Bull Mountain's Swimming Hole

Looking across the Swimming Hole in
Summer, 2016. The ruins of the dock
can be seen near the middle of the picture

A chance Encounter

Late one spring evening in 2016, I retreated to Southern Oregon University’s dimly lit Hannon Library to study for my accounting exams. I wandered to the back of the library, and settled in at the Hannon’s most coveted real estate--a set of secluded rectangular tables with outlets to power laptops. Not being an especially studious type, I became bored with studying in a matter of minutes, and decided to chat up the man sitting across the table from me. We talked about our studies, our prospects for the future, hobbies, and our hometowns. As he talked about his youth, he described a woodland on a hill outside of Beaverton where he had spent summers with his cousins as a boy. I listened eagerly as he described a swimming hole deep in a forest on the hillside. His family had gathered there on summer nights, he said. They had a fishing dock, and even some old abandoned cars parked in the woods. The land was donated, and remained in public ownership, though the family had to sue to keep it that way. He had watched the countryside around the base of his mountain give way to houses and streets. When I asked him where these woods were, he dropped a name that I know quite well: Bull Mountain.

There are several remnants of
the swimming hole's days as a
family gathering place.Old
  lamps still hang from the
trunks of maple trees near
the swimming hole.

I was intrigued, but also puzzled. Bull Mountain had my curiosity since 2012, and I have been exploring the area as much as I could ever since. And while I hadn’t visited every corner of it at the time--and still haven’t--I was fairly certain that I was at least aware of all public woodlands the mountain had to offer. Where could a public woodland of this size be? I pulled up a map and asked him if he could locate his summer retreat. My new acquaintance’s eyes lit up ever so slightly, and he pointed out a plot of land on the mountain’s eastern flank--land I had long believed to be private. We resumed our studies, but our conversation had stirred my curiosity. I wanted to se this place for myself.

When I flew home for spring break and taken a few days to settle in, I grabbed a camera and bicycle, and after stopping for lunch at Progress Ridge, headed east along Barrows Road to find his woodland. I turned off of Barrows a few blocks down, and climbed up the slopes of Bull Mountain, winding thorough the very neighborhoods my acquaintance had watched being built from this woodland hangout.

Finding the swimming hole isn’t difficult.

If you have never been there, it takes some wandering around the hillside to find it, but almost as soon as you enter the park, you locate the creek which was dammed to build it. A network of dirt trails wind through the forest. The one to the swimming hole, branches off and parallels the creek, crossing the creek a couple of times on makeshift bridges, before coming up on the swimming hole from below the dam. The dam is subtle, and until you realize that the pond is artificial, it could just be a ridge on the hillside, but there are several clues that point to the pond being not only artificial, but also well cared for at one time.

Hydrangeas, normally a garden
plant, growing in the woods
near the swimming hole.

One walk around it was all it took to know that i had found my acquaintance’s lost summer retreat. While the pond itself looks like any other northwest pond--brown with tannic acid and lined with natural brown clay--its shores are covered with cat tails, exotic bushes and many varieties of rhododendron and azalea. A hydrangea bush grows in one corner next to an odd broadleaf bush native to Eurasia: the place resembles an abandoned garden in the woods, more than a seasonal pond. 

It wasn’t just the plants : the pond was littered with evidence of human activity. A strange orange float sat in the middle of the pond, and the ruins of a collapsed wooden dock with a steel ladder lay sideways in the pond. Old lamps hung from the big-leaf maples surrounding the pond in a couple of places. It is easy to sit down and imagine the family gatherings my acceptance described. I never found the old cars, though I wandered around the hillside for many hours over the course of several trips looking for them, probably removed long ago by the city when they took over. In addition to the pond, the woodland and the surrounding public land hides other secrets of its own. A meadow above the pond is doted with madrone trees and a small orchard of edible and tasty apples. Red huckleberry bushes litter the forest floor, and in one corner is a bush of rare black raspberries.

Rusty remains of a plow located
towards the edge of the woodland.

After my first visit, I sent my pictures to my friend who commented on the pictures. We met a few more times, and became friends, though we lost touch after college. Yet I remain in Portland, and sometimes when I visit Bull Mountain or Progress Ridge, I top by this woodland, visit the pond and the orchard. In my ongoing quest to explore Bull Mountain I likely would have discovered the swimming hole eventually. Yet because of a chance encounter in a university library 250 miles away, I know the story behind it, and those details tell a story that a chance discovery would not. The garden and infrastructure may be in ruins, but there is a charm about a lost garden in the woods that brings me back now and then. -KP