Pics: Vista House from Portland Womens Forum

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A few of my attempts at the ur-prototypical Oregon tourist photo, "Vista House from Portland Womens Forum State Park".

I really don't see a need to do a full-on informational post about the place, since it's a contender for the least obscure location in the whole state. That's probably why I didn't bother doing a post about the place at all until now.

Then I was rifling through my photosets on Flickr and saw these, and figured, you know, these would look ok on the ol' humble blog, probably. So voila, here they are.

photo friday hits the road

Yep, it's time for yet another batch of flowers and berries and leaves, this time from a few spots around the Columbia Gorge. The first 5 pics are from along the trail at Hamilton Mountain, on the Washington side near Beacon Rock. The next two are from Portland Womens' Forum State Park, and the last is from the Vista House on Crown Point. All three places are most famous for their broad panoramic vistas, but we're sticking with the small stuff today, because it's always good to have a theme, or so I've heard.

Dalton Point

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Wildflower Hikes at Dalton Point
• Rorippa curvipes at the Oregon Flora Image Project
• Impatiens capensis at the Consortium of Pacific Northwest Herbaria
• The July-August 2004 Northwest Native Plant Journal mentions it as an outstanding plant site.
• Also mentioned in the Summer 2004 Friends of the Columbia Gorge newsletter has a short list of native plants you might encounter here.
• A NorthwestJourney.com page says the Pale Swallowtail butterfly (Papilio eurymedon) may also be seen here.

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

• It's mentioned in a recent book about the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area Act and how it's changed the Gorge in recent decades.
• State regulations allow seasonal waterfowl hunting, which is uncommon for state parks, but I haven't seen internet mentions of anyone actually doing so.
• Someone's photo from here
• A wedding at Wahclella Falls that I ran across while digging through the intergoogles. Basically unrelated, but awww.

HCRH Milepost 35

Continuing east, the next HCRH milepost on this weird little project is number 35, which -- conveniently -- is located right at the day use area portion of Ainsworth State Park, which we (as in, this humble blog here and its vast and rapidly growing global audience) last visited wayyy back in 2007. This milepost is unfortunately a bit worse for wear right now, or at least it was when I took the photos, and this one might just be reinforced concrete spalling, and not being sideswiped by some bro in a Hellcat trying to drift through here.

The park itself has an easy half-mile loop nature trail for the whole family, and Trail 400 passes through here too. Via the 400, to the west it's about half a mile to the Horsetail Falls trail and maybe onward to points west. To the east it's about a mile to the little-known, little-used Dodson Trailhead near Exit 35, and from there it isn't far to the rather un-picturesque setting of milepost 36. Not really a highlight of the Gorge, but if you're looking for unusual hike ideas, this is definitely one of them. If nothing else, it's a good trail to keep in mind if outdoor social distancing ever comes back.

If you aren't up for any hiking at all, it's probably a good spot to just hang out and watch the trains go by, if you're into that sort of thing.

For the higher difficulty levels, this is also where you would start if you're doing the legendary slash infamous Mystery Trail, or becoming one of the few people to ever climb St. Peter's Dome, or taking on the Ainsworth Left ice climbing route.

The park also has an overnight camping section, which might be the closest public camping site to Portland, with the sole exception of Oxbow Park. It wasn't always like this; until the late 1970s or early 1980s, there were plenty of others: Lewis & Clark State Park on the Sandy River at Troutdale; Dabney SP a bit further upriver, and Dodge Park even further south and east. Also Rooster Rock; the summit of Larch Mountain; and possibly Wahkeena Falls, though I'm less sure about that one. The powers that be decided this was attracting the wrong sort of person: Young, drunk, and disorderly partiers for one thing, but also people with nowhere else to go, and even people who were in town for the summer doing seasonal farm work, back when East Multnomah County was still largely rural. So now it costs enough to keep the poors out, and time limits ensure it's not a good option for seasonal workers, who instead get to live in whatever lightly-regulated housing a farmer feels like providing, out of sight and mind, and away from polite society.

Another nearby turnout has a roadside drinking fountain, fed by an underground spring. The Ainsworth page at Recreating the Columbia River Highway seems to indicate this is actually a bit older than the park itself, since the park was created in 1933 and the fountain was part of a statewide Highway Commission project in the 1920s. I think the "Sunset Springs" one on US 26 heading to the Coast is another survivor of this project, as was the recently-discontinued one on the HCRH across from Dabney State Park. Unlike those two, this one doesn't seem to have legions of devotees who come regularly to fill their VW Buses with multiple carboys of pure spring water. I'm not sure why not, though all the fancy stonework around might make it difficult to convince yourself you've come across a fountain "that was not made / by the hand of man", as the song goes.

The area is a bit thin on nearby historical events, but here's what I've got this time around:

• For people planning their summer vacations, in June 1953 the Oregonian printed a list of state parks with a brief blurb about each. 46 acres, 37 miles east of Portland. U.S. 30, at the foot of St. Peter’s Dome. Ice-cold spring, footpaths, parking and picnic areas.
• With later additions the park now comes to 171.97 acres. At least that's the number I come up with by adding up everything labeled "Ainsworth State Park" in the State Land Inventory System. That total includes a separate chunk of 25.08 acres along the river, directly north of I-84 Exit 35 and the railroad, which doesn't seem to be accessible, except maybe by boat. ODOT's Right-of-Way map and blueprint for the park shows the original park and the 1963 expansion
• A month later (July 1953), an article about a land acquisition near Oneonta Creek mentioned a plan to somehow run a road up Oneonta Creek to Triple Falls, then cut over to Horsetail Creek to visit Ponytail Falls, rejoining the old highway somewhere near Ainsworth. I may have mentioned this proposal before; I keep coming across it when searching for other things, and it's just such a strange and alarming idea. I feel like I need to point out the bullets that were dodged when I run across them, I guess as a reminder that when a particular place or thing survives, that survival was often not automatic or guaranteed, and as inhabitants of the modern 21st century we are every bit as susceptible to harebrained schemes as our counterparts 50 or 100 years ago, and possibly even more so.
• The state started talking about expanding the park in 1963, with the land to be used as a campground, and the expansion eventually opened in 1968.
• October 1972 dueling pair of letters to the editor about the new campground. The first complains that the camping portion of the park was not natural enough and reminded them of a supermarket parking lot. The second letter, in response, claims to like it that way, insisting it's the nicest and cleanest state park around. I have never actually been to that part and have no personal opinion on the subject. Or, as real professional journalists like to say about everything, Both Sides Do It.
• April 1985 interview with the Portland regional administrator for Oregon State Parks about his big plans for Trail 400, which was (and still kinda-sorta is) supposed to cover the whole distance between Troutdale and Hood River. The segment between Ainsworth and Elowah Falls / Yeon State Park had recently opened, and the next steps he had in mind were 1.) a route around Tooth Rock, between Tanner Creek and Eagle Creek, which was probably going to be expensive. 2.) A four-mile trail between Bridal Veil Falls and Latourell Falls, passing above Shepperds Dell and giving new views of the falls there. This was gated on some key land acquisitions and of course funding. 3.) A trail segment between Portland Womens Forum and Crown Point, which also needed some land acquisitions or easements. Something akin to item 1 happened in the late 1990s as the first segment of the bike-oriented HCRH State Trail. That project made its way around Tooth Rock via a segment of the old highway, rather than dynamiting a new ledge into the rock for the trail to use, while the Trail 400 that was eventually built makes its way from Tanner to Eagle Creek via a different route, with switchbacks on either end to gain/lose altitude, and then a roughly east-west route through the maze of existing Forest Service and BPA access roads in the area between the two creeks.

HCRH Milepost 28

Ok, the next stop on our eastbound tour of HCRH Mileposts is number 28, as seen above. For anyone just joining this little adventure, this milepost marks 28 miles eastbound from downtown Portland, as measured from the corner of SW Washingon & Broadway, across the river on the old Stark St. Ferry, then across the eastside on Stark to the Sandy River, and then along the original Columbia River Highway route to here. And it's taking us a while because we're stopping every mile to look at another one of these things, and (since the mile markers themselves aren't that compelling to visit) I usually rattle off some trivia about what else is nearby.

So 28 miles puts us just west of the Bridal Veil area, and it's another case where I ended up just snapping a couple of photos while rolling by, since there's nowhere to park right next to it, and parking further away and then walking along the shoulder doesn't seem overly safe. I mean, taking photos while rolling past at 5mph isn't 100% safe either, nor do you get a lot of quality photos that way, but it seemed a bit better than the other options at the time. The milepost itself was intact last time I checked, so -- as usual -- let's take a quick peek at what's in the surrounding area:

Roughly across the street and downhill from the milepost is a large house that looks for all the world like a plantation house from the deep South. This is not a common architectural style in the Northwest, and the reason it looks that way is because it was originally built to be a fried chicken restaurant. No, seriously. That was the big national food trend around the time the old highway opened, and it was kind of a special occcasion dish and not something most people made at home a lot, so several chicken dinner places opened along the old highway, enough that you needed a sort of theme to stand out from the crowd. The Chanticleer Inn (located where Portland Womens Forum State Park is now) obviously had the view as a big selling point, while Forest Hall here went for genteel Southernness. Patrons were asked to call ahead and make reservations, and the restaurant bragged (in a genteel sort of way) that they had an actual black chef who had moved here from Kentucky, and dinner at Forest Hall was the real deal. (Now imagine if the road had opened a century later, in 2016: The road would be lined with cutesy little cafes selling twee artisanal cupcakes, and very few of them would have survived the pandemic.)

Later on, in the 1940s, the restaurant changed hands and was called the Maxwell House for a while, named for the owners and not the long-gone grand hotel in Nashville, TN or the national ground coffee brand named after the hotel, though the name sort of referenced them in a way you couldn't get away with now, in the modern era of advanced global trademark policing. I don't know if the owners meant to reference this, but the Nashville hotel was also famous for hosting the first national meeting of the Ku Klux Klan in 1867, and long story short there was no limit to how problematic a simple chicken dinner could be in those days^[1]. You still see still occasional news reports of white racists trying to harrass black people with sneering references to fried chicken or watermelon, which is just about the least effective racial insult I can imagine. The harrassers always think they're being so bigly and threatening, but outside their little cultural bubble they just come off as jealous they weren't invited to the cookout, and have to go home to another plate of microwave hot pockets or a big glop of mayonnaise casserole.

Anyway, the most important thing to know about all this is that the building is now a private residence, and has been for years, so don't go knocking on doors and poking around as if it not being a restaurant is negotiable somehow.^[2]

Also nearby (and frankly the one big attraction of this mile of the road) is Bridal Veil Falls State Park, which is home to the namesake waterfall, and the overlook trail, and the "Pillars of Hercules"^[3]. The latter is a group of eroded basalt columns that you can see from the overlook, and (unofficially) from below too, while avoiding speeding trains that pass very close to the otherwise climbable rocks. I gather that rock climbers do this all the time, though that's not much of a data point as to whether it's a good idea or not.

There are another couple of large waterfalls further upstream on Bridal Veil Creek, but we'll get to those in the next post, since visiting them currently involves a trip up Palmer Mill Road, which begins near the next milepost up the road.

There's a historic HCRH bridge (albeit one of the lesser ones), a Union Pacific railroad bridge (just as utilitarian as all the others), and the few surviving remnants of the of the old sawmill that was here from the early 1880s to the early 1990s.

On the private sector side, Bridal Veil Lakes (a wedding venue) is somewhere up Henderson Road, while Bridal Veil Lodge (a bed-and-breakfast) is right across the street from the Bridal Veil state park's parking lot. And I guess that's about it for this edition, except for all the footnotes.

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footnote(s)

1. Years ago I lived in a small-ish town where I shared a first and last name with one of the few local dentists. He didn't list a 24-hour contact number for his office, so every now and then people would find me in the white pages and call at all hours thinking they were calling their dentist at home. I would try to explain they had a wrong number and I was not a dentist, much less their dentist, nor I did not have their dentist's private home number handy. That was usually the end of the conversation, but I remember a few trying to haggle, like they thought I could be persuaded to drive to a stranger's house at 3am with a pair of pliers and maybe a small hammer, and, obviously, no novocaine, to yoink their bad tooth. My point is, I don't know the current residents of the house, but you should assume they're about as likely to fry you a chicken dinner as I am to have a go at your bum tricuspid.
2. Further along the local spectrum of problematic-ness was the "[racial slur] Chicken Inn", a notorious restaurant chain that doubled and quintupled down on crude racial caricatures as their entire theme. And yes, there was a Portland location (and a Seattle one), and yes, they were hugely popular for decades, right up until sometime in the mid-1950s when society hit one of those cultural tipping points and the really overt racist stuff just wasn't respectable anymore. Kind of like the moment around 2020 when Confederate statues and monuments finally stopped being respectable, although the new orange president is doing everything he possibly can to roll that back. Not long after the Portland location closed, the building was stripped of its... decor (which hopefully nobody kept as a memento), and Clyde's Prime Rib moved in, and has been there ever since, since prime rib plus live jazz never really goes out of style, or at least it hasn't in 70 years. At whatever point the city eventually hits the 90% vegan + EDM-only threshold they might need to re-imagine the place a bit.
3. The original Pillars of Hercules are, of course, the giant rocks standing on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar in Greek mythology, and marking the edge of the known world. The northern rock being the Rock of Gibraltar, and the southern one is... well, nobody seems to agree on that part, and maybe the Greeks just sort of assumed there was another Gibraltar on the other side and didn't bother checking, because if the mighty Hercules could create one pillar with his bare hands (and the myths differ on whether he created them or was just here performing mighty deeds in the neighborhood once upon a time) he could certainly create a second one, and as a proper civilized Greek he would feel obligated to make a matching pair for the sake of classical symmetry. I had this idea that the two pillars were supposed to be enchanted and would occasionally rush out and smash together, crushing any ships that happened to be between them. But no, I was thinking of the Clashing Rocks, or Symplegades, a completely different pair of rocks that were tasked with guarding the Bosporus, the strait that serves as a gateway to the Black Sea, and is now the center of present-day Istanbul. Also, the rocks were a danger to Jason and the Argonauts, and not Odysseus and his crew, who never went anywhere near the Bosporus. I mention all this because the local Pillars were so named because the original 1870s railroad tracks once passed through a narrow gap between two of the pillars until the tracks were moved in the 1890s or so, and I was about to make a dumb joke that the tracks were moved because the pillars got ornery and kept crushing trains as they passed through, and then a few years later a random commenter would notice and point out my mistake and laugh and tell the others, and the crowd of sneering Classicists would quickly get out of hand, and it would all be very embarrassing. So, sorry about the tangent, but I had my myths crossed for a bit, and it could happen to you too, so I figured a quick PSA was in order.

Palisade Falls

Next up we're paying a visit to one of the Columbia Gorge's most seen but least visited waterfalls. If you're barreling along on I-84, as you pass the Crown Point area you might notice a waterfall tumbling down a cliff immediately east of the Vista House (unless it's late summer, when it usually dries up). That waterfall apparently doesn't have an official USGS-approved name, but often goes by "Palisade Falls", and is sometimes called "Crown Point Falls" for obvious reasons.

Until quite recently I thought Palisade Falls was completely inaccessible. There's no freeway exit for it like there is for Multnomah Falls. Nor is there a trail down to the top of the falls from the adjacent Vista House or anywhere nearby, and in fact the whole area above the falls is closed to all entry, with very stern but occasionally ignored No Trespassing signs seemingly every few feet. There also isn't a side road there, or an official trail that officially goes there, and I had never seen any photos of it up close, or even read about anyone going there. The only thing near the base of the falls is a railroad line, and it hasn't had an Amtrak route since 1997 when the Pioneer was discontinued, so I figured the only way to get a closer look would be to switch careers, join the Union Pacific Railroad, eventually get assigned to runs through the Gorge (which I imagine requires lots of seniority), and then catch occasional blurry glimpses of it while whooshing past at very-fast-by-USA-standards speeds.

A few weeks ago I was searching for something unrelated (and I don't recall what it was now) and ran across a 2016 OregonHikers forum thread with a couple of photos from right at the base of the falls, looking up. I'd wondered about this roughly since I was old enough to read a map, so it was a foregone conclusion that I was going to do whatever they did and go see for myself.

So the deal is that there is a trail there, or most of the way there. But it doesn't start where you'd think, and there is absolutely zero signage or any other indication that it goes anywhere interesting. If you're doing the standard tourist route along the old Columbia River Highway, Portland Womens Forum State Park is the place you stop for 5-10 minutes and take photos of the Vista House and the gorge, facing east. While you're doing that, directly behind you there's a locked gate, and behind it a gravel road meanders down toward the river. A trail detours around the gate, but no signs indicate where the trail goes, what it's called, or why you might want to go that direction, and I imagine upwards of 99.9% of visitors just ignore the whole thing. Turns out this is a very old road (by non-indigenous Pacific Northwest standards), connecting the park area (which then hosted the Chanticleer Inn restaurant) with the rail line down by the river; OregonHikers has a field guide page about the hike, calling it the "Rooster Rock Wagon Road". I gather it also went by "Chanticleer Point Wagon Road", I suppose based on which direction you were wagoning. It seems that passenger trains would let you off at a long-vanished station down below, and a horse-drawn wagon (or eventually a car) would ferry you up the hill for an amazing view and a chicken dinner. I'm going to guess the view was priced into the chicken dinner, because some things never change in the tourist business.

I'm not sure when the rail stop was discontinued, but the Chanticleer Inn burned in 1930 and was never rebuilt, which would have eliminated the road's main reason for being. Still, the mostly-disused road wasn't officially closed off until the late 1980s. (I have a very vague recollection of noticing when the gate went in, and not realizing there was a road there until that point.) In the intervening time, the road was a popular spot if you needed to dump a stolen car or a safe you'd just cracked, and remnants survive off to the sides of the old road, from the body of a 1949 Studebaker to the dashboard of a 70s Porsche 911. A few are visible from the road, while others require side trips; I wasn't there for the vintage auto/true crime history (and was kind of creeped out by it, to be honest), so this photoset is not a comprehensive catalog of everything that's down there. Another OregonHikers thread has photos of several of the cars and two safes, for anyone who's curious about that particular angle on the place.

What I do have are photos of the road/trail (since probably most people have never seen it), along with another unnamed waterfall you'll encounter on the way down & back. There are a few views of the Vista House around the top end of the trail, and views looking up at Crown Point and Chanticleer Point from the bottom of the trail, and a mysterious (and fortunately open) gate part of the way down, and eventually the trail peters out at the railroad tracks, where you're greeted by an ambiguous hardware-store-grade "No Trespassing" sign, and below it a painting of Portland's Steel Bridge painted on (I think) scrap metal, possibly from one of the junked cars uphill from here. The two seemed to be guarding a side trail to the west that I wouldn't have noticed otherwise; I heeded what I figured the sign was advising me about and didn't investigate further. On the far side of the tracks and just west of where the trail ends, a railroad service road covers the short distance over to I-84 -- I think, I didn't go any further in that direction -- and from there you can presumably make your way to the obscure & little-used Young Creek Trailhead along one of the Rooster Rock offramps. A page at Recreating the HCRH indicates the road we're on continued along to a salmon cannery near Rooster Rock before the freeway came along, and a WyEast Blog post has a few 19th century photos of the area, one of which shows Palisade Falls flowing into idyllic Echo Bay (now separated from the river by I-84 and renamed "Mirror Lake").

Anyway, here we are at the end of the trail, but there's no waterfall in sight, nor are there any obvious eastbound trails with signs saying "This way to the waterfall". Now what? Now you parallel the railroad tracks heading east for a bit, maybe 1000 feet to 1/4 mile or so. Not on the tracks, obviously, and further away is better, obviously, and what it boils down to is that I really don't want to be responsible for anyone getting smooshed by a train or tasered by security guards or whatever, so let's agree that the last leg of the journey involves dense GPS-jamming fog, a bit of handwaving, and a conveniently located personal jetpack that may or may not still be there when you visit.

Ok, so having landed next to the falls and set the jetpack aside to cool off for a bit, we can finally get a good look at the waterfall. You soon realize it's just a small stream that sort of burbles its way down the cliff face, and the steep V-shaped ravine above the falls (the off-limits No Trespassing area I mentioned) extends most of the way down from Crown Point so the falls aren't actually that tall either. Still, it's a pleasant spot, and -- more to the point -- it's a pleasant spot that nobody you know has ever been to (unless they're semi-adventurous and have a very specific hobby we'll get to in a moment), so by visiting you can obtain valuable Internet Points just like I'm doing right now. Note however that if you're doing this for Instagram, mere nature photos without people in them don't cut it anymore (ask me how I know this). As I understand it, full IG Internet Points are only awarded if you bust out some advanced yoga poses in front of the falls, or pose with an absurdly large gun, or maybe hike the whole way in a fursuit, or ideally all of the above simultaneously, while name dropping a long list of your brand endorsements and Patreon patrons. I'm not saying any of that is wrong, exactly, except for the gun part; it just seems like a lot of extra trouble to go to for a few more Internet Points, and if I was in that position it would quickly start to feel like a job, and a poorly paid one at that, with fairly bizarre hours and no benefits.

Enjoy the solitude and obscurity while you can, though; Palisade Falls may be less of a secret secluded spot someday, if current plans pan out. The Oregon State Parks Department adopted a new Master Plan for its Columbia Gorge holdings in 2015, and they have big plans for the old road. This is not the same thing as having money, blueprints, signed contracts, and a project schedule, but it's a start, I suppose. So the goal is to have an official route between Rooster Rock & the Portland Womens Forum viewpoint, based on the current route at least most of the way. They've broken it down into phases, phase 1 being official-ifying the road as far as the railroad tracks. It isn't clear what this would involve beyond putting up some signage and maybe a fence to keep people away from the rail line. Phase 2, which the plan implies is a distant-future, pie-in-the-sky vision, involves crossing the rail line in a manner acceptable to the railroad, and then onward to Rooster Rock. This is a separate phase because making railroads happy is expensive, and railroads hold all the cards thanks to 19th century federal laws. So the state will need a bridge over the tracks, tall enough to accommodate double or triple-stacked trains, or however tall the railroad supposes a future train might be someday, and enclosed so people can't throw anything onto the tracks. And the taller the bridge is, the more expensive it will be to meet ADA accessibility requirements, and on top of that there will be design requirements to satisfy due to being in a National Scenic Area, so it can't be ugly. To be clear, I am not arguing against any of these requirements, just pointing out there is a great deal of difference between just crossing railroad tracks, and doing so officially. Furthermore, the conceptual route maps in the master plan show the trail heading directly north to Rooster Rock after crossing the tracks, rather than east to the existing overpass at the Rooster Rock freeway exit. So this would seem to require a new pedestrian bridge over the interstate as well, though the plan doesn't mention this little detail. If I had to guess how this plays out eventually, I'd guess they'll route the trail over to the freeway exit, and build it in conjunction with replacing the existing 1950s or 1960s-era overpass (which is is bound to need replacing eventually, as nature bats last against midcentury rebar construction), so that part piggybacks on a freeway project, since there will always money for freeway projects.

The plan doesn't mention Palisade Falls at all, but it seems like the obvious candidate if you want the phase 1 trail to actually go somewhere, instead of just dead-ending at railroad tracks. I'm not the right type of engineer to be 100% certain of this, but it seems like there ought to be just enough space between the tracks and cliffs to build a nice official trail that isn't constantly pelted with falling rocks and also doesn't anger the gods railroad barons. It might even be possible to extend the trail around the far side of Crown Point and end up at Latourell Falls or points east from there. So that's suggestion #1. Suggestion #2 is that if you're rehabbing an old road, which is much wider than the typical Gorge trail, it would make sense to allow bikes on it, and ideally make sure it's usable by emergency vehicles. That last part might be my ongoing anxiety in the wake of the Eagle Creek fire, along with the global climate generally trending in a pro-fire direction.

Suggestion #3 is to remove the old cars. This may be an unpopular idea and I fully admit my personal biases here as a 1980s teenager, if you'll permit me to digress for a paragraph or so. Adults (including newly-respectable boomers) were absolutely convinced we were the coming doom of all that was good in the world. In particular, they were terrified of us turning 16 and semi-learning to drive, and inevitably denting the fenders of their precious BMWs. So we were made to watch roughly every single gory highway safety film ever made, including vintage pre-seatbelt ones with cars like the ones here. At least one of them was accompanied by a quadriplegic guest speaker whose message boiled down to "See? This is what happens if you ever drive drunk even once.", and who described his life-altering accident in excruciating detail. I had nightmares about it for weeks, and occasionally still do. I think we may have gotten an extra dose of vehicular doom awareness because my high school had a lot of rich kids (I was very much not one of them), some of them very much in the Brett Kavanaugh mold. I recall at least one instance where a classmate was given a Porsche for his 16th birthday by his parents, who then promptly decamped to their place in Palm Springs for the winter, leaving him to his own devices for several months. Their idea of responsible parenting involved getting him a Porsche 912, a short-lived model that looked exactly like a 911 but had an underpowered 4 cylinder engine and was slightly cheaper. Which I imagine meant everyone wanted to drag race you at stoplights, and you always lost. I suppose the school focused on the body horror angle because daddy's money and connections could make any legal unpleasantness go away, but daddy can't change the laws of physics or limitations of modern medicine. In short, I would be happier without the crashed vintage cars than with them, and thanks for listening.

Um, anyway, switching topics entirely, I'd mentioned earlier that there was one particular reason that your adventurous, outdoorsy friends might have been to Palisade Falls before. Every so often, not every winter but at least once every few years, the Gorge gets a serious cold snap, lasting from a few days to a few weeks. If it lasts long enough, waterfalls start freezing over, starting with the lower-volume ones like Palisade Falls where water runs down the rock face instead of launching outward from it. When this blessed event happens, the local ice climbing community (your more-outdoorsy-than-thou friend included) converges on the Gorge in a matter of nanoseconds, and the vertical wall of ice at Palisade Falls becomes the ice climbing route known as "Crown Jewel". Crown Jewel is popular due to its (relatively) moderate difficulty and its location as one of the closest ice climbing spots near Portland. I have never tried their sport, and let's be honest here, as a late-40s person without midlife crisis inclinations it's sort of unlikely I'll give it a try in the future. I do check up on them now and then because their geography of the Gorge is very different from anyone else's. Minor seasonal waterfalls that often don't even have official names become the, uh, crown jewels of their sport, like "Ainsworth Left" a few miles east of here in Ainsworth State Park, which is apparently so difficult that it was first climbed successfully in 2009 [???], and which is an otherwise unremarkable-by-Gorge-standards 700' cliff face the other 96% of the time when it isn't frozen.

In any case, here's a 2013 trip report with nice photos taken part of the way up the climb. One thing it mentions in passing, at the bottom of the post, is how to get to the falls during ice climbing season. I haven't seen any accounts about parking up above and hiking down; everyone parks at the Rooster Rock exit and heads directly to the frozen waterfall from there, and the most direct seasonal route involves hoofing it across frozen Mirror Lake. Which I suppose is something that doesn't worry you greatly if you're about to climb a frozen (and just barely frozen) waterfall that might "delaminate" (i.e. pop right off the rock face, taking you along for the ride) any minute. Another trip report from the same winter grumbles about being impeded by annoying stoners while trying to climb the falls. A Mazamas blog post from 2017 has mini trip reports from a few places around the gorge during a brief cold snap, Crown Jewel not included this time. And a 2014 OPB News piece speculates about what climate change means for the local ice climbing scene. (Spoiler: Warmer means less ice, and for ice-based sports this is a bad thing.). And finally, a mostly-unrelated Travel Oregon post that came up while searching the interwebs for "columbia gorge ice climbing". The author climbed Mt. Hood (where there was a great deal of ice), and went hiking in the Gorge the following day, thus satisfying the literal search terms if not the intent behind them. In any case, the post includes a lot of great photos he took along the way, so I figured I'd pass the link along even if it has nothing to do with the rest of this post. And with that, we're done here. I usually wrap these things up with a bit of is-it-worth-doing advice, but I'm not sure what to say this time. It was worth it to me as I finally got to satisfy a longstanding point of curiosity, but if you're coming into this cold it may not be quite as interesting. It does have one advantage in that it's a rare close-to-Portland trail that isn't swarmed with tourists during all daylight hours year-round, and a nice thing about having an obscure blog almost nobody reads is that I'm free to write about it without immediately ruining the place.

Lewis & Clark State Park

Next up we're visiting Lewis & Clark State Park, at the west end of the Columbia Gorge just across the Sandy River from downtown Troutdale. Let me start off by saying this post is not an adventure through pristine wilderness; the the park's essentially a glorified highway rest area -- it officially opened in October 1955 along with the nearby segment of I-84 -- surrounded by a few recreation options. (The park is classified as a "State Recreation Site", if we're going to split hairs.) The park is best known as a Sandy River access point for fishing and boating, and the high bluffs above the river have become a popular rock climbing spot in recent decades. The park is not famous for hiking, but it does have a few trails, and that's what we're here to check out. None of them are very long and most are easy, but one has sort of a weird mystery associated with it, which we'll get to in a bit. And don't miss the historical odds and ends down at the bottom, stuff that didn't fit anywhere else.

1. Lewis & Clark Nature Trail
2. Broughton Bluff Trail
3. Lewis & Clark Trail No. 400

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Lewis and Clark Nature Trail

So the first trail, and the only one with a sign, is the "Lewis & Clark Nature Trail", which is a mostly-paved loop around the landscaped "rest area" part of the park, with a few signs describing various native plants. In practice I imagine it's largely used by people and dogs who need a stretch after a long drive along I-84. When I started writing this post I sort of assumed the trail and the dated, weathered sign were original features of the park, but it turns out they were added in 1980 for the 175th anniversary of the Lewis & Clark expedition camping here for a bit in November 1805. And yes, a bit of my surprise is due to being of just the right age where 1955 is ancient history, while 1980 is a year I have clear childhood memories of, and therefore things from then cannot possibly look dated or weathered. (And yes, I have yet another birthday this month, why do you ask?)

An April 1980 Oregon Journal article described the upcoming trail:

When completed, the trail will feature many of the 150 flowers, shrubs, and trees identified and described by Capts. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in their journals which, besides an account of their travels, were a compendium of scientific data covering botany and other disciplines. The one-half mile loop trail, with a gravel covering, is in place and site preparation has been finished. Only a start has been made on the plantings.

The article then notes that they only had Oregon grapes in place so far, but a vine maple was coming soon. The article continued:

Plans are in progress for various planting areas to be “adopted” by garden clubs, civic and educational groups, each to plant and maintain its own plot. Twenty-two such groups have been enlisted so far. ... The nature trail is a project of the Oregon Lewis and Clark Trail Committee, chaired by Dr. E.G. Chuinard, Portland orthopedic surgeon. Dr. Chuinard is a nationally known Lewis and Clark scholar, and the trail has been a dream of his for many years.

The article goes on to mention that, as an orthopedic surgeon, he was proud that the new trail would be wheelchair-accessible, at least by the pre-ADA standards of 1980. Chuinard later wrote a book that more or less combined his professional and personal interests “Only One Man Died, the Medical Aspects of the Lewis & Clark Expedition”

An August 1979 Oregonian article described the proposal in similar terms, adding that this would be a great new use for the park, replacing the overnight campground that had been there since the park opened. Apparently the campground was considered a nuisance and drew 'undesirable' people to the area, though I'm not sure whether that meant partiers or something worse. A November 1978 letter to the Oregon Journal opposing removal of the campground explained that it was the only low-income camping option for people passing through the area in the summer, and Ainsworth was (and is) the closest alternative, much further from Portland and Troutdale. The Oregonian article went on to quote someone with the State Parks Division who hoped they'd be able to get rid of the adjacent dirt bike area just north of the park as that was considered a nuisance too.

1979, the oregonian editorialized in favor of the trail. The editorial board may not have paid close attention to the proposal up to this point, and it's hard to imagine a bunch of cynical old-school newspapermen caring a whit about gardening, but one historical constant about the Oregonian, from the 1850s to the present day, is that they will always endorse any proposal that involves being mean to poor people, whether as a deliberate goal, or as foreseeable collateral damage. So with this editorial, the project was virtually a done deal.

The nature trail was dedicated in October 1980. For the big event, the paper interviewed Roger Mackaness, a Corbett landscape architect, nursery owner, and part-time Job Corps instructor, who was handling the practical side of the project, translating Chuinard's daydream into an actual garden full of live plants.

“I can’t guarantee that anything will grow”, said Mackaness, explaining that certain plants such as sagebrush and prickly pear have to be grown from seed. “Eastern Oregon plants take special care.” Varieties of plants to be found on the trail include cliff dwellers, desert lovers, high mountain and shore plants, he said. Making the task even more difficult, the plants will be ordered in the manner in which Lewis and Clark discovered them, and each planting will be landscaped to mirror the topography found in the plant’s natural habitat. “This will be a trailhead for a 90 mile hike to The Dalles”, Mackaness said. “In the 1/4 mile nature trail you could see the same kind of plant life you’d see if you hiked to The Dalles.”

The article goes on to explain that the plantings should be complete in another two years or so. An Oregonian article on the trail dedication notes that the trail had been in the works since 1974, and the very first mention of it I saw came in a 1975 article by Chuinard, which mentions that a group in Charlottesville, VA was proposing an "all the Lewis & Clark plants" garden there.

In April 1982, a Lewis and Clark mini-garden opened at the Oregon Zoo, featuring some of the same plants, with Chuinard and other members of the trail committee in attendance. The Journal assured readers that

The new garden also is intended to complement, not compete with, the nature trail at Lewis and Clark State Park near the mouth of the Sandy River, which, when completed, will have examples of all or most of the plants identified in the Oregon country by the famous explorers. A sign in the zoo garden calls attention to the Sandy River project.

It's not clear what happened after that, as the Oregon Journal went out of business later that year and they covered the garden effort much more closely than the Oregonian ever did. Probably the same thing that often happens with efforts that start as one person's dream and that rely on volunteers to keep going. Especially when that one person was already a retiree and eventually retires "for real" from civic efforts too and moves out of the area to be near family, as the Chuinards did in 1987. He had already moved on to a new project at that point, trying to persuade the city to build a Lewis and Clark museum out at Kelley Point Park. He and the committee had originally wanted to build the museum here, piggybacking on a proposed ODOT port of entry, as Chuinard explained in a 1984 op-ed in the Oregonian.

He argued this was a great location for a museum (although the State Parks Division and environmental groups disagreed) and a logical follow-up for the still-incomplete nature trail. The museum would have been located in the still-barren 12 acre plot north of the 'main' park, between the railroad and I-84, which I think is where the county's short-lived offroad motorcycle park was located during the 1970s. an August 1985 article has more details about the proposal.

The problem with the trail, Chuinard said, is that the flowers do not bloom at the same time, and most are not at their peak during the short season of pleasant weather in the Columbia Gorge, when visitors are not subjected to rain or the cold east wind.

Which is true of the entire Northwest, frankly. He went on to suggest that we were rapidly falling behind Washington State in both quantity and quality of Lewis & Clark visitor centers, which is an odd sort of arms race to have. But I suppose that was how things got funded in 1984.

The present-day trail does not exactly look as though it has 22+ garden clubs and civic groups avidly maintaining their individual plots. Some of the signage has been updated fairly recently, though, possibly for the Lewis & Clark bicentennial in 2005. One of the newer signs concerns native medicinal plants, and has a sidebar snarking about the Lewis & Clark expedition dosing themselves to the gills with mercury and other toxic patent medicines of the era, I guess for a little contrast. Which is a fair point, and not one a circa-1980 sign would have mentioned, necessarily, even if the nature trail's main proponent wrote an entire book on the subject.

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Broughton Bluff Trail

The second trail is an obvious but unnamed trail that heads south and upward from the landscaped area. This is the access trail for the popular rock climbing area along the southwest-facing part of Broughton Bluff. This area is enormously popular when weather permits, which was not the case the day I visited. Which is great if (like me) you just want to take photos of the rocks and not try going up them. I only followed the trail to the point where you're looking almost straight down at the old Columbia River Highway bridge over the Sandy River, but I gather it dead-ends at the state park property line, not much further south from there. The potentially-climbable cliffs continue for a while south from there, but they're on private property and it seems the owners don't want the liability issues, and also don't want to sell. In terms of the trail having other features, there's one small and (as far as I know) unnamed waterfall along the way. I don't know whether it runs year round or it's just seasonal. Either way, I can't say it's worth going out of your way to see if you aren't there to climb any rocks, given all of the vastly better hiking options a few miles to the east. Small bit of trivia here, the place is named for a junior officer on the the George Vancouver expedition who made it roughly this far upriver, and is best known for naming Mt. Hood and Mt. St. Helens, along with a bunch of other names that didn't stick, like calling the Sandy the "Barings River", after the British bank that imploded in 1995 after a rogue trader lost all their money. Broughton didn't name the bluff after himself, though. That came later, after a 1926 lobbying campaign by local Girl Scouts.

In addition to the main trail, a scramble route goes to the top of the bluff, starting right at the point where the main trail rounds the sharp corner from the north face of the bluff to the southwest face. I only found out this existed afterward so I don't have any photos from the top, but blog posts at Casing Oregon and Columbia River Gorgeous include photos from up there, and a video from TheCascadeHiker shows both trails, first the main one, then backtracking to the one to the top. Unfortunately the park boundary also runs along or very close to the top of the bluff so you can't really go anywhere once you've made it to the top. A century ago (early November 1920) you could take a streetcar here from downtown Portland, climb the bluff (which went by "Troutdale Butte" back then) and then east and up to the top of Chamberlain Hill and back, but I get the impression that hikers and climbers and random tourists wore out their welcome here decades ago. In any event it's just ordinary farm country up there once you're away from the edge, and not one of those weird Venezuelan islands in the sky, especially not the kind with dinosaurs. Could be worse, though; if Portland's urban growth boundary didn't exist, the entire top of the bluff would likely be a nasty gated community full of ugly McMansions, and security goons from the HOA would pour boiling oil down on anyone who dared to climb here. So there's that.

As it is, the top of the bluff is just ordinary farm country growing normal farm products. It did have one brief brush with semi-importance back in 1961, when the top of Broughton Bluff was part of an elaborate surveying project by the US Coast & Geodetic Survey, the agency behind all of those pre-GPS vintage survey markers. This project involved a team of engineers, families in tow, traveling from place to place, marking and surveying, building and disassembling survey towers, measuring and remeasuring until the exact position of everything was nailed down to 1/300th of an inch, then going somewhere else and starting the process all over again, like the world's nerdiest traveling circus. I imagine that probably made for a weird childhood. The article mentions that the survey had been delayed by higher-priority projects like laying out Cold War missile bases.

September 1974 article on climbing here, mentions in passing that there are a few other things to do, like smelt dipping (no longer possible since the smelt runs collapsed in the 80s), camping (replaced by the garden), and dirt bike riding (also abolished, and replaced by an empty lot). While chain smoking or working your way through a case of Blitz beer or both whenever you had a hand free.

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Lewis & Clark Trail No. 400

And finally, at the far corner of the landscaped triangle, an unsigned trail heads east into the forest, and off the edge of most maps of the park. It's clearly a "real" trail, constructed by people who knew what they were doing, and not just a random use path, and it seems to get some level of regular maintenance, and you get the distinct impression that a trail like this is bound to go somewhere interesting, sign or no sign. So you keep going, doing a roughly flat, roughly straight traverse east, part of the way up the bluff and parallel to I-84 and the railroad (which you are never out of earshot of). But after a couple of miles it just sort of fades out and ends, and you can either turn back at that point or try bushwhacking further for a while and then turn back. The only real destination along the way is a stretch with several house-sized boulders toward the end of the (obvious) trail, known to local climbers as "The Zone". I can't say it's an amazing nature experience, but if you think of it as more of a very easterly city park along the lines of Portland's Forest Park, it's actually not that bad. I feel like I need to say this because the OregonHikers page about the trail snarks about it (which is quite uncharacteristic for them), saying they only did it just for the sake of completeness.

So why is there a trail here, if it just sort of ends at a random spot in the forest? That isn't typically what trails do. One clue is that although there's no sign for the trail in the park, if you look at the right maps you'll see occasional scattered references to it here and there calling it the "Lewis and Clark Trail 400" or some variation thereof. (I'm almost positive the name also appeared on an official PDF map of the park at one point, but I can't seem to find a link to that map now.) The "400" is the key detail: Under the longstanding trail numbering scheme in the Gorge (which I think is a Forest Service thing, although some trails on state land use it as well in the name of consistency), trails are all numbered 400-something, (other than the Gorge bit of the Pacific Crest Trail, which is #2000 for its whole length), and the number 400 was reserved early on for a hypothetical east-west trail stretching 90 miles or so from Portland out to Hood River or possibly The Dalles, depending on who you ask. This trail has never really existed over that full distance, but a few segments do, and it's slowly grown (and occasionally shrunk) over time when people take an interest in the idea for a while and funding becomes available. A couple of segments further east are known as the Gorge Trail #400, which I'm sure I've mentioned here once or twice. So right now the official west end of the westernmost existing chunk of Gorge Trail is at Angels Rest, which is obviously nowhere close to Troutdale, and that's how it's been for decades. That is, except for the obscure bit of dead-end trail we're visiting here. Which I guess makes it the trail equivalent of a freeway ghost ramp.

Note that Trail #400 is not the same thing as the under-construction Historic Columbia River Highway trail. It covers more or less the same ground but is a very different proposal, a paved path aimed primarily at road cyclists, often immediately next to the freeway, and encompassing surviving bits of the old highway where possible. I've walked on a few parts of it, and it's fine, I guess, but it's nobody's idea of a relaxing nature experience. And since the entire theme of the effort is around the old highway, the initial part of the route involves riding on the old road, sharing it with Winnebagos and monster SUVs and so forth. Which is not doable at all if you're on foot.

It's also not the same thing as the Hatfield Memorial Trail, which is supposed to be an east-west backcountry route, staying as far away from civilization as possible under the circumstances. A trail along these lines was proposed by the Sierra Club way back in 1971, and a fairly long route can be assembled out of parts of several existing trails, though some of these trails receive little or no Forest Service maintenance and it's an ongoing struggle to keep them from being taken back by the forest.

An early version of that idea (or part of it) was the proposed Talapus Trail, which would have connected Larch Mountain to Wahtum Lake by way of the Bull Run Watershed, a large area that's normally closed to all public access because it's the primary source of Portland's drinking water supply. I am not sure how that was supposed to work, whether they were going to tweak the closure boundary or just accept that a few backcountry hikers wouldn't be a problem, or they just hadn't figured that out yet. The notion being kicked around as early as 1974 (back when calling it "Hatfield Memorial" would have alarmed Senator Hatfield), and an August 1980 article was already looking ahead to a third east-west linkage once Gorge Trail #400 and the Talapus route were done and dusted. This third route would have run right along the Columbia shoreline, which isn't even on anyone's long-term ideas list anymore, as far as I've seen. It always shocks me to see how many grand plans of the 60s and 70s came to a crashing halt on election day 1980; I'm sure that there were a few clunker ideas in there, but I'd love to go visit the timeline where the entire Reagan Administration never happened, and the wingnuts and their ideas never took over, and just see how the year 2020 played out over there versus here. It can't have been worse, anyway

The notion of a Trail 400 that specifically started here seems to have burst onto the scene in 1979 with the state's new Columbia Gorge parks master plan, which envisioned what it called a "low-level gorge trail":

Proposed development of trail head parking for the "low level gorge trail", which, when fully completed, will complete a link for hikers from Troutdale to The Dalles, a distance of 90 miles. Portions of the trail have been completed, but access through some western properties is still being examined.

Toward the end of the article it mentions that funding was uncertain, and construction probably wouldn't begin until 1981-83 on any of the listed projects, and that was dependent on federal money coming through. Other interesting and sadly unbuilt ones include a trail between Rooster Rock and Latourell Falls, and a railroad underpass connecting Wahkeena Falls and Benson State Park. The plan mentions that the old Rooster Rock Wagon Road -- which we visited a few years ago in the Palisade Falls post -- would connect to the low-level trail as it passed through the area.

So the first problem with the trail and the rest of these grand plans was the date: 1979 was immediately before Ronald Reagan was elected and began slashing non-military budgets, and stomping on anything that looked vaguely environmental just to spite the hippies. The envisioned construction period also overlapped with Oregon's deep multiyear recession of the 1980s. So without money or political interest, the project fell by the wayside and has never been revived, just like other grand projects of the 1970s like switching to the metric system.

As for why it stops where it does, the current trail extends past the eastern edge of the park and out onto Forest Service land for a while, and remains largely federal as far as the Corbett area other than some assorted bits of ODOT-owned land and one stretch owned by the Union Pacific railroad. It's as if the state built as much as they could on their own and then the feds never picked up the baton. As for the railroad bit, I didn't see anything saying they were blocking the proposal, which I think would've been newsworthy if that had happened. I did see that they'd tried subdividing it into residential(?) lots at one point but didn't sell any of them, and the land hasn't been buildable since 1986 due to National Scenic Area rules). So maybe they'd still be up for selling that area, or at least doing an easement for a trail, though I obviously have no way to know that.

November 1981 - Multnomah County closed a mile of Henderson Road between Latourell & Bridal Veil, though holding on to the old right-of-way to maybe become part of trail #400 someday. The article mentions that the old road had once been part of the 1870s wagon road between the Sandy River and The Dalles. I gather the steep, long-closed, long-forgotten (but again never-vacated) Latourell Hill Road was once part of the old wagon route too, but I don't know if it was ever envisioned as a trail route.

Small calendar item from September 30th 1983, noting volunteers could come join a "work party clearing new low-level Gorge Trail No. 400 east from Lewis & Clark State Park".

Further east, the state was trying to arrange a land swap with the federal Bureau of Land Management for land further east along the proposed trail route; the article describes the 2 mile long parcel as 100 acres of steep north-facing bluffs next to the rail line, but I can't pin down which parcel they're talking about or who owns it now. The Friends of the Columbia Gorge was strongly opposed to the idea. It seems that a couple of rare and potentially endangered plants were known to live in the area: Sullivantia oregana and Dodecatheon dentatum, and the Friends figured they would no longer be protected properly with the plants in state hands. Thinking BLM would do a better job than the state would of protecting the environment seems a bit odd in the 2020s but maybe things were different back then.

The trail also ran into a degree of local opposition, as the park had a sketchy reputation back in those days, beyond the usual urban legends about highway rest areas. The trail was proposed around the same time the campground was removed, and the county-run dirtbike park next door was still there, and rural residents to the east found it easy to imagine the trail would funnel an urban crime wave in their direction. For example, a 1979 article about a longtime resident of the tiny town of Latourell (it's just downhill from Latourell Falls, but not visible from the Gorge highway) raised concerns about a proposal in the new state plan to turn a local historic house into a youth hostel for people through-hiking the new trail. Local residents strongly opposed the idea, the word "youth" being even more loaded then than it is now.

As another example, a 1982 article lamenting that 37 different government agencies were involved in managing the Sandy River area. mentioned rowdy campers at Dodge Park as one of the issues facing the area, holding all-night beer parties and such and driving away respectable visitors. A State Parks representative mentioned that similar problems had receded at Lewis & Clark after the campground had been removed. Other people wanted to talk about habitat protection, but the paper reported that toward the end, after the lurid stuff and the riling people up about big gummint bureaucrats.

By 1984 the Oregonian was wringing its hands again about the now campground-free, dirtbike-free park, as the area nearby saw its second homicide in as many years. I haven't looked up the news stories about those but it sounds like both were related to arguments between transients. The mayor of Troutdale was freaking out and blaming the park, conveniently outside city limits. A spokesman for the county sheriff's office explained that "Other than those two murders, we have no phenomenal problem at Lewis and Clark state park", to which the mayor responded "Don't you think one murder a year is too much?", as if this was now a long term trend. The article went on to lump in a recent homicide at a truck stop half a mile away, a sexual assault in Troutdale Community Park (now Glenn Otto Park) three years earlier, and the general unruly crowd atmosphere at Glenn Otto as if those were valid data points about Lewis & Clark being scary. I've complained before about how bad crime reporting was in the 80s, but it still startles me. Nobody was even trying to figure out actual cause and effect, just pointing fingers at everything randomly and freaking out even further when that approach didn't move the needle.

Despite all that, the effort forged ahead for another couple of years. Here's a 1985 interview with the Oregon State Parks regional administrator. The article explains that a trail from Troutdale to Hood River had been a longtime dream of his, noting however that some of the remaining parts would be expensive, like at Tooth Rock west of Eagle Creek. There's also a bit about another then-ongoing project to build a four-mile trail between Bridal Veil and Latourell Falls, with improved views of the falls at Shepperds Dell, which I imagine would have doubled as another Trail #400 segment. Seems this was never constructed either, which is a shame. The interview was in conjunction with the grand opening of another Gorge Trail segment further east, between Ainsworth and Yeon State Parks. Unfortunately that entire segment was destroyed by an enormous landslide in 1996 and has never been rebuilt.

Someone giving a presentation about the proposed trail at Portland State in 1986.

The 1986 talk was the last mention of the proposal that I could find in the newspaper archives, but I still had several open questions, like exactly what the intended route was, for example. I ended up looking for old planning documents to see if they offered any more clues, and luckily the 1994 state parks plan for the Gorge mentions the proposed trail a few times. (For whatever reason, all of the state parks department's master plan archives vanished off the net sometime in the last few months as part of a site redesign. But as usual, Archive.org has our back, or mine anyway.) From page 15:

Trail connections and/or trailhead development is proposed for a low elevation route from Lewis and Clark to the OPRD properties just west of Hood River via segments of the HCRH and via other new routes, and from the east side of Hood River to Mosier along the Historic Columbia River Highway (HCRH) to Mosier.

and then on page 26:

Trail use continues to be popular in the Gorge especially at the higher elevations. There has been an effort by recreationists for many years to see the establishment of a series of connections through the gorge at a lower elevation and along the river where possible. Most notable among these efforts are the Historic Columbia River Gorge Highway (HCRH) connection projects, the trail 400 project, and the Chinook Trail.

(If the name "Chinook Trail" is unfamiliar, you aren't alone; I had never heard of it before either, but it's a long-term effort to build a backcountry trail over on the Washington Side of the Gorge, eventually connecting with either the Gorge Trail, or the Hatfield Trail, or a fresh new backcountry trail on the Oregon side to form a big long loop.)

Anyway, in a later section of the plan, we finally get some details about what they had in mind. (The acronym NSA in this context means the then-new Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, not the shadowy intelligence agency.)

#1 Lewis and Clark to Portland Women's Forum, MP CRGNSA trail proposal No. T27. Trail Maps 1 and 2

OPRD's proposal for this trail deviates from the NSA proposal in that Chamberlain Road is used rather than trying to build a trail through the complex ownerships near Corbett Station. By constructing a pedestrian walk along the county road, a trail connection could be accomplished much sooner and at less expense. Easements will be needed across the north face of Chanticleer Point.

The connection of this trail to Portland Women's Forum cannot be accomplished until parking is expanded at Portland Women's Forum to accommodate the long term parking requirements of trail users. Additional trailhead parking could be developed at the Corbett Station quarry if a suitable trail route from the quarry to Portland Women's Forum or from the Lewis and Clark to Portland Women's Forum trail route could be found.

Google Books has the 1992 Federal management plan for the new scenic area, which describes that proposal in a couple of paragraphs:

Trail Description: The land is primarily in private ownership. This trail would provide a link between the Portland/Vancouver metropolitan area and the Scenic Area. The trail would provide views of both the Columbia River and the pastoral landscape of the western Gorge. This trail would form part of a loop trail that links to the Sandy River Delta Trail. Recreation Intensity Class: mostly 1. Development Proposal: Four miles of new trail are proposed to provide opportunities for hiking and scenic appreciation. There is an existing trailhead opportunity at Lewis and Clark State Park; a parking area is proposed at the existing borrow pit at Corbett Station in the GMA. Some sections of the trail traverse steep bluff lands and would require sophisticated design and construction.

For whatever reason, the Management Plan "as amended thru September 1st 2011" deletes the entire section of concrete proposals and just speaks somewhat vaguely about high level goals.

Getting back to the state plan, it has maps after page 100, which show the trail eventually connecting to the old wagon road between Portland Womens Forum and Rooster Rock, and then making its way over to the Vista House. The maps also show that the proposed trail would be both Trail 400 and the Chinook Trail; following the maps further east, the two routes diverge above Multnomah Falls, Trail 400 following its familiar (if currently closed) route, and the Chinook Trail taking a parallel route further south/uphill, and this arrangement continuing all the way to Hood River. I imagine this would let you hike to Hood River and back mostly as a loop (albeit a long, skinny sort of loop), or put together more reasonably-sized loops out of parts of the two plus connecting trails. The key detail here is that significant chunks of the Chinook route would be new construction, and as the first route to Hood River is not exactly making rapid progress, it feels like building a brand-new second route is a bit of a longer-term vision, to put it mildly. Maybe it'll be ready around the time the gorge has fully regrown from the Eagle Creek fire, who knows.

Metro's 1992 Metropolitan Greenspaces Master Plan described the proposal: "The Chinook Trail is a proposed Columbia River Gorge loop trail that will connect Vancouver Lake, Maryhill State Park, Biggs, and Portland. It will travel in part on existing trails. The concept was formalized in 1988 as a rim-top trail where possible."

These plans only get a very brief mention in the 2011 Master Plan for Lewis & Clark specifically, which mostly focuses on parking and congestion, and improved river access. It does acknowledge that the trail exists and ideas for it are out there, but doesn't propose doing anything about them.

[I]t is a hub for a series of existing and proposed trails that will eventually connect Portland with the City of Hood River. This includes an eventual link with the famous “40-Mile Loop” trail network on the east side of the Sandy River on federal and state land and with cycling routes along the Historic Columbia River Highway

and a few pages later:

There is a walking trail at the foot of Broughton Bluff along the edge of the lawn that extends northeast along the north face of the bluff at least as far as the eastern property boundary.

The state's 2015 Gorge master plan (which I guess supersedes the 1994 plan) more or less includes the 2011 plan by reference and repeats the ideas from there (chapter 8, pages 148-149, here). The map on page 149 incorrectly shows the trail heading off onto private property, which (as I noted above) is not actually true. Which is not an encouraging sign.

More recently, Metro -- Portland's regional government, which runs Oxbow Park further south on the Sandy (among many other things) -- has taken an interest in the long-running proposed trail, calling it the "Lower Columbia Gorge Trail". A 2014 map from Metro shows it as a "proposed regional trail" heading east off the map as a connection from Portland to the Gorge. The agency's 2017 "Green Trails" guide describes it as one of several future "inter-regional" trails, along with the Willamette Greenway south to Eugene-or-so, and two routes west to different destinations on the coast. The interesting thing about this is that, per a 2019 map, the "Sandy River Connections" project area is one of 24 "acquisition target areas" where they're interested in buying land or paying for easements. Historically they've just been interested in property along the Sandy, but the maps shows their "ok to buy within this area" radius, which looks like some number of miles past the urban growth boundary, and everything out to Rooster Rock seems to be fair game, in theory. And it's basically all state and federal land east of there, so that might be sufficient to fill in the gaps. Metro has local bond money specifically dedicated for this, too, where the state rarely does, and the feds are rarely interested these days (though that might change after the inauguration in January, unless Trump blows up the world before that.)

Which brings us to a "Now What?" section. For the sake of argument, let's assume first that schools, healthcare, housing, antipoverty programs and other concrete human needs are being funded properly, and there's money left over after that, and we don't need to have a zero-sum argument over what to cut in order to build something new. Let's also assume that within the recreation budget, maintenance and repair is already funded, so we aren't trading off against restoring Eagle Creek and other fire-damaged areas, reviving ones that were abandoned or relegated to unmaintained status like the old Perdition Trail at Multnomah Falls, the viewpoint at the top of Wahkeena Falls, and so on.

This is not the most wild or scenic stretch of the route. not aware of any key points of interest along the route, and land ownership around corbett is an issue. and I'm not personally sold that it would be important enough to buy except from willing sellers. the current thing that attracts funding is the bike-centric HCRH Trail, which follows the 1916 route of the old highway. eventually there may be an interest in doing the same thing for the circa-1940 pre-I-84 water-level route (per the Tunnel Point post), for cyclists who'd like to skip the tourist traffic (or just the additional elevation gain and loss) along the initial chunk of old highway. So a hiking trail could maybe piggyback on that in spots where there isn't space or money to build both. with or without HCRH trail involvement, one slightly-outside-the-box idea might be to cross the overpass at Corbett and walk along the river for a bit, either to Rooster Rock (where there's another existing overpass) or maybe to a new pedestrian bridge over I-84 at Tunnel Point and heading east from there to squeeze past Palisade Falls

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Historical Odds and Ends

• The very first piece of the park that the state owned was actually the gravel parking area just across the river from Glenn Otto Park, purchased way back in July 1936, probably for the sake of public fishing access. They don't appear to have named it right away, and the old survey map for it just calls it "Parking Area".
• land acquired in 1954 in a 3-way deal: Timber co. buys the land, swaps it for non-scenic BLM land elsewhere, BLM donates it to the state. Article says the goal was to eventually assemble a big park running the whole length of the gorge, which I suppose the National Scenic Area basically is.
• September 1955 article on the soon-to-open park

An article from December 1965 about what would eventually become Estacada's Milo McIver State Park explained that it was needed as a safety valve because existing parks along the Sandy and Columbia were overflowing with visitors. Rooster Rock and Dabney each attracted 250k visitors that year, and Lewis & Clark pulled in 350k people, who were packed into the park's "anemic" 56 acres like an "outdoor sardine can". For contrast, in 2019 Rooster Rock was the 19th most visited state park with 667k visitors, down 29% from the previous year for some reason. I can't find numbers for the others since they didn't make the top 20, or the bottom 20.

A 1965 article inventorying parks and recreational opportunities in East Multnomah County mentioned Lewis & Clark as one of the area's shiniest and newest parks, and explained that we would soon need even more parks like it. The author explained that in the time before white settlers arrived, local tribes had a word for the ennui that comes with having too much free time and no work that needed doing, in the months after the salmon and berries had been dried for the winter and so forth. He argued a similar situation was looming for Americans of the near future: "The Portland urban dweller of A.D. 2000 — perhaps even sooner — will find himself suffering from the same malady, what with the coming 30- and 20-hour week, the extended leisure time, and an increasingly easy life." .

• October 1967, in the upcoming election Troutdale voters were being asked to approve a controversial sewer bond issue, which on one hand would result in the city no longer dumping raw sewage into the river, just upstream of the park's public beaches. On the other hand, doing this would cost money.
• 1969, a Multnomah County Commissioner was bound and determined to site a new metro-area garbage dump in the sandy river delta, just downstream, although locals opposed the idea. Residents must have prevailed eventually, since there's no dump there now.
• A 1969 article explained that conventional wisdom among local park rangers -- including one responsible for both Dabney and Lewis & Clark -- was that out-of-state visitors were typically cleaner and nicer than local residents, contradicting a widespread public notion of the time. A visiting family from Pendleton at Lewis & Clark reported that someone had knocked their tent over, accusing them of being Californians and demanding that they leave the state.
• August 1970, county turned down a proposed rock quarry south of the park, after turning down another proposal in corbett, 2 miles from Crown Point. The developer couldn't see why people opposed the idea, explaining that the quarrying was temporary and he planned to build houses on the site as soon as the mining phase was done.
• August 1971, park hosted a unit of Green Berets who were retracing the Lewis & Clark route for some reason.
• October 1972, bit about historical sites being gobbled up by development. seemed to focus on lewis & clark sites, including here, which had no historical marker at the time. gov. mccall promised to fix that particular detail
• May 1974 E.G. Chuinard of the Lewis & Clark Trail Committee (seen above/later) writes in response to an earlier editorial about typos on a sign at the park. He explains that the typos are how Lewis & Clark spelled things and are thus historical in nature and not incorrect.
• the aforementioned editorial, titled "History in Misspelled Words".
• the coming-soon article
• the unveiling, with photo
• December 1975, a columnist waxing on about a seasonal waterfall a bit upstream of the park. (w/ photo)
• March 1976, the county had leased land for the motorcycle park as an alternative after passing a restrictive off-road vehicle ordinance. forgot to rezone the land for the new use at first. . a story on the same page mentions the shiny new Trojan Nuclear Plant was being swarmed by smelt and had to report it to the feds.
• March 1977, report on the annual smelt run
• September 1977: In an extremely 1970s episode, the park was the destination of a 5 mile river race from Dabney State Park, sponsored by the local 7-Up bottler and US Army recruiters, as one of many local festivities organized around the annual Jerry Lewis Telethon. (!!) Local telethon content was hosted by Ramblin' Rod. Other events included a 3-day CB radio jamboree, and a disco car wash at Beaverton Mall. leading up to this were a few weeks of danceathons, skateathons, bike races, raft races, waffle feeds, and shoot outs.
• July 1978, mentioned on a list of good picnic spots around the state. The list is interesting. hagg lake, blue lake, baldock rest area were state parks, cook park was washington county, belle view point was publicly accessible
• May 1981, legislative hearing endorses the so-called "40 mile loop", now "the intertwine", which
• August 1981, adjacent county land had been operated as a motorcycle park, but closed due to budget cuts. Recall that the county had opened it after an ordinance cracked down on offroad motorcycles. But closing the motorcycle facility did not revive o