“Wildwood” is an old English word meaning forest in its untamed, unmanaged state. It’s poetic, slightly archaic even in the early 20th century. Wordsworth used it. Tennyson used it. By the time Portland was platting its west hills, “wildwood” had the aura of something romanticized: the forest of imagination as much as fact. It turned up elsewhere in Oregon: the name of a ship, a hamlet near Mount Hood, a golf course in Scappoose, a farm on Mount Scott, and a Girl Scouts camp that relocated several times in the region.

Camp Wildwood was established in 1908 and operated in various forms and locations over the following decades: Welches, Lake Oswego, and the Molalla River near Canby. The Girl Scouts also offered an in-town day camp, Camp Sacajawea, which by 1930 had building on a city lot near to the Holman Park entrance. Holman Park was folded into Forest Park in 1948. Later, in the early 1960s, Camp Sacajawea became the base of operations for Portland’s first Youth Task Force.

Launched in 1963, The Youth Task Force was the city’s summer employment program for teenagers. Sixty boys the first summer; 120 the next. Their mission in Forest Park was to clear brush, maintain roads, and make trails. Among the trails they built and maintained: the Ditch Trail, the Cleator Trail, and Rocking Chair Trail.

The namesake of the Cleator Trail, Fred Cleator, spent his career with the U.S. Forest Service in Portland, retiring in 1945 after decades of trail work across the Pacific Northwest. He helped survey and establish hundreds of miles of routes, including early segments of what would become the Pacific Crest Trail. When the city consolidated Forest Park’s fragmented sections into a single continuous route in 1967, the Cleator Trail was absorbed into the new alignment. Today, a short connector trail in the interior still carries his name, a tribute to a man who had given his working life to the trails of the Northwest.

The 1967-68 Forest Park Trails Log from the City Archives—typed on a manual typewriter, retrieved from City Archives on request—shows the trail system in transition. Ditch Trail, Cleator Trail, Rocking Chair Trail, Wild Cherry Trail, Nature Trail: all appear as separate named segments. And at the head of the Wildwood Trail entry, the starting point is listed plainly as “0.00 Nature Trail & Cleator Trail.” The name had already been chosen. By the fall of 1967, the Wildwood Trail existed, at least on paper.

By August 1969, the Sunday Oregonian was running a full-page feature on Forest Park that described the Wildwood Trail as “the longest in the system,” running twelve miles from Saltzman Road south to the Japanese Gardens in Washington Park.

Timeline

• 1957: Committee of 50 votes on a new name for Forest Park. “Wildwood” was mentioned in the article in a field of five names.

• 1960: Segments of what would become the Wildwood Trail appear on published Forest Park map: Upper Macleay Trail, Lower Macleay Trail, Holman Park Trail, Ditch Trail and Cleator Trail.

• 1961: An Oregonian article outlined a vision for future trail building: “[Dale] Christianson’s long-range plan is to have a trail through the full length of the park. Following the steep contours of the park, this would allow a one-way hike of 12 miles.”

• 1963: An Oregonian article describes how high school boys from Camp Sacajawea, made significant trail-building progress: “In 46 days since the city’s youth work program was started the boys cleared more than 40 acres of rugged wilderness and opened up six miles of trails.”

• 1964: The program returned for a second summer, now 120 boys strong. A separate Oregonian article that year headlined Plan Sees Pittock Tract As Link Connecting Various Parks Sections, stated “Acquisition of The Pittock Estate Would Provide a continuous skyline trip of parks…a botanical paradise ranging all the way from primitive forest to scientific and formal gardens”

• 1967 The first known citation of the name “Wildwood Trail” appears in the 1967-1968 Trail Log.

• 1968: The first widely published record of the Wildwood Trail arrives in an updated Forest Park Trail map. The Wildwood Trail is shown as a 12-mile linear trail.

• 1969: The name “Wildwood Trail” first appears in an Oregonian article

Conclusions

So what conclusions can we draw? Quite a few. Of the five principal questions, where, when, why, how and who, we can tick off about three and a half:

1. Where: The Wildwood name was first applied to a trail segment beginning at the Nature Trail trailhead (where it joined with the Cleator Trail). It wound down 2.5 miles to Leif Erikson Drive.

2. When: 1967. The name was in use by 1967 and ascribed to six other previously named trail sections in 1968.

3. Why: Consolidation. Several different names for a continuous route is confusing. The 1967-1968 Trail Log document illustrates just how confusing the trail network was. The only name that could descriptively accommodate all the sections was also the most recent: Wildwood. (This is speculation, of course, but it does stand to reason. Half point.)

4. How: Like most place names, it first appears on a log or map, then it just sticks.

5. Who: The records don't say.

The most likely candidates for who are a small circle of Parks Bureau planners, particularly Dale Christensen, the city park forester who directed the Youth Task Force. What we do know is that “Wildwood” had already been formally proposed as the name for the entire park a decade earlier, in 1957, when the city solicited suggestions from the public. More than fifty names came in; a committee narrowed the field to five, Wildwood among them. The final vote: Portland Forest Park 45, Skyline Forest Park 44. Wildwood didn’t make the final two. The trail, quietly, took the name the park had turned down.

There may be a living person who knows the rest of the story. If so, they haven’t written it down anywhere I can find it. The trail got its name the way trails often get named: informally, by someone with the authority to put a word on paper.

Camp Sacajawea is gone. The old Cleator Trail is gone, folded into something larger. Those teenagers are in their late seventies now, if they're still around. But the name Wildwood is still out there on signs at every trailhead, on maps and apps and trail guides. Some names outlast their origins by quite a lot.

Flocks of hundreds of Canada Geese alighted and wheeled around, as they do. White-crowned Sparrows and Red-winged Blackbirds sang. Sandhill Cranes bugled and rattled, on land and on the wing.

This field recording is edited. I removed passing cars, trucks and airplanes. By the time I called it good, the run time was well under half of what it was originally. This process is tedious, but I edit all my recordings—now numbering in the thousands—compulsively. Some more than others, of course. I’m choosing to share this one more out of my fondness of the Sandhill Crane’s return, rather than it being an outstanding recording.

While on the island, I stretched my legs at Wapato Park. Seasonal Virginia Lake is a dry grassy bowl:

Further north I made this drawing off Rentenaar Rd.:

PS. I bumbled my calendar organization and inadvertently posted about tomorrow’s release Creek & Raven a week early. It lands on all music streaming services tomorrow, October 17th, 2025. Catch that post here:

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading and listening!

Read more

I edited the recording for length and calm listenability. The most charming layers of anthropogenic soundscape have been retained.

What inspired me was twofold: First, was realizing I was writing about my black and white photos a few weeks back in an almost defensive way, leading me to recollect how even before digital photography and amazing camera phones, photographs were a hard sell. Anyone can take a picture, we thought, and still think—with more reason now than then. In an anecdote, I recalled the mystifying embrace I felt for my own primitive paintings in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. That seems so long ago, and there’s a part of me that is reluctant to go there again with any commercial aspirations, for fear of “failing” I guess.

Secondly, I realized there are several incentives for me to shake up my workflow right now. Like, really shake it up; stop doing the same things over and over and try some new things. I won’t get into the nitty gritty presently, but suffice it to say the incentives both artistic and financial.

So I’ve been reminding myself how to “paint”. I started with good old paper and oil crayons, but it was pretty clear that wasn’t going to work for my aims. Eschewing the fussiness of Guache, I moved on to digital image-crafting on the iPad. I’m slowly finding my aesthetic. I dabbled with an app, Tayasui Sketches, seven, eight years ago. I remembered it being fun.

Fun is important.

So, the nice thing is the app works on both an iPad and a phone. A phone, of course, is super-portable, and draws almost no attention if you are stopped on the side of the trail, poking at it. So I tried mostly phone-painting on this walk, with the thought that these would be quicker; yielding enough images for a post. Voila!

I think the biggest thing I notice in plein air painting is how colors are not what you think they ought to be. In the abstract, creeks and sky are blue, right? Not always so in real life. And green! What an enigma! There are so many hues of green in the woods; stacking them and puzzling them together is a challenge.

Also, framing the scene is surely a honed skill. When it came time to bring out the iPad for a more detailed composition, I choose this little moss-walled grotto that I love. But capturing the essence of it eluded me. I think it has something to do with my point of view and framing here. It’s a new way of seeing, without a viewfinder.

No big deal. This is all just for practice; for kicks. It was fun to wrestle with it. The best things in my creative life have always sprung out of approaching a challenge with curiosity and a playful approach.

For now it seems to tick all the boxes.

Lastly, out tomorrow is another installment from my purely instrumental pseudonym Sleeping Animal. It’s called Catkins and can be found on all streaming services June 13th, 2025.

As always, thanks for listening and reading. Til next week, may we all find some solace in this tumultuous waning of spring into summer!

If you’re new here, this is Sound & Vision: part photo essay, part soundwalk, and part storytelling. This is The Wildwood Trail, Part 3. Find parts 1 and 2 here. Welcome!

1. I have a new EP out today. It’s another Sleeping Animal instrumental release. This one is called Sol. The cover art features a photo I took on this leg of the hike, and it was composed with light and atmosphere in mind. It’s available on all music streaming platforms today, Friday, May 9th. If you are listening on a PC, consider streaming it and this soundwalk simultaneously. They pair decently well, I think.

   

2. An anecdote about black and white photography.

3. A reflection on distillation and who this is for.

4. A few words about Macleay Park, the seed that grew into Forest Park, and lastly,

5. An overview of adjacent Holman Park and its mysterious ditch.

Black and White

Twenty-five years ago I was putting up a show of my paintings in a café and another artist, showing the month before me, was taking her work down, and we got to chatting. I asked her if she had a good show. She said yeah, nothing sold, but some interest.

I chose not to tell her that for my previous show, I sold nearly everything I hung. I was surprised. I thought her photos were great, and I honestly didn’t think my paintings were anything special. I chalked it up to being lucky with my choice to pursue painting.

Here I am now thinking about that, reflecting on my choice to embrace black and white photography for this little project. If I’m being honest, it really doesn’t present well. For starters there’s no punch of emotion. No green, in the season of green we find ourselves in. Moreover, the panoramic form factor is poorly suited to phone viewing, which I’m guessing is probably the majority of Substack traffic? I knew all this going into it. Still, I was curious to try something different.

Distillation

The other day, my friend sent me a link to a music project that involved making passive environmental recordings from a pine tree for a full year: 8760 hours of audio!

The artist’s name is Joshua Bonetta and you can listen to some of the The Pines project at Bandcamp. I did. I found it engrossing; like I was camping in a quiet place, hearing every sonic detail outside a tent.

Collecting the audio (swapping out batteries and SD cards every couple weeks) was just the start for Bonetta. Over the next three years, he meticulously logged, edited and reassembled a soundscape of fantastic realism, distilling the 8760 hours down to 4 hours, for a four album collection. A ratio of 2290 to 1. Insanity.

And here I thought my 20 hours of audio seemed unwieldy, a bit pointless to fuss over, and attempt to share.

I can’t help but compare my little Wildwood Trail project to his. In contrast, my ratio is maybe 2 to 1. I’m editing the work, like he did—I’m removing stuff that I don’t think listeners will find that interesting, like loud anthropogenic sounds, but I think when I’m all wrapped here I expect to come in at about 10 hours or so. Is my ratio off? Who is this for, I ask myself?

I can imagine that for someone incarcerated or someone or unable to get out much, this 10 hours of birds, water, weather and walking sounds would be useful, especially if they had a lot of time on their hands. But, that sounds like a difficult-to-reach demographic, right?

Or I can imagine a desk worker who wants to feel like they're outside, opening a virtual window in their cubicle. It’s useful for that. Or someone who misses a place; the sound of a place. I can imagine this being good for reminiscing. Or someone who just finds the sounds soothing, for whatever reason. I can see that. Maybe I’ll listen to it a few decades from now, when I can’t hike anymore.

Macleay Park

Maclaey Park was the seed that grew into Forest Park.

Macleay Park was formally adopted into Portland’s property inventory in 1897. It was donated, basically on a dare from the city tax man who said if the land can’t be made to earn its property taxes, why not consider just donating to the city as a park? A week later, businessman Donald Macleay did just that. It’s probably important to note here that following the Panic of 1893, property values plummeted and a long depression followed. Conditions were just starting to improve in 1897.

Macleay deeded the 140 acres of Balch Creek gulch to the city as raw land, with the guidance that the city should harvest some timber, splitting the profits between the two nearby hospitals, St. Vincent and Good Samaritan.

He stipulated, “a road wide enough for a horse team should thread through the park and and that patients from the hospitals should have the opportunity to ride along the road and enjoy the rich atmosphere of the outdoors”.

For that first decade the city did little but plant some wildflowers at the entrance to the canyon. According to a 1946 Oregonian article, it was a waiter at a restaurant a few blocks away who took it upon himself to start blazing the first trails in Macleay Park on lunch breaks and days off.

The waiter’s name has been lost in obscurity which is often the fate of the good and wise, but Mr. Keyser declares that the Macleay Park’s present network of trails is the humble waiter’s monument.

And so it goes that Forest Park traces it’s roots back to:

• A businessman’s tax-burdened, depression era land donation

• A city’s dereliction of donation terms, and initial lack of interest.

• A restaurant waiter’s passion project.

When I begin to worry about the possibility of a looming recession on the horizon, I’m reminded of the silver lining that these events often forestall development, and can lead to lasting conservation. If it weren’t for the conditions of the late 1890’s, this lovely old-growth forested canyon would have likely been logged like the rest of the Tualatin Mountains, and privately owned.

Eventually some pretty ornate, rustic bridges were built, along with a very cool staircase cut right out of a downed tree.

Balch Creek once played a role in Portland’s early water supply. Various bits of concrete ruins from that era can be seen from the westernmost bridge crossing.

Holman Park & Pence’s Ditch

The Wildwood Trail climbs out of Balch Creek Canyon, crossing over from the original Macleay Park acreage to the adjacent Holman Park tract, dedicated in 1939. Today it is uniformly just Forest Park. There are few reminders of Holman Park’s distinct origins.

On the February Day I visited, fog settled into the hills, making the rising sun into a light show.

Here the trail traverses above the Willamette Heights neighborhood. Early 1900’s homes back to the forest.

Few old growth survivors can be found on the broad hillsides.

But there are some.

The fog wears off and shadows grow sharper.

Nearing the intersection with the Wild Cherry Trail, the Wildwood Trail is built on an old ditch embankment dating back to 1905.

This ditch is a remnant of an ambitious land development scheme, the full intentions of which we may never know.

In 1905, Lafayette Pence, a former congressman and entrepreneur, began filing for water rights on a great number of creeks within proximity of Portland, while beginning construction on an elaborate ditch above Macleay Park.

According to an April 13th article of that year, Parks Commissioner Col. L. L. Hawkins stopped just short of accusing Pence of a scheme to extort the city of Portland of a future water supply.

“What makes my blood boil,” says the Colonel, “Is to see the manifestations of that man Pence’s colossal nerve. He schemes to take all the water away from that park, tapping Balch’s Creek immediately above the park limits and then goes slashing through the park itself to lay his ditch on public land. (The Oregonian April 15, 1905)”

Just shy of a month later, on May 5th, the embattled Pence gave a luncheon tour to the mayor, the Parks Commission, City Engineer Wanzer, and other officials. The Oregonian reporter declared Pence’s three minute speech delivered in front of his ditch, “a masterpiece,” adding, “It truly looked rather small of the Park Board to block an enterprise so large."

But what was the true aim of this enterprise, other than it being impressive in scope? According to Pence, it was to divert waters from three watersheds (two on the opposite side of the Tualatin Mountain crest to hydraulically grade (i.e. with a water cannon) the hillside above the Willamette Heights neighborhood, sluicing the muddy runoff into Guild’s Lake, ultimately filling it, creating valuable industrial land.

Opinion was split on the matter of whether to allow right-of-way for the flume through Macleay Park, with the Colonel voicing suspicion and opposition.

A week later, Pence’s purported plans were elegantly rendered in full page article in The Oregonian. Were it not for the 1905 Lewis & Clark Exposition opening in a matter of weeks, it might have been the talk of the town. One might wonder if any principals at the Oregonian had a stake in Pence’s scheme?

Fast forward nine months now to February 25th of 1906–the fairgrounds on the shore of Guilds Lake now quiet, and the ditch now funneling water—the conflict boils over for some reason. Mayor Lane and a number of police offers, with sledgehammers in hand, lay to waste 20 ft of flume passing through Macleay Park. “The waters which had been employed in washing down the hill back of Willamette Heights were turned back into the creek,” reported The Oregonian.

Incidentally, I discovered a shelf cut into the slope of Balch Canyon from this 120-year-old water excavation experiment that today allows for the formation of an ephemeral pond. Prior to putting together the pieces of this story—but thinking it was an interesting geologicaI anomaly—I made a soundscape recording here in 2022.

In the aftermath of the flume smashing The Oregonian reported, “Lafe Pence made a survey late yesterday afternoon and a report the part of the flume destroyed lies outside the boundaries of Macleay Park …making the city liable in a big damage suit should Mr. Pence desire to retaliate.”

At a hearing the next day Pence declared, “The only manly thing for you to do is grant me permission to repair the flume.”

“If you do I will have you placed under arrest,” said the Mayor.

Finally, a month later, Lafe Pence’s name appeared for the last time on this matter in the pages of The Oregonian. He was credited in helping to persuade one John S. McMillan of Seattle to purchase the Lewis & Clark exposition grounds and buildings for $500,000. Of McMillan, the article reads, “His plans to the future are retained to a large extent. Yet, in a general way it may be said that he intends bringing manufacturing concerns to Portland.” One may assume the ditch was abandoned.

[Pence] left town shortly thereafter. It is reported that his scheme cost the investors $225,000. Unfortunately he had planted a seed that grew and bore fruit alter he left. There were those who liked Pence's idea of filling Guild’s Lake and the profit it would make. …Now when we look down at the industrial area we can see Pence’s scheme instead of a natural body of blue water. (The Oregonian Sept. 27,1970)

The 52-acre Holman Park parcel was donated to the city in 1939, notably in the last years of the Great Depression. (I’m detecting a pattern, here.)

Named for Frederick, Mary and George Holman, the primitive Holman Lane follows the bluff of Balch Creek Canyon down to the Willamette Heights neighborhood where it meets a picturesque meadow, once the showpiece entrance to Holman Park.

Notably, Frederick Holman, a lawyer and avid rose exhibitor, is credited with giving Portland the name “The City of Roses”.

Speaking of names, Last week I mentioned investigating how the Wildwood Trail got its name. I’m still chasing down my leads—don’t touch that dial. Til next week, happy trails to you!

Forest Park Timeline

Let’s get to know this 5200 acre hillside woodland, taking a look back through time.

• Pre-1800s: Native American settlement of the area now known as Forest Park is believed to date back as far as 10,000 years. There were two trails that crossed over the Tualatin Hills in what we now called Forest Park, connecting Sauvie Island with the Upper Tualatin Valley. Originally Native American paths, they were developed into primitive roads by early settlers.

• 1851: Under the Donation Land Act, settlers claim land in the area, leading to deforestation and subsequent landslides that rendered the land unsuitable for development.

• 1867: Reverend Thomas Lamb Eliot moves to Portland and begins advocating for the preservation of the wooded hills that would become Forest Park.

• 1897: Donald Macleay deeds 108 acres along Balch Creek to the city, providing outdoor space for nearby hospital patients, and inspiring the concept of a forested park in the west hills.

• 1903: The Olmsted Brothers landscape architecture firm recommends creating a wildland park in Portland's wooded hills, laying the groundwork for Forest Park.

• 1915: Hillside Drive—renamed Leif Erikson Drive in the 1933—is constructed, traversing the East side of the Tualatin Mountains in an effort to bring residential development to the hills.

• 1920’s Construction and maintenance of Hillside Drive proves to be costly, causing the city to increase the assessed value of the platted lots nearby. Developers were not able to sell their lots, and buyers were reluctant to build. Hundreds of acres of land along Hillside Road were turned over to the City of Portland due to unpaid taxes.

• 1928-1930: The City Council's Delinquent Tax Committee transfers land to the Parks Bureau for a wildflower garden along Balch Creek. Macleay Park Shelter is completed in Balch Creek Canyon, offering restrooms to visitors. Construction materials were lowered into the remote location in a basket on a “highline”.

• August 1940: 1000 acres is burned south of Saltzman Road and east of Skyline.

• 1944: The mountain climbing group known as The Mazamas develops the Hardesty Trail for a tree planting campaign it calls “The Mazama Forest” in a burned area.

• 1945: The City Club of Portland conducts a feasibility study, renewing interest in establishing a large park in the city's west side.

• The City of Portland leases 2,000 acres to Richfield Oil Company within the proposed park on November 27, 1945. After drilling to 7,885 feet without finding gas or oil, Richfield terminated their leases in September 1946.

• September 23, 1948: Portland formally dedicates 4,200 acres as Forest Park, creating one of the largest urban forest reserves in the United States. A commemoration ceremony is held at the site of the exploratory gas well.

• 1950: The only house with a Leif Ericson Drive address, the 1930 Kitchell residence, is destroyed by fire, near Springville Rd.

• 1951: A wildfire burns 1200 acres of Forest Park, leading city planners to develop more than 10 fire lanes to address future fire suppression.

• 1964: The Pittock Estate Tract acquisition connects Washington Park and Hoyt Arboretum with Macleay Park and the bulk of Forest Park to the north, giving rise to a linear trail connecting the parks.

• 1968: Forest Park has a trail network of about 10 named trails, totaling 17 miles, or more. Leif Ericson Drive is open to vehicles from NW Thurman to Saltzman Road with three trailhead parking areas. The 12 mile Wildwood Trail begins at The Japanese Garden and ends at Saltzman Rd.

• July, 1975: The Wildwood Trail is designated a National Recreation Trail by the interior secretary, now 14 miles in length. Purchase of a 52-acre parcel on the north end of the park extends the future vision of a Wildwood Trail terminus at Newberry Road, eventually reaching 30 miles.

• December, 1975: Camp Tolinda shelter is destroyed by fire near Germantown Road. Camp Fire Girls summer programs continue at the location for another decade or so. The name lives on today with the development of the Tolinda Trail along the old camp road.

• 1980s: Wildwood Trail construction continues north to Germantown Road, then to BPA Road with significant volunteer help.

• 1991: Forest Park has a network of 15 trails with a total of 40 miles, 20 miles of firelanes, and 19 miles of roads. Leif Ericson Drive and Saltzman Road have been closed to vehicles for many years.

• 1999: The 30-mile Wildwood Trail is completed for the 50th anniversary of the park, running from W. Burnside Road through Forest Park to its northern terminus at NW Newberry Road.

• October, 2019: The Barbara Walker Crossing, the 4 million dollar 180-foot steel footbridge carrying the Wildwood Trail across West Burnside Street, opens.

• Early 2024: Forest Park Entrance, a 4.8 million dollar 30-space parking area and bus drop-off at NW St. Helens Rd and Hwy 30 opens. A Nature Center and plaza is shown in a schematic for a future phase of building, estimated to cost 13 million dollars in 2018.

Today, Forest Park encompasses over 5,200 acres, offering more than 80 miles of trails, fire lanes, and forest roads. It serves as a critical refuge for native wildlife and plant species, providing an unparalleled opportunity for visitors to experience a true Northwest forest within Portland's city limits.

Part 2: Barbara Walker Crossing to The Witch’s Castle

The Wildwood trail follows the Johnson Creek canyon out of Hoyt Arboretum.

Here we are spirited over W. Burnside on a the curvilinear and airy Barbara Walker Crossing. Barbara Walker did a lot for Portland natural areas, galvanizing an effort to conserve Marquam Nature Park, and reviving the concept of a network of trails first put forth by The Olmstead “40-mile Loop” plan of 1903, so it’s nice to see her name memorialized with this bridge.

A long time ago there used to be a roadside pull-out here with a few parking spots, functioning as an informal trailhead. Cars often careen down this curved stretch. It’s much safer now. We cross over into Pittock Acres, a south-facing slope with a young stand of Alder and vigorous English Ivy.

Up the hill we go.

Discovering along the way one of a few surviving wooden signs with stencilled lettering. Could it be 25 years old?

The late February morning sun casts a long shadow of the split rail fence.

Cresting the hill at 1000 ft. elevation, the high point of the entire Wildwood Trail, we come to the back lot of Pittock Mansion.

Pittock Mansion stands sentinel on the highest ridge of the Kings Heights neighborhood, overlooking downtown Portland. Completed in 1914, it was built as the private residence of Henry Pittock, publisher of The Oregonian and his wife, Georgiana. The couple lived in the mansion for only a few years before their deaths in 1918 and 1919. Their family continued to reside there until 1958.

The steep northern slope requires switchbacks for the descent into Balch Creek Canyon.

Shaped by seeps and streams, the hillside has multiple concave topographical features. (We stop to listen to one such rivulet at 8:30.) The broad bowl-shape coupled with the colonnade of trees, gives the soundscape a lovely reverberant quality.

In the quiet hours, the strains of birdsong carry. In the busy hours it bubbles and pings with tones of human conversation.

Woodpeckers of all stripes seem to love this slope. Downy, Hairy, and Pileated. Red-breasted Sapsuckers and Northern Flickers too.

Wildwood Hill Soundwalk, released in 2022, captures the unique qualities of the soundscape here.

The light pours over the ridge and penetrates in bands.

The air is crisp. Breaks in the canopy reveal far-off vistas. Squinting through the branches we see Mount St. Helens again:

Cornell Rd. comes into view below.

We cross the road at the Upper Macleay Park entrance, where a handsome midcentury stone wall welcomes visitors to the original nature park of Portland, dating back to 1898. More on Macleay Park in the next post.

We hear sizzle of tires in the tunnel. A Barred Owl calls out faintly. Over the bluff the sound of Balch creek roars to life (28:30).

Balch Creek Canyon is a wonderland. Its steep topography and early conservation prevented the logging of numerous heritage trees.

At the bottom we cross another new bridge.

Here we look down on the boulder-strewn Balch Creek coursing through the spillway of a small long-obsolete dam.

It’s a lively area, this watershed.

The trail follows the creek here, among Western Redcedars, Douglas-firs and a deciduous understory.

Past mossy-walled, maidenhair fern enclaves.

Past downed giants.

Arriving at the “Witch’s Castle”, a 1930’s restroom and shelter, now a canvas for so much lurid spraypaint. I wrote about it in one of my first Sound & Vision posts.

We’ll leave it there for now. Thanks for joining me. Tune in next week as we explore the history of this quarter of the park, in an attempt to uncover the origin of the name “Wildwood Trail”. Til then, happy trails to you.

Share Soundwalk

The Wildwood Trail traverses Portland’s Forest Park. It runs 30 miles north-south. It’s a National Recreational Trail, and the longest trail—by far—within an urban nature park. If you’re moderately fit and into long hikes, it can be completed in a day. Some people make it a tradition of it. One man hikes it every winter solstice. Another, to commemorate a 50th birthday. One woman hiked it start-to-finish once every month, for a year. A blind man walked the trail in a two days. It calls to people.

I hiked the complete trail in a day in 1999. It was just a little bit shorter then; 27 miles to my recollection. The last section was completed some months later, and for the last 25 years it has been about 30 miles long. The precise number remains somewhat elusive, as it varies by source.

I decided a couple months back that I wanted to revisit the Wildwood Trail, taking pictures and recording binaural audio all the way along. Doing it in a single day, however, held little appeal for this purpose, so I split it into segments. I figured I’d just shift my morning walk routine over to Forest Park. In all, it took 9 trips to chain it all together, and because the trail largely keeps to the interior of the park, I put in well over twice the mileage to get from various remote trailheads to the specific trail sections, devising out-and-back trips or loops involving other trails to get me back to my point of origin. I figure I put in about 75 miles of hiking in total to do it this way.

All this yielded over 600 photos and 20 hours of audio after culls and edits. Oh, and one video:

Why & How

Why do this? It was half just for the heck of it, and half for the project-ness of it. Rarely do I go for a walk in the woods without my trusty recording hat and a camera anyway. It’s “my practice”. You never know what cool soundscape might be around the corner, or what the light will do, or what creature might reveal itself to you, so why not?

But, beyond that I wanted to try something with a larger scope, and this seemed to strike a comfortable balance between ambitious and achievable. I didn’t have any commercial aspirations, but I wasn’t ruling anything out either. For now I’m happy just sharing most of it as a trove in the Sound & Vision tradition. I don’t expect any one person to absorb all of it; rather, I’m happy to just put it out there like a trail of breadcrumbs, hopefully to be found, and stumbled across over time.

I’d recently become enamored with the work of Carlton Watkins, who photographed the Yosemite Valley in 1861 and The Columbia Gorge in the 1867 with a heavy, bulky “mammoth plate” camera. These photos are wonderfully tonal, and were instrumental in conservation efforts. Inspired by them, I was keen to see where monochrome photography might take me.

After all, I reasoned, hundreds of color images from the Wildwood Trail have been crowdsourced via popular trail guide apps, and they tend to be pretty decent images. (I use All Trails.) If nothing else, I thought the monochrome aesthetic would set my photos apart, while lending the romantic aura of a landscape unmolested by industry.

Additionally, I leaned into panoramic photography to capture the sweep of the trail. For this I was inspired by the early 20th century images from the Columbia Gorge Scenic Highway showcasing the elegant engineering of the highway as it traced the contours of the rugged landscape. These photos tended to be as much about the road as the landscape, offering a point of entry into the scene.

I went so far as to watch Youtube videos offering photography tips. All the panoramic photos shared in this post were taken as a series of single frames taken with my “big lens” camera, intelligently stitched together with desktop software (Affinity Photo). I found this workflow too time intensive and later judged that my old iPhone (11) made comparable panoramic images with a lot less fuss. Now you know too!

As for the audio capture—the binaural soundwalk recordings—similar decisions were made. I spliced and edited the audio to remove 95% of automobile, airplane, hiker, runner and other 20th century sounds. These are escapist treatments, and while I’m more receptive to the notion that noise is learned, I do think there is strong use-case for this edited work. I just don’t think people would stick around for all the airplane sound in particular (They come in waves over the park.)

With that said, let’s get into the photos on the first leg of the journey.

Part 1: Washington Park to Barbara Walker Crossing

The trail begins near the Garden of Solace, the rising spiral path that forms the Vietnam Memorial in Washington Park. This is not officially part of the Wildwood Trail, but that is not made entirely clear given how the sign welcoming us to the Wildwood Trail seems to encourage walking in its direction.

At the highest point of the Wildwood Trail in Washington Park, a break in the canopy affords a view of Mount St. Helens framed by the diversity of trees on Hoyt Arboretum’s north side.

Not long ago, before it erupted in 1980, Mount St. Helens was a nearly perfect cone. Speaking of panoramas, this one from 1929, taken downriver at Scappoose, Oregon captures Mounts St. Helens and Hood—Loowit and Wy’east in the native tongue—with a stunning evening alpenglow:

Following the eruption, St. Helens was left with a massive crater; its contents blasted to the north, devastating 230 square miles of forested lands. Still, it’s a wonder.

To the south, the hills roll down to Sylvan Canyon, the gulch cut through the Tualatin Mountains by Canyon Creek. Sunset Hwy (HWY26) climbs out of downtown Portland here, the dense traffic sounding like a distant river.

The trail traverses stands of Douglas-fir above the Oregon Zoo.

Oregon Grape thrives in the understory.

Giving way to swordfern in shadier hillsides.

Old-growth survivors and second-growth alike are found here.

The trail follows the contour of these hills.

Windows into Portland Japanese Garden below appear in the winter canopy.

Residences back up to the trail greenway.

The hills of the Hoyt Arboretum introduce switchbacks and novel trees.

Soon we enter the Redwood Grove,

A lush, dark canyon with Coast Redwood trees planted in the early 1930’s.

Down to Johnson Creek we go (Not to be confused with the larger East Portland Johnson Creek).

A lovely sounding creek.

Where trails meet.

And roots reach down.

Past the hollow log that kids love to look through.

And climb over.

Down to Barbara Walker Crossing. Dedicated in 2019, this bridge offers safe passage over the busy W. Burnside Ave.

That’s it for this week on the Wildwood Trail. Thanks for coming along! I hope you’ll join me again next week.

I hiked up Wind Mountain in the Columbia Gorge yesterday with my son. This is what it looks like zooming in from Near-Earth orbit:

This is what it looked like in 1911, looking up from the Columbia River:

In many ways, these two images encapsulate the strange tension of this place and time we find ourselves in. GPS and satellite imagery are so familiar now that we now scarcely recall route-finding in the old ways. At any point on the hike I could look at my phone and see myself as a blue dot, discerning distances, topographic detail, and elevation at a glance. Interacting with a digital model of the world has become so central to self-understanding in the Information Age, it has diminished our capacity for mystery, for sublimity. There is still awe to be found in the beautiful view, still satisfaction in exertion to get to the top of a mountain, but there are tradeoffs that come with ability to quantify and conceptualize oneself as a little blue dot on a predetermined green line. In some ways it invokes the zoomed-out framework Carl Sagan encouraged in his classic writing excerpt Pale Blue Dot. but in other ways it seems to give rise to what he warned against: “our imagined self importance; the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe.”

Unlike most climbs from the Columba Gorge, this one wraps around, facing away from the transportation corridor, so it’s quite serene.

Hiking up the steep trail beneath a canopy of Douglas-fir affords views of mountains to the north. Evidence of the force for which the mountain is aptly named can be seen in a two-foot diameter tree trunk snapped like a toothpick, and in the various snags dotting the perimeter of the stand. I hear a Raven quietly calling (1:00).

As I understand it, this is where the winds that funnel down the “ductwork” of the Columbia Gorge first find a “vent”. According to Native American legend, the Great Spirit caused whirlwinds to blow incessantly around Wind Mountain as a punishment for those who violated a taboo by teaching white men how to snare salmon. Clouds and fog often shroud the top of the mountain:

Dog Mountain comes into view between the trees. One of the gorge’s signature hikes, it now requires parking reservations on spring weekends, when the mountain meadows come alive with wildflowers. The Dog Mountain climb almost triples the elevation gain of the Wind Mountain route, so Wind Mountain offers a good training option.

Rounding the mountain, the opposite side of the gorge and the river comes into view. The sound of highway traffic on Route 14 and HWY 84 aren’t quite drowned out by the sound of the wind today. It’s surprisingly still here. I hear a diesel locomotive groan past (3:00), followed by the soft whine of its long chain of container cars.

Coming to a bench, my lungs welcome a reprieve in climbing. Here the trees in the center of the stand have grown older.

Soon the trail passes a gnarled fallen tree covered with unusual stones. Usually you encounter basalt throughout the gorge, from a formation deposited by massive volcanic flows between 17 and 14 million years ago. These are quartz-diorite from a much younger 4 million year-old intrusion, and I soon find they have an altogether different sound underfoot (5:30). Why are people bringing them to this tree? It doesn’t look like the work of one person.

I wonder who started this, and why does it inspire followers? I reflect on this later.

As some views open up I see a Dog Mountain-shaped cloud floating above Dog Mountain:

Crossing the first Talus slope, I delight in the dense and rigid tones of the quartz-diorite underfoot, and the acoustics at play (8:00).

Red-breasted Nuthatches and Chestnut-backed Chickadees drift through the trees nearby (9:00). I hear Sooty Grouse: a deep wup, wup, wup, wup. It’s never close, but seemingly never far either. This is probably just a function of how low pitches (~100hz) can carry much further. A phantom sound. (It didn’t come through clearly on this recording because I had Low Cut turned on in my recorder.)

Nearing the top, I encounter a signpost. And, like a good 99% Invisible listener, I always read the plaque. To my delight I’m informed that just up the trail is an archeological site relating to the Native American right of passage known as spirit quest or vision quest. I had no idea.

Before the site comes into view, however, we look down over the wide Columbia. In the distance I see it narrow significantly, as it curls around a tongue of forested blue-green terrain. Just beyond is the Bridge of the Gods.

That tongue of land has only been there about 600 years. It is a massive landslide that temporarily dammed the Columbia, creating an ephemeral lake behind it, looking not unlike Lake Bonneville (water is impounded by the Bonneville Dam, just below the Bridge of the Gods) that you see today (11:00).

How do we know? It’s another win for ghost forests:

Here we see Wind Mountain with stumps in the water and along the shore, like Lewis and Clark would have witnessed passing by in 1805:

A remarkable circumstance in this part of the river is, the Stumps of pine trees are in many places are at some distance in the river, and gives every appearance of the rivers being damed up below from some cause which I am not at this time acquainted with. - Captain William Clark, 1805

These trees were submerged and drowned in the temporary lake that was created by the landslide. Over time they decayed, taking on the spectral quality of so many broken teeth on the shoreline.

Here is another view, looking east, with wonderful detail. Some piers, and many stumps can be seen on the north shore of the river;

To my understanding, none of these ghost tree stumps are visible today, given the normal water levels of Lake Bonneville.

At the summit, the trail deposits the hiker at the head of a very large talus slope, sculpted by human hands, over many centuries:

It’s hard to see the pits and contours in a still photo with the afternoon light. There are at least half a dozen in this panorama. Looking closer we find one measuring about 3’ deep, and 8-9’ long:

There are also a couple rock stacks, obviously made by modern-day visitors:

It’s a discouraging modification, but in all fairness the sign did include more information than most people usually stop to absorb. A pointed cautionary signpost at the top of the slope might remedy this. One would hope, anyway.

My son and I ate our sandwiches and some tangerines there in the lee of the breezes cresting over the mountain. We quietly shared observations. It was calm and peaceful (12:00).

I turned over questions in my mind. I wanted to know more. The diagram on the sign showed pits, and also linear constructions. I couldn’t really make out long mounds or trenches in the slope. How would a pit facilitate a spirit quest? Was it just hard work, to calm nerves? Surely the shape also served some purpose? At what age did the quest usually happen? My son’s age?

While we were there, the only animal that presented itself was a Turkey Vulture in flight:

I thought about California Condors—they were noted in the journals of Lewis and Clark, but the last documented sighting in of a wild condor in Washington state was in 1897. It seemed like Wind Mountain would have been condor habitat. But, overall I think the number of animals that might show up here at the summit would be few.

As I looked out over the pits I found myself wanting to visualize some sort of roof for them, as if they served some purpose as a shelter. Pithouses were common in the Columbia Plateau, after all. But, maybe the function of the shape was to isolate the individual, to deprive oneself of peripheral vision? To see only stars?

The closest tribe to Wind Mountain would have been the Chilluckittequaws, an Upper Chinookan people with villages at the mouth of the nearby Wind River, as well as present-day Bingen, WA and Hood River, OR with an estimated total population of 2200 in 1806. Like the tribes of Wapato Valley (Sauvie Island) their population was decimated by waves of malaria in the 1830’s.

In later research, I would discover other known sites of rock features at nearby Ruckel Ridge and Mosier, both across the river in Oregon. The Mosier Mounds Complex is much larger, and as the name suggests, features more mounds than pits.

Archeologists have posited burial site usage for the rock features at Mosier, pointing to descriptions of similar terraced features in Yakima, WA, and early 1900’s reports of grave-associated items at these sites. The article also mentions vision quests, and perhaps less likely, some relation to hunting.

The pits at Mosier seem to be in areas relatively isolated from the mounds, indicating the potential that they served a different purpose, or were built in a different time frame. This is my own conjecture, informed by a reading of Mapping the Mosier Mounds, a 1997 Journal of Archeological Science article:

Ethnographic information suggests that stone piling was part of a spiritual experience of adolescence; the labour of stone piling represented a ‘‘physical preparation for life’’.

Ultimately we may never know the precise motivation for mounds and pits, or their builders. Some experts believe the Mosier Mounds precede the ascendency of the Chinookan peoples, according to the 2001 National Register of Historic Places form. In the early 1900’s settlers assumed they were “battlements”, resembling US Civil War-era fortifications. A 1903 article in The Oregonian touting the newly developed Collins Hot Springs Resort one mile east of Wind Mountain said,

This was a favorite camping spot of the Indians and the top of Wind Mountain gave evidence of a great Indian fortress there at one time. The ruins of rock breastworks and trenches are found at every strategic point in the mountains and it is said that a great battle between tribes took place there in the remote past.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, in these temperate rainforests west of the Cascade range, so many sites of Native American inhabitation are entirely gone. They’ve decomposed into the soil. They’ve been obliterated by development. They’ve been burned and washed away by floods. All that is left, for the most part, is what was rendered in stone.

Coming down from the peak, I ruminated on this, again paying attention to the sound underfoot when crossing the talus slopes. It was as if the stones called out, beckoning the wayfarer to pick one up, to place upon the tree down the trail; a collective action shaping the landscape, leaving a spontaneous shrine. I was here.

I didn’t pick up a stone and place it on the tree. It chafes at the leave no trace dictum of being in the wilderness that I aspire to. My son and I had a little debate about a tangerine peel up at the summit. It’s organic, it’s compost, he suggested.

There are no tangerine trees up here, I observed. I tucked it in the pack and left it at that.

Will the visit to Wind Mountain have any effect on my son or I? Will it plant a seed, or adjust our bearings in the universe, if only infinitesimally? Like the individual stories behind the stacked stones, the answer is unknowable. It felt like a memory in the making though, which was enough.

More than ever we just can’t be bothered to cue an album and listen with intention. The many permutations of the broad ambient genre seem to find homes in the popular sleep, chill, and focus options in a panoply of playlists now called “mood music”.

I didn’t develop a taste for ambient music until pretty recently. I only listened to Brian Eno’s seminal Music for Airports for the first time about three years ago.

Just recently, I started thinking about my exposure to ambient-adjacent music in my developmental years, and it started to explain a few things about why my music is the way it is.

My earliest interest in music coincided with the heyday of pop: the early 80’s. I’m talking Duran Duran’s Rio, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, David Bowie’s Let’s Dance, Depeche Mode’s Some Great Reward, Prince’s Purple Rain. I wore out these records and cassettes.

But there were albums on the periphery—albums that I didn’t buy—that I enjoyed quite a bit. For starters we played George Winston in the living room a lot. He had a string of solo piano albums in the early 80’s, inspired loosely by the seasons: Autumn, Winter into Spring, and December. I associate these albums with weekends, brunch, people over, sun streaming through the windows.

I particularly loved the cover for December: the paper birch trees reminded me of the cluster of the same trees we had in our own yard for a number of years. I recalled how I peeled the shedding bark as a child, just to while away the time outside.

Today I enjoy these albums for the nostalgia and memories, but the thin, bright piano sound and Winston’s aggressive and precise style makes the more dynamic tracks less appealing to my modern ears and my fondness of imperfection. These stylistic preferences tend to be cyclical: so I’m sure that bright piano is making a comeback right now. How could it not?

Next up Kitaro - Silk Road. It’s possible this cassette was brought into the household by to my dad. He was looking to Self-help and New Age sources to help make sense of his life at that time. Silk Road had a modern New Age sheen to its instrumentation, and major key flute leads that were both humble and soaring. Because Silk Road was a soundtrack for a NHK/CCTV/PBS documentary series The Silk Road, a few tracks (“Shourou”, “Choujou”, “Bosatsu”) were more cues than songs: synthesizer jams that just settled into an atmosphere. These were probably the first true ambient tracks I encountered and enjoyed as a child. To me they weren’t that far off from the 80’s synthesizer-based new wave music I craved.

Lastly Enya - Watermark. This album landed as the 80’s were drawing to a close. “Orinoco Flow” announced itself with fanfare on our morning radio dial, in heavy rotation. It sounded like nothing else. Here again we have these very bright string sounds, almost like pizzicato orchestra plucks, but icier. This was when CD adoption was starting to hit a critical mass, and crisp, digital sound was trending. A thin piano blended right in, and the bass mixed at a whisper. This left room for the timpani-style percussion during the chorus, really driving it home. It was weird and memorable. You might find yourself humming “sail away, sail away, sail away,” carelessly after hearing it.

Honestly, I didn’t like it at first—it reminded me of the cheesy Calgon “take me away” bath powder commercials of the time. This was a punchline for 1980’s boys. It was Enya’s ballads that I fell for, and Watermark’s tracklist was mostly ballads.

Enya carved out a niche in music all to herself. It might be described as part Celtic, part devotional, part chant, part lullaby, part New Wave pop, and part New Age. In fact Watermark ended up becoming a cornerstone for the burgeoning New Age genre, a runaway commercial success with over 11 million copies sold worldwide.

So, how do these albums from the 80’s explain anything about my music today? I think they imprinted on me at a formative time. Of the many memories I formed over the decades, some of the most indelible are from this time period.

On a more stylistic note, all three of these artists place an emphasis on melody in their compositions. I aim to do that too.

George Winston was content to present works for solo piano in a series, such as his trilogy based on the seasons. The series concept really drives what I do. Working in batches has always appealed to me. First came Field Reports, then Soundwalks, and now Listening Spot Suites. They are similar, but different in their approach. Likewise the instrumentation is simple, on average utilizing just two instruments for any movement in the compositions.

Kitaro used warm-toned synthesizers alongside acoustic instruments, and in the case of Silk Road, strung songs together seamlessly with segue pieces that prioritized atmosphere, allowing the song cycle to breathe. He also occasionally used nature sounds in his compositions. Same here.

At the core of Enya’s highly produced songs are simple, expressive performances without the aid of a click track. Watermark feels so very reflective. It’s a feeling I strive for.

Lastly all three made music that seemed rooted to a sense of place. I believe in the power of place.

Say “Balch Creek” and Portlanders are like, whose creek? Say, “the creek with the Witch’s Castle,” and they’ll be like, Oh, yeah I’ve been there!

Balch Creek flows right into the urban quarter of NW Portland. There it enters a pipe and flows under the an industrial section of the city to the Willamette River. The canyon is home to the tallest tree in Portland. It’s a strikingly beautiful place, but what most people remember about it is the moss-covered stone-walled ruin at a trail junction, deep in the canyon.

Somewhere along the way it got the name “Witch’s Castle” and it has captured imaginations for decades now. (Nevermind the Forest Park Conservancy prefers to call it “Stone House”.) With the passing years its weird significance in the mind of visitors and citizens alike has become more entrenched, more mythical, and more colorful. Literally:

To me, it’s become a lurid spectacle, in part because I have a memory of it, not long ago, with markedly less graffiti (see this Wikipedia 2008 photo). I find graffiti particularly repulsive in a natural setting. The graffiti seeps out onto nearby tree trunks, logs, posts, signs, etc. Some take it as a signal for permission to litter, for getting high, doing weird stuff, or all three. Lifting it up as a Keep Portland Weird pilgrimage site…I dunno…I’m not hip to that, personally.

There’s certainly some urban legend mixed with historical lore and researched history that fuels the intrigue. But, at the end of the day, it’s just the stone walls of a bathroom / shelter completed just prior to the Great Depression.

Before you look at these two photos and conflate my malaise with the notion of decline, and nostalgia for the works of a great generation, keep in mind that among the reasons the Parks Bureau decommissioned the structure—following damage sustained in the 1964 Columbus Day—was vandalism. As long as there have been bathrooms, it seems, there’s been people scrawling on them, making a mess. It would be impractical to restore the building, to make it great again.

But, historical photos have an aura of greatness, don’t they? Look at the craftsmanship, the elegance of the architecture, the heft of the materials. “They don’t make them like they used to,” we say, earnestly. Heck, it seems like half of the public bathroom buildings in park settings around here are shuttered now, post-Covid, in favor of maintenance-outsourced portable toilets. What often doesn’t enter into this vision of past greatness are the decisions that led to such short-lived utility. Why build bathrooms a mile away from any road in a forested city park? Who requires such high maintenance and gentile infrastructure? What underpinned the societal ideals that made it seem attractive in the first place? Ideas of modernity, class, and civilized society? Dominance over nature?

What dominance over nature seems to have accomplished with astonishing speed is to raise global surface temperature 1.5˚celsius over the last two centuries. This is contributing to all kinds of destabilizing problems we are confronting today, and will contend with in increasing severity, for decades, possibly centuries, to come.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I? I’m here to notice small things, to reconnect with nature. Let’s get a bird’s eye view, shall we? See this green canyon? That’s where I am, just under that little bridge in the foreground.

This is what the canyon looks like at the entrance.

Within a couple hundred yards the paved trail surface gives way to gravel. The canyon walls steepen and the creek is one vignette after another of little cascades.

Mushrooms abound in this mossy wonderland.

A Song Sparrow works its way along the bank, singing and dipping its feet.

Soon enough I come to this 78 foot-long steel bridge with a kink in it.

The reason for the kink becomes clear. Here the trail crosses over a small waterfall. The design facilitates the pretty view:

Above the falls is a broad section in the creek with large stones.

The trail winds along through the canyon.

Invasive English ivy thrives here. Volunteer crews take to the slopes in the spring to beat it back.

The creek tumbles and burbles.

Near Portland’s tallest tree is a fallen giant, blown over in a storm a year ago. As it fell, it sheared off many large branches of its champion neighbor.

I took a photo of its cross section and counted the rings as best I could after it was cut and bucked last January. I estimated 200 rings. It’s a reminder of massive change this area has seen in the life of one Douglas-fir tree. Indeed, the massive change the planet has seen.

And just up the rise, beyond the Witch’s Castle is a lovely little natural wall. Flowering trees brighten this little nook in the spring.

For now the mosses and dormant Western maidenhair ferns offer a rich, jewel-toned backdrop.

Heading back now, I hear the chip call of a Pacific Wren. I look for movement. I see you, there. Hello!

Pacific Wrens are among the smallest of the wren family. These little forest ambassadors greet you with exquisite trills of allegro molto song in the spring.

Down the trail I stop to take a photo of the ferns emerging from a rock wall embankment.

Out of the corner of my eye I see a flutter. The blur could have been a Robin, but wasn’t it too small to be a Robin? I follow its movement and get a few captures as it emerges from the brush. It’s a Hermit Thrush. Not much larger than a Song Sparrow. And from this angle, quite similar in color.

But not this angle. This is a boldly patterned creature! Look at those smudged spots! I wonder what led to that adaptation? Is it camouflage? Is it dazzle to confuse a predator or prey’s directional and spatial awareness? Whatever it is, it’s a thrill to see.

Finally we emerge from the canyon, back into the urban jungle from whence we came.

But before we go, let’s remember another building that also met its demise in 1964. A much, much larger building than the Witch’s Castle that stood just three blocks from here, for 60 years.

The Forestry Building.

Designed and erected for the 1905 Lewis & Clark Exposition, the interior of the Forestry Building featured colonnades of 54 massive, unpeeled six-foot-diameter Douglas-fir tree trunks. Look at the worker dwarfed by the column he stands atop, like the wick of a candle:

It was designed on the scale of the Parthenon in Greece, and soon dubbed the “world’s largest log cabin”. The equivalent of more than one million board feet of lumber went into its construction.

The rustic vernacular architecture stood out among the Spanish Renaissance and Beux Arts structures designed and built for the exposition.

It proved to be quite popular among visitors, and may have set a strong precedent for national parks lodges and WPA buildings built in the following decades. Completed in 1914, Glacier Park Lodge was modeled after the Forestry Building, and still hosts visitors and guests today.

This wondrous building met its fate on August 17th 1964, when the original electrical wiring sparked a fire which soon grew to inferno proportions.

“The flames were almost ten stories high,” reported an eye-witness. “The fire illuminated the sky for miles, the neighborhood was an orange glow.

The windows on the entire south side of the Montgomery Park Building were blown out. The heat was so intense that the windows were popping out.

Glass was falling down to the street below. Ashes the sizes of large snowflakes fell to the ground within a mile of the structure. It was surreal, an amazing sight.” (rarehistoricalphotos)

Here we have another example of building that captured the imaginations of many that is both impractical and nearly inconceivable to build again. In retrospect, was it really that surprising that it went down in flames? The day after the fire, The Oregonian concluded the front page story with this statement from an official, “There was no insurance on the building. Premium costs would have been prohibitive.”

It was framed as a given, but really it was a choice. It was a risk that was tolerated for other priorities. Yes, a policy on an enormous log building with 1905 wiring and no fire suppression sprinkler system (the first of such codes were written in 1898) would have been hard to defend as a line item in the parks budget, no doubt. But it was a choice not to install such a system in the late 50’s when the building underwent a significant restoration. It was a choice to not update the wiring. It turned out to be the losing choice, and arguably shortsighted.

Taking the long view is often unpopular, it requires clear-eyed discernment and investment, it’s often a thankless job in the short run, sometimes even in the span of a lifetime. But the generations to come will inherit the choices we make today.

Thanks for joining me for this installment of Sound & Vision. Thanks for reading, looking, and listening. Til next time, stay curious.

On December 10th, 2023 I took receipt of a Sennheiser Ambeo Headset. This is a niche product on closeout (once $300, now $50), following Apple’s iPhone changeover to a USB-C port. The headset is of the old wired paradigm, earbud style, but larger and heavier than those that used to come standard with an iPhone, and so requiring a soft coat hanger curl to rest on the top of your ears. The main selling point for me was the promise of exceptional quality binaural sound recording, captured by two tiny microphones facing out from the earbuds.

So I padded over to Irving Park to test it out and no sooner did I arrive at a novel scene when the action was just beginning. The scene itself was familiar: a roughly 50’ wide amoeba shaped concrete derelict terrace and wall in mysterious disuse for several decades. (These days it is mostly enjoyed as parkour grounds.) But on this day, owing to an atmospheric river event, the basin was completely flooded and for the first time in recent history it was briefly brought to life as what I always assumed it originally was: a wading pool.

I was delighted by the hallucinatory sense of space that was captured by the headset: the sparkling splashes bouncing off the concrete, the vivid reconstruction of space the brain can intuit from acoustic cues, particularly when tuning into the range of frequencies the human voice occupies.

Largely indistinguishable from regular earbuds, I was also able to park myself against a low wall, thumbing at my phone while I captured the soundscape of children and adults milling around naturally in the foreground, the ambience of the park and street life in the background.

Later, listening back, I knew I wanted to make music to live alongside it. Something meandering, disinhibited and bemused. And so, last week I did just that. Voila Concrete Jungle, Vernal Pond. I hope you are enjoying it now. (You may get the best listening experience with headphones.)

I found myself curious to know a little more about the concrete relic. Surely it had a story. Surely there are photographs of it in its operational heyday somewhere. So I went to the digital archive of The Oregonian and Oregon Journal to see what I could dig up.

Photographically, I dug up a hole.

In 1972 community organizers in coordination with The Portland Development Commission gathered to commemorate groundbreaking on multiphase renovations to Irving Park, which according to an Oregonian article the previous summer, everybody seemed to agree had been sorely neglected. Here we see the excavation for the concrete features we see today.

Now, I know I’m not the only one intrigued by this. A Reddit post from 2020 asked: So this is in Irving park and it’s clearly not used anymore but does anyone know what it was back in the day? It got 45 replies. The most up-voted reply was:

Ahhh! I actually know this having lived in Boise-Eliot for the entirety of my childhood.

This was not a wading pool. It was a weird cement play structure with raised walkways and giant cylindrical cement tunnel things. It also had raised cement stepping stone type things. ... It’s a bit hard to explain...

Looking back on it the entire area was probably kinda’ dangerous.

It was the 90s.

I had a hard time accepting this. When I moved to the neighborhood in 1997 it looked pretty much identical to today.

Looking closer, you will find in the top terrace a cylinder of concrete with a pipe in the center. That’s where the water came out, I said to myself. The bottom, clearly graded as a bowl, was where it was collected, I said to myself. This well-meaning Reddit user surely just missed the era—the 70’s—where it served as a terraced wading pool, right?

Well, I dug and I dug. The Oregonian archive offered low quality photographs of the Pre 1971 wading pool: a perfect circle now a paved-over area where they corral the massive piles of leaves in the fall. And another, the post mid-seventies wading pool, which still exists in the same rough footprint today, to the east of the ruin. (It was updated with new plumbing and spray fixtures in the 2000’s.)

A fascinating 2023 thesis research paper entitled How Black Portlanders Transformed Irving Park, 1960s- 1980s by Ana Bane also had a clue: an un-dated high quality photo:

Clearly this was not the terraced area with a high wall around it. Though interestingly the wading pool pictured here had a low curb and deck around the perimeter, removed sometime later. The 1987 newspaper photo appears to show the area holding a pool of water, perhaps about ten inches deep.

The citation for the wading pool photograph in the research paper led me to a PDF trove on file at The City of Portland which finally offered up some definitive photographic evidence of the concrete area in its infancy. Sure enough, it was not a terraced wading pool:

Hold the phone! Let’s just briefly analyze these playground structures, in what is referred to as a “tot play area” in schematics. The cylinders are cast concrete culvert segments stood on end. Some of them taller than an average tot, I’d guess. It doesn’t take much imagination to visualize these becoming trash receptacles does it? And the tire pole? Even if there’s a drainage hole drilled in each tire, they will invariably get plugged from tots filling the tires with dirt, eventually filling up with water and becoming a spawning ground for mosquitoes. The wood beams stood on end seem like the most engaging thing here, which isn’t saying much. Am I wrong? And why go to all the trouble to make these thick concrete walls and terraces just to scatter some concrete culvert pipes inside? This was a real let-down of a find, actually. This kind of cold, brutalist form-over-function design seems to have be en vogue in the late 60’s and 70’s. Was the designer attempting to make a “tot lot” that was also a minimalist, futuristic sculpture garden…on a budget? Nearby, Unthank Park, built in 1969 was originally the same type of thing, writ large. Perhaps the subject for another post.

The metal pre-fab playground structure in the upper left background of the photo is what I remember from the late 90’s. I remember it being surprisingly tall, with catwalk sections that appeared to levitate, for their lack of buttressing.

Thankfully, another photo revealed some long lost 1970’s structures that looked more promising:

This Barrel o’Fun looks great. A kid-sized hamster wheel? And the Tree Climber thing in the background looks like something a kid would naturally want to engage with. The City Archives PDF trove features a slightly amusing correspondence regarding two Kilgore Corporation Bob-A-Rounds which “failed miserably” in their first year. Under warranty, they were replaced with the Tree Climber 620-000 (presumably what we are seeing in the above photo) and the Flower No. 643-000, which we can only guess at.

Am I wrong to want to think the concrete area was indeed designed and built as a terraced wading pool and re-purposed as a tot lot before it ever spouted water, perhaps because it didn’t meet safety guidelines or the plumbing was botched, or something? Who would know now? If the past half century tells us anything, the concrete will endure as a relic of its mysterious past and keep all visitors guessing.