So here we are at Milepost 25 on the old Columbia River Highway. We're surrounded by an average bit of forest, with no real views to speak of, and no geological marvels or historical curiosities to stop and check out. Instead the highway itself is the main attraction for a bit, since right after the milepost the road begins a series of tight horseshoe switchbacks, usually known as the "Crown Point Loops" or "Figure-Eight Loops". I don't actually own a dashcam, so probably the best way to give you an idea about this part of the road is with a few videos I found on the interwebs:
- Someone drifting the loops a few times in a 1986 Toyota Corolla
- Somebody's dashcam video from a few years back
- A fast descent on a bike, and not even a racing bike.
- Oh, and here's a helmet cam video of someone on a Kawasaki chasing a Harley down to Latourell Falls and back.
There are a few other places like this along the old highway, just east of Hood River then the famous ones at Rowena (as seen in an endless number of car commercials, like these 2012 Infiniti ads), plus Rainier Hill Rd. and the ones that used to exist near Bradley State Park, both along the Lower Columbia stretch of the highway. Then there's the famous Maryhill Loops just across the river (and not far from the local Stonehenge), which are in no way part of the HCRH but served as a kind of prototype for some of the engineering ideas used in it. Here's a short video of someone tackling the Maryhill Hillclimb in an actual race car, doing it in just 1:46 at speeds up to 155mph. And here's GoPro footage from a big longboard and street luge event from fall 2024. You know, street luge, the thing from the 90s Mountain Dew commercials.
The one common bit of trivia you might encounter about this corner of the Gorge is that the surrounding 61.48 acres used to be a separate Crown Point Loops State Park, beginning sometime after November 1935 when Multnomah County donated the land to the state, and ending sometime before 1946, when an official history said it was now part of Guy Talbot State Park next door. Nobody explains why it was a separate park, and nobody explains why they were merged later. Maybe it saved the state a few bucks by not having to put up any "Welcome to Crown Point Loops State Park" signs, I dunno. You might think it's a weird idea to have a state park that's meant to be enjoyed from a moving vehicle, but the state park system includes an official "State Scenic Corridor" category and recognizes fourteen of them around the state [1]. This might reflect the system's origin as a side hobby of the state highway commission, one way to convince the public to drive more and pay more gas taxes.
Ok, that isn't the most compelling bit of historical trivia, but I do have a vintage crime story to pass along too. And believe it or not, it's not about someone being nabbed for speeding or reckless driving. You see, back in 1932, and into the 1960s in some places, the old highway was the only highway, and until I-84 opened gawking tourists had to share the road with impatient commuters and even commercial truck traffic, which caused endless traffic jams, which led some trucking companies to move cargo around late at night to avoid paying drivers to sit idle in traffic. But that led to new problems, and in July 1932 the Crown Point Loops were the site of a series of truck robberies.
Two men who had been robbing trucks of The Dalles truck line for several weeks were nursing shotgun wounds somewhere today… More than 40 parcels had disappeared from Dalles-Portland trucks in recent weeks. Last night George Spickerman, one of the owners of the line, hid in one of the trucks with a sawed-off shotgun. As the truck was proceeding slowly up the Crown Point loops at 2:30 this morning two men jumped on the end of the truck and started throwing off sacks of beans. Spickerman ordered them to hold up their hands, but instead they fled. Spickerman fired three shots at them and is confident that a number of bullets took effect.
The more I read that, the more it sounds like a news story from the early 2020s: People met with gunfire for stealing food, the satisfied tone of approval in the local media, the lack of curiosity as to what could possibly motivate someone to steal sacks of beans off a moving truck at 2:30am, as if 1932 was just another normal year for the thriving US economy.
Anyway, after the loops the road approaches the tiny burg of Latourell, which once had its own train station and steamboat landing back in its heyday, but is now down to a few dozen residents at best. On your left, Latourell Road branches off and goes downhill into the town, where there's also more parking for Latourell Falls. Across the highway, on your right, there's a house, and just before the house is a gated dirt road with a "No Trespassing" sign on it. This is the point where the old pre-HCRH road into Latourell continues more or less straight uphill to a junction with Larch Mountain Road. This was called Latourell Hill Road (aka County Road 377) back in the old days, and it's the old highway's even older, narrower, shorter, and steeper predecessor through this area. It isn't quite the very first road here, but it was built way back in 1885, probably to replace earlier road access (via the Rooster Rock Wagon Road) that was being lost to railroad construction.
Instead of 100' curves and 5% grades, and a full traffic lane in each direction, the old road to Latourell was a single lane dirt road with a few steep sections with around 20% grades. That means you gain or lose a foot (or a meter if you prefer) for every five you travel horizontally. That's equivalent to some of the steepest roads they use in the Tour de France and other pro cycling races. There's a famous 1915 birds-eye map that the Oregonian published showing the then-brand-new highway, includes a photo captioned "Thor's Heights and Highway from Point on Old Latourelle Road", another common name for road 377. The map includes the old road and highlights a scenic viewpoint on it labeled "Goat Point", which is potentially where that photo was taken. That name and place have fallen out of living memory over the years, but evidently it was well known enough back then that the Oregonian included it on their map of HCRH highlights, even though the new road was about to bypass the place. Goat Point was also the one serious hairpin corner on Latourell Hill Road, much tighter than anything that would have been allowed along the HCRH.
One curious detail is that it's still legally a county road, or most of it is. If you can find the unmarked intersection with it along Larch Mountain Road, you might notice there's no gate preventing you from turning there and driving down the road toward Goat Point, and the only barrier is your basic common sense. Well, that and there are likely fallen trees blocking the road here and there, since the county considers it a "local access road", meaning they have jurisdiction over it but have no obligation to ever do any maintenance on it. There's a middle section of road, roughly the part nearest the Loops, that was vacated at some point, and LIDAR it looks like there used to be a few structures there, maybe a sawmill or something, though that's strictly a guess on my part. Then the lower section is the part closest to the gate and No Trespassing sign. I gather the property line with the house next door runs down the middle of the road, and the owners don't want people driving on it, and dispute the current legal status of the road. And who knows, maybe they're right, and either way it's been like this for as long as I can remember, and resolving stuff like this is way over my pay grade. I do have some ideas around what to do with this and a few of the other "local access" roads in the area, but I wrote about that stuff at (maybe excessive) length here if anyone's interested.
[1] Since you asked, the other State Scenic Corridors are:
- Eastern Oregon
- Oregon Coast
- Columbia Gorge
- Coast Range
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