Per New Year's Eve (more or less) tradition, here are some cat photos from the last year. The one on the bottom is actually from New Year's Eve last year, because I added it by accident and now it's too cute to remove. As luck would have it, this post is a tiebreaker, and I now have more posts this year than last year, with almost 90 minutes to spare. One thing I forgot to do this year was an early-December post about this weird little website turning 16 years old now, old enough for one of those extremely limited airquote drivers licenses for teens, and a poorly-paid job in the fast food sector. I also narrowly avoided doing a brand-new post about one of those street intersection murals that dot SE Portland -- I was going to explain that I had just sort of stumbled across it and knew nothing about it, but then I figured I ought to google it in case there was an interesting story to pass along or something... and discovered that I had already done a post about it and then forgot all about it. So yeah, that felt really great. Sixteen years, it's all just a blur, man.
Friday, December 31, 2021
Thursday, December 30, 2021
King KalÄkaua Park, WaikÄ«kÄ«
Next up on this humble blog's ongoing public art thing is a statue of Hawaii's King David KalÄkaua, located in the half-acre King KalÄkaua Park at the intersection of Kalakaua & Kuhio Avenues in WaikÄ«kÄ« (so it's kind of a city park post too). Visiting was pretty unremarkable, so this post is basically a big messy brain dump of all the random stuff I could find about the park and statue across the interwebs.
First some vital stats and such. The statue here was created by Hawaii artist Sean K.L. Browne, commissioned in 1985, and installed somewhere around 1989-91. Browne also did Lahui in Kaka'ako, and the Kresser Memorial in downtown Honolulu, and a few other things around Oahu, and I mention those two in particular because I also have draft posts about them that I've been meaning to finish for a while. A plaque on the base of the statue proclaims it a gift from a local nonprofit on behalf of the state's Japanese-American community, as a token of thanks for inviting their ancestors to emigrate to Hawaii. Of course (jumping ahead to the fine print) the invite wasn't motivated by pure altruism; the islands' native population was rapidly dwindling at the time due to various then-untreatable Western diseases, and the resulting labor shortage was a serious inconvenience for the all-powerful sugar industry. So the king went to work recruiting replacement workers/subjects from around the globe, because the spice sugar must flow[1].
As a minor attraction in an area full of tourists, the statue has the usual Tripadvisor and Lonely Planet pages, and a Waymarking one, but (unlike most of the statues in Waikiki) it doesn't seem to have any Yelp reviews. Maybe giving the king anything less than maximum stars would count as lĆØse-majestĆ© or something, I dunno. The park as a whole does have a Yelp page, unfortunately marred by a handful of single-star reviews from people who were trying to review a nearby parking garage instead. The park also has a Tripadvisor page under "Waikiki Gateway Park", its previous name from before the statue went in, which a few sources (including Google Maps) can't quite let go of. This original name was once shared with an adjacent hotel, which has since been renamed as well.
For whatever reason the state's public art website (and related interactive map) have no references to the statue, while the city only has a few passing mentions of it: It appears briefly on page 61 of an art inventory doc, including a dead link to a photo of it. It also gets a quick mention in a 2007 survey for the city's troubled, still-incomplete light rail system, as a cultural object that might be affeted if they ever get around to building out the whole rail system they had in mind back then. A much-shorter initial phase of the project is allegedly supposed to enter service in April 2022, a few short months from now, though this effort is already $8B over budget and 11 years behind schedule, so I'm not exactly holding my breath. As of right now there are no longer any firm plans to ever extend it into Waikiki, partly to save money and partly so it doesn't look like it's being built just for tourists.
I thought I'd found a Smithsonian art inventory page for the statue, at least, but it turned out to refer to a different, seated statue by different artists over in Hilo. At one point in this post's long existence as a draft post, I had found a page from a cleaning product company bragging about their "aqueous ozone" product being used to clean the statue in 2015; this post sat around in drafts long enough for the original to disappear, but the Wayback Machine had a copy, if you'd like to read more about cleaning products.
As for the surrounding park, the city parks department has nothing much to say about it; they have a pushpin for it on their comprehensive (?) Google map of all (?) parks on the island, but no further information is available from there. Meanwhile the state government has a 1991 environmental assessment around re-landscaping the park, because no project in the state is too small to require one. Apparently after the statue went in they decided the park needed to be redesigned, for whatever reason. The doc's only a couple of pages since the state quickly decided there was no nature or history there that needed preserving, and concluded that the re-landscaping was desirable and in the public interest. It does have a paragraph about what the park was like at that point:
The park site is almost level. Current landscaping improvements include a lawn, 14 coconut palms, 8 rainbow shower trees, and several hibiscus and mock orange hedges. Structural improvements include tile pavers along KalÄkaua Avenue, a concrete sidewalk along Kuhio Avenue, a King KalÄkaua Statue mounted on a circular concrete pad, and a concrete walkway and plaza enclosed by a low rock wall. (See Figure 3) The rainbow shower trees surround and shade the plaza. Within the center of the plaza there is a simulated volcano: Red bougainvillea within a gently sloping, circular rock mound.
I haven't been able to find any photos of this long-gone simulated volcano, unfortunately. Going by the description above it could've been anything from a clever bit of tasteful landscaping to full-on midcentury tiki cheese. It certainly wouldn't have measured up to the then-brand-spanking-new, all-singing, all-dancing volcano at the Mirage in Las Vegas. Which a lot of locals would have seen, Vegas being the "ninth island" and all. I did run across a 1971 photo of the intersection showing buildings where the park is now, and a comment on that page says the visible building was a rock club/bar in a former 1930s ice cream hut, and out of frame there was a local market in a former Piggly Wiggly building, all of which were demolished to make room for the park within a few years of the photo. (The county GIS system gives dates in the 1973-1978 range for the acquisition & bulldozing work.) And yes, there was an environmental assessment for the original park work too, though the only thing about it I can find is a September 1977 summary. I dunno, I actually kind of enjoy reading those things, and I realize I may be the only person who does.
Another photo from ~1965 shows a midcentury Japanese teahouse that once stood across the street from the park, which was demolished around 1991 to make room for a sleeker, more upscale... Japanese teahouse. Which went out of business a few years later, and the building has sat empty ever since, though I understand the parking garage is still open. I haven't found any old news articles to prove this but it sure looks like was a concerted (and largely unsuccessful) effort in the 90s to take this whole area of Waikiki upscale. Another big example of this is right on the other side of the park's once-eponymous hotel, where you'll find the long-vacant King KalÄkaua Plaza building, a four-story upscale retail plaza that opened in 1998, anchored by Niketown and Banana Republic flagship stores and an Official All-Star Cafe. The latter was one of those inexplicable 90s theme restaurant chains, a genre that no longer exists outside of the Las Vegas Strip, Times Square, and the more cartoonish parts of Florida. The retailers all cratered within a few years, and the fourth floor office space was never occupied at all, and despite an endless series of grand plans for the site it's remained empty ever since. Though like the teahouse the parking garage remains open for business. Though I'm not sure how underground parking even works when your building is just 5-7 feet above -- and a few blocks north of -- sea level.
The park also got a brief mention in someone's 2002 masters thesis about 3D visualization in highway planning. It seems that the city wanted to spruce up the intersection back in 2000 and built some kind of early VR model of the area to help imagine what the proposed sprucing might look like. Confusingly the thesis says this work was for the intersection of Kalakaua and Kapiolani. Which is a completely different intersection over by the Convention Center, across the Ala Wai canal from Waikiki proper. Where (as you can see on Street View) there's a distinct lack of anything that looks remotely like a park. So either the paper got a minor fact wrong and nobody noticed until now, or there's a second "Waikiki Gateway Park" out there that only exists in virtual reality. Which -- if nothing else -- is bound to cut down on maintenance costs. Either way, it would be kind of funny to see what either intersection looks like in vintage 90s VRML, but this was long before source control became cool, so if a copy still exists it's probably moldering away on a forgotten Zip disk in someone's office junk drawer. Oh well.
Ok, so at this point I have to pivot awkwardly back to the statue, because there's one other detail I was saving for the end. There's another plaque on the base of the statue, this one noting it (as in, the base and pedestal) had been laid by local Masons, as the king had been an active and high ranking member for many years, as had several of his predecessors. As a result the local organization owns a lot of historical artifacts and occasionally lends some of them out for display, including a royal Knights Templar sword (whatever that is) that somehow ended up at Sotheby's in New York in 2003. As far as I know there are no magical powers associated with the sword, or any sort of curse or prophesy or anything, and finding it in a D&D campaign would likely be a big disappointment, and the whole business seems rather silly. But say what you will, you never get stories like this coming out of rectangular corn states, so there's that at least.
Based on the statue's highly visible location, and the plaque's subject matter, and the usual inclinations of the 21st century internet, search results about it quickly descend into tinfoil hat territory after the first few pages of search results, because internet. Note that those links all go to recent Wayback Machine captures and not the sites themselves, since I'm mentioning them here strictly for entertainment purposes and not to send them traffic or spread their ideas. So instead of spending any more time on that, please enjoy that one semi-related song from that one show:
By way of contrast, here's what it looks like when actual Masons have a go at the same song, after a drink or two, or three, or so.
[1]
The combo of sugar money and an ambitious king did lead to an interesting historical episode in 1886-87. It's not really relevant to the rest of this post but hey. KalÄkaua had big plans for his country despite the ongoing medical tragedy; word had reached him of a civil war erupting in Samoa, with the opposing factions backed by competing Western colonial powers (the UK, USA, and Germany, in this case) contending for influence in the South Pacific as they'd previously done elsewhere around the world. This was an unwelcome development as Hawaii was in a similar position, trying to avoid being gobbled up by one Western country or another. KalÄkaua had ambitions beyond his own shores, though, imagining an ocean-spanning Polynesian Confederation powerful enough to keep the region from being sliced and diced into a bunch of crown colonies and overseas territories and whatnot. With, naturally, himself as the overall head of state of this far-flung new nation. So the Hawaiian Royal Navy's first (and as it turned out, only) modern navy ship was dispatched to Samoa for a little gunboat diplomacy, and actually got as far as signing a confederation treaty with the kingdom's preferred local ruler, while almost going to war with Germany in the process. Meanwhile back home in Hawaii the sugar oligarchs decided KalÄkaua had gotten too big for his britches and staged a coup, forcing the king to sign a new "Bayonet Constitution" that strictly limited his authority. This was sold to the world as introducing a modern constitutional monarchy, but the new constitution also altered voting rules such that rich foreigners could now vote, but at least 2/3 of local residents could not, thus ensuring a majority white male legislature for the remainder of the kingdom's existence. As a result of all this, the Samoa expedition was called home, and the ship was quickly sold and the navy disbanded. So yeah, the king's brief attempt at a more assertive foreign policy didn't really play out the way he'd hoped. Or at least not in our timeline. An alternate history forum thread I ran across explores some of the inevitable "What If?" and "If So, How?" questions.
Tuesday, December 07, 2021
photo outage
For those of you out there who check this tiny lil' blog obsessively, looking for the latest newly-published post that I probably started in the mid-2010s and just finished, you might have noticed some ugly 504 Gateway Timeout errors where there ought to have been embedded Flickr slideshows. The deal is that there was a huge Amazon Web Services outage earlier today (though it's apparently back to normal now), which caused a total Flickr outage since they rely heavily on AWS, and that in turn caused a partial outage here, as in no photos for a few hours. No permanent harm done, from what I can tell, and no lost revenue because I didn't have any in the first place.
I only mention all of this because a core best practice in this exciting modern DevOps universe is to maintain a status blog and write a post on it whenever you have an outage, explaining what happened. Everybody says that explaining is very, very important, and explaining things is basically all I do here, so I figured somebody out there might be expecting an official status post or something. Which would go here, because this blog is its own status blog. The reason this is important is not because you necessarily expect customers to understand, but they're apparently flattered that you even tried to, and then they can repeat the explanation to other people and sound smart. For bonus points, you can make it an apology that doubles as a job posting, as this outage was minimized on your end thanks to some advanced tools you wrote in-house using the latest and trendiest language of the year, and you're thinking about open-sourcing these tools if only you could hire someone as a maintainer. As it so happens my, uh, monitoring tool was me trying to find a photo to use as a new MS Teams background during an overlong meeting today. Which, on one hand, detected the outage without any annoying pagers going off, though on the other hand it doesn't scale up very well. As for the detailed explanation, Amazon will probably post one eventually here. When that happens, just imagine that statement plus me nodding along sagely to phrases like "Elastic Kubernetes" and "Flux Capacitor", and that's your official status update from here.
This particular outage annoyed me because I like to insist this humble little blog is a tiny one-person operation, and it's just me here puttering around pursuing various weird and eccentric hobbies and whatnot. And I like the idea that the site at least appears to exist outside of capitalism: No ads, nothing for sale, no sponsored guest posts, no affiliate links, nothing. And then an outage comes along and reminds me and everybody else that this is a reverse Wizard of Oz situation, with the twin corporate monoliths of Google and Amazon hiding behind a curtain & operating all of the actual machinery here. In theory I could probably host everything from home except for the embedded maps here, that would almost certainly be slower and less secure while also costing more, and doing a bunch of system administration at home as a hobby has never been my idea of a good time.
Wednesday, December 01, 2021
Lotus Cafe Mural
Continuing the theme from the previous post, here's another long-gone Portland mural. This time around it's the one on the back of the Lotus Cafe building, which was demolished in 2018 to make way for yet another generic steel-and-glass (and thus non-mural-able) hotel tower, a late entry in the city's inexplicable late-2010s hotel bubble. The cafe itself closed in 2016 after 92 often-sketchy years in business. It was, believe it or not, a popular and trendy dance club when I was in college in the late 80s and early 90s, despite its location amid government office blocks, far from any other nightlife options. Eventually the place settled down to being a kinda-mundane after-work happy hour spot, popular among people who had settled down into kinda-mundane office jobs nearby, present company included. In fact the photos in this post were taken from my office at the time, looking down at the doomed mural a few days before the rest of the Lotus building came down. Most likely I had fresh coffee with me and had to set it down to take these photos, and it's reasonably likely that I then forgot my coffee and walked back to my cubicle without it. At that point, still needing caffeine, I probably would have made a second, successful coffee run to the break room. Eventually I would have remembered my misplaced coffee and retrieved it, and (if it hadn't been forgotten overnight) possibly checked whether it was still drinkable. Because, after all, it was quite a long walk from my desk to the break room and back, and it's not as if coffee turns into worthless decaf as it gets cold. And this is the point where I sigh loudly and admit I sometimes miss working in an office with other people in it, in case you were wondering how year 2 of the pandemic is going these days.
Google Maps now labels the former Lotus site as the "SW 3rd and Salmon Tower", with an image that appears to be a CGI architectural rendering, not a photo. Somewhat embarrassingly, I do not actually know whether the depicted building currently exists outside of AutoCAD (or whatever architects use these days). I'm sure I've walked past the site sometime within the last six months, and I like to think I would have noticed a brand new 20-story hotel, but I have no recollection of seeing one. So it's possible they haven't gotten around to building it yet, and maybe they never will. On the other hand, the building in that rendering is remarkably boring even by circa-2021 standards, so it's also possible the building is there and I've even seen it in person, but it sort of fades into the background immediately without really registering. I am, in fact, so bored just looking at it that I can't muster any enthusiasm to go for a quick 15 minute walk and double check, though I absolutely agree that would be the responsible thing to do. If it's there, most likely it would just fade into the background again without being noticed, and I would come home still not knowing whether it exists, having been rained on for my trouble, and I'm annoyed just thinking about it.
The old Lotus merited a few pages in Jeff Dwyer's Ghost Hunter's Guide to Portland and the Oregon Coast published in 2015 right around the pop-cultural peaks of both national Portland-mania and of ghost-hunting reality shows. As the story goes, the building's cellar was home to some sort of angry male evil spirit, still nursing a grudge over whatever happened to him back in the Shanghai tunnel era. I have to admit I'm not really a ghost expert, so I have no idea what happens when you tear down an old haunted building and replace it with an utterly sterile new one. Does that free the ghosts or drive them away somehow? Or does a new building just make them even angrier, like the thing in Poltergeist where greedy developers only moved the headstones? I kind of suspect the latter, but again this is not really my bailiwick. So, as always, feel free to chime in down in the comments if you can field this one.
Tuesday, November 30, 2021
a long-gone mural @ ne 15th & burnside
So a fun thing about losing track of old draft blog posts is that occasionally the subject of the post no longer exists when I circle back to the post again. This happens a lot with murals in Portland; other than a few city-owned ones, there's no expectation they'll stick around for the long term, and usually no budget to touch them up as they age. Some fade away, while others fall prey to vandals, developers, or others located somewhere along the vandal/developer spectrum. Then there are a few spots around town where every so often they just have someone come in and paint a new and different mural over the current one, which is what happened here. Where "here" means one side of the Columbia Art & Drafting Supply building, at NE 15th & Burnside. So the one shown here was painted in 2013 by Portland artist Ashley Montague and was apparently just called "Columbia art mural". And, well, that's all I can really tell you about it, to be honest.
Montague painted a second mural on the same building a few months later that went by "Visual Guardians", which drew a bit more attention at the time, maybe because of the large tiger. It featured in a 2014 r/Portland Reddit thread that in turn links to an Imgur photo of it being painted in late 2013. I somehow got the idea it was called "Beastmaster", thanks to someone else's Flickr photos that I ran across, and did a post about it under that name. So it's about a long-gone mural, under the wrong name, and the embedded "Beastmaster" (1982) movie trailer I included due to the wrong name is now a dead link. Which -- if nothing else -- is an impressive amount of brokenness and wrongness for such a brief post.
A comment on the "Beastmaster" post says the mural had been replaced sometime before November 2016, while current (as of right now) Street View imagery is dated June 2019 and shows what the building's 3 mural spots looked like at that point. If they're on something like a 3 year rotation, they may have cycled through up to 3 new designs since I took the photos here. Which is fine, of course; I'm just mentioning this in case anyone still thinks this little website here is some sort of slick, professional breaking news and current events operation. This may be hard to believe, but we (as in, I) don't even have a single news helicopter. Strange but true.
Sunday, November 07, 2021
Community Garden Fence, McCoy Park
The New Community Garden Fence panels mark each of the four entries to the garden and represent different areas of the world. The images of food and plants along with their quotations offer visual and cultural references which reflect both the similarities and differences between cultures.
As you might've guessed, this is another post that sat around as a forgotten draft since 2014, shortly after I took the photos here. So the standard disclaimer applies: Old photos mean it may or may not look like this now, your mileage may vary, no refunds. The last photo in the set is from a distance to show more of the fence in context, which is the only photo I took of the garden itself. Which is a little odd since I had an occasional "take photos of community gardens" project going at the time, but I always tend to do this, going full tunnel vision on one particular topic for a while and not noticing the mural I walked past on my way to look at an obscure bridge, and a month later not noticing an obscure bridge on my way to an especially interesting waterfall, or not attending to the growing stack of real life to-do items that pile up while chasing this stuff. I do really enjoy chasing rabbit holes all the way down, but I can't pretend there isn't a downside to being like this.
This was originally supposed to be the third of four public art posts set in or near the same park; the fourth would have been about Ancestor Tree, a very large conceptual art thing that was meant to be a centerpiece of the park. It was a chunk of a huge London plane tree that had been cut down during the New Columbia rebuild, trimmed and flipped upside down so it looked like a tree stump balancing on the tips of its roots. I was not a big fan of it based on photos I'd seen, and snarking about it might have been fun. But apparently the ex-tree was no match for the elements in its new form, and it began to rot not long after installation. So the city removed it in 2012, before I got around to stopping by for photos. The article talks about maybe finding some sort of replacement art to take its place, but I gather this never happened and the site remains an open grassy field instead, which is a perfectly fine thing to have in a city park.
The article doesn't say what happened to the semi-rotten art afterward. They probably just woodchipped it, but sometimes it's easier, from a bureaucratic standpoint, to just ship things off to an obscure warehouse to be forgotten in long-term storage, like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. So who knows. It would be weird and unsettling to run across it lurking in a shadowy corner of a vast, dimly lit warehouse, but I guess that's still better than being stuck with a warehouse full of unwanted Confederate statues like a lot of cities in this country. So there's that, I guess.
Friday, November 05, 2021
Moons and Stars, McCoy Park
Next up, here are a few photos of Moons & Stars, another public art piece at McCoy Park, taken on the same visit as the previous post (as in, these photos are from 2014, and things might have changed since then). This one was created by by Hong Kong-born Portland artist Horatio Hung-Yan Law, and its RACC page includes a brief description:
The moon’s phases are represented by the granite disks found embedded in the pavement. Various cultural ideas about the cycle of life are captured in the quotations, proverbs, folk sayings and myths you’ll find etched in the disks.
Squirrel/Salmon Benches, McCoy Park
November seems to be a designated month for people to do ambitious projects: Writing a novel in 30 days; growing a luxurious handlebar mustache in 30 days to raise prostate awareness, and other worthy causes. I'm not feeling anywhere near that ambitious, but it occurred to me that my infamous drafts folder is a mix of recent hiking & outdoor posts that lately seem to take forever to finish, and a smaller set of public art and city park posts from a few years ago that I never quite finished for various reasons and kind of forgot about. So I thought I might switch gears and start at the back of the drafts folder and see how many of those I can finish this month. Unless I get chosen for jury duty later this month, in which case all bets are off.
So the first thing we're looking at this month is "Squirrel/Salmon Benches", a couple of cute circa-2005 park benches in North Portland's McCoy Park. The second link, which goes to the freshly-redesigned-again RACC public art database -- has this to say about it:
The squirrel & salmon benches were designed to reflect Northwest wildlife. Mufu Ahmed is a Nigerian poet, sculptor and textile artist who combines the imagery, traditions and stories of his Yoruba culture with the techniques, materials and applications of the Western world.
I really like the squirrel design, and the salmon one is fine as far as salmon art goes, although it's a heavily overused theme in this part of the world. At one point I started tagging posts about salmon art with "Heroic Salmon", as the fish are usually depicted bravely struggling back to their streams of origin to spawn and promptly drop dead. An inspiring life story from which the public is meant to draw important life lessons, I guess. Or maybe I'm reading too much into that. Anyway, the really striking thing about the benches, and a big clue that they're from 2005 and not 2021, is what's not there: No metal bar down the middle to keep people from sleeping there, no spiky bits to make it unpleasant to sit on, no electrified razor wire or whatever the latest anti-homeless technology is. They're just plain old park benches, which are rapidly becoming about as common as pay phones. The big asterisk here is that these are not recent photos, and for all I know the city could have built a piranha-filled moat around the benches by now. Your mileage may vary widely, in other words.
Oddly enough, one of the other recipients of the aforementioned "Heroic Salmon" tag (and subject of a 2012 post here) is a fountain inside a parking garage at the Lloyd Center mall. And in a weird coincidence, the entire mall is being repossessed as of this week, and the would-be repossessor says they plan to demolish the mall and put in offices and housing instead, and the Lloyd District will eventually look just like every other gentrified part of town, with identical buildings sporting the same hip local chain stores and restaurants. I mean, I realize the shopping mall era is over, and this particular mall's been declining for years now, and a vast shopping mall just across the river from downtown was always a an awkward fit, and an open-air mall was never a good idea in this climate. And even after its 1990s revival slash heyday it was never actually 'cool', because it was still a shopping mall. And a mall with awful timing, too; in the 90s renovation the owners managed to rip out or conceal all of the mall's original Midcentury character, just before that look became cool again, and now the mall's goofy 1990 postmodern stuff is about to meet the same fate, probably just before that look becomes cool again. All of that said, I do have fond memories about the place during that particular time period, though, I will actually be sad to see it go. It's hard to explain.
The park here is actually the result of another demolish-replace-and-gentrify effort, this one from a late 90s/early 2000s effort to replace the city's most notorious public housing project with a twee suburb. But we'll get into that when I finish the post about the park itself. Which might happen this month? Or if not this month, soon at least. Ideally.
Saturday, October 30, 2021
Perdition Falls
Apparently for Halloween 2021 I'm rummaging through draft posts and trying to finish ones that seem vaguely spooky. Like the previous post about the Gorge's Old Boneyard Road, the place we're visiting this time has a semi-spooky name, but beyond that any Halloween connection is a real stretch. This post is also part of our extremely slow virtual hike around the Multnomah-Wahkeena loop, while doing a separate blog post about each individual waterfall on the way. I probably ought to have done this one first, or at least second after Little Multnomah Falls.
Anyway, if you visit Multnomah Falls during the wet season, or any time of the year when it's rained recently, you'll immediately see that the famous waterfall has a less-powerful twin to its right, plummeting over the same cliff into the same pool. I had always sort of figured this twin was a side branch of Multnomah Creek that branched off somewhere above the falls, but it turns out that's not what's going on here at all. It's a whole separate creek with its own little watershed, draining a small area wedged in between Shady Creek and Multnomah Creek proper. This creek burbles along minding its own business until suddenly it falls over a cliff created by its famous and powerful next door neighbor. The two creeks merge in the pool between the two tiers of Multnomah Falls, and it's all downhill from there. The resulting waterfall occasionally goes by the name "Perdition Falls", on the very rare occasions that someone needs to refer to it specifically.
The deal with the spooky-sounding name is actually more straightforward than some of the places we've visited already: It's named (unoffically) after the creek, which in turn is named (unofficially) after the Perdition Trail, a famous cliff's-edge trail connecting the top of Multnomah Falls with the top of Wahkeena Falls and forming a shorter and easier (but very scenic) loop trail as compared to the full Multnomah-Wahkeena one. Unfortunately this trail has been closed to the public since 1996 when it was damaged by one of that year's winter storms. Searching on the name of the trail leads us back to the first time it appeared in print, a July 13th 1919 Oregonian article titled "Zestful Pleasures Afforded by Week-End Hiking Trip". The list of zestful weekend suggestions is a bit on the ambitious side, leading off with climbing Mt. Hood. Which, back then, you could try on a whim, without a permit, and aided only by circa-1919 climbing gear. Or, more reasonably, you could have a go at a long hike to the Gorge's Wahtum Lake and back, starting from either Herman Creek or Eagle Creek.
For people looking to do a bit of serious climbing, the article recommends St. Peter's Dome, east of Multnomah Falls, noting however that (as of 1919) it had never actually been scaled successfully and might never be, though a recent Trails Club expedition had made it as far as the narrow saddle leading out to the mostly-freestanding rock. In fact, as far as anyone knows it was first climbed in 1940, and only occasionally after that; a detailed 2008 account of climbing it notes they were just the twenty-first party to have climbed it and added themselves to the logbook at the summit.
As a less extreme alternative, the article suggests doing the traditional night hike up the Larch Mountain Trail (more about which later), and if you didn't feel like doing the full Larch Mountain trip, there was always the Multnomah-Wahkeena loop, which was laid out essentially identically to the present-day trail; it seems that the high point along this trail used to be called "Looksee Point" back then, and had quite a view, which I imagine is completely obscured by trees now. And if you weren't up for this 5 mile loop, or were just short on time, perhaps the shiny new recently-built Perdition Trail would hit the spot for you. Of it, the article says:
The new trail, inaugurated by the Trails Club, and built ty the city park department, from the head of Multnomah Falls to Wahkeena, is called, for some unknown reason, the Perdition Trail. It is to be avoided in winter, but makes a very pleasant short trip, and affords at the side trail at View Point the most wonderful aspect of Multnomah Falls.
So there you have it: The people who built the trail a century ago gave it a spooky name and never told anyone why, and now they're all dead and we can't badger them about it. It's not a very satisfying answer, but at least now you know as much about the name as anyone alive does, except maybe for a few Trails Club oldtimers, and they aren't talking. But of course we can try to guess what they might have meant by it. The word "perdition" isn't common anymore, and is generally used to mean "hell" or "damnation" or something along those lines, as in the famous rant uttered first by Captain Ahab and again several centuries later by everyone's favorite Star Trek villain:
But it's also an archaic word, and already was in 1919, and it specifically comes across as a bit of corny Old West lingo, like something grizzled mountain men and old-timey prospectors would say. And for them it was more of a general purpose "holy shit", a couple of steps up from plain old "tarnation". So the trail name may come from someone imagining what an early pioneer might have said, hypothetically, on first seeing the view from along the trail. That's my guess, anyway. Speaking as a Generation X person, "tarnation" is an ordinary "whoa", while "perdition" is Keanu saying "whoa".
It was a useful word in the Old West, in that it sounds awfully blasphemous, but saying it wouldn't necessarily get you banned from the local saloon, depending largely on what sort of saloon, and what sort of town, you happen to have moseyed into. You can be certain the word isn't actually blasphemous because it was used in print in a 1995 Deseret News travel article about visiting the Gorge, way back in the olden days when the trail was open, newspapers had travel sections, and travel didn't involve dodging deadly viruses. It's possible there may have been an editorial meeting or two about it first, as the word does have a very specific (and negative) meaning in LDS theology. (See also the 2010 documentary Sons of Perdition, following several teens exiled from the polygamous FLDS communities of southern Utah and northern Arizona. The 2002 film Road to Perdition is unrelated, and stars Tom Hanks as a Depression-era Mob enforcer.)
In truth there are almost no examples on the interwebs of people using the name "Perdition Falls" for the waterfall here, or really of calling it by any specific name at all; there's a caption in someone's Smugmug gallery concerning an illicit hike along the closed trail, and it gets a quick mention in Zach Forsyth's book Waterfalls of the Columbia Gorge, and I could swear I've seen at least one other reference to the name somewhere that I can't find now. So part of the point of the post you're reading now is to create one more search result for people to stumble across, and learn about the long-closed trail, and call their member of Congress about it, and then maybe the necessary repair and redesign work will finally get funded if enough people do that. I figure this is at least worth a try, as the trail has been closed for 25 years now and so far nothing else has worked.
The trail used to have an OregonHikers page, as did the infamous stairwaythat led to the long-term closure. Those links go to Wayback Machine versions of those pages from a few years ago. And just to be really clear, I'm linking to that and other trail info purely for historical reasons, not to encourage people to go give it a try despite the closure. As I understand it, they do actually enforce the closure, and given the trail's location there are decent odds of being noticed from down below if anyone's watching. I guess my standpoint here is that I'm pretty curious about the trail and the area it goes through, but not enough to risk getting tasered over it. Needless to say, I didn't attempt the trail for this post, and if at any point I sound like I know the area, remember I'm going purely on vague childhood memories of hiking it with my parents a few times in the late 1970s or early 80s. So I may have some of the details wrong.
There's still an OregonHikers page for one of the viewpoints, plus a "FAQ" thread and a few other forum threads about the old trail, because I'm by no means the only person who's curious about it. (In one of those threads, a poster refers to Perdition Falls as "Second Multnomah Falls", and includes a photo of a small upper waterfall along the same creek.) And a page at Trailkeepers of Oregon (the parent org behind OregonHikers) explains the group does want to restore the trail someday, albeit as one of several competing priorities. From all of this, I gather there are several problems that would need to be resolved in order to reopen the trail. First would be solving the stairs problem. The original wood stairs burned in the 1991 forest fire, while the heavy concrete replacement stairs sheared off and slid downhill during the 1996 floods, and they either need to find a different way to build stairs here that's more robust, or a way to do it cheaply that can be replaced easily, or maybe a way to reroute the trail so as not require stairs.
The second problem is that people are now worried about debris falling onto the old highway, which runs right along the base of the cliff directly below the trail, either from construction or hikers kicking rocks loose or maybe taking a tumble off the cliff. Although I think this is just a small addition to the inherent, natural rockfall hazard that comes with building a road along the base of a cliff. So maybe the answer is to fix the road, not the trail. I know the highway is historic and people don't want to change anything about it, so this probably won't happen, but it's always easier to find road money than it is to find trail money. And as for altering the nature of the road, it's often said the Columbia River Highway was inspired by the Axenstrasse, an old scenic road in the Swiss Alps, which also gets its share of rockfall issues. The usual solution used there -- and elsewhere across the Alps -- is to build a concrete avalanche gallery above the road to catch falling rocks (see two examples, and an engineering paper about a third one and how well it holds up under boulder impacts.) So building one here could maybe be justified that way. Granted these are rather expensive to build, which somehow means that countries of the Alps can afford to build them, and we can't, so as a practical matter this would likely only get funded after a boulder squashes a celebrity. Not that I am seriously proposing this, or have any particular celebrity in mind.
Since I'm talking about the trail in a historical capacity, it did at least show up in local newspapers with regularity. The 1919 article I mentioned above was the first example I found, and it just mentioned the trail in passing. A May 1921 article about the still-new trail goes on and on about it, and gets a bit melodramatic about the three designated viewpoints along the new trail:
Three outstanding vista points have been designated as Flat Fir Point, the Altar of the Gods, and Lonesome Corner. Flat Fir Point is a moss-covered rock with a wind-blown fir flattened against the stone just below it. From here a splendid view may be had up river. The most unique place on the trail is the Altar of the Gods, a great pile of rocks, resembling an ancient place of worship. The altar tops a sheer cliff of several hundred feet. A panorama of the Columbia Gorge is possible from this point. Lonesome Corner is off by the main trail and is reached by a short side path. The corner is a tiny shelf of rock from which the Multnomah falls may be viewed from the west side. A cable has been anchored in the rocks and placed around a huge fir tree so that visitors may enjoy this hazardous spot with some degree of comfort.
The trail is also mentioned in a somewhat terse 1932 article cataloging interesting hikes around the region. Most items on the list explain how to get to the trailhead by bus or train, which in a lot of cases is no longer possible in 2021. In some cases the route isn't even possible anymore, like a route following Latourell Creek all the way to its source on Pepper Mountain, or the destination has been lost or forgotten, such as a hike along the Sandy River to a "Broughton cairn" somewhere nearby. Broughton being the British naval lieutenant who ventured this far up the Columbia as part of the George Vancouver expedition. This cairn seems to have been sufficiently well-known at the time that the article doesn't explain whether Broughton built it, or if it was just a historical marker indicating about how far upstream he'd gotten to, or what, but I've never heard of it before, and I think I would have if it was a.) authentic and b.) still existed.
A 1946 article about driving up Larch Mountain Road mentions the trail briefly as something else to do while you're in the general vicinity. The article notes that the road was built in 1938 as a WPA project, and was the first road suitable for the general public (as opposed to just log trucks) up there, and explains the once-popular night hike up the Larch Mountain Trail.
The traditional way to do the trail, during its early years, was to start off in the late afternoon or early evening, possibly after a nice dinner at the Multnomah Falls lodge. If you were fast enough you might reach the summit by sunset, but either way you could take in the night sky and Portland city lights in the distance before sleeping under the stars for a few hours. Before you knew it, it would be time for the main event, watching the sunrise from the summit, ideally from the Sherrard Point viewpoint. A photo of the viewpoint at the top shows none of today's safety improvements, by which I mean the concrete slab viewpoint at the top and the safety railing around it. Back then it was just a big rock hanging out into empty space, encircled by distant volcanoes in all (ok, most) directions. I gather watching a sunrise from there would've been the local equivalent of the Haleakala sunrise thing that's still incredibly popular on Maui.
Please note that this adventure is no longer possible as described; there's no view to the west any longer, due to the forest slowly growing back over the past century, and camping at the top is no longer allowed, though you may be able to just get up and drive to the top before the sun comes up. Which is just not the same, somehow. The developed day use area at the top sure looks like a campground, but (like a number of locations around the Gorge, and others west of Mt. Hood) it hasn't been one since sometime in the 70s or 80s. Authorities at the time blamed this on drunk and disorderly campers ruining it for everybody forever, with a side of Reagan-era budget cuts.
The 1946 article mentions that the Larch Mountainn Trail might not be suitable for the elderly, and mentions the Perdition Trail as an alternative for people who aren't up for tackling the main trail. The article shows a photo of the author in knee-deep snow somewhere near the mountaintop, having (I think) gotten there by car, but doesn't explain how he managed that. Maybe the county used to try to keep the road plowed and open all year, though that practice can't have lasted for long before they realized it was futile and expensive. Now they just close the snow gate just past Palmer Mill Road, usually sometime in mid-December, and then it typically stays closed until May.
A 1970 article by the Oregonian's regular hiking columnist said it was a great trail for the whole family, though you might want to consider keeping an eye on the kids at the various sheer clifftop viewpoints, in case you ever wondered what GenX childhoods were like. The article mentions a few long-ago events, like a couple of recent rockfalls at Wahkeena Falls in 1966 and 1969, one of which damaged the bridge at the falls and another took out part of the trail for a while. Also mentions a little-used possibly lost side trail that I'd never heard of before at the last switchback on the way down to Multnomah Falls Lodge, which led to a viewpoint with what was supposed to be the best view of the falls. If you can find that old trail somehow in 2021, an can make it to the viewpoint, we're told that the light is just right for a great photo right around 11am.
The trail is mentioned in a 1983 Oregonian article as an alternate route for through-hiking the gorge, on the parts of the Gorge Trail that had been completed at the time. It mentions the long-stalled initiative to have the trail start in Troutdale and continue to Hood River and points east from there. As of 2021 the only concrete product of this initiative is the obscure dead-end trail that heads a couple of miles east from Lewis & Clark State Park before just sort of petering out mid-forest.
The old trail is mentioned as a great place to view fall foliage, in 1985 Oregonian article by Don & Roberta Lowe, authors of the definitive Northwest trail guidebooks from that era. The fall foliage angle is also covered in a 1998 Kitsap Sun article, which mentions the trail along with a number of closer-to-home waterfalls in the North Cascades along Washington's US 2. The trail was already closed at that point, but at first everyone sort of assumed the closure was temporary and the trail would be repaired and back open before you knew it. You can see this in an account of hiking it in 1998. That link goes to someone's personal pages at the University of Hawaii, which I've linked to several times before for various hikes around OŹ»ahu like the Lanikai Pillboxes hike.
More recently, here's a trail report from 2011. Also people posted some old photos of it under the hashtag #gorgememory around the time of the Eagle Creek fire in 2017. I also ran across a photo of an old sign for the trail, over on the Wahkeena Falls side, on a site that's just about fonts used in (mostly US) park and trail signage. As far as I know the sign is still there despite the long closure, possibly because the sign itself is considered historic and can't legally be removed.
So that's a bit of background on the trail, but this post is about the falls, and sadly the name "Perdition Falls" has never appeared in local newspapers, and "Perdition Creek" appears precisely once, in an 1863 Oregonian editorial trying to persuade local farmers not to abandon their farms and run off to the latest gold rush. And the name is used not in connection with the creek here, but as a ridiculous gold rush place name along with other gems like "Satan's Ravine" and "the Devil's Diggings".
The fact that I've got basically no details about the falls or the creek, and limited info about the old trail, doesn't mean there aren't a ton of search hits on these names. Oh no, and these links go to all sorts of things. Here's a quick sampling of some other results that came back:
- A current series of fantasy novels set in the small town of Perdition Falls in upstate New York (book 1 published in March 2020)
- A city name in a 2017 fantasy novel.
- IMDb says there's an "in-development" movie titled "Perdition Trail", with no details available because I haven't paid to upgrade to the Pro version.
- A song, from a concept album in a tetralogy with a whole urban fantasy mythos built around them.
- "Perdition Creek" pops up in a forum thread brainstorming fantasy Old West place names.
- And there's a "Perdition Creek" in a 2016 novel about a haunted Georgia plantation house
- There are also search hits out there for "Perdition Valley", like the eponymous 76th book in the long-running "Deathlands" series of post-nuclear adventure novels. I vaguely remember those from the 1980s, but apparently the series has continued to the present day, now in a purely audiobook form and aimed at the long-distance trucker market.
While trying to find interesting stuff about the falls and related topics, I figured at least a few people out there must have been curious about the waterfall right next to Multnomah Falls without knowing any of its unofficial names or nicknames, so I tried searching on phrases like "next to multnomah falls" and "right of multnomah falls", and found a few mostly unrelated results, given all the different meanings "next to" can have. The Multnomah Falls lodge, Benson Bridge, and Wahkeena Falls cover most of the top hits, while the long tail of search results includes all manner of things:
- "Next to" as in immediately next to, and rappelling down a 600' rope. Normally this is Highly Frowned Upon, and more to the point, it would be impossible to do this quietly and get away with it without anyone noticing. But this was for an official search-and-rescue demonstration, so they had a special permit that mere mortals get laughed at for trying to request.
- "Next to", as in the next interesting hike to the east of Multnomah Falls, namely the dreaded Elevator Shaft trail. I've never actually done this trail, but it's on my TODO-someday list, at whatever point I'm in about the same shape as 2019. This post originally said something about trying again once Trail 400 was open again after the long closure due to the Eagle Creek Fire, COVID, and then a bunch of winter landslides along the old highway. (This is the trail that branches off the Larch Mountain Trail not far after the Benson Bridge; an old sign at the junction calls it the "Ak-Wanee Trail" but that name never really caught on.) I tried to at least have a look at the base of the trail back in June but after a short distance Trail 400 became so overgrown that you couldn't see your own feet, and the mud bog of a trail beneath all the brush was very slippery, and a slip could mean a long tumble down a steep slope. So I immediately bailed on that idea for the time being.
- The previous item reminded me of a proposal that was briefly considered in 1924 to build an actual elevator next to Multnomah Falls, for the convenience of visitors who didn't feel like walking to the top.
- "Next to", as in old photos of the author and his parents next to the falls, from what looks like an interesting book about Northwest hydropower
- "Next to", as in the ugly (but effective) cable fencing next to the initial bit of trail up to Benson Bridge, which had to be installed after the 1991 fire to prevent rockslides onto the trail. The phrase occurs in a 2019 paper presented at that year's meeting of the Association of Environmental & Engineering Geologists. That paper seems relevant to where things stand in the Gorge right now, and I think quoting the full abstract counts as fair use, so:
Forest Fires and Slope Stability in a Rain Forest: Lessons Learned from the 1991 Forest Fire in the Columbia Gorge, Oregon, USA Burns, Scott, Portland State University, *****@pdx.edu (TS #13) In the late summer of 1991, there was an extensive forest fire in the Columbia Gorge, USA, on the Oregon side of the river that was started naturally by lightning. We learned from this fire that this steep terrain underwent three basic erosion/landslide processes in the next ten years as a result of the fire. After the fire was out in the autumn, the first rains brought abundant surface erosion of burnt soil and vegetation. A lot of this ended in the streams. Second, extensive enhanced rock fall occurred in the burned area. One classic area was next to Multnomah Falls where a Brugg cable fence had to be installed to protect the trail leading to Benson Bridge from rock fall onto hikers. Third, we learned that in a period of 5–10 years after the forest fire, areas of intensive burning of the forest would produce very large debris flows. It takes 5–10 years for the roots of the trees burned to disintegrate. Seven large debris flows in 1996 at Dodson and one large one near there in 2001 are examples of this delayed debris flow generation when a “Pineapple Express” would come into the area. This is a rain forest getting over 60 inches of precipitation per year. This differs from dry climate forest fires where debris flows are generated with the first major storm after the fire. After the 2017 Gorge fire—which also occurred on the Oregon side—was started by two teenagers, we noted the same things. First, there was extensive surface erosion for a week after the first rainfall. Also, all of the roads and trails were closed until checked for rock fall hazards. We now expect debris flows in the next 5–10 years to come down the following drainages that had extreme burning in the headwaters: Tanner Creek, Eagle Creek, Oneonta Creek, and Horsetail Creek.
- "Next to", as in one of the top two tourist attraction in the Gorge next to Multnomah Falls. Which is what civic boosters in Cascade Locks are hoping the Bridge of the Gods might become, once they manage to add a pedestrian walkway to it. As of 2018, it was thought this could be ready by 2022-23 if the Port of Cascade Locks could find the money for it. But the project is stalled right now due to some sort of arcane federal rules about it being a toll bridge -- even though it doesn't charge tolls for pedestrians, bikes, or horses, who would be the only users of the pedestrian addition.
- "Next to", as in the 2nd highest waterfall in Oregon next to Multnomah Falls. About which, opinions vary widely. The Bend Bulletin and various others say the silver medal goes to Salt Creek Falls , in the Cascades off OR-58 near Oakridge. But it turns out that Watson Falls, on a tributary of the North Umpqua, east of Roseburg, is juuust a few feet taller than Salt Creek Falls, per a 2009 remeasurement. Which ironically is mentioned on the Salt Creek wiki page but not its own.
Waterfalls Northwest inevitably has a tallest waterfalls list for the state, which puts Watson at a distant 14th and Salt Creek at 15th. That list includes a few sorta-prominent seasonal waterfalls like Dalton Falls, but no mention of Perdition Falls. It drops from roughly the same height as the upper tier of Multnomah Falls, maybe even a few feet higher thanks to less erosion, and hits the pool between the upper & lower Multnomah tiers at essentially the same height. If we go with the standard height for the upper tier, 542' puts it a solid 4th after Linton Falls in Lane County and Alkali Falls in Douglas County near Crater Lake, and just ahead of Mist Falls, the second-to-next falls west of Multnomah. Although height numbers for Mist Falls vary by quite a bit, as discussed in my old post about the falls, with one outlier crediting it as a full 1200' feet high.
A Salem Statesman-Journal article argues Multnomah Falls may not actually be the tallest in the state, listing Linton Falls, Ice Falls in the Wallowas, and the Breitenbush Cascades as potential challengers.
On the other hand, Salt Creek Falls is just down the trail from Too Much Bear Lake, and the other candidates aren't, which really ought to count for something. - Meanwhile the only result I found for "right of multnomah falls" actually refers to the correct place, and it's someone in an ice climbing forum gazing sort of wistfully at it; from what I know about the sport, this would be an ideal climbing spot -- a nice clean 500+' stretch of ice, with just the right winter volume that it might actually freeze all the way top to bottom, and without any weird dangers or obstacles. The only problem is that (like I noted above) climbing here is highly illegal thanks to the famous waterfall next door, and access to the top of the falls is illegal due to the Perdition Trail situation, and access to the base is also illegal due to the big Multnomah Falls rockslide in the 90s, and furthermore you'd be climbing in an extremely public fishbowl and somebody would notice you and call 911 because reasons, and you'd end up getting droned over it or something, which is absolutely not the kind of danger you had in mind going in.
I do have an alternate theory about the trail closure, and why the feds apparently have zero interest in ever fixing the trail. And before you go "oh great, this is another sasquatch story, isn't it?", let me stop you right there and confirm your suspicions. We've already established that Ecola Falls -- less than a mile upstream on Multnomah Creek -- was once the center of the Sasquatch whaling industry, which is how the odd name of the place came about. This time we have a much more recent story, as the closure is the result of a unique partnership between the US Forest Service and the NHL Players Association, specifically their pension & retirement office. It's a widely-known open secret that sasquatches have always been present in the top tiers of professional hockey, and at times have dominated the sport, as with the Philadelphia Flyers teams of the 1970s, and the Portland Rosebuds of the early 20th Century, who owned the Stanley Cup for about a month in 1916. This is actually the main reason the NHL won't give us an expansion team to replace the Rosebuds, because we would instantly have an unfair avantage thanks to recruiting the local wildlife. (You might wonder why Seattle now has an NHL expansion team given that rule; the answer of course is that Seattle has tons of billionaires and when one of them wants something, it generally can't be stopped.)
Back in the 1980s and 1990s you started to see awkward media stories about how various retired NHL stars were faring after retirement, featuring disheveled ex-defensemen wandering around half-wrecked LA mansions in a state of bewilderment. What the stories didn't tell you was that in addition to the usual wear and tear after long NHL careers, many of these guys were feeling the call of the wild, and could not experience inner peace without returning to the forest. Early experiments went badly as they were shunned by the Sasquatch society they'd rejected decades earlier, lured away by the lights of the big city and dreams of fame and fortune. Also they'd become acclimated to human food, specifically 1970s hockey arena food, and the traditional fare of roots and berries and grubs wasn't really cutting it. So they set up a retirement zone a short stroll from the Multnomah Falls lodge, so every evening around twilight a few small groups of hairy elderly dudes emerge from the forest and shamble down to the lodge to pick up their usual take-out orders. Barrel of chili cheese fries (vegetarian), crate of onion rings, crate of nachos, frosty keg of Michelob, etc., So the ongoing trail closure is just so they can have a little peace and quiet, and the government coverup is mostly to keep autograph seekers away. Incidentally, pro hockey isn't the only sasquatch-dominated sport out there, for example many of the most famous pro wrestlers of the 80s were at least part sasquatch. The difference is that the hockey 'squatches have a strong union that looks out for their interests in their later years, while the wrestlers never did and still don't.
