HCRH Milepost 17

A few of you out there might remember an old project I did around the Stark St. Milestones, a series of very old stone markers along Stark St. each carved to indicate the distance in miles from downtown Portland (measured specifically from the intersection of SW Broadway & Washington St.), with a surprising number of surviving stones, from milestone P2 embedded into a wall at Lone Fir Cemetery in inner SE Portland, out to P14 on the campus of Mt. Hood Community College, along the east edge of Gresham and Troutdale. I mentioned a few times that Stark was eventually extended across the Sandy River to join the new Columbia River Highway, and they decided to continue the existing mile numbering as the highway continued east. I didn't follow suit immediately; I was just happy to have collected the whole set thru #14. You will not be surprised to learn that I recently decided to go ahead and do HCRH mile markers as a project. I didn't see anyone else doing it, for one thing, and for another I'd recently bought a fun new car and this was a fresh excuse to take it out for a spin on several weekends over the summer.

As for the scope of this project: After MHCC there are apparently no markers for miles 15 and 16, and it's unclear whether those ever existed. Then there's a continuous stretch of mileposts from 17 thru 36 (except for the currently-missing 19 and 20). There's an odd one-off wooden Milepost 43 around the eastern outskirts of Cascade Locks, and a few sporadic ones numbered in the 50s and low 60s this side of Hood River, picking up again east of town at 67 and continuing east to around 88 on the west side of The Dalles, and I've heard there are even more of them way out in the Umatilla area with mile numbers in the 170s, but those may not be part of the same "miles from Portland" sequence, in which case they don't count. So the exact end of this thing is TBD, and for those of you following along at home (and rushing out to visit each one as the next post goes up) the important thing to know is that mile counts always reset at state lines and so there's no risk of blundering across into Idaho (where the shadows lie) by chasing these things around.

That may seem like a lot of surviving mileposts, given the originals were made with 1910s reinforced concrete and not stone. It turns out most of the ones you'll see out there are replacements that only date to the 1980s, which was practically yesterday. But -- crucially -- a couple of them did survive from way back when, and the new replacements copy the originals' design, and -- also crucially -- they didn't explain which two are the originals so it could be any of them, and the only way to be sure you have photos of these important historical artifacts is to find all of them. (Or, I guess, you could just call up ODOT and ask, but where's the fun in that?)

So with all of that background out of the way, the first milepost we encounter on the way east is Milepost 17, which is located along a shady shoulder of the highway around 1/3 mile past the Stark St. Bridge, before the entrance to Dabney State Park. Note that the shoulder is actually marked No Parking, I think because parking here would let a few visitors stroll into the park and scratch their disc golf itch without paying. So if you just pull off the road briefly to take photos of a concrete milepost, this will probably not lead to getting tasered by The Man, though you never know.

I think another thing I'll do for these posts is list some "nearby attractions", and sort of figure out what that means on the fly. (I think Wordpress is able to do that automagically based on geotags, but Google yoinked most of their Blogger engineers away to go build Google+ before they got around to building this.) Anyway, here's what's nearby:

• An old post about the Stark St. Bridge, currently closed for emergency repairs.
• Flickr photos from Dabney State Park right here, since the related blog post isn't done yet. And I could swear I have more material than the two short video clips in that set. I think I must have mis-filed them somewhere.
• A short distance past the entrance to Dabney, at the intersection with Nielson Rd., is the site of "Dabney Springs" aka "Troutdale Springs". Which until quite recently was another minor relic of the old highway, a free-flowing water fountain installed by the state Highway Commission sometime in the early years of the old highway, as a source of radiator water for your poor overheated Model T Ford. Decades later, local hippies decided it was a source of pure mountain spring ambrosia, unsullied by The Man and his chlorinated fluoridated dihydrogen-monoxidated corporate mainstream "water". Even though the water flowed out of an iron pipe, embedded in a big concrete block, and the state never actually said where the water came from or even promised that it was safe for humans to drink. Eventually (sometime earlier this year) this attracted enough hippies to become a regular traffic hazard -- I dunno, maybe they kept twirling in the street or something -- and The Man came and shut it all down. I don't have a post about this or any photos of it or anything, but a recent ZehnKatzen Times post has all the details here.
• Flickr photos from the obscure Stark St. Viaduct, another HCRH-style bridge uphill from the bridge on the Sandy River. That post isn't done yet either.
• If you crossed the Stark St. bridge and then turned left instead of right onto the HCRH, and continued around the bend in the river, you'll soon be at Keanes Creek Falls and the former Tippy Canoe dive bar, and past there a series of small roadside waterfalls on the way to central Troutdale.