Tanner Creek Bridge

Next up we're looking at the Tanner Creek Bridge an old Columbia River Highway bridge that I somehow skipped over back when I was doing posts about a lot of the others. ODOT's 2013 guide to historic highway bridges has an entry for it, with a brief description:

Bypassed and no longer in use, the Tanner Creek Bridge is a reinforced concrete deck girder, 60 feet in length. The bridge is located near the Interstate 84 entrance to the Bonneville Dam and is now owned by the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission. Completed in 1915, the bridge was constructed by the State Highway Department. Charles H. Purcell was the state bridge engineer, and Samuel Lancaster was the engineer for the Columbia River Highway.

Honestly this is not one of the major scenic or engineering highlights of the old highway. As a general rule of thumb, just because I went out of my way to go see something doesn't mean it's worth seeing. Especially when it costs $5 to park at Wahclella Falls, which has the nearest parking spaces to the bridge. (Although it looks like a lot of visitors park on the road just outside the lot to avoid paying.) This bridge wasn't considered a "contributing structure" when the old highway was added to the National Register of Historic Places, per the nomination paperwork. Which is unlike its closest neighbors, the arch bridges at Moffett Creek to the west and Eagle Creek to the east. I just realized I've never actually done the stretch between Tanner Creek and Moffett Creek on either the HCRH Trail or Trail 400 (the long but incomplete trail that was -- and maybe still is -- supposed to connect Troutdale to Hood River someday), and making a short loop out of the two looks pretty straightforward. I may have to try that at some point. And possibly try to find the first waterfall up Moffett Creek while I'm in the neighborhood, since that seems to be the most interesting sight along the way. It looks like you get a good look at the Tanner Creek railroad viaduct from the HCRH Trail, if you're into bridge stuff, which I gather most people aren't. Plus there's the unofficial Munra Point Trail, which I've never done, but I keep hearing it's sketchy with lots of exposure, and it's also usually packed with influencers doing dumb risky shit for TikTok or the 'Gram, and I'd really rather not watch anybody fall in person. Second only to not falling myself, of course.

As usual for HCRH bridges, there are pages about this bridge at Recreating the HCRH, Columbia River Images and BridgeHunter, though you might notice the last two are Wayback Machine links, as both sites have gone offline since the last time I did one of these posts (and Recreating the HCRH was down for a long while a few years ago). I'm saddened to report that both sites went down for very final reasons: The retired lady who ran Columbia River Images passed away in 2022, and the guy behind BridgeHunter died in a 2020 hiking accident.

Both sites were one-person operations with (I assume) occasional hosting and domain name bills that needed paying, and occasional admin tasks that needed administrating, and any of these things could be the thing that takes a website offline permanently. Not to make this about myself, and not to be morbid, but the humble blog you're currently reading is a one-person operation too, and the fate of two longtime resources I've relied on for years got me thinking about what will become of this place in the end. As a Blogspot site, I don't have regular hosting bills that need to be paid or else the site goes down. I do pay for Flickr, though, so photos will stop working whenever charging my card stops working, or I guess if Flickr goes away someday. And then there's Google's new policy on inactive accounts, where your stuff gets deleted if you haven't logged in for three years or so. I don't know whether that just means your bulging folder of never-to-be-read emails gets deleted, or blogs go away too, or what exactly. So this site could also go away due to a current or future inactive account policy, or Google could just decide Blogger as a whole is not profitable enough to keep around anymore (which is probably true already, quite honestly) and kill off the whole thing, and then this humble lil' blog will go the way of Google Reader, Google Groups, and Google+. Or, in theory, Google could go out of business entirely, or a giant meteor gets us, or yeah.

For reasons I don't recall now, I poked the Wayback Machine really early on and it's been taking occasional snapshots of this humble blog since sometime in 2006. So at least offsite backups are happening, archived by an idealistic nonprofit that aspires to keep and share every last bit of the interwebs forever. Which is cool as far as that goes, but the record industry is currently trying to sue them out of existence, and their password database was breached by Russian hackers a few days ago. And even if they survive the current BS, chances are the internet wouldn't survive a Big Rip, or a false vacuum decay event. So it's anybody's guess what "forever" really means in this context.