Rocky Butte: Volcano, Quarry, New Deal Fortress

The hill you can see to the northeast of the freeway is not just a hill. It is an extinct volcano, one of more than eighty small volcanic vents that make up the Boring Volcanic Field scattered across the Portland metropolitan area. Rocky Butte erupted several hundred thousand years ago, though estimates vary, producing basalt and red scoria that built the cone-shaped prominence you see today.

For generations before European settlement, the Multnomah, Clackamas, and Cascade peoples called this place Mowich Illahee, which translates to Home of the Deer. Hunters drove deer over the cliff or into concealed pits dug into the east slope, and cedar longhouses occupied the surrounding land.

By the eighteen eighties, settlers had begun quarrying the butte for its dense basalt. Stone from Rocky Butte went into Oregon roads, railways, churches, hotels, and the original Multnomah County Jail. The quarrying was industrial enough to reshape parts of the hill before it stopped.

The most visible features at the summit today were built during the Great Depression, when the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps put unemployed workers to work transforming Rocky Butte into a public park. The WPA employed thousands of Portlanders to construct a castle-like stone viewpoint at the crest, a scenic spiral road to the top, a tunnel through the hillside, and retaining walls along the route. The masons used basalt quarried from the butte itself, giving the structures a rough, organic character that echoes the Columbia River Highway stonework built in the same decade.

The county dedicated the park at the summit in nineteen thirty-five. The view from the top takes in Mount Hood, Mount Saint Helens, the Columbia River, and the city grid below. The fortress walls and arched openings still stand, a Depression-era public works project built into the bones of an ancient volcano.