I know this is technically out of district, but it is really close, and was very interesting.  I thought I would post it here to see if anyone knew the background of it.

Zack dragged me out of the house yesterday to go hiking in the rain.  We ended up choosing the Eagle Creek trail off the Clackamas.  He had previously marked what he thought was an old trail junction that he wanted to investigate.

We got to this junction, which is hard to see in the photo, but the trail in question kind of heads straight, while the Eagle Creek trail heads to the right (you can see it clearly) - the other trail is to the left of the two trees in the center:

That had a sign at one point:

From here on is where this hike got really interesting.  We wandered up what looked like old tread, finding a cut log and a blaze.  Shortly, we found these very old, but obviously milled boards, about 3 inches thick (covered in very thick moss):

These were obviously man made, not natural, so we wandered around trying to see if we could find more, or maybe what they were part of.  We thought maybe they were part of a bridge across the nearby unnamed creek, but could not find a clear crossing point.  We continued poking around and then I came across this old sign laying on the ground!

This area was kind of strange looking - there had been a lot of disturbances in the area.  Like a camp, maybe.  Lots of open, flat ground.  We continued searching the area, and then found the first of a set of posts:

We were postulating that these might have been "hitching posts" to tie horses to - they obviously had some sort of cross brace on them at one point in time.  We ended up finding 5 sets of them in the area.

We wandered over to a very open area, and I spotted this unusual item - an old watering trough made from a log:

The next find was really weird - Zack was commenting that "you'd think we would see some sort of fire pit around here" - I looked down and saw a heavily moss covered fire pit!  We removed the moss and found a concrete fire pit underneath:

Looking around the area of the firepit, we found several more milled pieces of wood, a few of which were notched:

These looked to be remnants of a picnic table - the notches were at an angle that would match what you'd see on a picnic table and there were some longer boards like you would have for the top.  I wonder if those first board we found were the tops to these picnic tables?

We continued searching the area for a while, looking for more artifacts, but other than some more cut logs, didn't really find anything else. 

I haven't seen anything on maps that talks about an old camp in this location.  Does anyone know what this camp was?  It was obviously very substantial.  It is just north of the trail, maybe a couple hundred yards.  The junction is down the trail about 4 miles or so.