My Places of Doom Tour is growing. Among other sources for the list that follows, I found a trove of historic Oregon place names printed by the Oregon Historical Quarterly in 1944. Here some of the highlights:
Asbestos
Bloody Creek
Bloody Run
Butte Disappointment
Cemetary Hill
Cemetery Ridge
Coffin Mountain
Creep and Crawl Lake
Deadhorse Ridge
Dead Indian Creek
Dead Ox Ranch
Dead Man’s Cove
Deadman Creek
Deadman Spring
Deadmans Hollow
Deathball Mountain
Deathball Rock
Devil’s Punchbowl
Devil’s Churn
Dread and Terror Ridge
Drought Creek
Gouge Eye
Grave Creek
Graveyard Point
Hells Canyon
Helloff Creek
Misery Ridge
Quicksand Creek
Skull Creek Road
Skull Spring
Tombstone Gap
TNT Creek
Honorable Mention:
Bitter Lick
Brokencot Creek
Camp Castaway
Crazyman Creek
Hardscrabble Hill
Hungry Hill
Needy
Jumpoff Joe Creek
Adding this list to the previous one, it’s a lot of places to visit.
My Favorite of these is Deathball Mountain. According to the Oregon Historical Quarterly, Deathball got its name from a campsite on the Oregon Trail where the party’s cook’s biscuits were so bad, they were dubbed “Deathballs”. The meal was perpetrated at a large rock at the site, which became Deathball Rock, and the mountain soon took the name as well.
One of the issues I am having with the list is that most of them are hundreds of miles from where I live. Getting there is not a simple matter. Most would require many hours driving, and an overnight stay. I am not daunted, though. I hope to have more of them photographed by the Spring.
More to come.
