More PDX shots

This is a nice shot of downtown Portland from Washington Park.

I've always enjoyed finding these contractor labels on Portland's old sidewalks. I see few of these marks in other cities but they're all over the older sections of Portland. This one is near NE 28th and Everett.

This one's in the Ladd Addition. The oldest such inscription I've seen in Portland is 1903. Perhaps on a future visit I'll roam around town and make a photographic collection of these things.

Ancient Floods

The first pic here is a current shot of the Burnside Bridge. Notice the sharp line of demarcation between the light colored concrete below and the darker shade above. This is a flood mark. As you can see, at some time in the past the Willamette River rose to about the height of the top of the bridge pier on the left side of the picture. This is about 20-25 feet from the level of the river in the photo.

This is a photo of a photo of the famous Portland Christmas Day flood of December 1964. Yes, the old sloat took this picture...he was a young sloat then. Blow up the picture and at the top right you can see the Burnside Bridge. The water is almost up to the steel beams on the bottom of the bridge, and the pier is not visible. The water in the picture is about as high as the mark in the newer photo. That watermark was reinforced in February 1996, when the Willamette rose to about the same level for the only time since 1964. Also notice that the waterfront on the west side of the river has a freeway and only a fairly narrow pedestrian walkway. In the 1970s the freeway was torn up and replaced by a park. Imagine that!

Dracula in PDX?

Wandering around the West Hills in PDX, trying not to get lost, I came upon this distinctive home. I don't recall reading about the count spending any time in town, but if he did he'd probably live here, I reckon.

Highway as a work of art

The old Columbia River Highway is an amazing feat of architecture. It was built in WWI days, completed in 1915 I believe, to open the Columbia Gorge to motor vehicle traffic. In those days cars were still rather a novelty, and auto travel was adventurous, new, and slow. The pace of life in general was slow compared to the present day. The highway was built over rough terrain and was painstakingly constructed to fit the contours of the land. Tunnels, bridges, viaducts, and even guard railings were built as works of art. Italian stonemasons constructed the railings, using a minimum of mortar. Almost a century later this stretch of road, buried in the forest and no longer used for vehicle traffic, is still elegant. It is now a fancy hiking and biking trail.

These columns forming a guard rail also have an Italian feel. This is actually a viaduct...the left side of the road is suspended well above ground level, and even the right side is not quite flush with the rock. As you can see the road was very narrow, just wide enough for two small old cars to pass each other. The fact that it was paved...in 1915...made it state of the art. But within about 20 years, with the advent of larger, faster cars and trucks, it was obsolete and a new gorge highway was gradually built, wider and less sinuous. By the 1950s the old highway was strictly a tourist road, and by the early 1960s a freeway was in place.

This stone masterpiece is a bridge over Eagle Creek on the old highway. They don't make bridges like this anymore...think about the intricate, prolonged labor it took to build this. Most likely the work of those Italian stonemasons.

The builders of the old highway even had pedestrians in mind! This little niche was constructed right next to the Eagle Creek bridge, most likely at the same time. You have a fine view of the creek and the bridge. The Old Sloat rested his flippers here for awhile, reading his book about two hitchhikers in Australia. If they were hitching here they no doubt would enjoy this spot too.

A distinctive PDX 'hood

The Ladd Addition is an older Portland neighborhood in the near southeast part of the city. I have always been interested in it because of its unique geography. Whereas most of the streets in east Portland run in a N-S E-W grid, the streets in the Ladd Addition run northeast-southwest...southeast-northwest...and north-south. The neighborhood really stands out on a city map or on Google Earth. As a pup the Old Sloat had a habit of gazing at the Portland map, finding such neighborhoods, and at first navigating my dad to drive there to see what it looked like, and later to ride my bike into the 'hood. The Ladd Addition has one large circular park in a roundabout, and four tidy diamond shaped parks filled with roses. It's all neat and tidy, though without a map it's easy for a newcomer to get lost in the maze of streets.

The architecture in Ladd is eclectic. There are fine craftsman homes as well as mediterranean bungalows. There is one big mansion with Ionic columns...did old man Ladd live there? It's leafy, green, and quiet, and it appears that the residents take pride in their neighborhood...it's quite well maintained.

I don't know much about the history of the area, but it appears that most of the sidewalks were laid in 1907, so many of the homes are probably about a century old. If you look closely, you can spot a few horse rings on the curbs...used to "park" our equine friends in the old days.

Mt St Helens, 27 Years After

I visited Mount Rainier and Mount St Helens in the same day yesterday, which was very cool. St Helens was never nearly as massive as Rainier, but it used to be equally beautiful, a symmetric white cone rising above the Portland area to the north. Of course, that all changed on May 18, 1980 when the mountain blew its top. The north side of it was blasted away, radically altering Spirit Lake, washing water and volcanic debris hundreds of feet up the adjacent mountains and sending ash thousands of miles to the east; I had a light coating of ash from the eruption on my car in Denver the next day. My mom watched the eruption from her living room window in Portland...quite a spectacle.

I enjoy going back to the mountain every decade or so to see how the landscape is recovering. The volcano is still steaming...the lava dome in the crater continues to build slowly, and centuries or millenia from now, the cone shape may return...if there's not another major eruption. The landscape adjacent to the north side of the mountain is revegetating slowly, but outside of the most extreme blast zone, forests with trees 20-30 feet high are thriving.

These trees are one of the eeriest results of the eruption. Notice that they're all lying in the same direction, instead of being jumbled as would normally be the case. Of course, they're all facing away from the mountain; the blast knocked them down in an instant. The new trees to the right of the picture are in an area where perhaps the heat and intensity of the blast were less than to the left, which was directly exposed to the eruption without any intervening terrain.

This lake is just over a small ridge from direct exposure to the volcano. It still devastated the area...the old spars were trees in an old growth forest that were snapped like matchsticks! But probably the heat from the blast was not as intense as in areas with absolute direct exposure to the eruption, so the soil fared better; and now a healthy new forest is well underway.

Da Kine Big Kahuna Mountain!

Mount Rainier is perhaps the most dramatic mountain in the 48 states. Other peaks in the Sierra and Rockies are about as high, but none stand alone and tower so far above the surrounding landscape. Rainier dominates the country for many miles in all directions. It's an enormous pile of rock, snow, and ice, 14,410 feet high. It's massive, majestic, awesome, and, on a sunny day like this one, it lifts my spirits. Not sure why, maybe just the sheer majesty of it does the job. It should be remembered, however, that Mt Rainier is considered the most dangerous of the Cascade volcanoes. It hasn't caused any trouble for a couple centuries, but it periodically releases massive mudflows called lahars that regularly sweep into the valleys near Tacoma. The last such lahar occurred about 500 years ago, when those valleys were only thinly settled by Native Americans. Now, there are tens of thousands of people there, hundreds of thousands if you include some of the Tacoma area which could be affected in an extreme case. The lahars occur about every 500-1000 years, so another could happen at any time. They could be triggered by an eruption, or simply by unusually strong melting due to weather conditions.

This huge mass of ice is Emmons Glacier, on the east side of the mountain. Though it's smaller than it was 100 years ago, It still has the largest surface area of any glacier in the contiguous US. Though it looks like the glacier ends near the bottom of the picture, it actually ends farther down, out of the photo. Lower reaches of Emmons are black with rock debris carried down from high on the mountain, and a stream flows vigorously from underneath the ice, at least at this time of year.

Mr Marmot

I was hiking in Mt Rainier National Park the other day with my ol' college roommate Dick and his wife Wilma and son John when we came upon this marmot, grazing on plants at the side of the trail. I guess I identify with marmots because, like myself, they're fat; they like to lay in the sun; and they enjoy the mountains. You find them in all the mountains of the west; they're plentiful in the Rockies and Sierra as well as the Cascades. Though mostly herbivorous, marmots...at least those in the Mineral King area of Sequoia NP, have developed a taste for antifreeze. They will bite through hoses in cars to get at the tasty (?) liquid and have been known to disable vehicles in that area! On other occasions they have set up under the hood of someone's car and still been there, without disabling the vehicle, when the owner returned and drove off. In this way our furry mountain friends have made it as far afield as LA! I reckon a marmot would look cool riding in a Mercedes convertible wearing Oakleys.

An Enchanted Canyon

I may have touched on this in March, but the country above Multnomah Falls is fine. Moss drapes the trees; there are several other waterfalls; and 95 percent of the throngs that hike to the top of Multnomah go no farther, leaving the higher reach of Multnomah Creek uncrowded and peaceful.

Here's one of the waterfalls about a mile up the trail above Multnomah. It's about 60 feet high, give or take a few yards.

I have always enjoyed the Columbia Gorge. It is a dramatic place where the broad river courses through a majestic canyon with almost vertical walls of basalt, especially on the south side. That side, the Oregon sector of the gorge, is graced with many waterfalls. This is Wahkeena Falls, near Multnomah. Incidentially, the gorge was shaped to a considerable extent by our old friends, the Missoula floods, which scraped away the basalt, leaving hanging valleys which, of course, result in waterfalls.

The forests in the western end of the gorge are lush and cool, drenched with up to 80 inches of rain per year. Moss abounds and thrives, rendering a soft, dreamlike aura in the canyons. Hiking is fine...beautiful vistas of the gorge in open spots, and mellow, verdant peace in the woods. However, most of the trails are serious. The Wahkeena Falls trail ascends 1500 feet in its first two miles. The Old Sloat handles such ascents by going 100-200 steps at a time, then pausing to admire the scene and perhaps take a photo...while recovering for the next upward slog.