Next up we're at HCRH Milestone 26, which is located right at Latourell Falls. Specifically at the west side of the Latourell Creek Bridge, by a wide spot in the road that serves as summer overflow parking. There's an old monument to Guy Talbot here -- he was the state park's primary donor-slash-namesake, and nearby is a crosswalk for the park's loop trail, so you could just start the trail from here if you wanted to. The crosswalk doesn't have crosswalk stripes, I think because it didn't have crosswalk stripes in 1916, and traffic safety would not be historically accurate. And the reason there weren't crosswalk stripes here back then was because the trail used to cross the road on a sort of skybridge over the highway, and no crosswalk was needed. If you look closely you can still see a concrete support for the old skybridge on the north side of the road, mostly overtaken by underbrush now.
Going from that to having a mere crosswalk here is kind of suboptimal, since a lot of traffic on the road isn't disposed toward noticing pedestrians. Some of the traffic is going to be cars or motorcycles racing the clock, going for a new personal best Vista-to-Latourell-and-back time. Others are visitors from rectangular corn states, a bit white-knuckled about the twisty drive but also giddy about seeing a waterfall for the first time and maybe not watching for road hazards that closely. A crosswalk signal for the trail crossing seems like overkill, but a crossing guard during the summer might help. Rebuilding the old skybridge like it once was is a non-starter, since modern RVs and shuttle buses would probably struggle to get under it. And going by current trends, the average family SUV will expand to be at least that size in a few years. But do I have an idea for a little adaptive reuse. And this isn't one of my usual dumb ideas, nor is it very expensive, at least not directly. You know how local bike activists are always saying there aren't enough bike trails in the Gorge, even with the HCRH State Trail now mostly complete? My idea helps with that too, a little. So, back during the 2019 Tour de France, someone jumped a BMX bike over the race and made it onto all the daily highlight reels, and maybe the old skybridge piers are a place where regular people could finally give that cool bike trick a try without having to learn French and go overseas and take a bunch of advanced performance-enhancing drugs and so forth. The lack of a bridge also means there won't be a lot of hikers on that particular stretch of trail, at most probably just a few parkour runners, and I think they might legally count as bikes for jumping purposes (Note: I am not a lawyer, so don't cite me as an authority on this.)
After passing through Latourell the older old road crosses the HCRH again, becoming Alex Barr Road (County Road 566 at first, then as CR 648 after the junction w/ Toll Road), and immediately starts climbing again. It's one of two surviving backroads into the Gorge, and two "local access" roads branch off of it: Henderson Road (Road 634) runs above and parallel to the HCRH along the stretch between here and Bridal Veil Falls, and if reopened to hikers and cyclists would open up access to the top of Shepperds Dell Falls, Huerta Falls, and all the other seasonal falls along the way. Further up, a road now called Toll Road (and once known as the Latourell Falls Toll Road, and either way numbered as another part of Road 566) climbs sort-of diagonally uphill to a junction with Brower Rd. near where it crosses Young Creek, and where the old Brower sawmill used to be. The Donohue Creek trail system is nearby, and in theory you can go all sorts of places via roads 458 and 550, the latter climbing up Larch Mountain and ending up somewhere deep in the forbidden Bull Run Watershed. For a while during the area's logging heyday, the road's right of way was shared with a log flume, starting at the mill in Brower and ending at another mill in Latourell. It's not surprising that the flume was either torn out or (more likely) burned many decades ago after the area ran out of loggable trees. I'm not saying I wish it was still there, much less that someone ought to build a new one, but back when I was in third grade my teacher got married over spring break and honeymooned on either Maui or the Big Island, and showed us lots of photos when she was back, and they had gone to... it was either a former log flume or an old irrigation canal or aqueduct, that was either officially repurposed as a waterslide, or at least locals used it as one whenever The Man wasn't looking, and she said it was really fast and scary compared to the ordinary waterslides at the mall, and I thought that sounded really fun and exciting at the time. Whereas now the first thing that comes to mind is all the many reasons -- entirely reasonable reasons -- an authentic log flume waterslide would be shut down or sued out of existence on day 1.
As for the town itself, it still has a number of sorta-historic old houses, but has no hotels or restaurants or antique shops or gas stations or any other businesses these days, and no city hall or public library or any churches, not even a post office. Despite the town's heyday as the entertainment and nightlife capitol of the western Gorge, today there are no nightclubs, no dance halls, no music venues, or anywhere else dedicated to carousing and carrying on into the wee hours. In short there's nothing for you as an outsider to see or do there, and there's no reason to linger around there annoying the locals. They do happen to have a local water utility, the Latourell Falls Township water system, a topic I was curious about after learning about the disgusting medieval water system used by the old company town over at Bridal Veil. That state filing says it's a local government entity, and Townships are a common form of (mostly rural) local government in a lot of other states, largely in the Midwest, where they function as a sort of sub-county, delivering various public services on a smaller scale. And technically the Oregon state constitution does mention "towns" and "townships" a few times, mostly when saying "cities and towns". But there aren't any state laws that spell out exactly how they're created, or how they're run, or who runs them, or what they can and can't do, and and I (possibly naively) assumed that meant we didn't have any townships here. And maybe we don't, and I'm just misreading the scarce factual info I've come across. At one point I was up to around six footnotes of a paragraph or two each, just for this one item, speculating about what might be going on here, and going off on further tangents about special districts and local justice-of-the-peace courts and whatnot, and I realized I would never, ever finish this post if I included all of that stuff. Alhough, apropos of nothing, here's the relevant Oregon state law on organizing and operating a local Weather Modification District, if you're into that sort of thing.
This township stuff did remind me of an old, old post I did about the little town of Greenhorn, OR way back in 2006, which has had an average population in the low single digits for decades now, just enough to keep the state from abolishing the city government due to it being a ghost town. Various sources claim Greenhorn also operates under a "township charter", without explaining what that means any further. I dunno, I guess I'm intrigued by the idea that we might have a whole tier of local government that was vaguely authorized by the 1859 state constitution and promptly forgotten, and it's just been off doing its own thing ever since, a bit like Starfleet's Section 31 except they send you a water bill every month.
