thing being a going concern; but it's just a hobby, and one that continues to amuse me after fifteen years, so I'm going to go ahead and keep doing this thing I keep doing.

I didn't want to be a complete shut-in during this global pandemic, so I had a sort of guideline that it was ok to go places where I could be reasonably certain I wouldn't run into a single other human being, or failing that, at least minimize the number of people I was near, or downwind of. Which meant lots of research, lots of avoiding popular places in favor of second-to-fourth rate alternatives that nobody's ever heard of, and in short doing the thing I do here anyway, except now as a responsible civic-minded public health measure, and obviously for self-preservation.

All of which brings us to the subject of this post, an obscure little Columbia River Gorge waterfall you may have glimpsed briefly (if you live around here), but that you've almost certainly never heard of. If you're heading east from Portland on I-84, shortly after the Corbett interchange you'll pass Tunnel Point, where the freeway veers around a rocky outcrop, and the adjacent rail line passes through it in an old tunnel, hence the name. If you look to your right just before the west end of the tunnel, you may catch a brief glimpse of a small waterfall tumbling down the bluff just beyond the tracks Unless the creek has dried up for the season, or the falls are obscured by vegetation, or you blinked while whooshing by at some multiple of the legal speed limit. If that brief glimpse caught your fancy for whatever reason, and you wanted to get a better look at that waterfall, you can do that from the Tunnel Point scenic viewpoint, but it's only accessible to westbound traffic, so your best bet is to turn around at one of the upcoming exits -- Rooster Rock, Bridal Veil, Multnomah Falls etc. will all do the trick here -- head back west, and pull off at the un-numbered exit labeled simply "Scenic Viewpoint". And yes, the viewpoint is pretty scenic (albeit really noisy due to the freeway), but you can't quite see the little waterfall from the viewpoint itself. To do that you need to walk west another 200-300 feet; there's enough ground between the freeway guardrail and the Columbia River that you can do this safely, maybe even enough space to set up a tripod for proper waterfall photos (which I obviously didn't do), though you may wonder whether it's really worth doing thanks to all the noise and freeway garbage and so forth. Once you get to the falls you can take your photos and hopefully get a few without cars or trains in them, and impress your friends, and internet randos too, as if the two things are all that different in 2021.

Your friends may politely ask some followup questions, like how tall it is or what it's called, either out of genuine curiosity or because they like you enough to continue humoring your weird hobbies. I don't have an official height number for you, but I tried measuring it with the state LIDAR map and came up with something around 45' in two tiers. I've found I tend to come up with somewhat larger numbers this way than the official numbers, when there are official numbers, so let's say it's somewhere in the 35'-45' range. As for the name, it honestly isn't impressive enough to have an official one, or to have picked up an unofficial one, but at least we can apply a common rule of thumb here: If a creek/stream/river/bayou/etc. is named X, and there's only one waterfall on it, and the falls don't already have a name, they are automatically X Falls, more as a unique description than a name. The rule applies here because -- weirdly enough -- this little creek goes by Crusher Creek, which has been its 100% official, US Government-approved name since 1986, although the entry insists this spot is somehow part of Clackamas County. Despite the 1986 date, the name is not a reference to everyone's least favorite TNG character; the USGS page references an earlier State of Oregon water resource map from 1964, before even TOS had hit the airwaves. Instead, there's a clue elsewhere in the USGS database, in a 'locale' entry for "Crusher (historical)", which points at a spot just on the other side of Tunnel Point from the creek and falls.

Strictly speaking those coordinates are out in the river, which seems unlikely. But transcription errors do creep into the database now and then, and if you just tweak the 2nd digit after the decimal point in the entry's latitude, that puts you on dry land near the Union Pacific railroad tracks. Which is important because the USGS database entry references a 1916 Union Pacific timetable as a primary source, by way of the 1996 book "The Railroad Stations of Oregon" by Lewis L. McArthur (who you might remember from the Wiesendanger Falls post a few months ago) and Cynthia B. Gardiner. The book isn't available online, and it's out of stock at both Powells and Amazon, so I don't have a definitive answer on what sort of locale we're talking about here. But going by the name my guess is that it was the site of a literal rock crusher, producing gravel for the railroad, and not a long-lost town by that name. There's a Rock Crusher Creek located in a remote corner of Coos County as another example of what I think happened here. From the look of it, rock crushing machinery produces a lot of dust, and it's good to locate your operation near a convenient source of water for dust control. So the creek was named for a long-gone railroad facility it might have provided water for, and the falls are quote-unquote named for the creek, and it's not really history's most thrilling origin story, is it?

Updated: Ok, I tracked down a 1915 county survey map that confirms it was a rock crushing operation, not a town. The map shows it had a rail siding and a dock, a main building that I imagine was for the crusher operation, plus a few outbuildings that might have been employee bunkhouses or something along those lines, so maybe it depends on how you define "town". It was just west of another creek now known as Rainbow Creek. So it's possible the name "Crusher Creek" used to apply there and sort of migrated over time, as names tend to do, especially when the name isn't very important anymore and nobody's paying close attention.

So for the sake of argument, let's suppose the last paragraph was completely wrong, and the mid-river location from the USGS is accurate. Suppose that was once the site of a notorious enchanted wandering rock, cousin to the Planctae and Symplegades of Greek mythology, united by their hatred of ships and boats of all kinds. As with all wandering rocks down through the ages, opinions vary as to whether the rocks wander of their own volition, or only do so after the captain's had an extra flagon or two of seafarers' grog, as with the Exxon Valdez. 19th Century settlers couldn't pronounce the millennia-old name local tribes had given it, and instead simply called it "Crusher", the bane of paddlewheel steamboats and riverboat gamblers and that whole milieu for the few decades when that was a thing here. Turns out there was a railroad station nearby, also named Crusher, at a spot where Portlanders of the era would come to picnic and watch boats try to run the gauntlet, and gamble on the outcome. After a few decades of this, the Corps of Engineers finally showed up and broke the curse with more dynamite than was strictly necessary. They'd intended to completely demolish the rock but ended up merely driving it ashore, where it remains to this day as present-day Onion Rock, located along the riverbank maybe 1/4 mile upstream of Tunnel Point, and it either learned its lesson or it's merely licking its wounds and biding its time and could resume its predations any day now, geologically speaking. To mark the day of the great dynamiting, a local poet who claimed to have gone to college Back East was commissioned to write the usual Victorian epic poem on relevant mythological themes (and how those myths would have turned out if the heroes had had modern explosives). We won't get into whether the epic poem was any good, since the last time I criticized somebody's poem I got an angry email from a descendant of the poet, outraged at my mild insult to his long-deceased ancestor. After the events of the big day, reporters filed breathless wire stories for the big eastern papers.... and the entire East Coast laughed at us, and how we bragged on and on about successfully bullying a magic rock, and it was all very embarrassing, and it instantly became one of those episodes we all agreed to never speak of again. Somehow no photos of the dynamiting have survived, nor have any of the rock preying on innocent steamboats, and no copies of the epic poem have survived either, and the boring cover story about a rock crusher has fooled almost everyone for the last 150 years or so. But only almost everyone. So you can take my word for it, or not, that's entirely up to you.

If all of this has left you wanting a better look at the falls than what I've got here, there's unfortunately no easy and straightforward way to do that. If you lift the "easy and straightforward" limitation, it looks like there's might be a way, though I haven't actually tried it and can't recommend it. Look closely at a terrain map of the area (like the LIDAR map linked earlier), or at old photos of Tunnel Point like the one on this state history page, and you can see a steep old road down the west side of the point, south of the tunnel, starting up on the bluff at (I think) a wide spot along NE Reed Rd. and ending up somewhere near the base of Crusher Creek Falls. I don't know whether this was an old road down to the river from before I-84 went in, or it's simply a railroad service road, maybe for tunnel maintenance. Either way, the whole thing seems to be on railroad-owned land now, so if you really want to do this your options seem to be, in order of difficulty: a.) trespassing successfully, b.) contacting the railroad somehow and asking nicely for permission, and (I assume) at minimum promising not to get on the tracks or walk through the tunnel or touch any of their equipment, c.) convincing the railroad to hire you into some sort of job that takes you here officially, or d.) making like most civilized countries and nationalizing the railroads, which (among other things) would make this spot public property. This, in turn will most likely involve either winning a few elections or somehow awakening class consciousness in the US proletariat. But hey, I didn't say this was going to be easy.

Kailua Beach and the Last Normal Day

Last week I got my second COVID-19 shot, vaccinating me against a disease that virtually no one understood a year ago, one that didn't even exist in humans a year and a half ago. I'm sure I don't have to describe what the last year-and-change has been like. And now with a tiny light at the end of the tunnel, this month we all had to relive how it began, a month of strange, difficult, and sometimes tragic one-year anniversaries. For my part, the day I keep thinking back to is March 9th 2020, which stuck in my mind as the last normal day of the Before Times, before all of this happened.

In truth it really wasn't a normal day at all. I was on vacation, a long-planned trip to O'ahu after a stressful work project had finally wrapped up. I needed time away from that and from a bunch of serious family medical things and related drama, so despite the reports of a strange disease popping up in a remote corner of China I rolled the dice and got on a plane, and then spent most of the trip holed up my condo anxiously reading coronavirus news as things rapidly went from bad to worse across the globe. One morning I decided to try to have at least one normal vacation day before heading home, figuring then I'd lie low for a few weeks after that until the virus situation was over. So I hopped on a city bus and made my way over to Kailua, a suburban beach town on the windward side of the island. The plan for the day was not ambitious: just go walk down the town's famous beach to see what it was like, take a few photos for the humble blog, and then maybe check out a new brewpub/taproom that had recently opened along the town's main drag. My notes from a year ago say I had a mask with me on the trip, but I have no recollection of whether I wore it on the bus or in the pub or on the flight home.

It was dim and grey out and it drizzled on and off all day, and I passed several people on the beach wearing sweatshirts and huddling up for warmth, just like Oregonians do at the coast; imagine that but 20 degrees warmer. It's tempting to laugh at people acting that way in 72 degree weather, but you don't have to be there long before any hint of temperatures below the low 80s registers as cold. Especially when all the other weather cues that register as "Pacific winter storm" are present, and other people are acting like it's cold outside, and the local restaurants are running winter specials heavy on the hearty soups and stews and whatnot.

I figured I'd start at the Kailuana end of the beach and walk south til I got to Kailua Beach Park, not because different parts of the beach are significantly different from each other, but that if I just went there to sit on the beach and shiver in 72 degree weather, I would inevitably end up staring at my phone and looking at virus news instead of having a proper vacation day. So step one was just to find the beach access. I had read conflicting things about where it was, and ended up wandering through a subdivision where all the street names are "Kailuana"-something, looking for the Kailuana beach access. I even saw what looked like a beach access, but it was gated off, and eventually I ended up back out on Kalaheo Avenue -- the main drag through the area -- and eventually sighted the actual beach trail just a couple of doors down from the subdivision. It turned out to be a long, neglected-looking alleyway between swanky houses, marked by a heavily vandalized city park sign.

It turns out that my initial guess was not totally off the mark, though. The black gate I saw, with the red letters spelling out "Private Property No Trespassing" really is a beach access spot, but it's a members-only gate for the local HOA. Now, the subdivision itself isn't gated, and its streets are public, and people can and regularly do park on the street and take the slighly roundabout path to the beach from there, often with surfboards in tow. And the beach on the far side of the gate is a public beach, by state law, and royal proclamation before that, and by local tradition going back endless centuries. But thanks to a little platting-and-deeding magic the subdivision got an exclusive beach path for themselves, in exchange for also putting in a beach alley nearby for the peasants. Which is one of the more tremendously petty things I've seen in a long time. It also tells you who has the power within the HOA: If your house isn't right on the beach, and you're the sort of person who frets about outsiders disturbing your genteel peace and quiet and so forth, you may actually have more people walking past your house to get to the beach the roundabout way than you would if the gate was just open to everybody. For some residents this also means outsiders walking down an alley that backs up to your backyard.

Of course the nature of rich people is that beyond every velvet rope is another velvet rope: The 0.1 percenters will need to wall themselves off from the mere one-percenters, and the 0.01 percenters can't bear to live among the smelly 0.1 percenters, and so on. So it won't surprise you that at the far end of the neighborhood I wandered through is a second gate, and residents' beach keys don't fit this gate. Beyond it, Kailuana Place continues out onto a narrow spit of land between the ocean and the Kawainui Canal, inhabited by the next-most-exclusive tier of rich person. One of the houses out there repeatedly served as the "winter White House" during the Obama administration, and the president could only afford it as a vacation rental.

So I ran into a cul-de-sac at this point, not a literal subdivision-type one, but a dead end while puttng this post together; I had a few more links radiating out from this land use situation that I couldn't quite mash into a good storyline, and that in turn was blocking me from finishing this post, and I ended up stuck at this point for several weeks, and here I am after dark on March 31st trying to finish a one-year-ago-this-month post about the previous March before it stops being the following March. So here are a few of the links I had that I didn't quite want to just toss out: A couple about the security zone that was set up here during the Obama era, and I was going to toss in a gratuitous link to a post here from a few months back snarking at Mar-a-Lago. Was also going to veer off on a tangent about a similar controversy over on Kaua'i where a commenter referenced the situation here, and another tangent about beach access in Oregon that I'd already kicked off to a footnote. And a couple of links explaining that bike access is a problem here too.

So moving right along, I made it to the beach and walked along for a while and took the photos here, ending up at crowded Kailua Beach Park; evidently it was a great day for kiteboarding, and colorful kites filled the grey sky. Although I somehow neglected to take any photos whatsoever of any of this, and I have no idea why not. From snippets of conversation I overheard, several of the people there were quite well-known within the sport, though I didn't catch any names and would not have recognized them if I had. Also I'm terrible at names and faces and would not have linked the name to the right person, and long story short, I am the world's worst papparazzo and if you came here looking for stale year-old kiteboard celebrity news, I'm afraid this is not your lucky day. If you continue down the beach at this point you'll end up at Lanikai Beach and near the popular end of the Lanikai Pillbox Trail, which I didn't do since I've already been there and done that, on a much sunnier and dryer day.

Besides, I was already focusing on goal number two for the day, tracking down the new-ish Olomana Brewing taproom, in an older building along the main drag through town. Had a couple of beers and chatted a bit with the owner and some of the other patrons there; as of press time this is still the last time I've had a beer in the presence of other human beings. Turns out there were a couple of other people from Portland there, which happens a lot; I suppose Portlanders visiting breweries while traveling is sort of a busman's holiday thing, pursuing Portland-y interests as best we can elsewhere, while the puzzled locals look at you like you're some kind of obsessive weirdo. In my defense, I'm almost positive I've never quizzed anyone about IBUs or mashing times or canning vs. bottling while on vacation, since it's a life goal of mine to never be That Guy. But I have had people volunteer these details and more, completely unasked, after hearing the word "Portland".

At least hiking is a popular local thing on O'ahu and nobody looks at you funny about that. As a matter of fact, the brewery is named after a local cartoonishly-steep peak that looms over the Kailua area. Olomana is widely thought to be one of the scariest and most dangerous hiking trails on O'ahu, home to a long list of fatal accidents over the years. I have never attempted it, and it's not really high on my todo list, as roughly the entire route is along a razor-sharp narrow ridge with tons of exposure, which I admit I am no big fan of. Narrow, as in nearly two-dimensional narrow, and you're hiking along the edge of where a third dimension ought to be and isn't. And calling it hiking is a stretch as I gather you spend much of the route relying on ropes of unknown age and provenance for help getting up and down slopes of up to and beyond vertical. And there's mud everywhere, and the mud doesn't provide any more traction than it does anywhere else on the island, and it's wet and muddy a lot more here than most parts of the island, thanks to being an isolated peak just windward of the windward side of the Ko'olaus. At this point I'd sort of like to point you at UH Manoa's interactive rainfall map to demonstrate just how much wetter it is than the surrounding parts of the windward side... but it's a small microclimate and the university doesn't have a weather sensor on top of any of the peaks, as this would involve climing the peaks a lot in all weather conditions. So Olomana is essentially invisible on that map. But since the point of this sensor network is to extrapolate conditions across the whole island from a limited sensor network, your model may be more accurate overall without a few mountaintop sensors sending in wacky outlier numbers all the time. You'd never guess that the highest point tops out at just 1644'.

In lieu of veering further down another cul-de-sac at this point, there's more info about climbing the thing (if you're so inclined) at SummitPost, BodeDotCom, OahuHike, Oahu Hikes and Trails, The Hiking HI, and The Outbound and a couple of typical videos.

As I was leaving the pub I mentioned I was heading back to the mainland in a few days but would be back after the virus thing was sorted out. Which I'm choosing to think of as a somewhat delayed but still-pending todo item, since both they and I seem to have survived this recent unpleasantness. Maybe in a few more months, depending on how things go from here.

If you've paged through the photoset you might have noticed a couple of photos of a rooster. While I was waiting for the bus home, he strolled by on the sidewalk, ignoring everyone standing there, and all the traffic on the adjacent four-lane road, and everything else except for a fellow rooster on the far side of the road. The two kept yelling at each other over what I imagine was some sort of property dispute; you'd think the busy road would appear as a reasonable and fair natural boundary, but no, the rooster from our side had to dart across the street, oblivious to traffic, to press the battle in the distant land of Other Rooster. I'm fairly sure there's a vintage George W. Bush or Dick Cheney quote explaining why preemptive invasions are an essential part of self-defense, but I can't be bothered to look it up at the moment. Anyway, he made it across and they chased each other out of sight, and may still be fighting it out, given how that sort of conflict tends to go, especially if either of the roosters has somehow discovered oil.

Once I got home it was back to virus news stories, and a couple of days later was the day Tom Hanks caught the virus and the NBA season was canceled and the rest was history, and a few days after that I made it back to Portland while trying not to breathe too much on a 5 hour flight, just in time for a family memorial service that ended up being canceled, and then stores began running out of everything, and certain presidents insisted it was all just a big hoax, and, well, you know the rest.

In honor of spending the last year indoors messing around on the internet instead of going places, I put together a little YouTube playlist of island music, which is the sort of goofy sentimental thing you do when a place you're fond of suddenly becomes infinitely far away for the foreseeable future. I can't quite figure out whether the shots walking down an alley in the first video are from the beach access thing I mentioned earlier, but it looked a lot like that, anyway. I'll probably think this is vaguely embarrassing when I look at it a few Marches from now, but here goes:

---

footnote(s)

Oregon beach access thing

So the weird Oregon beach access thing that I wanted to tell you about at one point is about Little Whale Cove, a small inlet on the coast near Depoe Bay, home to an upscale gated community and best known for a notorious 1980s court case. Oregonians of a certain age will go on and on about the famous Beach Bill, a 1970s law that guaranteed public access to the state's beaches and limited development of tideland areas. They won't tell you it was based on an earlier law in (gasp!) Texas, or that the legal trick that made coastal protections possible here was declaring the state's beaches an official state highway. Which is why the state highway department ended up in charge of dynamiting a beached whale in 1970. Anyway, sometime in the 80s developers noticed this one cove near Depoe Bay had a little geological quirk where at low tide the cove became a pond detached from the ocean by some rocks or a sandbar or I'm not sure what exactly. Some fancy lawyers figured out that if you read the beach bill just the right way, the cove was maybe not part of the ocean and the beach wasn't covered by the law and you could fence it off and keep the peasants out and have a proper California-style gated community, and best of all it was the only one of its kind that was possible anywhere on the Oregon coast. So they went ahead with the project, and fought the inevitable court case all the way to the state Supreme Court, and won. But given the unique geology it turned out not to be the statewide apocalypse that some predicted at the time, so they've just sort of been there since then quietly keeping to themselves and doing whatever it is that rich people do at the coast.

Except that it turns out one of those rich person things involves keeping the public away from nearby, non-little Whale Cove as well. You might think that would be tough, since there's no geological loophole there, and the beach is actually part of an official state park. Ah, but if you can manage to buy up the land people would have to cross to get to said beach, and donate it to the nearby National Wildlife Refuge that's absolutely closed to all public access forever, that protects your precious privacy in a way nobody can criticize without seeming like some kind of earth-hating SUV monster. So that's where things stand right now. And at whatever point the largely-theoretical Oregon Coast Trail becomes more of a thing that exists along the central coast, this whole area is going to be a big barrier they'll have to work around somehow.

The inability to go to either cove and take photos is why this situation is relegated to a footnote in a Hawaii post instead of getting a proper post of its own. FWIW.

---

another playlist

Since I'm in a rare playlist-sharing mood at the moment, I figured I'd drop in a bonus one. This time it's some music from the (ex-Soviet) Republic of Georgia, a place I've been intrigued by since college but have never visited. According to the interwebs, life there seems to revolve around wine and feasts and singing and dancing (with swords) and related extrovert things that I would not actually do in real life, but which seem endlessly compelling on cold winter days when you literally have not encountered a single live human being in person in weeks, and you'd recoil from them anxiously if you did. Anyway, here: