Calapooia River to Talking Waters

bobcat · Post by **bobcat** » April 8th, 2015, 4:31 pm

Haven’t seen a TR on Albany yet, so I thought I’d post. My wife and I were down in the Valley and we squeezed in this walk while spending most of the weekend helping someone to move: about eight miles total.

We started at Monteith Riverpark in Albany, where the Calapooia meets the Willamette. The bandstand here hosts an annual summer concert series. Heading east along a big bend in the Willamette, you take up the paved Dave Clark Trail, which passes amenities such as an antique store and a pub. Eventually you reach Front Avenue and then have to cut in to Water Avenue to cross Periwinkle Creek. We fetched up at the Willamette again at Bowman Park. On the way, we passed some funky dwellings, including the locally famous foam volcano.

From here, a chip trail leads along the river into Simpson Park. Gradually, you get beyond the blackberries and enter a more natural forest of tall Douglas-firs with an understory of snowberry, hazel, etc. The path squeezes between the river and a former channel now represented by two oxbow lakes which once served as mill ponds for Simpson Lumber.

We also took a diversion from Simpson Park to the Talking Water Gardens, Albany’s award-winning wastewater treatment ponds which were principally funded by the American Recovery and Investment Act. Here a former lumber mill site has been converted into a series of ponds, or cells, that are alive with the springtime cacophony of geese, coots, mallards, buffleheads, grebes, and herons. It’s an arundinaceous landscape (cattails dominate) with artificial waterfalls and channels that cool, aerate, filter, and remove nitrogen and phosphorus. Some foundations from the lumber mill have been integrated into the design. Near the gate is an oak grove shading a carpet of blooming camas.