6A • May 19, 2017 | Cannon Beach Gazette | cannonbeachgazette.com
New public works director chosen for Cannon Beach
Arndt brings
40 years of
public works
experience
By Brenna Visser
Cannon Beach Gazette
Longtime Cannon Beach
resident Jim Arndt is the new
director of public works start-
ing Monday.
Arndt replaces Dan Grass-
ick, who retired at the begin-
ning of May. Arndt has been
BRENNA VISSER/CANNON BEACH GAZETTE
Jim Arndt will be the new
public works director start-
ing May 22.
in public works for munici-
palities in Washington state,
Colorado and California for
more than 40 years. He retired
from his most recent post in
Manhattan Beach, California,
in 2013, but decided to come
out of retirement to serve a
community he has come to
call home.
“I was actually having cof-
fee with my wife when we
saw the article in the Cannon
Beach Gazette about Dan re-
tiring,” Arndt said. “I found
that I missed engineering and
this was a unique opportuni-
ty.”
Arndt and his wife have
had a house in Cannon Beach
on and off since 1988, he said.
City
Manager
Brant
Kucera said Arndt stood out
as a candidate because of his
familiarity with the area, as
well as his decades of experi-
ence in public works.
“I think he’s going to be a
great fit,” Kucera said.
Arndt said he liked the fact
the city has adopted a parks
master plan and drafted water
and wastewater master plans.
“I think the city has been
doing a good job looking
forward with regards to plan-
ning,” Arndt said. “Not every
city gets that far.”
Arndt said he has
long-standing passion for util-
ity and infrastructure work,
and enjoys the challenge of
communicating why that
work is needed in the commu-
nity.
Arndt will be taking the
lead as the city considers
water and wastewater mas-
ter plans many have deemed
controversial after a rate
study proposed a 40 percent
increase in water rates to im-
plement it.
For the next fiscal year, the
city has proposed a 3 percent
increase to cover operation-
al costs, but the debate over
whether or not rates need to
be increased in the future is
not over, Kucera said.
“The community is very
active and passionate, and I
hope to work with the council
and the citizens to come to a
mutual agreement that works
for the town,” Arndt said.
“I’ve worked with councils
and the community for a long
time now, and I hope that ex-
perience helps.”
SLIP SLIDIN’ AWAY
Erosion, winter storms cause slides at Ecola State Park
By Katie Frankowicz
EO Media Group
Erosion, winter storms and
landslides have shut down Eco-
la State Park multiple times and
cut a popular trail in two in the
past year and a half.
Now, more than 40 years
after a 1975 park master plan
highlighted these same prob-
lem areas, the Oregon Parks
and Recreation Department is
examining some of the same
solutions proposed back then.
“The problems at the park
date back decades,” said Chris
Havel, associate director for
the parks department, “and the
solutions are really rather diffi-
cult if we’re going to stick with
the current entrance. And that’s
where things get sticky.”
To reroute the washed-out
trail between Ecola Point and
Indian Beach is one thing. It
will be labor intensive and re-
quire funds the park hadn’t
budgeted for, but at least with
trail-building park manage-
ment is on familiar territory.
A long-term fix for the road
leading into the park is another
dilemma entirely. Since 2015,
the department has spent over
$30,000 on various sections of
Ecola Park Road.
“Anything that we do
there,” said Park Manager Ben
Cox, “well, nothing that we
do there is going to hold back
Mother Nature.”
Long-term solutions
The 1975 master plan pro-
posed changing road access to
the park, noting the existing
Ecola Park Road’s sharp turns,
steep grades, narrow width and
vulnerability to landslide dam-
age.
Planners at the time pro-
posed two different access
routes: One that used the cur-
rent road but branched off to
intersect with an undeveloped
access road, Radar Road, that
enters the park from its eastern
end near Tillamook Head. The
other option abandoned the
original road and suggested di-
rect access from U.S. Highway
101 via Radar Road.
“Both access alternatives
would require acquisition of
private property,” the plan not-
ed. Today, planners would also
have to consider the dozens of
homes that cluster in the hills
below the park’s boundaries.
Park management has yet
to outline a plan or come up
with a new suite of possible
solutions but they say any long-
term proposals would require
extensive scoping, meetings
and conversations.
The park is looking at the
areas where the land is, and his-
torically has been, stable.
“Maybe these are areas
where we’d like to relocate or
plan a road,” said Cliff Serres,
manager of the parks depart-
ment’s engineering section.
“We’re exploring options
that include an alternate route
into the park,” Cox said.
Residents farther down
Ecola Park Road are concerned
about the road’s integrity as its
condition worsened since last
year. Alternative routes are vir-
tually nonexistent, or require
four-wheel drive. One resident,
Les Wierson, recently present-
ed a petition to the City Coun-
cil, urging councilors to take a
more active role in maintaining
the stretch of road between city
limits and the park’s entrance.
Meanwhile, Ecola State
Park reopened after contractors
tore out cracked and sliding
asphalt along a portion of the
road near the pay booth and
replaced it with gravel. Later
this year, contractors plan to re-
place a culvert under a section
of road right before the Indian
Beach parking lot.
Rangers are preparing for
summer crowds — an esti-
mated 313,808 people visit the
park each year — and the sea-
sonal increase in vehicle traffic,
cars that will idle in long lines
on the newly graveled road,
bottlenecking at the pay booth.
The recent repairs should
get them through the summer.
“We’re crossing our fin-
gers,” Cox said.
Historic problems
Park rangers find them-
selves saying variations of
“Hopefully this will get us
through the summer” and
“Hopefully this will get us
through the winter” often. And
for a while there it felt like they
were constantly, jokingly, ask-
ing each other, “What’s the di-
saster of the day?”
After all, portions of this
popular park have been sliding
into the ocean for as long as
anyone can remember.
“Nothing’s new here under
the sun,” said Serres. “These
are the same issues we’ve been
dealing with at the park since
we became stewards of the
park.”
A viewpoint that once
wrapped around the side of a
cliff at Ecola Point crumbled
into the ocean several years
ago. Every few years, park
managers have to make repairs
PTARMIGAN PTRAILS
Ed Kessler, principal owner of Ptarmigan Ptrails, the com-
pany hired by Oregon State Parks to scout new hiking trail
routes around the slide area at Ecola State Park, stands on
an enormous spruce tree that succumbed to the slide.
to Ecola Park Road as well as
the road that dips off toward In-
dian Beach.
In 1961, a landslide at Ecola
Point damaged 125 acres of the
1,023-acre park.
“I’d go up and visit it peri-
odically,” said Wierson. “You
could stand where the pay
booth is now and you couldn’t
see (the slide) move, but you
could hear the trees snap.”
The scars of this massive
movement of earth and trees
and undergrowth were visible
for a long time.
The 1975 plan identified
three major landslides in Ecola
State Park. Ecola Park Road bi-
sects one of these slides. As re-
corded in 1975 and continuing
through today, the slide contin-
ues to damage the road.
Slides have impacted the
park’s ability to get water and
electricity to its ranger and vis-
itor facilities, snapping under-
ground wires and pipes. Today,
power lines are strung along
poles in the slide area right be-
fore the pay booth, and water
comes in through a flexible,
above-ground pipeline.
The Ecola slides are slow
moving. While they are dra-
matic in scope, they rarely pres-
ent major threats to the health
and safety of visitors. They do,
however, threaten accessibility
to the park.
and more of a bulge, says Ed
Kessler with Ptarmigan Ptrails,
the company hired by the parks
department to identify new trail
routes around the slide.
Softer material is sliding
out of a half-mile-wide crown,
Kessler said, creating a bottle-
neck between bedrock. Water
that rangers can hear trickling
through the woods has no ob-
vious above-ground source,
until they see it shooting out
from underneath the landslide
debris.
“There’s pressure from
trapped groundwater and
there’s pressure from the loos-
ened soil material,” Kessler
said. Up above the landslide,
there’s a pond of trapped wa-
ter that stretches for almost an
acre.
The slide area is shaped
a bit like the letter “U,” “like
the cirque or bowl of an alpine
mountain,” Kessler said. The
arms of the “U” are the cliffs
on either side, relatively solid
points marching down toward
the ocean. The curved base of
the “U” is the ridgeline, a sort of
crown of higher, solid ground
that arcs between Ecola Point’s
parking lot and Indian Beach.
The trees that grow up there
are older and taller than those
below; they have withstood nu-
merous slides over the decades.
The empty space between the
arms and the base of the “U”
is where the ground has thun-
dered away, sliding and bulging
into the ocean. Deep fissures
opened up in these hillsides, 20
feet deep in some places and 10
to 15 feet wide.
Farther down, where the
trail used to be, is a river of
brown mud and clay. The slide
uprooted trees, sent some slid-
ing down toward the water and
slammed into others near the
cliff edge, causing them to slant
backward toward the ridge. It
rolled undergrowth into mud-
dy tangles and washed a small
bridge dozens of feet down
from its original placement on
a trail segment that no longer
exists. There’s an ocean view
that wasn’t there before.
New trail
It is the nature of this land-
scape to change, says Park
Ranger Bo Ensign.
As he looked over the slide
area at the end of April, he had
a hard time remembering what
this particular portion of the
trail had even looked like.
“Even what had been here
is different from what it was
before,” he said. Now: “It just
looks like a bomb went off.”
Though park management
has yet to finalize a plan, they
will likely abandon this en-
tire middle section, opting to
bypass the slide zone entirely
and reroute up to the ridgeline.
They may decide to provide a
few in-and-out trails down to
familiar viewpoints to preserve
some of the characteristics of
the original trail. The reroute
is expected to cost between
$20,000 and $50,000.
The route proposed by
Ptarmigan Ptrails would travel
from high point to high point
— from the surviving end of
the trail at Ecola Point, up to
the solid ridgeline above the
slide, and then back down to
meet the piece of untouched
trail that comes up from Indian
Beach. Cox and the rangers say
they are excited to show hikers
something new.
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