Is There a Secret Spring in Portland, Oregon’s Mt. Tabor Neighborhood?

Aaron Gilbreath
4 min readJan 4, 2020

One nosey resident sniffed around to find the truth about Crystal Springs.

Mt. Tabor, facing west.

There it was, clear as day: A satellite photo of what looked like a natural lake in the backyard of a house on Mount Tabor, posted on Reddit back in March 2014. The anonymous user claimed that the secret lake was fed from water flowing from an underground river called…

Aaron Gilbreath

Essayist, Journalist, Burritoist. Longreads Editor. Writing: Harper’s, NYT, Slate, Paris Review, VQR, Oxford American, Kenyon Review. 3 nonfiction books.