WILLAMETTE FALLS

As we drove between Milwaukie and Newberg Friday evening we noticed that the Willamette was flooding. The park at the confluence of the Willamette and the Clackamas just north of Oregon City was completely gone. And so we decided that we wanted to take a better look at the river on our way out of town Saturday afternoon.
Kathy and I both grew up in Milwaukie and southeast Portland and remember the Willamette and Johnson Creek flooding. Johnson Creek was such a common occurrence that we expected it to happen. Flooding was part of life. And despite the danger, from the time I was in grade school, I and many of my friends played along the creek. Over the years several of them died because of it. If not the creek then the gravel pits. They were the most dangerous with sloping sides and loose gravel.
Muskrats lived along the creek and in the pits. Guys tried to trap them. The brother of one of my friends actually made money doing it. He died when I was in Junior High. Barnhardt was the best of all the trappers I knew.
When I was in High School I lost my close attachment to the creek. Still every morning on our way to school after seminary, my friends and I would make sure we checked out the house above Johnson Creek to the west of River Road where it meets McLaughlin Boulevard. I don’t understand why anyone lived there because it got flooded every year. How did we determine just how bad the flooding was? Could we still see the windows on the side of the house.
That house is gone now, so from that perspective it is hard to make a comparison but what Kathy and I saw Saturday when we stopped at the viewpoint on I-205 overlooking Oregon City matched anything from 40 years ago. Willamette Falls looked to be almost as high on the downriver side as it was on upriver side. It was more like a rapids than a falls. But you take a look and tell me what you think.