Per recent tradition, the last post of the year here is simply a collection of cat photos I've posted over on the 'Gram. It seems better than writing a serious roundup of the last year, which would be incredibly tedious. Before drawing any conclusions from the photos, no, he isn't any goofier than last year, that's entirely the photographer's doing. Maybe I've gotten better at anticipating the derp and catching him in the act, I dunno. Anyway, Happy New Year!
Saturday, December 31, 2022
Miami Beach, Summer 2018
And here we have a few more hot, summery Florida photos to go with the summer 2018 Miami photos I just posted. This time the photos are from wandering around Miami Beach, which involves a surprisingly long bus ride from Miami proper. Again, it was a fun and interesting place to wander around playing tourist. I just don't have any very deep thoughts about the place. But hey, not every post here has to be me trying to theorize about something for twenty paragraphs, especially when it's New Years Eve and I'm just a post or two short of how many I did back in 2016. I'm sure nobody else cares about that particular goal besides me. Just putting it out there for full disclosure.
I will say that having this many Art Deco buildings in one place, with the usual Miami Deco color scheme, the overall effect gets to be a bit silly after a while. The smattering of 1980s postmodern buildings in the same color scheme, like the first photo above, somehow makes the overall effect even sillier. I said no theories, but my theory about that is that what architects' clients really wanted in the 80s were brand new Art Deco buildings, but with modern wiring and plumbing and so on, and they wanted that right up until they saw what all that attention to detail would cost in 1988. Also no architect under 40 wanted to work on paper anymore and things had advanced so you could get most of the job done on a decked-out Mac IIci, at least so long as you limited the design to a few simple shapes and colors. And out of necessity, a whole new style was born, along with dense art jargon explaining why it's the new One True Way. That's my theory, anyway.
Said theory is based largely on my own experience of trying to do creative stuff on a Mac back then. You'd have this feeling of unlimited possibilities -- and there really was a lot you could do even back then -- but inevitably you'd run into hardware limitations and have to scale things back until the machine would meet you kind of halfway. Wireframes that won't render. Spell checkers that get exponentially slower if your document is too big. Spending hours in PageMaker creating a concert poster for a coworker who needed one, scaling elaborate band logos just right, adjusting fonts by tenths of points, and so on, only to find that the office's low-end laser printer wasn't up to the job. Too many fonts, too much clip art, a few individual band logos that were way too rad and xtreme to be printable at any size. There was talk of going to Kinko's and trying to print from there, but that was Very Expensive, and the poster layout wouldn't quite fit on a floppy anyway, and I think the job eventually got done the old-school way, with tape and a photocopier.
Miami, Summer 2018
For anyone who's tired of all the cold and gloom this time of year, here are some warm summery photos I took in Miami back in 2018. I was in Florida for the launch of the Parker Solar Probe, and had (wisely, as it turned out) built a few extra days into my travel plans in case of launch delays. Ultimately the launch only slipped by a day and then went off without a hitch, so I had a couple of days to burn before flying home. I decided to head south since I'd never been there before, and did a little sightseeing. So this set of photos is from Miami itself, as in the mainland, actual city part. I did wander over to Miami Beach one day, and took another day to go see the Everglades, but those are separate posts I haven't posted yet. Some of these are from walking around (albeit not very far, because heat & humidity), with a few swanky hotel balcony photos mixed in. Overall it was a fun side trip, though I can't say I have any unique or intersting insights to share about the place. So, er, enjoy the photos.
A Park
Next up we're visiting another Portland city park, this time in SW Portland a bit off Barbur. It's your basic ballfields-and-playground arrangement; I usually don't bother with these, and to be honest with you we're only visiting this one because of its name. Or rather, the lack of a name. The official city parks website just calls it "A Park". Until December 2020 the park was known as "Custer Park" after the infamous general, but then outgoing city commissioner Amanda Fritz removed the embarrassing name by executive order.
Now, naming or renaming things in Portland is a long and complex process involving public hearings and consulting everyone who could possibly count as a stakeholder. But thanks to a quirk in city ordinances it's apparently quite trivial to un-name things. The city commissioner with Parks & Recreation in their portfolio simply announces that a name has been yoinked away, and poof, it's gone. Of course the risk with doing this on your way out the door is that the next Parks Commissioner won't necessarily put the same priority on doing the harder part, coming up with a new name for the place. Thus the park has gone without any official name for the last two years.
Some local news stories about the 2020 yoinking:
- Oregonian
- KOIN
- The Skanner
- Willamette Week
- KATU
- KEX Radio
- Hillsdale News (which also did a followup story)
This naturally showed up on the park's (non-renamed) Yelp page, and a Reddit r/Portland thread, with a few examples of the usual conservative shrieking, though this may have been more subdued than usual due to Custer's earlier work in ending the Confederacy. Still, it may please them to know Custer still has lots of stuff named after him, including a very imposing 2nd place participation trophy at the Little Bighorn battlefield itself.
Closer to home, a street nearby still goes by SW Custer Drive, and there are bits and pieces of street named SW Custer St. stretching from the river all the way west to city limits, though never more than a few blocks at a time due to the hilly terrain. None of those have been renamed yet, though the name has been preemptively removed from a future MAX station planned for the Hillsdale area, on the theory that the street will likely be renamed too before the new line opens. The first newspaper mention I found of streets named Custer was small item from 1897 about Fulton Park, so it already existed at that point. This was a brief mention in a list of recent city council actions, and the next item concerned legalizing fireworks within city limits for a couple of weeks in January for Chinese New Year. That sounds unusually progressive for 1897 Portland, so I imagine the non-Chinese population just saw it as another chance to be reckless and irresponsible with fireworks, which is always a winner here.
The lack of a name doesn't mean the city's neglecting the place, by the way; there's a proposal to give it a nature patch, one of the new commissioner's pet projects. There's also a proposed stormwater facility that would be near or possibly conflicting with the nature patch, which might explain why the stormwater project was on hold last time I checked.
So here we are at the end of 2022, and the park still doesn't have a name. Around the time of the de-naming there was a change.org petition with a specific new name in mind, but I'm reasonably sure Portland (like most major cities) has a blanket policy of not responding to change.org petitions. Although it will get you signed up for endless fundraising emails until the heat death of the universe, so there's that to consider.
I should point out that renaming things in Portland isn't always this hard. Around the same time this park was de-Custer-ified, a park in outer SE Portland was renamed from renamed from "Lynchview Park" to "Verdell Burdine Rutherford Park" without the park going nameless for years first. And it's not as if the park was ever actually a place to come and view lynchings; if I remember right, it was just named for some unremarkable midcentury developer or landowner named Lynch. But still, the name doesn't exactly sound good to contemporary ears. And before anyone goes on a rant about 21st century people being so oversensitive, there's a local precedent. Back in 1966, the city was about to get a couple of new city parks as part of the South Auditorium urban renewal project, and it was decided to name them after early pioneers who had staked out the original settler land claims in what's now downtown Portland. There were three of these guys: Asa Lovejoy, Francis Pettygrove, and Stephen Coffin. Let's see if you can guess which of the three isn't honored with a city park or anything else being named after him. Not because he was a notably bad person, but because "Coffin Park" just really, really doesn't sound good.
In any case, the very latest in the naming situation came back in August of ths year, when the city asked the public for suggestions, explaining that the kinds of names they were looking for should:
• reflect and inspire the community • honor Native and Indigenous communities • are symbolic or significant • create a sense of community and inclusion • are future facing and imagine a Portland for all
So it's possible there's already a new name in the works and they just haven't announced it yet. Or maybe voters approving a complete revamp of how city government works threw a wrench into the works, since city bureaus won't be under individual commissioners anymore. Maybe it seemed better to leave the renaming until after the revamp happens. Or maybe they just didn't get any good suggestions and aren't sure where to go from here.
Before they announced that process, I had taken a look at old county survey records to see if there were any interesting (and non-murdery) historical names associated with the area that might at least be inoffensive enough to make it through . There were a couple that might work, but nothing really stood out, and none of those would really "honor Native and Indigenous communities", and I really like that idea. So I kicked that research down to a footnote in case they do rename the streets someday, or maybe if the neighborhood gets a second park someday and it needs a name.
Or, I dunno, if the city can't come up with a good, appropriate name, maybe we should just leave it as "A Park" forever, like the old generic brand items stores used to carry in the 1970s and 1980s, the ones with the white label and black letters that just said "Lima Beans" or "Beer" or whatever was inside. (Apparently this practice still exists in Canada, except the labels are yellow, metric, and bilingual.) I mean, if it works for lima beans, why can't it work for a whole city park?
So that's about all I've got on the name front, but I did run across a few news items and historical odds and ends along the way, so there they are mostly-chronologically:
- 1959: the city decided it maybe ought to rent some port-a-potties for this and a few other parks for Little League games, so people wouldn't have to go find a bush during the 7th inning stretch. It must have been an exceedingly slow news day. This is the first mention of the park in the newspaper, though it had existed for five years at that point.
- 1962: the city must have installed actual restrooms shortly afterward, as local residents were annoyed, though, as in the immediate wake of the Columbus Day Storm the restrooms had power restored before their houses did.
- A couple of sorta-vintage photos of the park from 1963 and 1975, looking about the same as now but with smaller trees and vintage cars.
- Things got pretty exciting here in July 1969, when the park hosted a city-sponsored "Flower Children Carnival". The blurb describes it: "Featured will be booths, rides, and tennis golf, a game created by Park Bureau staffer Neil Owens.". I can't tell if it was aimed at kids or hippies, reading that.
- A longer and snarkier item in the Journal about the same event,
Your city has not forgotten you, flower children. Wednesday from 1 to 5 pm your very own “Flower Children Carnival” is scheduled at Custer Park, SW 21st Ave. and Capitol Hill Road. It will be sponsored by the City of Portland Bureau of Parks and Public Recreation.
See, you ARE loved, after all!
They’ll have booths to test your skill, to go fishing, and many others. Amusement rides will be bountiful… such as the caterpillar-covered merry-go-round, the slide tunnel and others.
There will even be a putt-putt for those who get their jollies from tennis golf (a game created by Neil Owens of the Park Bureau staff).
So, as the park folks say in their announcement, “all beautiful people gather and come to Custer Park” Wednesday. (Don’t take that “beautiful” part too literally — you’re all invited.) - A crafting for kids event in 1972
- June 1973, in another city-sponsored event, the park hosted a performance by a traveling mime troupe, which would include their original adaptation of "The Red Balloon". Because 1973. I got to see the original in grade school a couple of times, I guess on the theory that kids love anything containing balloons. Watching it in 2022 as an adult, it just makes me think of all the marine life harmed by eating balloons that drifted out to sea and deflated, and the planet rapidly running out of helium.
- A 1976 letter to the editor, in which a visitor from Madras, OR complained about people not cleaning up after their dogs in the park.
- A late 1990s neighborhood conflict over a longtime unofficial right-of-way into the park from the north. It seems residents thought it was public property, but it wasn't, and the new owner closed it as part of a renovation project. A followup said he'd had a change of heart & wanted to work with the neighborhood association on restoring some sort of access, though a 2000 subdivision plat for that spot doesn't show an easement, and I didn't see a path on Street View or by walking past where I imagine it would have been if it still existed. So who knows.
A while back I took a look at county survey records to see if maybe there were any historical names -- of the non-murdery variety this time -- associated with the area that might work as a replacement. So the first attempted subdivision of the area was in 1891, when the land around the park was platted as "Ma Belle Park". Evidently that didn't take off, and it was vacated piece by piece starting around 1916. Still, it has "Park" right there in the name, so "Ma Belle Park" might work. The same area was later re-subdivided as "Raz Hill" starting in March 1927, expanded in December 1945 mostly south and east of the park, with a smaller "Raz Estates" to the north.
Next to Raz Estates an "Alpine View" was platted in 1957. Portland doesn't have have an "Alpine View Park" so that might work too, though it sounds a bit generic, and someone ought to check on a sunny day and verify there's still is an alpine view from the park, as that could have changed in the last 65 years. "Raz Park" would make sense too; not only were they the previous landowners before suburbia got here, but were later involved in the creation of nearby Stephens Creek Nature Park. Though in general I think we're better served by not naming anything after people for a while. The oldest regular land survey I see for the area is from 1871, just the 10th survey registered with Multnomah County. It's just a brief handwritten note though, adn the handwriting is fairly illegible, so no luck there. A 1920 road survey, in which today's Capitol Hill Road was surveyed as County Road #876, called the area due south of here "Latourette", centered roughly on where the Barbur Safeway stands now. That may have just been the name for a streetcar stop and not a neighborhood; either way it was probably someone's name and again, name moratorium.
Several more survey records in connection with building the new subdivision in the early 1950s. The first, in 1952, calls the area the "Raz tract", while a 1954 revision vacated a few of the roads proposed earlier, and another tweak a few months later shows a "Proposed Park", half the size of the current park. After that, my guess would be someone realized that a park just big enough for a Little League diamond is going to result in a lot of errant fly balls through windows and made the park bigger.
Wednesday, December 28, 2022
Graffiti, SE 8th & Woodward
This photoset is just some graffiti on a midcentury warehouse in industrial SE Portland. It's not part of a wider project, and it also isn't social commentary about anything at all. I just happened to notice it when I was in the right mood and liked the combination of the aggregate texture with the dark grey glossy paint (probably over previous graffiti) and then the purple and hot pink graffiti layered on top of that, and the fact that it got this way thru a completely adversarial series of events. I don't think anyone involved was going for a "look", including whoever added the latest color bits, which are strictly low-end, so-and-so-was-here stuff.
If I've sold you on the look, or at least the idea of it, and you want to go see for yourself, or maybe you think it would appeal to anonymous art collectors and money launderers in Zurich or Dubai, and you're about to send in your jackhammer goon squad, er, street art extraction team, you're probably out of luck. I took these photos months ago and (although I haven't gone back to check) it just stands to reason that it's been painted over at least once since then, with who knows what. And (as far as I know) the technology doesn't exist yet to pick apart all the paint layers to be framed and sold separately, as incredibly lucrative as that would be.
At that point my brain went off on a tangent and dreamed up a Next Generation episode on that theme, and I don't have any more material for this post, so I might as well tell you what it is. Ok, so the Enterprise shows up at the planet of the week, which has two long-warring continents. At one point centuries ago the forces of continent A captured a priceless painting belonging to continent B, and a completely different but equally priceless masterpiece was then painted on top of the original out of pure spite, and it's been a major bone of contention ever since. Picard volunteers to have Geordi separate the two paintings with the transporter, both completely unharmed, which is obviously very delicate work and might involve remodulating the phase inverters or some such. Continent A's national museum curator (a very aggravating person) reluctantly agrees, and it seems to go well at first, but right at the end a transporter accident turns both paintings to piles of dust, or so it appears. A major diplomatic incident ensues, and the locals arrest Geordi or maybe Picard, and a renewed global war looms. Closer investigation reveals a second transporter beam, traced to offworld art thieves in league with the curator, and the crew has to perform an even trickier transporter thing to get both paintings back unharmed, like somehow beaming them out of a sealed cargo hold on a cloaked ship at warp 8, swapping them out for other paintings of exactly equal mass without the subterfuge being detected. Maybe a quick Raiders of the Lost Ark in-joke happens at this point, seeing as they're both Paramount franchises. The crew pulls it off, the thieves' ship is last seen entering Orion Syndicate territory, still unaware of the swap, and everyone else lives happily ever. Right at the end we learn the replacements were a velvet Elvis and a painting of dogs playing poker, both from Riker's personal collection.
Friday, December 23, 2022
Path of Bliss
Next up we have another -- yes, another -- street mural at an intersection in inner SE Portland. This one's at SE 19th & Clinton St., and I had no idea it existed until I stumbled across it literally yesterday. (To clarify, for fellow pedants: Encountering it for the first time yesterday is literal; the part about stumbling is strictly figurative.). This one is supposed be sort of a mandala design, and the intersection where it's located is right outside the New Day School, an alternative grade school based on the ideas of P.R. Sarkar, 20th century Indian philosopher.
I think I missed this one until now because it was first painted in 2017 (per this blog post), after I had finished most of the street mural posts here and moved on to other things. It was repainted in June 2019, the summer before COVID-19 arrived. Street murals going un-repainted since then seems to be very common, whether out of an abundance of residual caution, or lack of volunteers, or maybe people are just tired of performing civility and pretending to like their neighbors. Who knows.
Thursday, December 22, 2022
South Roadside Falls
So this post marks one of those extremely rare occasions where I actually wrap up a series of posts, without leaving any unfinished ones forgotten in Drafts or letting the project scope creep out of control so it can never finish at all. Or at least that will be true assuming I can get this one finished. This series covers a group of mostly-nameless seasonal waterfalls along the Sandy River stretch of the Historic Columbia River Highway. To recap, this was part of a mid-pandemic effort to find obscure and less-visited places to go, in order to get outside while avoiding all other human beings to the greatest possible degree. That worked out really well in a lot of places but not here, exactly, as people kept stopping to take photos of whatever I was taking photos of. Ok, technically it happened twice. So far we've had a look at:
- Keanes Creek Falls, the southernmost of the five
- City Limit Falls, the northernmost of the bunch
- North Roadside Falls, continuing south from there
- Middle Roadside Falls, apparently the tallest one, if you trust my math and map-point-picking skills
And this one finishes the set, unless you count a couple of others that are so seasonal that they only seem to run literally in the middle of big winter storms. Which to me just doesn't seem worth pursuing.
Heightwise, given the top (167.75' / 162.25') and bottom (61.45' / 61.22'), the math says it's around 100.8 - 106.5 feet high. Which, possibly.
You might notice that the highway shoulder is especially wide along this stretch of road. It turns out the stretch of riverbank through here is a small Metro-owned public park, and it's here to provide public river access, specifically public fishing access. There aren't any signs around that say this, but there's plenty of room to park, and usually a car or truck or two parked here, so I guess enough people find out about the place by word of mouth. This is actually not the only spot like this; depending on whose map you look at there are either three (lettered A thru C) or five (numbered 1-5) of them, all on the east bank of the Sandy, and located between the Stark St. & Troutdale bridges.
And if this doesn't sound like a very Metro thing to do, you're absolutely right; these sites were part of the old Multnomah County park system before Metro absorbed it in 1994, and you can check out a 2008 post of mine for more than you probably care to know about that whole thing. I couldn't find any info on when the county may have purchased these places, the closest data point I have is a
a March 1963 Oregonian article about the county's ambitious new parks plan, with a map showing roughly where the county's new parks would be. Their focus at the time was on adding neighborhood parks to serve then-unincorporated parts of the county, and the only ones, current or proposed, east of the Sandy would have been neighborhood playground-type ones in the Springdale and Corbett areas. The river access parcels aren't mentioned and don't appear on the map, so either the county hadn't bought them yet, or river access fell under a separate budget category or a whole different department and didn't count.
As I understand it, the rationale behind these fishing spots is that the Sandy might be the best river for salmon in the region, and the stretch between the two bridges is possibly the best part of the river, and it would be undemocratic to have it limited people who can afford to own a boat, or build a house on the river. For many years the state prohibited fishing from boats anywhere upstream of the Stark St. bridge for similar reasons, the idea being boaters had an unfair advantage over people fishing on the riverbank when both were allowed. So when the state pushed the no-boats boundary back four miles to Oxbow Park in December 1987, some people reacted like democracy itself was being eroded in favor of rich people always getting whatever they want. And who knows, maybe that really was an early symptom on the way to January 6th 2021. This happened in the middle of the Reagan-Bush era, when a lot of little things like this happened, so the timing's spot on, at least.
Anyway, here's the list, starting here and heading downstream:
- Unit C (1.21 acres, aka unit 4) is where we're at now. If I'm reading it right, a 2007 iFish forum post is saying this place is called "The Willows" out in the real world.
- Unit 5 is not actually river access, but two tiny pieces of land on the waterfall side of the road, 0.11 and 0.01 acres respectively, with the larger one possibly including the falls we came here to look at. For anyone who missed the wrong day in grade school weights and measures class, one one-hundredth of an acre is equal to about 344 square feet, equivalent to an 18.5' square.
- As for unit 2? Maps that have the sites numbered it show it as a long and extremely skinny bit of riverbank, roughly the whole stretch between City Limit Falls and North Roadside Falls, while maps that give the sites letters don't show this one at all, and PortlandMaps has it listed as private property, so I'm not sure what's going on here. I think the forum post from above is saying this area goes by "Duck Hole", unless maybe the highway speed limit signs have moved around since 2007. Google seems to think it's a popular place, or at least one that gets talked about a lot, so I dunno. I guess my point here is that if you want to know more about it (and what the legal situation is, etc.) your best bet is to go ask someone who actually knows what they're talking about, because I sure don't.
- Unit B (0.43 acres, aka unit 3) is further downstream, right around the (relatively) busy intersection of the Columbia River Highway & Woodard Road. Thing is, there's not really anywhere to park around this one, and there are several "No Parking" signs are posted on both streets just in case anyone even thinks about trying it. So this one may be more of a locals-only thing. Or maybe it isn't a thing at all; I am absolutely clueless about the fish situation here, and you're on your own for that.
- And finally there's Unit A (0.1 acres, aka unit 1), which may have been public access at one point but is now home to a boat launch for the Multnomah County Sheriff's River Patrol, accessed from a shared driveway to the south that's clearly posted No Trespassing. Given what the river patrol does, and the kind of river the Sandy is, the place is probably haunted too. I mean, if you believe in that sort of thing, and I'm not saying I do.
Tuesday, December 20, 2022
Middle Roadside Falls
Continuing from the previous post, a short walk or drive south on the Columbia River Highway brings us to the next seasonal waterfall. "Middle Roadside Falls", which is another of the 'meh' names I made up just so I'd have some titles for blog posts. This one might be the tallest of the five waterfalls in the area, assuming you trust any of the height numbers I've been coming up with, which I'm not sure I do. The top (189.14' - 198.31') and bottom (64.93' - 86.06') points I came come up with once again give a height number that seems to be on the high side. As in 100-130 feet high, or technically 103.08 - 133.38, although I doubt the second decimal place is significant. I guess what I'm trying to figure out is whether my LIDAR-assisted guessing is any more accurate than the old-fashioned kind, and what I'm doing wrong if it isn't.
On the subject of whether to believe state GIS systems, the unnamed stream here (like the others nearby) appears on a state map of barriers to migratory fish. Which is technically true, but the entry here is just for the long culvert under the street, with no mention at all of the maybe-130' waterfall about a foot or two upstream of the pipe. So if anyone's divvying up habitat grant money sight unseen based on that dataset, it could lead to some really odd projects getting approved. At least the map has you click through a EULA first, agreeing that the data comes "as is" and isn't guaranteed to be accurate or complete or useful for any purpose whatsoever, which I guess is nice because nobody ever clicks though EULAs without reading them.
(The same dataset insists there's an 8' waterfall on Johnson Creek just west of Bell Ave. in Milwaukie, complete with a midcentury fish ladder, that as far as I can tell doesn't actually exist. But I haven't yet gone looking for it in person, and I may need to go do that just to be extra sure.)
North Roadside Falls
In the previous post we made a quick visit to "City Limit Falls" (a name I just made up), one of about five seasonal waterfalls you'll see right along the Columbia River Highway as it heads south out of Troutdale. Continuing south from there brings us to the middle trio of the five, which occur within sight of each other on a 0.2 mile stretch of the road. Inconveniently the middle three don't have names or much in the way of distinguishing features, so these photos got hung up in Drafts for months while I figured out what to call them. Which is a really dumb problem to have, so I'm not going to bore you going on about it. The important thing is that we're visiting "North Roadside Falls" this time around. The name describes the location, and (to me) "Roadside" also has an air of "roadside attraction" which kind of fits because of a weird phenomenon I noticed: Normally people just drive on through here on their way to the big tourist spots, but if you stop and people see you standing there taking photos, they'll stop and take photos too. Or at least it's happened to me a couple of times. I dunno, maybe I just look like I know what I'm doing, and people think if they don't stop where the experts do they'll miss out on the full Gorge tourist experience. Ok, that or I'm drawing a lot of unjustified conclusions from a sample size of two. And your mileage may vary, obviously.
But if people will stop if they see you taking photos, maybe they'll also stop for actors pretending to take photos and then decide they need a cup of your "famous" hot cocoa or lemonade or maybe a hot dog from your stand nearby. And maybe pick up a commemorative shot glass or spoon from your gift shop next door for their display case back home, and while they're occupied you slap a bumper sticker on their RV and they proceed to drive around the country proudly advertising your cozy little tourist trap. And more tourists come, and you put in a motel, and a petting zoo, and you light the falls at night, and add a pump system so they don't dry up in the summer, and you put the kids thru college that way. But then they're off doctoring and lawyering and succeeding generally and don't want to take over the family business, so after a while you sell the place and retire to Florida, and the new owners let it go to seed and eventually burn it all down for the insurance money and do 6-10 years in the state pen for it, and I've completely forgotten where I was going with this idea.
Anyway, as in the previous post, I looked at the state LIDAR map to try to figure out how tall this one is. Given a top point somewhere between 132.53' and 152.59' above sea level, and a base in the 62.47' - 79.21' range, that comes to, er, 53.32' - 90.12', which is broad enough to be almost meaningless. I think the 79.21' number is an outlier for the base as most of the other height measurements around that point are more like 64'. And yet, a height somewhere in the 70'-90' range seems way too tall again, even knowing that we're only looking at the bottom part of the thing from street level. So who knows, really.
Monday, December 19, 2022
City Limit Falls
Ok, so back in May of last year I did a post about Keanes Creek Falls, one of the little seasonal waterfalls along the Sandy River stretch of the old Columbia River Highway. (Specifically, the one across from where the old Tippy Canoe dive bar used to be.) I mentioned in passing that it was the southernmost of about five waterfalls along a 0.6 mile stretch of the road, and it should come as no surprise to anyone that I decided I had to go back and visit the others. Which I did, so (after the usual delays) here we are at another of them.
Now, the problem with this sort of mini-project is that blog posts need titles, but none of these waterfalls seem to have names, and the creeks they're on also don't have names. So I figured I'd have to make up some nicknames for them just to tell them apart. Which is the hard part, of course; there's an old tech industry saying dad joke that the two genuinely hard problems in Computer Science are cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.
In any case, here we are at the northernmost of the five, which happens to be just a few feet outside, or possibly inside, of the current (as of December 2022) Troutdale city limit along the old highway. That seems to be the only landmark nearby so I went with "City Limit Falls" for this one. Google seems to think there aren't any other waterfalls by that name anywhere on Earth, which may be a clue that it's a dumb name. For one thing, the name instantly becomes wrong if the city limit ever moves. But hey, I just need titles for a few blog posts, I'm not trying to be Columbus or anything.
For a little context on what's going on here, this stretch of the highway runs along a narrow bit of floodplain with the Sandy River one one side and near-vertical basalt cliffs on the other, generally about 150'-250' high. Those cliffs are actually the eroded west side of Chamberlain Hill, an old volcano that's part of the same Boring Lava Field as Portland's Mt. Tabor and Kelly Butte. Above the vertical edges the mountain is mostly gentle rolling farmland, with a steeper cone at the 909' summit. Note that you can't actually visit the top; the road that seems to go to there ends in a cluster of gated driveways, as you can see on Street View here. So you should probably ignore the auto-generated Peakbagger and Lists of John pages about the place. The key point right now is that it rains a lot here, and rain that falls on the west side of the hill has to go off a cliff to get to the Sandy River. This particular creek has carved sort of a north-facing grotto so it doesn't get a lot of direct sunlight even in late afternoons, and it's harder to see from the road than some of the others. You catch a glimpse of it heading south but there's nowhere to park when you're going that direction. Heading north there's room for about one car to park on the shoulder, though you won't really see the waterfall until it's in your rear view mirror going that way. So if you want a good look at this one, you sort of have to study a map and plan it out ahead of time. Honestly it's probably easier to walk or bike this one, though admittedly I haven't actually tried that.
I don't have any fun facts to share about this one, so I guess the next order of business is to figure out how tall it is. I'm not very good at just looking at things and guessing, and I don't own any climbing gear or surveying equipment to measure it either of those ways. But I do know my way around the state LIDAR map fairly well, so we'll see what we can come up with that way. The map has a "Bare Earth Slope (degrees)" layer, where the steepest terrain is coded as white and flattest is a dark grey. So the trick is to find the river/creek/stream you're interested in, then squint at the map and find the points where it becomes very steep and then flattens out again, and and take those as our top and base. Each point on the map has several elevation numbers, up to around 10-12 of them; then the slope at a given point is derived from those altitude numbers with a bit of simple calculus, which you fortunately don't need to compute on your own. For the overall height, take the highest and lowest elevation from both points (124.77' and 117.37' for the top point and 68.06' and 61.54' for the base), then do a little subtraction, and that gives you a range. Sounds easy, right? The only problem (which may not be a problem at all) is that this consistently produces numbers that are quite a bit higher than what I come up with standing at the base and guessing (which -- as I keep saying -- I am notoriously bad at). As in, I get around 50-60 feet (49.31' - 63.23' to be precise) from the map and would not have guessed over 25-30' here. I'm not sure where the discrepancy is creeping in; maybe the map numbers are absolutely spot on, and you just can't see the very top of the falls due to the angle. Or the point I picked as the top is somewhere above the real top and I'm picking up extra height that way. I'm honestly not sure.
Sunday, December 04, 2022
Upper Perdition Falls
Back in October of last year (2021), I did a post about Perdition Falls, which is an unofficial name for the seasonal waterfall just to the right of Multnomah Falls. In that post I briefly mentioned something about there being another smaller waterfall on the same creek, just upstream and right next to the long-closed Perdition Trail. The trail closure means there's no legal way to visit the upper falls in person. It didn't occur to me that they might be visible from below, at least. But I happened to be at Multnomah Falls last week for lunch and as soon as I got out of my car some dusty weird corner of my brain went "Wait a minute, what's that?". There's really no mistaking it once you know it's there, and as a bonus that makes it easy to tell where the old trail was (and still is, unofficially).
The mildly weird part is that I don't recall ever seeing it before. This is only mildly weird, because my powers of observation are... a bit off. So it's entirely possible I've seen it regularly for years and it just sort of never registered somehow. But it also may have been completely hidden by trees before the 2017 fire, and it seems as though you can only see it from the I-84 parking lot and not from any closer, and I can probably come up with even more excuses if I have to.
In any case, I think I've located the falls on the state LIDAR map right around here, and I used the latitude & longitude from that placemark to create the embedded Google Map here, for anyone who has, I dunno, rocket boots and can get there without using the trail. The advanced technique of clicking around the area on the LIDAR map and guessing what spots might the top and bottom of the falls gives me height numbers in the 20-40 foot range most of the time, with the wide error bar completely due to the human in the loop.
The original dataset has latitude & longitude numbers out to a whopping eleven digits, which I actually had to trim down to six to make Google Maps happy. Which got me wondering just what these decimal places mean in terms of physical distance. One degree latitude comes to about 69 nautical miles, or 111.1 km, anywhere in the world, while the length of one degree longitude varies by latitude: It's the same 111.1 km at the equator, but around 79km at the 45th parallel, and a bit shorter than that in the gorge (the number eventually goes to zero at the poles). Going with the latitude number, one decimal place is 1/10 degree, or 11.1km, while a change in the sixth decimal place is 11.1cm. At eleven decimal places (or 10^-11 degrees), a change in the last digit is a distance of 1111 nanometers, which just so happens to be about one wavelength of near-infrared light of the type typically used in LIDAR. So while 11 digits looks impressive, I'm not sure how many of those are actual significant digits.
So I stumbled off a Google tangent at that point, as I tend to do, so here's a short list of links mostly about lasers that I'm not even going to try to relate back to the subject of this post.
- Slides from a Portland State geography class explaining how airborne LIDAR works, aimed at people who might be using the data later in the term.
- A 2018 paper calculates theoretical accuracy limits for LIDAR in self-driving cars, and comes up with something around 0.1mm.
- A 2019 paper proposes that better resolution can be achieved by ditching the lasers in favor of spooky quantum magic with entangled photons.
- Which in turn leads to Wikipedia articles about things like quantum metrology (which LIGO might use someday) and quantum lithography (which might be used in chipmaking someday)
- A paper about a specialized Leica camera designed for LIDAR applications. This particular model was from way back in 2011, so it's useful information in case they start showing up at Goodwill or something.
- There seems to be a lot of overlap between LIDAR vendors and major defense contractors, so you're always just a few clicks away from stuff like this article. One of the lesser-known Geneva conventions from the 1970s bans using lasers to blind people, and another bans any weapons that cause 'undue suffering'. The article argues that there's a way around these unfortunate legal obstacles, which is to use a laser powerful enough to instantly vaporize whoever it's used on, so they don't suffer first. And no suffering means there's no problem and you can go around lasering people to your heart's delight. Of course those lasers don't actually exist yet, not in airborne form at least, so (as usual) a massive federal research program is needed in order to bring this inspiring dream to life.
Saturday, November 26, 2022
Rowena Plateau, June 2022 (II)
As promised in part I back in August, here are more photos from the Nature Conservancy preserve at Rowena, OR, taken back in June around the tail end of desert wildflower season. These were taken with an old Sony DSLR from Goodwill and a couple of equally old Sony/Minolta lenses, including a 50mm macro lens that I've decided I'm a huge fan of. If there's a trick to taking sorta-ok macro photos, without a tripod, on a windy day in the Gorge, I guess it would be to just take a ton of photos to boost the odds you'll get some decent ones between wind gusts. If I was actually trying to make money off this stuff it would probably help to find a really pretentious way to phrase that, maybe some mumbo-jumbo about the zen of inhabiting the still spaces inside the wind, and offer to teach people how to do that in expensive multi-day workshops. If only I could say all that with a straight face, and I was more of a people person, and also unscrupulous.
In any case, I unfortunately don't have an ID on the beetle in the first couple of photos. You can kind of make out that it has tiny hairs on its thorax that pick up pollen as it wanders around this arrowleaf balsamroot flower, sipping on nectar (or eating pollen, or whatever it's doing.) It seems reasonable to guess that some pollination happens while it goes about its business.
But I haven't seen anything in writing saying the plant is pollinated by such-and-such beetle. I did run across a 2005 study on the pollination needs of the plant. It notes that essentially no previous studies had been done on pollination for the whole balsamroot genus, but then zooms in on the habits of a couple of native bee species and never mentions beetles at all. The study was motivated by practical concerns, namely an interest in growing balsamroot seed commercially, as the plant seems to be good for habitat restoration, and both livestock and wildlife seem to think it's delicious. There are already other seed crops that rely on native bees, such as Eastern Washington's alfalfa seed industry and its dependence on alkali bees, so maybe it just seemed natural to focus on that and not the care and feeding of some weird desert beetle. And admittedly this beetle didn't seem to be in any great hurry to buzz away to the next flower, which helps if you want photos, not so much if you're an international seed conglomerate and your CEO needs a new yacht.
So we're at a dead end regarding beetles, but a Forest Service info page about the plant has a couple of other unrelated nuggets. First, it describes the flowers as "bigger than a silver dollar but smaller than a CD; about the size of a small floppy disk", which is overly wordy but gives you a strong clue as to the age of the author. Later, toward the end when it describes the plant's culinary and medicinal uses, it says cryptically that "The root could be used as a coffee substitute", without elaborating any further. A page at Eat The Planet repeats the claim, as do a lot of other search results, but nobody on the whole wide internet says whether the resulting beverage is regular or decaf. Which to me is the one key detail about anything described as a coffee substitute. No caffeine and it's just another way to make hot water taste bitter, which is not so interesting. Either way, the public deserves answers.
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