The Copper Mountain Property

Next up we're visiting Portland's Copper Mountain Property, another really obscure city park that you probably haven't heard of. The name alone inspires thoughts of rugged wilderness adventures, doesn't it? It caught my eye on PortlandMaps or maybe MetroMap and figured I should check it out. So I packed up the Adventuremobile X-9000 with the essentials (dogsled, salt pork, hardtack, flamethrower, rocket boots, etc.) and set off to see what destiny had in store...

Ok, who am I kidding? The name sure sounds exciting, but it turns out that's just the name of the investment firm that owns the adjacent property to the east. There is no mountain to see here; it's just two skinny (and completely flat) lots just off Airport Way in industrial NE Portland, and I only burned any time on visiting because I was already in the area making a necessary Costco run.

There is also no copper here; if there had been, it would have been stolen as scrap metal years ago by the area's vast homeless population. In theory this narrow strip is home to a trail that connects this stretch of Airport Way to the Columbia Slough Trail, and that might have made it a potentially scenic and interesting place in the not-so-distant past. But not right now, and probably not in the immediate future, and I have literally no idea what to do about it, and I also don't want to devote a whole blog post to the subject, especially since I don't have any actual policy ideas to kick around.

For what it's worth, there's another similar bit of city land maybe 1/4 mile to the east, also connecting the slough to airport way, but without a trail, or (as far as I can tell) a name, and it isn't labeled as greenspace in PortlandMaps, but I think it's the same basic idea other than those details. I have no idea why the two places are treated differently, but I have a hunch that the reasons are not very interesting.

The normies at Google have no additional info about this place, and will try to steer you to Metro's Cooper Mountain Nature Park instead, because there's no possible way you could really want to come here (which I guess is fair this time around); or if you can persuade Google you really did mean "Copper" and not "Cooper" it'll push you toward a different Copper Mountain with vastly more mainstream appeal, a ski resort town in Colorado. Which, again, is fair this time around. Come to think of it, every other place on Earth that has a vaguely similar name seems to be better and more appealing, and this isn't the first time that's happened. And now I remember why I sort of lost interest in doing "obscure city park you probably haven't heard of" posts like this: There may still be a few hidden gems out there, but by and large the others are obscure for good reason and probably ought to stay that way.

Foxglove Falls

Next up we're taking a peek (albeit not a very close peek) at the Columbia Gorge's Foxglove Falls. This is the waterfall you can see looking east from the top of Angels Rest, tumbling down the far wall of the deep canyon on that side of the viewpoint. I think it's right about here on the state LIDAR map. The canyon is due to Dalton Creek, which we've visited a couple of times downstream in the Dalton Point and Old Boneyard Road posts, and we were in the vicinity of in the Backstrand Road post. The creek is just not very big, and just goes to show what a little water can do to solid rock (albeit relatively weak and crumbly solid rock) over geological time.

As far as I know the Angels Rest viewpoint is the closest mere mortals can get to it without advanced technical gear and skills that I don't have. Although way back in 1918 there was a short-lived proposal to turn the whole Angels Rest area into a private tourist attraction, complete with pack mule trail rides just like at the Grand Canyon, promising great views of the hanging gardens above Dalton Creek among other things. That obviously never panned out, and I'm not sure how serious of an idea it ever was, as the proposal was just one of a series of real estate and stock schemes that had played out over the previous few years. The most serious of these plans involved the backers laying their grubby hands on the bankrupt woolen mill at Pendleton, relocating it to a new company town right at Wahkeena Falls (then known as "Gordon Falls"), damming Wahkeena Creek to power the mill, and Dalton Creek to supply water to Gordon Falls City (the future great metropolis of the western Gorge) and of course selling a bunch of unregulated stock to finance this exciting new 100% guaranteed goldmine. Except that the deal fell through when local interests in Pendleton bought the woolen mill instead, and shareholders in the Gordon Falls Co. lost every cent of their money overnight. It was never clarified whether the backers knew this was about to happen, but they somehow managed to hold onto the land after the company cratered and soon tried a few other moneymaking schemes continuing into the 1920s, like the pack mule adventure park, and at least one proposal to build mansions all over the top of Angels Rest, before eventually losing the land over unpaid taxes during the Depression.

If you're wondering why the waterfall isn't called "Dalton Falls", after the creek, I'm afraid it's a long story. There was a minor local internet controversy about this back in the mid-2000s, and like most internet controversies it was never really resolved to anyone's satisfaction. The name currently applies to a prominent seasonal waterfall on a different creek just west of Mist Falls (and right around HCRH Milepost 31), which we've visited a couple of times, here and here. A theory gained currency that this mismatch was a fairly recent mistake, either by uninformed people on the early internet, possibly echoing a misguided guidebook author or two in the 1970s, 80s, or 90s. The name and location of the creek (and its mouth at Dalton Point) were pretty well documented, thanks to various surveys and property records, so (the idea went) the real Dalton Falls should be somewhere around here too.

Eventually people settled on the waterfall below (and semi-glimpse-able from) Angels Rest as the most likely candidate, the theory being that it was probably named not long after the area was logged, and it would have been a lot more prominent back then. And I think that's the explanation I've repeated here a few times. But then the Eagle Creek Fire happened, and that made Foxglove Falls much easier to see from the Angels Rest viewpoint (like in the photos here), and closer to what people would have seen a century ago. But it still isn't a prominent sight from down on the old highway. So now I'm not really sure anymore. As in, maybe the creek and the falls were always in different watersheds, a testament to the once-widespread fame of the mysterious W. Dalton they're both named for. The name seems to have existed already when the old highway was still under construction, so maybe the falls are a lot more prominent when seen from further away, like on a steamboat heading upriver (for example), than they are from the HCRH. That's certainly true for Mist Falls as well as the "Dalton Falls" at milepost 31, where up close you can only see the very lowest tier of the falls. But then, making an accurate, detailed map from a steamboat was subject to its own hazards back then, like having a bourbon or three too many, losing all your money playing cards with a friendly gentleman named after a state (or even worse, two states, like "Colorado Tex"), and then the friendly ladies wearing all those feathers abruptly stop paying attention to you after you run out of silver dollars. Why, it's enough to make a mild-mannered cartographer scribble "Dalton Falls" on just any old place, and we've been stuck with it ever since.

This whole thing would've been helped immeasurably if anyone had thought to make a clearly labeled set of daguerreotypes of second-tier Gorge landmarks back in the day, but no examples of that have surfaced so far. Barring that, the other thing that would resolve this pretty quickly would be newly-discovered evidence that W. Dalton was some kind of monster and needed cancelling. Like maybe he came west while on the run from charges back home in Alabama, where he was accused of mistreating his many, many slaves. Or something along those lines. And as a result every last thing that might have been named after him, here and across the northwest, would have to be renamed.

Meanwhile the name "Foxglove Falls" is relatively recent, originating in a 2007 OregonHikers thread as a way to sidestep arguments about various things named Dalton. It featured in a number of forum threads there after the name was invented:

• April 2007: "Hidden in plain sight: a waterfall at Angels Rest!"
• February 2008: "Foxglove Falls 2-9-08"
• late February 2008: "Angels Rest via Foxglove Canyon"
• late February 2010: "Guess where I went today..(Revealed: Foxglove creek) 2-20-10"
• Early December 2010: "Foxglove Creek"
• Mid-December 2010: "Dalton Falls to Mist Falls Loop 12/19/10"
• Late December 2010: "Dalton - Foxglove Conundrum"
• Later December 2010: "Mesachie Creek"
• Mid-December 2013: "No Waterfalls on Devils Rest 11-Dec-2013"
• Late December 2013: "Angel's Rest (Nostalgia) Trip! (Dec 27)"
• March 2017: Angel's Rest direct (bowl to the east)"
• December 2018: "Palmer Mill Rd/Primrose Path - Dec 7, 2018"

It also has a Northwest Waterfall Survey page now, and generally seems pretty established at this point. The page wisely doesn't hazard a guess as to how tall it might be; the LIDAR link up above points at what looks like the most prominent single drop in a series of closely spaced drops, each in the 20'-40' range, with the creek rushing steeply downhill between them, and at one end of the scale you could point at the one bit I think I have photos of, which might be in the 40' range. Lumping them together with the top here and the bottom here gives a total height of 220', while pulling in everything from the very top to the point where all four main tributary creeks join together here comes to 436', almost exactly 11x as tall as the low-end number. So that's not especially useful, as vital statistics go.

Regarding the new namesake: Foxglove is not native to the Pacific Northwest, but you may see it growing as an invasive plant in the Angels Rest area. It seems that decades ago, someone involved in building or maintaining the unofficial trail network above Angels Rest was also an amateur gardener, and as this was before the modern environmental movement got going, it seemed like a good idea at the time to combine two hobbies and improve the forest with some of their favorite ornamental plants, and then name a few of the trails after what's planted along them. So until quite recently there were three trails named Foxglove (Foxglove Way, along with the Upper and Lower Foxglove Trails), and a steep, rocky Primrose Path that apparently needed a re-primrosing on a fairly regular basis, and I think a couple of other plant-themed ones whose names escape me at the moment.

Sometime around January 2022, another anonymous individual decided three trails was entirely too many Foxgloves and unilaterally renamed a couple of them. Renamed them in the OregonHikers Field Guide wiki, and on OpenStreetMap, and even posted freshly-made hand-carved wooden signs at all of the affected trail junctions, replacing the few decades-old ones that had survived the Eagle Creek Fire. Whether you like the change or not, you have to respect that level of dedication.

Forest Road NF-20, Larch Mountain

Ok, so the last Columbia Gorge Forest Service road we looked at (NF-1500-150) was a tad underwhelming. Hopefully this next one is a bit more interesting. We're still poking around on the south side of Larch Mountain Road, this time at the crossroads where Larch Mountain Road meets (gated) Palmer Mill Road, around milepost 10. The seasonal snow gate goes up here in the winter. Today we're exploring Forest Road NF-20, which is sort of a continuation of Palmer Mill that continues south, curving around the side of Larch Mountain and continuing on toward points unknown deep within the forbidden Bull Run Watershed. So far this probably sounds a lot like Forest Road NF-1509, and it is, with a couple of differences.

Like NF-1509 and the upper portion of Palmer Mill (aka NF-1520), NF-20 was gated off sometime in the late 90s due to undesirable uses of the area. Then in 2010 the Forest Service went a step further and decommissioned NF-20, evidently with a great deal of enthusiasm and an unusually big budget. Which means they daylight every culvert under the road, grind up any asphalt that might be there and cart some of it away, then go through with an excavator and dig a sort of tank trap pit every so often, to make the road impassable by any sort of vehicle, and by people on foot if possible, then remove it from all maps, never speak of it again, and deny it ever existed, under penalty of I'm not sure what exactly. As you'll see in the photoset here, returning the forest to something resembling a pre-road natural state was not a goal, so the finished state is a long line of little hills and pits with a lot of clumps of old asphalt lying around. On the other hand, I suspect this treatment would work really well against the tanks of an invading army, should we ever need that.

I turned around and went back at a multiway intersection of Forest Service roads, which is close to the Bull Run boundary, and I seem to recall that all but the rightmost of the available roads continue into the Forbidden Zone, so those are out. The remaining road takes you to the big powerline corridor, and after a short distance strolling under the buzzing wires you can connect to NF-1509 and make a loop of it. The main problem with this loop is that getting back to your vehicle (assuming you brought a vehicle) will involve a stroll along Larch Mountain Road, which has a lot of fast drivers who aren't expecting to see pedestrians through here. A bike would help for this part, but it would be kind of useless now on the NF-20 part of the loop. I dunno, I have no useful advice here, but I'm sure you'll figure something out if you decide to try it.

The only other intersection or trail crossing or what-have-you that you'll encounter is closer to the start of the road. NF-20 crosses a small stream and intersects a trail that runs parallel to the stream, heading steeply uphill without switchbacks. There are no signs to explain this, but I'm fairly sure the trail is actually County Road 550, which was once the main road up Larch Mountain from 1891-ish until 1937 when the current road opened. The county never actually vacated it after the big rerouting happened, and the unused old road just sort of faded away into the forest over time. But it still legally exists on paper, as the county never officially abandoned it. (You can see the county's collection of these on this ArcGIS layer. It's a map of "local access roads", the county's term for roads it owns but feels it has no legal obligation to maintain.)

I think I've found one end of Road 550 over near the Donahue Creek Trail, or technically a bit of County Road 458 heading to the long-abandoned town of Brower, where the 550 branches off, in theory. On paper the old road heads due east and straight uphill, crossing Larch Mountain Road (though I can't find any surviving traces of that intersection) and vaguely tracking along the section line a mile north of the Stark St. survey baseline. After crossing NF-20, instead of climbing to the very top of Larch Mountain it turns south and curves around the side of the mountain instead, running roughly parallel with NF-20 and a bit uphill of it. Eventually it, too, enters the Bull Run zone, and probably once connected some godforsaken logging camps to the outside world, so long as it hadn't rained recently. Evidently when it came time to build the scenic viewpoint on top of the mountain, and a modern paved road with two normal-width lanes to get you there, the powers that be decided to just ditch the existing road and start over from scratch. I may try to check out the 550 at some point since I'm curious how much of it still exists, though my expectations are pretty low and I wouldn't say it's a top priority.

Anyway, regarding the NF-20 and what happened to it, 2010 doc from Zigzag Ranger District about that year's round of road decommissioning explains further, and makes it clear they knew Putin-proofing the road would be a bit disruptive for the slow trickle of visitors who used it, but went ahead and did it anyway:

page 70:

The Gordon Creek area is located on the western flanks of popular and scenic Larch Mountain. It is the watershed for the town of Corbett. Forest Road 15 takes recreationists to nearly the summit of Larch Mountain ending at Sherrard Point Picnic Area with views of five Cascade peaks. The road system south west of the road to the summit, Roads 20 and 1509 were blocked with gates more than ten years ago due to illegal target shooting, dumping and other inappropriate uses that could adversely affect the Corbett Watershed. The loop roads behind the gates are used by dispersed recreationists for mountain bike riding, horseback riding, hiking, hunting, and special forest product collection. Gating the area has greatly reduced the previous dumping and target shooting problems.

page 73:

Alternative 2 would decommission Forest Road 20 and several spur roads in the area effectively eliminating the “Road 1509-Road 20 loop” used by hikers and mountain bikers. It is possible hikers may still be able to access the loop, but mountain bikes may be displaced.

Which brings us to the main reason anyone still ventures down the former road. In the Northwest, "special forest products" typically means mushroom picking, which is big business around these parts. In the eastern US it can mean wild ginseng ( https://www.fs.usda.gov/wildflowers/Native_Plant_Materials/americanginseng/index.shtml ), while in Oregon state forests the list includes "Truffles, Mushrooms, Alder or Corral poles, Beargrass, Ferns, Huckleberry, Manzanita, Rock, Salal". If you're curious how this works in practice, here's a 2019 Zach Urness article at the Salem Statesman-Journal about obtaining and using a permit for collecting sword ferns.

In any case, a Mt. Hood National Forest map of legal mushroom-picking zones includes a corridor along either side of the road formerly known as NF-20, despite the road no longer existing from a legal standpoint. In practice, the gravel roller coaster ride they made is still the only useful access into the picking area. This is one of the few parts of the whole National Forest where this is allowed -- the only other one north of the Bull Run watershed is a bit of the Bonneville powerline corridor along Tanner Creek, outside of both the National Scenic Area and Bull Run. Inside the National Scenic Area it's currently not legal anywhere and evidently not a high priority for them. The linked page explains that, by law and in theory, they could allow mushroom hunting, but even now they're still a very new unit of the National Forest system (established in 1986, which is almost yesterday by federal bureaucracy standards) and they've had higher priorities and just haven't had time or money to perform the full environmental analysis they would have to do first.

Which is not to say there hasn't been any research done. Here are a couple of Forest Service docs: "Handbook to Strategy 1 Fungal Species in the Northwest Forest Plan" and "Handbook to Additional Fungal Species of Special Concern in the Northwest Forest Plan", both part of a survey of fungi known to be present in Northern Spotted Owl habitat. It's not that owls eat mushrooms directly; as I understand it, the idea is that they indicate general forest health, and you never know if one might be a key part of the spotted owl food web, especially if the number and distribution of species is poorly known. Plus it's basic research fieldwork that generally doesn't get funded on its own.

Speaking of mushrooms, and the variability that comes with eating things that some rando found in the forest, a recent food poisoning case out of Bozeman, Montana was linked to either morel mushrooms (which are generally recognized as edible), or possibly false morels, which are quite bad for you. Evidently the toxic component in this event was a chemical called hydrazine (or maybe a precursor chemical that turns into hydrazine when eaten), which is often used as a spacecraft propellant because it's simple to ignite, meaning it spontaneously combusts on contact with all sorts of things. In fact NASA and the US Air Force are working on a 'green' alternative fuel to replace hydrazine because it's is so dangerous (and therefore expensive) to work with. 2013 Proton rocket launch accident, to give you some idea.

And since we're off topic already, it turns out that hydrazine is also the stuff of myth and legend in the drag racing community, spoken of in hushed tones, comment sections full of stern warnings from surviving oldtimers:

• Dragzine: "Flashback Friday: The Story of the Lethal Fuel called Hydrazine"
• Motor Trend: "What is Nitromethane, anyway?"
• DragList:
• Nitromater: "What can you tell me about hydrazine and drag racing?"
• BangShift: "This 1966 NASA Film is all about hydrazine, how bad it is, and how it is properly handled"
• Dover Dragstrip: "Hydrazine: Doomsday Fuel of the 60s"
• Euclid's Bridge: "Drag Racing Pioneers or Suicidal Nutjobs?"

And I can't really go off on a tangent like this without recommending John Drury Clark's 1972 book Ignition!, concerning the early days of liquid fuel rocket research. Here, the author reminisces about chlorine trifluoride, another rather alarming substance:

“It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.”

Lower Bridge Creek Falls

In the previous post (that is, the one about Bridge Creek Falls, in the Oregon Coast Range), I forgot to even mention that it has a downstream sibling. Lower Bridge Creek Falls is easier to see in that you don't have to race across busy Highway 6 to see it. The creek drops at least as far as the upper falls, I think, and it drops onto rocks next to the Wilson River -- and it probably goes straight into the river during the wet season.

But snobs and pedants and internet busybodies of all types turn up their noses at it, because the creek travels under Highway 6 in a pipe and you can see the pipe from some angles, and if your really overthink it a bunch it kinda-sorta looks a bit like it might be untreated outflow from some chemical plant going into a river full of endangered species. That isn't what it is, of course, and (as far as I know) the stream is just as pristine as anything else in the Coast Range. It is probably true that no matter how good your photos of it are, nobody will want a print of it on the wall of their outdoor gear store if it shows the creek coming out of a pipe. It's possible nobody will want a print of it on their wall, by the breakfast nook, strictly for aesthetic reasons. But, I mean, stuff like that can be covered up with a bit of Disney landscaping magic if need be, or the culvert and pipe could be replaced with a tiny little mini-bridge so it looks more natural from below, or who knows. Maybe plant some vines to deemphasize the WPA stonework under the bridge next to the falls, and swap out the ugly chainlink fence along the road, above the falls, with just about anything else that still works as a fence. I dunno, that probably wouldn't help. To misquote Upton Sinclair, there's just no pleasing people whose livelihoods depend on rage clicks.

On the other hand, the internet being internet-level mad about this one means there isn't much about it on the interwebs, and I can point you at all of it, or at least everything that Google thinks is worth indexing -- which seems to be less and less original human-created content as time goes on. Pages at Waterfalls West, My Wild Adventure, and Exploring My Life, and a cameo in an OregonHikers trip report. Also a couple of stock photos on Alamy, and a clip of stock video footage on something called Pond5, and a brief YouTube video from 2013. And that last one I only found thru DDG, even though Google and YouTube are parts of the same vast, lumbering monolith and you'd think its search tentacle would do an excellent job of indexing its video tentacle, wouldn't you? But no, or at least not anymore.

Bridge Creek Falls

Next we're paying a quick visit to Bridge Creek Falls, in the Oregon Coast Range right off Highway 6, at the Tillamook State Forest's "Footbridge Day Use Area and Trailhead". Like most of the recreation spots along Highway 6, the turnoff is a bit awkward and you'll miss it entirely if you blink at the wrong time.

Getting to the falls from the parking lot is not difficult if you know what you're doing. The one exciting part is that the falls are on the other side of the highway, so you have to walk back up to the road, look for the trail on the other side of the highway, and sprint across when nobody's coming. Be patient and wait as long as you need to, or come back a different day when the road isn't packed with seniors in RVs and angry business dudes in BMWs who desperately want to pass the RVs. Or more precisely, they paid good money for that M5, and Highway 6 would be an ideal road for doing M5 stuff except for that one stupid RV chugging along at 20mph. Now if there was just a good place to whip around those geezers and really floor it the way its Bavarian creators intended... which in practice means you get to catch up to the next RV that much faster. And somehow there's always another RV up there chugging away. Passing one RV is easy. Passing another one every 10 minutes is annoying but doable. But somehow, passing all of them is a whole different sort of problem, and might involve some variation on Zeno's paradox.

Assuming you don't get M5'd while crossing the street, there's an old sign for the trail. It's the only sign, for the only trail, you can't miss it. The first thing you'll notice are stairs. And not just any stairs, created with dirt and boards and maybe some chicken wire. No, these are carved stone stairs, made by people who knew what they were doing, and they don't look recent. What you're looking at is a vestige of the 1930s WPA project that created Highway 6 in more or less its current form. Modernizing the old Wilson River Road became urgent after summer 1933, when the northern Coast Range was devastated by the first of the Tillamook Burn series of forest fires. At one point the new road was planned to open by December 1936, per this map, but that goal slipped due to funding and construction difficulties. Over the course of the year, the project was repeatedly funded and canceled, and authorities quarreled over things they should have worked out before starting, like who was paying for what, and whether the road could legally charge tolls.

Things continued along that way for a few more years, and eventually 1941 rolled around and the road was finally almost ready to open. So they announced a grand opening gala for August 19th, but quickly canceled that, blaming it on a typo. Then the September 19 date was rained out, and the new road finally opened without fanfare in October 1941. The state planned to treat this as a sort of soft opening and still have the planned grand opening gala in the following spring. I couldn't find any indication that this ever actually happened. I imagine that, like a lot of big plans, it just sort of fell by the wayside after Pearl Harbor.

During all that news about the roadwork, there wasn't anything in the paper about their plans for the Bridge Creek area specifically, or a list of places that were be brought up to WPA standards. The latter would be interesting in case there are other examples of their design work along the way, but forgotten out there in the forest somewhere. And maybe there are still records of a master plan on file somewhere, though I'm not sure who gets those after the responsible federal agency is abolished, like the WPA was. Maybe the National Archives would have that? In any case, Oregon newspapers did not mention Bridge Creek Falls by name until the 2020s: First a March 2020 roundup of scenic Coast Range waterfalls worth visiting, and again in October 2021 as one of the highlights of the Wilson River Trail.

Some links from around the interwebs, mostly concerning the falls, the river, the footbridge over the river, and the various trails radiating out from the far side of the bridge.

• OregonWaterfalls
• Waterfall Record
• PNW Photo Blog
• Aaron's Waterfall World
• The Outdoor Project
• The Hiking Project
• Trail Run Project
• Oregon Discovery
• The Narrative Image
• Day by Day - Rock Climbing & Life
• Wandering Yuncks
• my morning moxie
• Paul's Bizarre Website

Oh, and there's also

another Bridge Creek Falls in Oregon, in Deschutes County, upstream of famous Tumalo Falls. That waterfall was even mentioned once in the Oregonian a few years before the coastal one, in a 2017 article about things to do in the Bend area.

The Wave

I was out at the coast recently and stopped in Cannon Beach, and happened to park at a municipal lot a block or so off the main drag. The lot has a couple of public restrooms, and a small but very shiny and sparkly sculpture nearby that seems to get leaned on a lot by people waiting for someone in the restrooms. I took a couple of photos when it (the art) wasn't in use, so here they are. One thing I didn't see was a nameplate or any kind of indication who made it or what it was called, but I correctly assumed the city or local tourism office or someone was bound to have a public art page covering Cannon Beach, aand I was right again. So thanks to that, I can report that this is called The Wave, and it was made by Northwest artist Sharon Warman Agnor, and a local news site in Vancouver (WA) interviewed her back in 2017. I don't know the exact year it was made or when it arrived at the beach, but apparently Cannon Beach has a program similar to Lake Oswego where the city puts art on display for a year and then asks the public to vote on which one (if any) to buy and add to the permanent collection. The walking tour guides say The Wave won the voting after its trial year in town, but doesn't say what year that was. I really thought this detail was important I could probably just start calling or emailing people; it's a small town and it seems like everyone who actually lives there knows each other to some degree, so someone is bound to remember.

Cape Horn Viewpoint

Next up, here are a few photos from the Cape Horn Viewpoint, right on SR14 on the Washington side of the Columbia Gorge. It's basically just a wide spot on SR14 with a nice unobstructed view to the south and east and an official sign. This is right around a blind corner on a busy state highway and there aren't any signs telling drivers it's coming up just ahead, so it's very easy to zoom right by and miss it. But then, the wide shoulder that passes for a parking lot is already as big as it can get, and it's quite often completely full, so doing anything that would attract more would-be visitors might be counterproductive. So visitation is on sort of an if-you-know-you-know basis. If you miss it and want to try again, the first good place to turn around is the Salmon Falls Park and Ride, which is maybe a mile past the viewpoint. There's nowhere safe to park on the other side of the highway, and if you could, crossing the road there isn't exactly a good idea either, so keep going and turn around a second time at Belle Center Road, another mile westbound from there, and try not to miss it this time.

Incidentally, there's a Belle Center Creek that runs sorta-parallel to Belle Center Rd. and becomes a rather tall waterfall south of the intersection with SR14. A handful of trip reports can be found online, but the land is not actually public property, and is probably not going to become public property anytime soon. It seems there's a long-running dispute going back to at least 2009, and still going as of 2023. The root cause seems to be the landowner's passion for, or obsession with, ziplines. More precisely, his interest in building and operating them without clearing it with the county or complying with the National Scenic Area's many, many rules and regulations. Even spent a brief period behind bars for noncompliance, early on. And unusually, I feel kind of sympathetic toward his efforts. Not in a "rules and regulations shouldn't exist" libertarian sort of way, more of a, this guy seems to genuinely feel this is his life's purpose, like he's sort of a Johnny Appleseed of building ziplines, and I bet that would be a fascinating TED talk. Was there a moment he realized this was his life's work, or was it more of a gradual thing? I am genuinely curious.

Anyway, one practical detail you ought to know: The Cape Horn area is also home to a Forest Service-run recreational area, which I covered in a Cape Horn Loop post back in 2020, which I think covers the surrounding area pretty well, or at least it's up to my usual standards. The important detail right now is that the viewpoint is not connected to that trail network in any way. This is not a trailhead, and there's just enough parking for people to stop, get a photo or two, and then get a move on. I think this is also true of the Ozone Crag rock climbing area and other similar spots to the west of here, meaning you can't park somewhere else and take one of the hiking trails to the climbing area.

I also have one historical tidbit to share about this stretch of the highway. If you stand near the railing and look north you might notice that the highway continues on a concrete viaduct for about 500 feet or so. This was not in the original design for the road, and exists thanks to a 1927 construction accident, where either the state transportation department or a contractor got the math wrong and used wayyy too much dynamite, which turned a nice stretch of freshly built scenic highway into a field of boulders and gravel a few hundred feet below. Incredibly, nobody was killed or seriously injured when this happened, so it's ok to point and laugh at Washington's hapless highway engineers. The nearly-complete highway was delayed in opening for another 3 years, so this was a much more consequential screw-up than Oregon's exploding whale incident of November 12th 1970, though the whale incident is still funnier. Bonus fun fact, Tonya Harding (the legendary/notorious figure skater) was born on the same exact day the state detonated that whale. As far as anybody knows this was just a weird coincidence and the two facts are otherwise unrelated.

Speaking of which, here's the trailer to a low-budget action film she co-starred in shortly after all that Nancy business.

Reading Rooms, Willow Creek MAX station

The next installment in the ongoing public art thing takes us out to the Willow Creek MAX station, out in the westside 'burbs, where we're taking a look at the station's oversized teracotta tables and chairs. TriMet's Blue Line Public Art Guide describes the furniture and the general theme of the stop:

Early plans for a library branch at this station inspired the theme of reading and literature. Though the library is no longer planned, the theme blossomed, resulting in the creation of several living rooms, places where one can curl up with a good book under the cherry trees. The cherry tree was chosen because of the role it has played in literature from different cultures.

Cast concrete furniture is clustered in groups. Literary references are sandblasted onto the backs of the chairs and on tabletops. Word scramble puzzles under the three shelters contain names of authors and characters from children’s books. Letters from the world’s alphabets are randomly tossed in seven locations along the bus and light rail platforms.

A September 1998 Oregonian piece by the paper's architecture critic (back in the olden days of yore when newspapers could afford architecture critics) offers a bit more detail, crediting Seattle artist Norie Sato for the design:

* Willow Creek/SW 185th Street: Although it had one of the smallest budgets, this station in a few years is apt to be one of the nicest. Using inexpensive, off-the-shelf Victorian-themed furniture, artist Sato created a series of outdoor "reading rooms" for a proposed branch library. The design team artists also successfully fought Tri-Met's objections to blooming trees, which require higher maintenance, to create a station worth an unplanned stop.

This post sat around in Drafts for several years before I finally figured out who designed it, which is one of those pesky little details I like to know before I hit 'Publish' if at all possible. If you look at the Tri-Met public art guide I linked to, you might notice that it generally offers little or no information about who created most of the art along the Blue Line. These glaring omissions were not accidental. As I mentioned in a 2018 post about the Milikan Way MAX station art, this is an enduring legacy of the silly late-80s and early-90s culture wars, back when right-wing busybodies had nothing better to do than fill their adult diapers over a few examples of controversial art funded by You, The American Taxpayer™. (If that era was before your time, or you just generally don't follow art news that closely, the Wiki bios of photographers Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano might be a good place to start.)

The important thing to know about that historical episode is that it happened right around Peak Gingrich, and so the GOP outrage led to a few years' moratorium on any new public art in all federally-funded projects, which was long enough for that particular culture war to blow over and the GOP to find something new to go shrieking about. If I recall correctly they switched over to impeaching the president for having an affair, while they were all quietly having affairs too, but that's a whole other story. The moratorium happened to coincide with the design work for phase 1 of the Westside MAX line, from downtown Portland out to 185th. So, officially, everything decorative along that stretch of track was considered Design and not Art. It was all, officially, a collaborative effort by the whole Westside MAX Design Team, each element contributing to a single unified (and uncontroversial) theme at each station. No individual credit was given, and if the individual bits of design had names, the public was not supposed to ever find out what they were called or who made them, or else the whole city gets stomped by a mile-high Gingrich kaiju or something. I mean, in reality that almost certainly won't happen; the Culture War industry currently has bigger fish to fry, like banning vaccines, and burning books, and persecuting non-Aryans, and ending democracy once and for all, forever. It's not that they aren't still mad about art; it's just that everyone who'd be detained for making decadent art is already destined for the camps for any number of other reasons. Besides, they have their own art and artists now, like this guy

As it turned out, the MAX line was delayed several years because tunneling through the West Hills turned out to be a lot more complicated than anyone had expected, and the federal ban actually expired a few years before the line opened. So they were able to tell us a few names and titles here and there, like Core Sample Time Line at the underground Washington Park station. Other info sorta-leaked out later via an obscure, now-defunct RACC web server (RACC being Portland's regional public art agency), as with Transplant at the Elmonica MAX station. That server was for the agency's "design roster", listing local artists with past experience handling public commissions and the bureaucratic stuff that comes with them, and a track record of getting quality work done on time and within budget. The program still exists, and a recent (2017-2020) collection of artists' resumes includes a couple of references to prior work on MAX projects a quarter-century ago, and to the Willow Creek station specifically, but that didn't give me enough to go on, and years went by until I took another look at this post and happened to search the library's newspaper database with exactly the right search terms.

The really sad thing about all this is that the proposed library never happened. They did open one at a different MAX stop closer to Hillsboro, but it closed after a few years, and the area even lost the longtime Tanasbourne Library after a bond measure for a new building failed, and the existing version of it lost its lease in a mini-mall on 185th & Evergreen and had nowhere to go, and now the only option nearby is the Aloha Community Library, a scrappy underdog nonprofit (as in, it gets zero government dollars and relies on volunteers to keep the doors open.) down at the shopping center at Kinnaman and Farmington, several miles away.

Monkey, New Columbia

Next up in the ongoing public art thing, we're looking at a kinda-disturbing monkey statue located outside the New Columbia Apartments complex, across the street from McCoy Park in North Portland. This was created by Nigerian-born artist Mufu Ahmed, who also did the squirrel and salmon park benches over in the park. I really liked those, so maybe my issue with this one is that monkeys are inherently kind of disturbing. The internet says this is one of three Ahmed animal statues at the apartment complex, the others being a heron and a lizard, possibly gecko, or maybe a chameleon. I'm going to go with chameleon, based solely on the fact that it's located just steps away from the monkey and I apparently walked right past it without noticing.

This post was stuck in Drafts for years because I didn't have the info in the last paragraph (including, frankly, what it's supposed to be; I was thinking it was some kind of unholy hybrid, possibly a greyhound with a human face). Repeated internet searches over time failed to return any useful results, and I had largely given up on solving this one. But the search engine gods were off their game recently and allowed an actually useful result to sneak into the first dozen pages or so of ads and irrelevant results and general spam. It turns out the info I was looking for has been out there on the internet this entire time, in a 2006 post on the old Portland Public Art blog. Said blog has been "on hiatus" since 2009 and somehow, every now and then, it still turns out to have the answers I'm looking for when nobody else does. I don't know anything at all about the mysterious "C" behind the blog, but I hope they're enjoying their extended hiatus and are out living their best life.

On that note I should probably say something about the other art you can see if you make the trek to McCoy Park to gawk at the weird monkey statue. Across the street to the west, McCoy Park is home to a kid-friendly fountain, along with the aforementioned benches, a moon-n-stars inlay in the sidewalk, and an art fence around the park's community garden.

The community center across the street to the south also has some art to look at, like Green Silver on the roof of the building. The RACC website says there's more stuff to see inside, which I didn't know at the time, so that's left as an exercise for the reader, I guess.

One thing you won't see here is Ancestor Tree, a ginormous thingamabob made from the roots of a tree that was torn out for the New Columbia project. It was dedicated in 2005, and spent the next few years weirding people out while also beginning to rot subtly. By 2012 it was already so far gone that they decided to just tear it out on safety grounds. There was talk of replacing it for a while, but it's been over a decade now that hasn't happened yet, probably for budgetary reasons. Which is ironic given that tree roots technically do grow on trees. But hey, what do I know...

Unseen Worlds

Next up we're back in industrial North Portland for another installment in the ongoing public art series. This time^[1] we're taking a look at Unseen Worlds (2002) by artist Fernanda d'Agostino (whose work has appeared here a lot). This comes to us via Portland's Bureau of Environmental Services, specifically their Columbia Blvd. Wastewater Treatment Plant, which is one reason the mainstream guides for tourists don't tell you this is a must-see. (C'mon, stop snickering for a minute and let's pretend we're all serious people having a serious chat about capital-A Art for a minute.) Here's the official RACC description, which is repeated across several pages covering different sub-categories of the art here:

The artworks along this path depict various aspects of the wetlands and reparian environments of the site. You’ll find images of microorganisms and macro invertebrates used to test water quality. The paving inlays hint at the tidal nature of the slough. The “Dendritic Bridge” frames a view of the intersection of industrial and natural landscapes and you’ll find a bird list for the site beneath your feet. Birdhouses provide bird habitat and the perches reference feathers, beaks and some of the tools used in the sewer treatment plant. Looking through the three holes in the “Periscope Stone” you’ll see the favorite perch for Bald Eagles that frequent the park in early spring, the composter at the treatment plant, and the biggest snag (favorite all round habitat) on the site.

So why is this here? The art's located along a side branch of the Columbia Slough Trail skirts around the east side of the plant. On the south end, it almost[2] connects you to the Peninsula Crossing Trail, Evidently either the trail, or the Inverness bridge, or the Big Pipe, or some other capital project here generated enough Percent for Art money to fund some art and, I guess, give trail users something less sewer-y to look at and think about on their way through the area. Which I guess is nice if you're a squeamish grownup with delicate sensibilities, which covers just about everyone here. I mean, the agency's name -- "Bureau of Environmental Services" -- is a euphemism, and they would apparently be thrilled if the public saw them as the agency that's somehow in charge of herons and salmon and rain, and their engineers spend their days working on the city's mystical bond with same. Or something along those lines anyway.

But that's just one way to approach the problem. Next time BES has a major capital project here -- and there's bound to be another one sooner or later -- I hereby propose we put the city's eight year olds in charge of the whole public art program. I mean, grade school kids generally, but especially the eight year olds. And instead of no-fun grownups guiding them toward another batch of the same old tasteful nature art that everyone's supposed to like -- instead of doing that we really lean into whatever the eight year olds come up with, just this once. Obviously in general this is no way to run a city, and calling them "subject matter experts" is kind of a stretch, but they at least spend a lot of time giggling about the topic.

Also it's not like this would be unprecedented in the wider art world, although most of the examples that come back in a quick interweb search seem to be unintentional.

• The, ah, tightly coiled new W Hotel in Edinburgh, Scotland. I mean, it's Scotland -- even if people thought it looked like a local walnut-chocolate snack, or a "haute couture blindfold", rather than a big pile of poo, they wouldn't admit to it.
• Meanwhile in Philadelphia (possibly America's answer to Scotland), the local art museum acquired one of those giant Claes Oldenburg sculptures in 2011. Paint Torch is a 51' high tilted paintbrush, with a nearby blob of red paint, celebrating the art of painting. And that's all it was until one day in 2015 when artist Kid Hazo happened along and attached a grinning mouth and two big googly eyes to the paint blob, which was instantly and utterly transformed. In an age of omni-surveillance and zero tolerance everything, this is the only kind of art intervention that works: It can be undone in seconds, but can't be unseen no matter how much time elapses.
• Meanwhile in Boston, in 2023 the city welcomed The Embrace, the city's weird but official new MLK memorial. Said to be inspired by a photo of MLK hugging Corretta Scott King shortly after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the $10M giant-sized art tries and fails to show just the hug in a sorta-minimalist way by depicting a tangled nightmare of disembodied arms and general biology, inspiring scatological thoughts over on Reddit.
• San Jose, California's 1994 statue of the feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl depicts him coiled like a rattlesnake, and seen from a certain distance bystanders tend to just see the coiled shape and draw conclusions. General consensus seems to be that even if it was a poo emoji statue, it's still an upgrade over the statue it replaced, a pioneer so odious he was canceled way back in 1988.
• In Chicago, an artist made a fountain depicting a semi-realistic pile of the stuff, even labeling it "SHIT FOUNTAIN" to remove any lingering doubt. Seems he created it to criticize his neighbors for not cleaning up after their dogs.
• Meanwhile in Rotterdam, back in 2018, a local art museum hosted a Vienna-based art collective and their giant photorealistic logs of poo. They may have realized, late in the process, that this might not be quite enough to get a rise out of jaded Dutch museum-goers, and added another conceptual bit to the mix:
  

  Now, the sculptures rest on Persian rugs and are stared at by visitors wearing naked suits featuring various shapes and sizes of male and female sexual parts.
  
  For Gantner, the naked suits are “a gift to visitors” that enhance the exhibition and their own experience of it.
  
  “You step into the costume and you immediately transform into another being. People don’t know anymore what your job is, if you’re rich, poor, male or female, so you forget a little bit about all these rules.”

• Which brings us to Orlando, Florida, where we meet the most crass one of all, a giant walk-in inflatable poo emoji that was in town temporarily to promote some sort of deodorizer spray.

Since I'm way too old to submit ideas to the contest I just suggested, and I'm also not an official artist and ineligible if they did a boring regular art proposal process, let me just tell you my idea. You know how grand entrances to important buildings are often flanked by art of guardian animals, right? Things like sculptures of lions sitting outside library entrances. Imagine a pair of giant stainless steel poo emojis, grinning as they flank the main entrance to the plant. Coiling in opposite directions to maintain classical symmetry, and bidding the visitor welcome to where the magic happens.

---

Footnotes

[1]. About this post

You might have noticed that the photos in this post are a bit subpar and few in number. If you look closer you might notice they were taken wayyy back in 2014. This is another one of those posts that lingered around in drafts for ages because I couldn't figure out what it was called, and without a name I don't even have a title for the post, and the rest of the research gets pretty difficult, too, and I'd basically given up on this one but never got around to deleting it. Then a few days ago I was poking around on the revamped RACC website again and noticed entries for the art next to the sewer plant, and I will swear up and down and three times sideways that these database entries didn't exist until quite recently. So this time I couldn't move forward because the website that's supposed to be the single source of truth about these things just sort of neglected to mention the art here, for unknown reasons.

Little Jack Falls

Next up we're visiting another obscure waterfall along the lower Columbia River. Little Jack Falls is a short distance from Jack Falls, on an abandoned stretch of the old Lower Columbia River Highway, outside of tiny Prescott, OR, where the old Trojan nuclear plant used to be. The state still owns the old stretch of road, and it's still largely passable with one big exception we'll get to shortly (or you'll just see in the photoset here).

Getting to the falls involves simply walking along the old road for a bit, and you can start at either the bottom or the top. I've only been there via the lower sorta-trailhead so far, and that route involves parking somewhere near the US 30 intersection with Graham Road, then crossing 30 when it's safe, and looking for a trail starting around where concrete barriers turn into metal guardrails. From there, follow the old highway uphill until you get to Jack Falls, first. Have a look at the falls, and the cute little historic bridge that the creek goes over, then keep going uphill until you get to Little Jack Falls. You can't miss it, or I hope you can't, because sadly the original LCRH bridge that was here is completely gone now, and absentmindedly falling into the gap would mean a long tumble down a steep slope to the edge of the present-day highway.

If the way here, and especially the area right around the falls, look a bit less natural and magical than similar spots in the Gorge, it might be the invasive ivy currently overrunning the vicinity. The airquote-fun detail about this situation is that it was intentional, at first. A 1915 Oregonian article concerning a long drive from Portland to Astoria in a shiny new Reo automobile mentions that the original landscaping around the base of Little Jack Falls included decorative plantings of ivy, for a complete dumbass reason. A 1920 state highway report includes some photos of the ongoing roadwork along this stretch of the highway, then under construction, and the whole area had obviously been clearcut shortly before the road went in. So to make it look less bare and desolate here, they planted one of the rare few things that isn't an improvement over bare dirt.

The ivy situation really complicates things here, if the state ever decides to renovate this stretch of the old highway. The ivy isn't just a nasty invasive plant, it's also an important part of the historical context and built landscape around here, and that would make it illegal, verging on sacreligious, to ever tear it out or let goats nibble on it, or otherwise prevent it from spreading as it sees fit. So that ought to be an especially fun series of angry public meetings.

Also, Little Jack Falls is almost certainly haunted, if you believe in that sort of thing. As noted in the Jack Falls post, there used to be a collection of abandoned buildings either here or at the other waterfall, depending on which oral history you believe, and that spot became a hideout for a gang of outlaws, but they all died in a shootout and their loot has never been found (and is presumably still around here somewhere). Couple of additional strange incidents happened here, decades later, which makes me think Little Jack is the waterfall with the outlaw ghosts and the hidden treasure: In August 1922, an intercity bus was driving along through here when a man randomly shot two fellow passengers just as they passed Little Jack Falls, killing one of them. Then in 1947 a duck hunter parked at the falls, intending to go hunting in the nearby marshes (close where the nuclear plant would be decades later), and was never seen again. Ok, that or he turned up uneventfully after the media lost interest and lived happily ever after, possibly under a new name. Most likely it was one of those things or the other, at any rate. If a lost hunter from 1947 somehow encountered sci-fi atomic radiation from 1997 and became a kaiju-sized ravenous man-duck hybrid, you'd think someone would have noticed by now. Unless maybe he's not ready to burst forth from underground yet, in which case he'll probably show up in 2047 after marinating in bad swamp mojo for a century, and comic-book radiation for the second half of that century. But it wouldn't hurt to keep a closer eye on the area in 2027 and 2037 in case I got the math wrong somehow.

On a more cheerful note, I think you said earlier that you wanted to know where the name came from. And to that end we have a 1915 Oregon Journal article that explains the falls are named for the young son of District Engineer Thompson. The article does not explain whether Jack Falls is also named after the kid and the "Little" describes the falls, or maybe the kid was "Little Jack" and Jack Falls is named after his dad. Some future historian with access to more sources will have to figure that one out for us.

One feature of the upper route (and thus not pictured here) is the old Prescott Point Viaduct, which was considered an engineering marvel of its day (though bridge pedants would like to point out that it's technically just a half-viaduct). Some photos on that page show another reason why they used this route and not the current one, namely that the present-day route was either part of the river, or a river-adjacent swamp, back then, and the route only became buildable after levees went in, around 1938-39. The half-viaduct here and another elsewhere cost $5k in 1918 dollars.

Unlike Jack Falls down the road, the creek is apparently not part of anyone's water supply. The eponymous Little Jack Falls Water System -- the local utility for a handful of area residents -- draws from a nearby spring and not the creek itself. I know this thanks to their 2001 state licensing form (if you're curious what one of those looks like), which also tells us the current operators (as of 2001) had owned & run it since 1976. This factoid is not really relevant to much of anything; it's mostly that while researching a different waterfall post I realized that small water utilities were effectively unregulated in Oregon until the early 1980s, and what came out of your tap could be a real crapshoot, scatological pun intended. And yes, that was a transparent attempt to get visitors to go read a second post here, even though I don't make a penny off this weird little blog either way.

Jack Falls

A while back we paid a visit to Beaver Falls, a now-obscure waterfall that used to be a scenic highlight of the old Lower Columbia River Highway. Which was the predecessor of today's US 30 between Portland and Astoria, and the continuation of the famous Columbia River Highway that meanders through the Gorge. It's not widely known anymore that there's anything worth stopping to see along the road to Astoria, but in this post we're going to visit another one.

This time we're near the small city of Prescott (pop. 55), which is on the Columbia River just downstream from the former Trojan nuclear power plant, the inspiration for The Simpsons' Springfield Nuclear Plant. I mention that just because nobody knows where Prescott is. I honestly didn't either until I went looking for waterfalls nearby. The town (and plant site) are on a rocky area that was probably an island once, now connected to the "mainland" by a large swampy wetland area, bordered by east-facing steep bluffs. Present-day US 30 runs along the base of the bluffs near Prescott and then climbs a steep grade to the community of Lindbergh and the city of Rainier a short distance past there.

There were two basic obstacles to using the present-day route, When the old road first went in, the average 1920s passenger car could not have handled the steeper parts of the present-day highway, and instead the road used to climb the hill on a gentle continuous grade from the intersection with Graham Road (the main road to Prescott) up to the top of the hill over the course of about a mile. There was no obvious way to expand this route to four lanes, so the after the current route opened the old way uphill was simply abandoned to the forest. And it's remained that way ever since, surprisingly intact in most places, beneath a protective layer of moss and decades of fallen leaves. It's going to be our trail today.

Abandoned along with the old road was any official access to two waterfalls that until then had been scenic highlights of the road to the coast. Jack Falls (here) and Little Jack Falls (just down the road) were either a.) both named for a child of an engineering manager on the construction project, or b.) one is named after the kid and the other after his dad, and they were never renamed with native-sounding names of dubious origin like they did throughout the Gorge. In this post we're looking at Jack Falls, since it's the one you encounter first if you're coming from below, i.e. the Prescott end of the road. The link above goes to the companion post about the other waterfall.

But first you have to find the old road that takes you to them. A 2017 OregonWaterfalls post explains how to get there: Turn off US 30 at Graham Road and park in a turnout near the intersection. The road is on a levee between two wetland areas, and any other vehicles parked here will most likely be birdwatchers. Rather than joining them, go back to the US30 intersection, wait for a gap in traffic, and carefully cross the highway. You'll need to hop over a guardrail on the other side, ideally near where the metal guardrail turns into concrete barriers. Initially you're looking for a plain old unmarked trail heading into the forest. When I was there, there were several fallen trees and assorted other debris right when you walked into the forest, and it would be easy to conclude you were going the wrong way. If you keep going, pretty soon it opens up and it looks like, well, a leaf-covered road with the occasional fallen tree across it, and patches of ivy here and there. If you clear away the debris layer, you'll find there's still a mostly-intact asphalt road down there, and traces of painted lane markings are still visible in parts. Ok, there are occasional hidden cracks in the pavement that you could easily wedge a foot into, which would be a fun way to break an ankle if you aren't paying attention, and if anything trips you, you might fall onto devil's club or maybe poison oak. But generally you can just follow an existing boot path through the ivy for decent footing and ways around whatever debris is on the road. In a couple of spots some anonymous volunteer has obviously sawed up a lot of the debris to remove blockages. So any masked individuals with chainsaws you might encounter along this stretch of abandoned road are most likely friendly and benevolent local community members.

Anyway, now that you've found the road, finding the waterfall should be easy enough. Look to your left and uphill. If you see a waterfall, you're there. If you don't, but it's late summer and you're standing on an old HCRH-style stone/concrete bridge over a dry creekbed, you're also there, most likely. Otherwise continue walking forward and do this check again in a few minutes. Check your GPS coordinates against the map above. Seriously, I found it with no trouble and so can you. Once there, you can do some advanced influencer yoga poses for the 'Gram (watch out for gravel), or dance a jig for TikTok, or go off on a spittle-flecked conspiracy rant for X (formerly Twitter), or whatever your content creation routine happens to be in the year 2024 AD. And after that you can either turn around and go home, or keep going to Little Jack Falls. Which is a whole other blog post, because of a rule I made up years ago. If you hit a point where parts of the road have fallen away and it narrows to roughly trail width for a short distance, you've gone too far and wandered into the other blog post, and if the road fades out entirely and beyond it is nothing but dragons, it means I haven't hit 'Publish' on that other post yet.

But you're still here, so: Congratulations, you're at Jack Falls, and the odds are pretty good that you don't know jack about it. But that's about to change, thanks to this brief but inevitable dump of facts about it:

• It's about 75' tall by most estimates, a whopping 5 feet taller than Little Jack Falls just up the road.
• Except that the little in the name isn't about which is taller, but because the construction manager for this stretch of highway had a young son who went by "Little Jack", which I think means Jack Falls is named after his dad. I'm not sure, though; the old Oregon Journal article I got this factoid from doesn't mention Jack Falls at all and doesn't address how that name came about.
• In fact, as far as I can determine no Portland periodical has ever printed a single word about Jack Falls. The only news items I've ever seen about it were in the Saint Helens Mist, a long-vanished periodical of the early 20th century:
  
  • An October 1916 issue of the St. Helens Mist - county appropriated money to build present-day Graham Rd. to connect to the old highway, which was there first apparently. so the road into town is where it is because of the abandoned old highway
  • A July 1917 issue of the same paper seems to indicate there was a local road here before the full highway, which would have been some kind of narrow gravel road. That sounds a little too exciting, if you ask me.
  • And regarding the general perception that the old highway was a bit... unsafe, an October 1922 personal injury court case relating to a car crash on the stretch of road past little jack falls on the way to rainier.
• Oh, and before anyone asks, as sketchy as it may look, we are doing this 100% legally. The state hung onto the right-of-way for the old highway route after closing it to traffic; they seem to do this a lot in rural or natural areas, I guess to keep all their future options open. On top of that, Columbia County GIS says the City of Prescott owns the falls, which they'd originally bought as a sort of miniature Bull Run watershed, as I understand it, though they aren't currently using it for that.
• A circa-2018 mention of Jack Falls on reddit, OP was looking for hikes near St. Helens, one reply mentions the falls and notes someone had rigged up a hose & ball valve to it for some reason. I didn't see any amenities like that when visiting, so it may be long gone by now. Unless maybe someone's very determined that Jack Falls needs a hose, for secret reasons, and clandestinely installs new ones as needed. Either way, there either is or isn't a hose and/or ball valve like this right now, and it may or may not be there at whatever time you visit.
• The Google Maps entry for includes seven photos, mostly of the right waterfall, while elsewhere on the interwebs I came across six Flickr photos, three Instagram posts, and one mention (with a photo) at Recreating the HCRH.
• Also we've got two dueling oral histories to consider, both interviews with local oldtimers. This one was recorded in 1961 and mostly recounts the history of sawmills at Prescott; the town's brief heyday as a cosmopolitan seaport, exporting products overseas directly from the local mill; the town's contribution to the war effort in WWII, etc., and we're told in passing that there was a school somewhere around Little Jack Falls really early on, before the present-day town really got going. A competing history relays the facts differently:
  

  Ed: Before Prescott there was a town and a mill up by Jack Falls. It had a school and some vacant buildings. A gang of crooks were supposed to be holed up there and were killed in a shootout. The money was never found.

  
  Ok, that's more like it. If you're a gang of crooks, and you're holed up near a waterfall, odds are you aren't doing it for the scenery or the relaxing white noise. No, the only reason you're likely to do this is if you're hiding something behind the waterfall. Could be the legendary lost treasure that "Ed" mentioned, could be an escape tunnel for avoiding shootouts, could be lots of things. It's just that nobody knows anymore which falls this happened at. My money's on Little Jack since it just looks better for concealing things, though the main drop of Jack Falls up toward the top of the bluff might be viable too. Either way, any henchmen who died in the shootout (not having been told about any secret escape tunnels) are probably still there as angry ghosts skulking around haunting whichever falls is the right one.

Naturally there's another, larger Jack Falls in Oregon, located along the Umpqua River east of Roseburg. And even more naturally there's a Fall(s) Creek Falls relatively close to both falls named Jack Falls , because you're never very far from a Fall(s) Creek in the wet parts of the Northwest. Thanks again, unimaginative pioneers!

The Fall Creek Falls in Columbia County is right in Clatskanie just off OR 47, behind the park with the baseball diamonds. It's very much privately owned, and the current owner is trying to make a go of it as an event venue and does not welcome visitors outside My personal preference is always going to be that scenic places ought to be public places, open to all and sundry with little or no red tape. But given the small population of the county, and the usual rural Oregon aversion to paying taxes for anything, this may be the best realistic outcome. I mean, Columbia County has had at least three waterfalls on the books as county parks (Beaver Falls, Lava Creek Falls, Carcus Creek Falls) for over a century now without doing much of anything with them, so if they came into possession of another one now it would probably just end up last in line behind the others. And if the county doesn't have the money, chances are the city of Clatskanie doesn't either. I'm telling you all this now because the only way I'm likely to end up with photos of Clatskanie's Fall Creek Falls (and thus the only way you get a post about those falls) is if someone out there needs a junior assistant wedding photographer and you don't really care whether my photos of your most cherished moments are any good -- which is a legitimate possibility since I've never actually done wedding photos before. And you also don't care that I shoo everyone out of frame a few times so I can just get undisturbed photos of the falls and nothing else. If asked by curious guests, I would just say that my creative process requires it, and not elaborate further. That's usually enough to end conversations and not become a distraction on your special day. So yeah, if you want to see a "Fall Creek Falls (Clatskanie)" post here someday, and you're up for helping make that happen, all you need to do is find your soulmate and get together, choose this specific place as your venue, invite me (as explained above) and somehow convince me the invite isn't some kind of weird scam or kidnapping attempt or timeshare presentation, and afterward remind me a few times so the post doesn't get lost in Drafts for ages.

And while we're talking about potential future events: The thing that really struck me on this trip was the old highway and its current conditions. I am just barely old enough to remember that long stretches of the old Columbia River Highway in the Gorge used to look just like this, back before present-day restoration efforts got going. You don't have to be a TED-talking, outside-the-boxing think-o-brain visionary to wonder if the same thing would work here too. The Portland bike community is forever making noise about needing at least one less-unsafe route between the city and the coast; maybe a "Historic Lower Columbia Highway State Trail" is the way to make this happen. It would inevitably be a bike-centric trail (vs a hiking one), even more so than the HCRH trail. The scenic highlights are usually separated by long stretches of just farm country and no nature to speak of. A lot of the work is just putting up signs marking the original route, and sharing the road on still-in-use rural backroads, and probably redesigning some intersections with present-day US30 since the meandering original route crosses back and forth over the current route quite a few times. ODOT could turn a few four-way stops into freeway intersections, which they're pretty good at and are always up for. Also throw some money at local scenic and natural attractions and hopefully persuade a few people to stop off along the way and spend some money in Saint Helens, Rainier, Clatskanie, and the other old river towns along the way. So that's in general; for the segment of road we just visited, that would be restored like some old HCRH parts: Reopened just to bikes & pedestrians, maybe with a safer way for people to get across Highway 30 at both both ends, and more parking at the lower end of the route. Maybe a crosswalk, maybe a skybridge, depending on how likely you think drivers will be to stop at the new signal. Maybe combine the old existing right-of-way with Prescott's old watershed area and declare it a new state park. If possible include the other nearby road segments to the logical east/physical south. Replace the Little Jack Falls bridge, maybe not an exact replica of the one that failed, seems like they built it too close to the falls for effect.

Anyway, that's Jack Falls. Stay tuned (or keep walking) for the Little Jack installment of this exciting adventure...