The Rocky Butte picnic adventure.
"Its slopes are rough and broken. A grove of quaking aspen, not ordinarily native to the lower altitudes of western Oregon, grows on the northern side. From Rocky Butte there is a view of the city stretching to the hills beyond the Willamette and northwestward to the lowlands of the Columbia River. Beyond the Columbia are the peaks of St. Helens, Rainier, and Adams. Eastward the Columbia is lost between encroaching foothills of the Cascades, while slightly to the southeast rises Mount Hood..." (1940)
The first outing of the PDX Metro Adventure club was met by sunny skies and lovely weather. After meeting at 3 Friends cafe we made for the buses that run east out Sandy and for our walk up Rocky Butte.
Jeff tried his hand at stretching before the six hundred foot walk to the top.
In 1901, Joseph Wood Hill established Hill Military Academy in northwest Portland and soon moved it to the Rocky Butte area. In 1935, land on Rocky Butte was donated to the public. The following year, Joseph Wood Hill Park was completed and officially dedicated at a ceremony which paid tribute to the WPA workers who built it.
Some of the sadly overgrown and unnoticed stoneworks that line the road to the top.
At the top the WPA workers built a mad stone wall around the park in the 30's. The aircraft light tower dates from 1940. Rocky Butte it's self is a volcanic cone and part of the Boring Lava Field. Once known as "Wiberg Butte", today it is called "Rocky Butte" after the quarry on it's east side. Rock from that quarry was used for the Penitentiary at Walla Walla, the Portland Hotel, and the Old Steel Bridge in Portland, and as a source rock for the culverts of the Union Pacific Railway. The slightly-over-600-feet-high butte is about 1.3 million years old.
Rocky Butte is one of the over 50 vents and cones of the old lava Fields which surround Portland. The field it's self is 1 to 2 million years old. As Lewis and Clark paddled down the Columbia River on the west side of the Columbia River Gorge, they passed many cones of the Boring Lava Field, including the big volcano of Larch Mountain and the smaller cone of Rocky Butte.
From the top we looked out towards downtown Portland and the west hills. Mt. Hood peeked out from behind hazy clouds to the south east. Sadly Mt. Saint Hellens remained hidden.
The art of the picnic wasn't lost on Susan and Jeff.
Jeff passionately explains the rules of a game he is just making up on the spot that involves hopping from stone to stone back up the hill. The intricate rules were lost on me...
...but he had a grand time with it and I believe he took first place.
Things took a turn for the dodgy as we walked from the base of Rocky Butte to the Grotto (sorry, that's The National Sanctuary of Our Sorrowful Mother - also known as The Grotto) about a mile away.
The Grotto is a 62 acre Catholic Shrine and botanical garden that was established by the Servite Friars in 1924 and it's..well...a little odd in there.
After the bus back down sandy and a good trodding through the Hollywood district the sign at the Moon and Sixpence was a welcome sight!
