Wilson River Bridge, Tillamook

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A few photos of the bridge over the Wilson River at Tillamook, just south of the famous cheese factory. Although it looks a bit worse for wear, it still seems like an absurdly grand and out-of-scale bridge for the location. The Wilson River isn't very big, and the site of the bridge is in the midst of flat muddy farm country. Maybe the location is more challenging to build on than it looks. The wikipedia article (above) indicates that this was a very early bridge of its type, so possibly the state prototyped the design here before using it where it was really needed. Dunno.

As one commenter notes below, this is a Conde McCullough bridge (like many bridges along US 101), so it does have historical significance to Oregon. It's not anywhere as big or showy as its better-known siblings in Newport, Florence, Coos Bay, etc.. You can see a distinct family resemblance to other smaller McCullough bridges, though, like the bridge in Oregon City even though the latter is a through arch design.



I should probably point out that these were taken from a moving vehicle, and we didn't stop to take a closer look at the bridge, much less walk across it. I don't think I've made this clear before, but the whole walking across thing is strictly a Portland-area project. Elsewhere it's strictly optional, especially when the area smells heavily of dairy cows.


Btw, this post is getting tons of hits from some somewhere on Facebook. Not sure what that's all about. Anyone want to enlighten me? Thx. Mgmt.

Updated 8/31/10: Aha. We have linkage from the Tillamook Headlight-Herald group on Facebook. One commenter whines about me mentioning the odor, and implies that we city folk don't know where cheese comes from. I guess on the theory that if you love sausage, you ought to love everything about sausage factories too.

I was around cows a lot as a kid, actually. My uncle had a few dozen at least; it seemed like hundreds at the time. I helped out with the cows now and then. I was hauled out of bed in the middle of the night more than once to come watch a calf being born, I guess because it was supposed to be educational or something. And I gotta say, I didn't like the smell of cows then, and I don't much care for it now either. And I do like cheese, and I'm not going to apologize for that. Stop me if you can.