Laurel Hill

The laurel was rhododendron. Emigrants on the Barlow Road took its glossy leaves for laurel and named the hill for them, and the shrub still grows under the firs here. The hill was the worst descent on the Oregon Trail: wagons went straight down grades as steep as sixty percent, held by ropes snubbed around trees or by whole trees dragged behind as brakes. Each chute wore down into rock until it could not be used and another was cut. The road over the hill stayed one-way until a stage road was finished in 1866.

What the plaque says

Historic Oregon Trail Laurel Hill The pioneer road here detoured the Columbia River rapids and Mount Hood to the Willamette Valley. The road at first followed an old Indian trail. The later name was Barlow Road. Travel was difficult. Wagons were snubbed to trees by ropes or held back by drags of cut trees. Early travelers named the hill from the resemblance of native leaves to laurel.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Timberline Lodge — 4.6 mi
  A lodge raised by hand by relief workers in 1936-38, from boulders off the mountain and iron forged from old railroad rails, and dark for an unpaid power bill less than twenty years later.
• Bonneville Dam — 24 mi
  The first federal dam on the Columbia, where someone has counted the fish climbing its ladders every year since 1938, beside an island the Corps used as a dump for forty years.
• Multnomah Falls — 24 mi
  A 620-foot double waterfall whose 1925 stone lodge survived because firefighters kept it soaked while the forest burned around it in September 2017.
• Vista House at Crown Point — 27 mi
  A rest stop on a basalt point 733 feet above the Columbia, budgeted at $12,000, finished for about $100,000, and mocked for years as Oregon's most expensive outhouse.

More markers nearby

• Beacon Rock — 24 mi