Wheatland Ferry

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Today's episode in what's apparently now a bridge and ferry project takes us to the Wheatland Ferry, a few miles north/downstream of Salem, OR at the tiny town of Wheatland. It's the same basic idea as the Canby Ferry, but busier; you pay while the boat's moving instead of prior to departure, probably to shave off a few minutes at the dock. At peak times -- summer and harvest time, primarily -- traffic tends to back up waiting to use the ferry. As this is the only river crossing of any kind between downtown Salem and the OR 219 bridge at Newberg, the Wheatland Ferry will likely be replaced with a bridge long before the other remaining Willamette River ferries. Not that it's all that likely in the near term; demand or not, a bridge -- even a utilitarian ugly one -- would still be expensive, and neither the state nor Marion County has a lot of cash lying around.

A 2009 Terry Richard column describes the ferry briefly, although he doesn't have a lot to say about river ferries that I haven't already covered here. There really isn't a lot to cover: You explain where it is, and tell the n00bs how to use the thing, and you might toss in a few snarky non-sequiturs if you happen to be me, which you probably aren't. You'd think there'd be a lot of fascinating history tidbits to share about the thing, given how long there's been a ferry at this location, but I haven't come across any yet.

The ferry does have a sorta-official website, although the page design is a retina-melting throwback to the Geocities/MySpace era. If there's a web browser out there that lets you disable tiled animated-gif background images, that would probably be the one to use. Failing that, welder's goggles would work, or you could try projecting the website onto a wall so that you aren't directly exposing your eyes to it. That's the safe way to observe a solar eclipse, so it might work for this website too. I note, in passing, that the link to their web design firm is a 404. FWIW.