(Click here for a larger view) It was the summer of 1939, and Depression-era Americans were escaping the hard times with the theater releases of “Gone with the Wind” and “The Wizard of Oz”. In Europe, Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September of 1939 ignited World War II. Against the sweeping backdrop of this pivotal [...]
Posted tagged ‘Columbia River Gorge’
Warren Falls Mystery… Solved!
January 31, 2012New Lidar Maps of Mount Hood
December 26, 2011The age of the microprocessor has ushered in a revolution in the fields of cartography and geosciences. After all, few could have imagined streaming Google Earth imagery over a worldwide web when the first air photos were being scanned and digitized in the 1980s. The latest innovation on the geo-data front promises still more detailed [...]
Columbia Gorge: The Fight for Paradise
November 18, 2011On November 17, OPB’s Oregon Field Guide aired a special 1-hour look at the Columbia River Gorge Scenic Act, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the legislation. The show provides a comprehensive look at the history of the Gorge Act, its friends and foes and some of the future challenges, including those never anticipated when the [...]
2012 Mount Hood National Park Calendar
October 30, 2011Each year at about this time I assemble the Mount Hood National Park Scenic Calendar. The proceeds are modest, but do help support the Mount Hood National Park Campaign website and related project expenses. The main purpose is simply to promote the project, and make the case for the campaign with pictures. I’ve published the [...]
Proposal: Mark O. Hatfield Memorial Trail
June 20, 2010One of the legacies of former Oregon Senator Mark O. Hatfield was expansion of the state’s wilderness system in 1978 and 1984, the largest expansion before or since that time. Though Hatfield was harshly criticized by conservationists for also sponsoring pro-logging legislation that led to the destruction of ancient forests, his role in creating new [...]
New Maps of Mount Hood and the Gorge
November 7, 2009Mount Hood and the Columbia River Gorge were in fine company earlier this year when the National Geographic Society released a pair of new maps in their Trails Illustrated series covering both areas. This map series is generally limited to national parks, so the few outstanding areas outside the National Park System (NPS) included in [...]
The Million Dollar View
March 22, 2009Beacon Rock rises nearly 1,000 feet above the Columbia River, and forms the nucleus of some of the finest park lands on the Washington side of the Columbia Gorge. The famous network of catwalks and stairways installed on Beacon Rock in the 1920s leads thousands of visitors to the airy summit each year to marvel [...]
Phoca Rock
January 10, 2009Anyone who has made a few trips through the Columbia Gorge has noticed the small monolith that pokes out of the center of the river near Cape Horn. This is Phoca Rock, and its distinction lies partly in the fact that it is one of the few landmarks in the Gorge that carries the name [...]
We have to choose?
November 25, 2008According to the Columbia Gorge Commission website, the Vital Signs Indicators Project is “identifying several measures to assess changes in the scenic quality of the Gorge over time.” Translated, this means that the Gorge Commission has set up a web survey to poll the most popular Gorge vistas among the traveling public. The survey allows [...]
