NICK CHRISTENSEN / METRO NEWS
Metro arborist and ranger Howard Rasmussen talks about the damage to Oxbow Regional Park on Jan. 26, 2012. Behind him is the riverbank that was washed away in flooding earlier in the month.
Reporting from Gresham
There's a lost forest in eastern Multnomah County, centuries-old tree trunks dotting the landscape, standing as straight as they did 230 years ago.
Visitors to Oxbow Regional Park have walked all over this forest, but few know it's there. Until last week, the trees were buried in the sand underneath the amphitheater and in the bluffs next to the Sandy River.
For the first time since 1781, those trees saw the light of day last week, as the raging Sandy River tore through the bank, the sand, and the amphitheater at Oxbow. The river cut a gash in the land that is now perilously close to the road to the campground, leaving early season camping at the park in jeopardy.
The Sandy has been taking a toll on Oxbow for a couple of years. The river is in a cycle where it's got a bulls-eye on the bank near the campground, and when winter's fierce rains come down on Mount Hood, a quarter-mile-wide fire hose sprays right at Oxbow's eastern edge.
The damage from the erosion this month was the some of the most severe on memory. The amphitheater is gone, the only remnants of it being benches that were saved, and a signpost pointing in its direction – attached to an informational display about flood damage.
"I've never witnessed anything like this before in my life," said Howard Rasmussen, an arborist and ranger at the park. "All the big trees on the edge here are going in."
A consultant told Metro parks officials last week that the road to the campground and a 12-year-old bathroom building should be removed before further erosion takes place. The 75-foot-tall ramparts that lead down to the riverbank are now only about 15 feet from parts of the road to the campground.
Most of the park remains open, said Metro parks director Justin Patterson. But the area around the campground?
"Who knows when the erosion may stop?" Patterson said. "We want to let the river do what it's going to do, but we also want to preserve access to the public, because we have over 200,000 people who come through Oxbow every year."
With only one road into the campground – the one that is now only feet from the ash-grey bluff next to the river – that may involve carving a new road into the campground area.
Metro inherited Oxbow Regional Park from Multnomah County in the mid-1990s property acquisition that also saw the agency take on management of the Expo Center, Glendoveer Golf Course and pioneer cemeteries among other properties.
The campground dates back to Multnomah County's ownership of the park, but many of the improvements, including the bathroom-shower building that the consultant said to pull out, have occurred under Metro's management.
Metro's parks department has money in its operating funds to deal with this month's flooding, but Patterson said a larger budget will likely be needed for further flood mitigation at the park.
The last four years have been particularly harsh on Oxbow's changing scenery. In a sense, the area is a microcosm of the forces that shape Oregon – the 1781 eruption of Mount Hood sent rocks and debris surging down the Sandy, burying the forest upright and leaving about 75 feet of very loose earth in the Oxbow area.
Three centuries later, the Sandy is reclaiming its turf. But it's sending the land Oregonians know as Oxbow Regional Park further downstream.
That poses a question for Metro – how to manage a situation that is certain to change in the years going forward?
"We've got the funding to do the immediate work to secure the site," Patterson said. "How do we handle what we've got for the long term?"
Note - An earlier version of this story had an incorrect number of years since the last Mt. Hood eruption. This version has been corrected.