flowerslide

I only just realized you can embed Flickr slideshows here, not just individual photos. Apparently this feature has been available, officially, for almost a year now, and I didn't notice until today. This ought to come in handy, since copying & pasting lots of photo links quickly becomes an annoying chore.

So here's a slideshow as a quick experiment, showing everything I've tagged with "flowers" over the years. That comes to some 808 photos at the time I'm posting this, so it should be good for hours of entertainment, unlike most things I post here...

Chimney Park expedition

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Today's adventure takes us north again, to remote little Chimney Park, just off Columbia Boulevard up toward the top end of North Portland. This is pretty much the far edge, or slightly past the far edge of "inhabited" North Portland; everything north of here on the peninsula is either industrial or wetland, and just across Columbia Boulevard is the former site of, well, I'll get to that in a moment.



I've been meaning to do a post about this park for a while now, because the place a fairly curious history. Or more precisely, the weird building in the middle of the park has a fairly curious history. The sign out front calls it the Stanley Parr Archives Center. Until next year, this remote, obscure location is home to the city government's central archives. It's a fairly sturdy-looking building, but surprisingly it wasn't built for this purpose. Some years ago, right across Columbia Boulevard was the old St. Johns Landfill, and the archives building was once the city garbage incinerator. Seriously. I am not making this up. Ironic! The jokes basically write themselves. Insert yours here, if you like.



Up until a few years ago, the building used to have a tall chimney (hence the name of the park) left over from its career as an incinerator. Eventually the powers that be decided the thing wasn't safe and tore it down. So no actual chimney in Chimney Park. Doubly ironic! Or at least kind of peculiar, or something.

A while back the Tribune ran a Stumptown Stumper explaining the name, so naturally they included a photo with the old chimney, if you're curious what it looked like. The book Vanishing Portland includes an aerial photo of the incinerator, circa 1940.

The Center for Columbia River History has a few pages about the history of the landfill, starting here. And here's an Oregon DEQ page about the park, detailing what they know about chemical contaminants at the site, presumably holdovers from the incinerator days. If I'm reading it correctly, it sounds as though the area really hasn't been tested that extensively. Which is surprising considering the whole incinerator thing. Maybe people figured it was better not to know. Knowing this sort of thing tends to get very expensive.



The place originally got on my radar for a separate and unrelated reason, though. Many maps of Portland show the park being home to something called the "Portland Public Astronomy Center". I'd never heard anything else about the place other than seeing it on maps, so naturally I was curious. It seems that back in the 70's there was a serious proposal to put telescopes here for public use, but it never actually happened. So it's curious that it continues to show up on new maps all these decades later.

Haven't been able to find out very much about this "public astronomy center" thing, which I guess is understandable since it never actually existed. I did run across a 2004 Rose City Astronomers newsletter that includes an obit for a guy who spearheaded the effort. And references to two documents the city has about the proposal -- the documents aren't online, but they are available in... wait for it... the city archives. Ironic!



I probably ought to mention the one thing that actually brings visitors to the park, the one thing that interests the general (i.e. non-geeky, non-pedantic) public, which is that much of the park is a designated off-leash dog area. I'm not really into the whole large dog thing, myself, but I understand that a lot of people are, so I figured I ought to mention it. The city has a PDF map of the off-leash area, and there are pages about it at Portland Pooch and BringFido, plus a post on Javafoto. So there you have it.



I mentioned earlier that the archives are moving soon. In fact they'll be moving downtown to PSU next year some time. While we're on the subject, which we sort of are, here's a rather fascinating interview with the City Archivist, and a photo inside the archives with an assistant archivist.

No word yet on what's next for the building after the archives hit the road. This being Portland, the obvious answer -- to the point of being a cliche -- is to turn it into a McMenamins. Which isn't a terrible idea, although considering it's in the middle of an off-leash dog area, maybe a Lucky Lab would be more appropriate (plus I like their beer better). Mmmmm..... beeeeeer.....

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But wait, there's more! While I was meandering around taking the photos you see above, I realized that the lawn was full of dandelions, and I thought I'd try to take some ultraviolet photos of them. They didn't really turn out all that well, and I didn't think they merited a post of their own. But I figured I might as well tack a couple onto the end here. Consider them an intermediate result in an ongoing effort to maybe-someday get a result I'm happy with. As for what they're supposed to look like, check out here and here. Clearly, I have a way to go yet. I suspect I may have to abandon any notion of doing this without a tripod, for starters.

inframisc.

Some recent experiments with "color infrared". Which involves taking a regular IR photo in a color mode rather than the usual monochrome, which gives you an all-red photo, not that interesting at this point. Step 2 is to have GIMP try to auto-correct exposure and white balance, which leads to the lilac-colored trees and orange sky you see here. The fact that the colors are consistently this way suggests there's some physical basis behind the color differences (although not the colors themselves, obviously), but I have no idea what that might be. Step 3 is additional tweaking to exposure, color saturation, etc., as needed, until it looks nice. Or at least until you feel you've had some manual input into the process, I guess.

blue heron, laurelhurst pond

Marine Drive Trail

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Here are a few photos from along Portland's Marine Drive Trail, on the south shore of the Columbia next to, well, Marine Drive. The trail extends along the river from just west of the airport all the way out to the area of Blue Lake Park, with a couple of gaps here and there. So it surprises me how little info there is about it on the interwebs. Part of this may be due to who owns it: Most of the stretch belongs to the Port of Portland (due I guess to being next to the airport), making it part of their hyper-obscure little park system (see also McCarthy Park and Stanley Park Blocks). The eastern stretch is the "Phiippi Property", another of the assorted park-like bits Metro inherited when they took over the Multnomah County park system back in the 90's. As far as I can tell, neither agency mentions the trail anywhere on their respective websites.

(I later realized there's third stretch of trail further west from these two, extending between the Expo Center and the Oregon Slough Railroad Bridge. Most of this stretch is privately owned, though Metro owns the piece closest to the Expo Center.)

There is an upside to this, though. Walking along the trail, you might note it really is just a trail. If the city had put it together, there'd be tedious interpretive signs and fair-to-middlin' quality public art every few feet, and the project would've been vastly more expensive. So it's a nice break, if you aren't in the mood to be lectured again about our collective mystical-yet-gastronomical love of salmon or some such thing.

One downside is that it also feels oddly remote, even though Marine Drive is right next door, on top of the levee. Maybe not the ideal place to be a lone jogger at night. I can't put my finger on why; that's just the vibe I got.

A few links, photos, etc., from across the series of tubes:

• A page including a map at Off-Street Paved Bike Paths in Oregon
• "marine drive bike path" at Mary Anne's Portland Oregon Travel Blog
• "Marine Drive Bike Ride", WierHere Blog
• "The Little List To the Right", Felt Up Tees
• "Sunset Clamshell, Sky Pano" on Flickr
• Apparently there's a Women's Triathlon every year that uses part of the trail.
• Oh, and the inevitable Urban Adventure League post, a few steps ahead of me as always. Bah, humbug.

The View from Elk Rock

In my Elk Rock Island post last October, I mentioned briefly that the high cliffs across the river were a public park too. I put it on my blog todo list (and yes, I do have such a thing) to go check the place out, and I finally got around to it the other day. So this is the place the city calls the "Peter Kerr Property". Or more precisely, I took these from slightly outside the park, at the intersection of SW Riverside Drive (i.e. Macadam / OR 43 ) and SW Greenwood Rd., down in luxo-ritzy Dunthorpe. The park itself is the extremely steep ivy-choked hillside in the foreground of most of these photos. Elk Rock Island is just across the river, and 200-some feet straight down.

I was actually hoping for a better view than this -- I don't see Mt. Hood anywhere, and there are all these ivy-strangled trees in the way. But hey. It is what it is, and now I can tick this item off my todo list, for whatever that's worth.

Since I've already posted on the topic, I won't get pedantic at length about how this is a Portland city park despite being outside city limits, nor will I go on about the curious fact that Dunthorpe's managed to stay outside city limits all these years. I won't do the latter because I'd hate to anger powerful Dunthorpians (Dunthorpites? Dunthorpoids?), who like low taxes and love staying off the radar. Seriously, you don't want to make them angry. A couple of quick phone calls and they'll have you deleted from the space-time continuum, along with all your ancestors going back to the last ice age, and your little dog too.

Needless to say, I won't explain exactly how I got here. I will mention that buses 35 and 36 stop nearby, I suppose so butlers, cooks, gardeners, nannies, and others who serve the Dunthorpii can get to work without sullying the area with their grubby little non-upscale cars. Not that there's anywhere convenient to park anyway.

The photos on the city's "Peter Kerr Property" page (link above) must be from a different vantage point than mine. The park does continue for a couple of blocks or so north of the intersection, so that must be what's going on. I didn't stay long enough to find out for sure, since I didn't much care for all the traffic whizzing by a couple of feet behind me as I was taking these. I'd meant to take a few infrared photos since I've kind of been on an IR bender lately, but after a few minutes I just went, screw it, I'm out of here. This place could be a nice scenic viewpoint if only there was somewhere to stand and take photos without being mauled by luxury SUVs. Of course, that would attract outsiders to the area, and I guess that's to be avoided. Well, plus I don't see the city putting a lot of resources into improving the place if the local neighbors aren't going to pay any taxes for its upkeep. Oh, well.