HCRH Milepost 36

Ok, it's time for another installment in our occasional tour of Columbia River Highway mileposts. The next one up, heading west to east, is number 36, which is the eastern-most of the ones along the main tourist corridor in the Gorge. This one also has the least picturesque and tourist-friendly setting of the series so far, and maybe the series as a whole, stuck by the side of the road in the middle of the Interstate 84 Exit 35 interchange. (I have a feeling this is one of the mileposts that was lost and then recreated in the 1980s, since its original location would have been torn up as part of freeway construction.)

Scenic and historical points of interest are a bit thin on the ground around here, but there are a handful of them:

• The old highway continues east from here for another two miles or so, if you follow the signs for "Yeon State Park", which is where you'll find the trailhead for Elowah Falls, which is worth a visit. But if you're jaded about waterfalls and just want to look at little concrete mileposts, there aren't any along that stretch of road. From my reading of what's in ODOT's GIS system, those two miles are now considered just a frontage road for I-84 and not a separate state highway of its own, and frontage roads don't get their own mileposts, certainly not ones that are out of sync with the main highway.
• Besides Elowah Falls (and the upper falls I covered recently), the first car-free stretch of HCRH Trail starts there and runs all the way to Cascade Locks.
• Closer to where we are now, the little-known Dodson Trailhead marks the east end of the first segment of Trail 400; the trail picks back up at Elowah Falls too, and from the late 1970s until the 1996 floods it was one big happy continuous trail through here. I do have a small photoset of the little-used Ainsworth-to-Dodson segment of Trail 400 if anyone's curious. Overall it isn't the most spectacular stretch of trail, but it was pretty good for "social distancing" back when people cared about that sort of thing.
• At one point in recent years there was a short stretch of HCRH Trail that allowed bikes and pedestrians to get around the Exit 35 interchange without riding in traffic or walking along the side of the road, but that has disappeared from recent maps, possibly also a victim of flood damage.
• Once you're east of the intersection, you're in the tiny burg of Dodson, or what's left of it. At one point, before the freeway came, Dodson had a couple of motels, a general store, a gas station, and a few houses off on side streets. A few people still live around here, but the commercial buildings are all just ruins at this point, and mostly not in a picturesque Route 66 kind of way. Still, if you're here and you happened to bring the semi-trusty old Holga or Diana+ along, there might be a hip artsy photo or two to be had. I have to tell you that's never been my personal experience around here, but your inspiration probably works differently than mine and you may have better luck.
• A short distance east on Frontage Rd. is a quiet residential side street, wider than the others and grandly named "McLoughlin Parkway". A century ago developers had big plans for this area. The parkway was to be the grand entrance to a new subdivision or suburb to be named "Bonnie Park", and the larger "Ellahurst" next door, and would then lead to a large public park and campground to be named for Dr. John McLoughlin, the omnipresent historical figure from early pioneer days. It seems that Ellahurst never really took off, beyond a few scattered houses and commercial buildings along the old highway. The park first belonged to the City of Portland, believe it or not, as this was a couple of years before the state park system was created, and decades before Multnomah County tried to build up a county park system, and Metro's regional park system only got going in the late 1990s. As far as I know, this was the furthest-ever outpost of the Portland city park system, except maybe Dodge Park at Bull Run, which is a unique special case anyway. The city never developed the place, and spent years trying to convince the state or the Forest Service or someone to take it off their hands. The state finally relented in 1957 and McLoughlin State Park (now a 'State Natural Area') was born. The state also hasn't done anything with the place, though at one point there was apparently a trail connection through to Trail 400 at one point. I have heard rumors that the short bit of trail between the Dodson Trailhead and McLoughlin still exists, faintly, if you know where to find it, but I haven't personally tried this and I have no idea where to look. I'm just pointing this out so I don't get sued if someone goes to look for the trail and can't find it, or they find it and are deeply underwhelmed, or they find it and it leads to Shell Beach, or the secret Truman Show exit door and they (understandably) get a case of mental anguish about our entire world being fake. I mean, hypothetically.
• There's another frontage road on the other side of I-84. Over there there's a private marina, and you can go peek at the Tumalt Creek Railroad Bridge just for the sake of completeness, and there's a small residential area along the river that technically isn't gated but does not exactly welcome visitors, per the hostile signs on either end of NE Tumalt Rd.

After this, there's one isolated milepost at Cascade Locks, another at Hood River, and then a stretch of them from Mosier to The Dalles. The good news is that I already took the photos I need for all of these; now I just need to find something interesting to say about each of these places.