Routson Park retired: County closes riverside campground

The County Board of Commissioners shut it down for good on March 21 due to maintenance costs, water supply issues, and waning popularity. The property will be absorbed back into county forest land.

Though road signs and some travel websites still promote Routson as a campground, it’s been closed on an operational level for nearly five years.

Google Maps now lists the spot as “permanently closed.” A gate blocks entrance off Highway 35, and tree debris litters the path.

“Ultimately, the area looks quite abandoned,” County Public Works Director Mikel Diwan said in a report.

Once a well-known park, Routson’s history goes back to the early 1900s. The park was named after Roy Routson, a homesteader who claimed the land in 1909. His family settled down in a rustic cabin near the East Fork. During the Great Depression in the 1930s, the family decided to foreclose on the land instead of paying property taxes, at which point the county acquired the tract.

In the early 1960s, volunteers and county park development teams pooled their efforts to give the land new life as a park — a $15,000 project. About 28 boys in the development program toiled for a full summer, pouring cement fireplace boxes, chopping wood and pulverizing underbrush.

When the park was dedicated in 1963, roughly 70 people braved stormy weather to celebrate. Members of the Routson family attended the event.

“Mrs. Roy Routson said it had always been her husband’s dream to see a park on the land,” Hood River News reported in a front page Aug. 29, 1963 article.

The park was incorporated into the county parks system in the mid-1980s, and upkeep passed into the care of Public Works.

Despite the aura of excitement when Routson Park first awoke, popularity didn’t persist into the 21st century.

According to a County Public Works report, Routson unsuccessfully competed for attention with more popular (and better maintained) Toll Bridge and Tucker Park. Since 2004, Routson only brought in an average of $130 per year in revenue — less than one camper per month.

The county closed the park in 2011, before the end of the normal summer season, due to issues with its water supply. The County Health Department conducted a water survey and found multiple “deficiencies” such as leaky pipelines and a spotty record of quality testing.

After briefly trying to reopen the park in 2012, the county opted to seal it off again. It’s stayed that way since.

Diwan said crews plan to take out existing facilities at the park in late summer, such as the water system and fireplaces. Before then, the county will work out code changes to reflect the removal of Routson, and to include Punchbowl Falls into its park system. Punchbowl will join the county’s parks roster this year as a low-maintenance passive use park at a waterfall near Dee.