Trojan, Today
Just east of Highway 30 near the sleepy town of Rainer, Oregon sits Trojan Park, a post-industrial natural space wedged between a railroad, a barbed wire fence, defunct electrical towers and the foothills of the Tuality Mountains. The park is maintained by Portland General Electric who care for the plants and the nuclear cooling ponds-turned fish-stocked lakes. Trojan Nuclear Powerplant once functioned here. In 2003, the plant’s nuclear waste was transferred into casts and stored onsite, where it is still awaiting transport to permanent storage deep beneath the Yucca Mountains in Nevada. In 2006 the cooling tower was imploded, the first of its kind to be demolished in the United States. The foundations of a visitors center, an overgrown parking lot, and outdoor park facilities remain, the latter of which are available for use by visitors of the manicured disc-golf park today. This teaser shows a snippet of the 16mm footage that Hannah Clark and I have shot at the park and assembled over the past year. Our documentary will act as an observation of this site in its current state, and will include narration from guide pamphlets from the park when it accompanied the power plant as a tourist attraction in the 1970s.
The score for this teaser was composed and recorded by Elizabeth Wyse.
Please get in touch here if you’re interested in donating to support the processing of film and post-production for this project. Any contributions are greatly appreciated.
Below is a photo essay shot on our first day of filming at Trojan Park. These images were shot on my grandpa’s old Braun Paxette which he bought from his barber in Cayman sometime in the 1950s, and was last used in the 1980s. He said to me, “Take it if you’ll use it!’ It’s crazy to think that back when Trojan was functioning my grandparents would take their family there for outings. What a very different very similar world.
