Balch Creek
Balch Creek is now underground past Thurman Street... It can be heard running under the manholes along NW 30th.
Laura O. Foster, Portland Hill Walks: Twenty Explorations in Parks and Neighborhoods
Balch Creek was named for Danford Balch. With his wife and nine children, he emigrated to Oregon in 1847, and in 1850 filed a donation land claim for the area bounded by Vaughn Street and Saint Helens Road to the north, 22nd Avenue to the east, Cornell Road to the south, and Aspen Avenue to the west. He built a home along the creek that bears his name. In 1859 Balch was hanged for shooting the man who ran off and married his fifteen-year-old daughter. His daughter witnessed the execution along with five hundred other Portlanders.
Foster 23
High up in the Balch Creek drainage, [Lafe Pence] cut trees to construct miles of wooden flumes to carry rocks and soil downhill. He milled logs at a mill that he built in the woods, and obtained water from Balch Creek and streams in the Tualatin River watershed (on the western side of these hills). Once all the elements were in place, Pence began to sluice down the hill into Guilds Lake.
Incensed at Pence's temerity, city fathers brought their axes up into the hills in 1906 and personally demolished the flume. In 1960 Thornton Munger noted in his History of Portland's Forest Park that part of the flume, which ran along the western side of Balch Creek, was still visible under the Thurman Street Bridge. Today, it is no longer visible there, but a revised edition (1998) of Munger's book notes that remains can be seen in the form of a ditch alongside the Wildwood Trail, between the Birch and Wild Cherry trails.
Foster 16-17
Witch's Castle
"In the 1930s, the stone structure that is seen today was built near the site of the Balch homestead. It was maintained by Portland Parks and Recreation, and was used as a park ranger station and restrooms for hikers. In 1962, the structure was heavily damaged in a storm and was abandoned. Moss soon covered the stone walls, the roof caved in, and some people graffitied its walls. It was mostly forgotten until the 1980s, when local high school students found it was a fun place to hold parties. The students named it 'the Witch’s Castle' (despite no connection to witches) and made a tradition of holding gatherings on Friday nights, something that still happens today."
Atlas Obscura: The Witch's Castlehttps://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-witches-castle-portland-oregon
Today, the creek goes underground at the Thurman Street Bridge...
Balch Creek Trash Trap
...you can see two wire-mesh structures designed to catch debris, and an older wooden weir at the place where the water runs into a culvert. As you enter the meadow [from the east] underneath the Thurman Street Bridge, the change in topography is striking: the ground becomes unnaturally flat and suddenly streamless. The creek valley has been filled, either when homes were constructed on the hillside about or as a result of Lafe Pence's sluicing. The stream doesn't see daylight until it hits the Willamette River about a mile from here.
Foster 25
