Milepost 43, Cascade Locks

The next installment in the ongoing HCRH Milepost adventure is a bit of a mystery. The mostly-unbroken series of mileposts we were following since Troutdale ends at HCRH Milepost 36, at the Ainsworth interchange with Interstate 84. Now we're a few miles east of there, in Cascade Locks, toward the east end of Wa Na Pa Street (which is what the old highway is called within city limits) as the road heads toward merging onto I-84 eastbound. If you find the city fire station, across the street and a short distance east of there is a weathered wooden post with "43" inscribed on it. It's clearly not of the same vintage as the mileposts we've looked at so far, and it's not included on the ODOT map of official historic mileposts. I only know about it because Recreating the HCRH has a page about "Wood Milepost 43", and they don't seem to know any more about it than I do. One comment speculates that it can't be much older than the late 1990s seeing as it's made of (seemingly) untreated wood and it's exposed to the elements right in the middle of the Gorge, and that would roughly line up with some of the earliest work on the HCRH State Trail.

So that probably explains why the post is here. At least, off the top of my head I can't come up with any other reasonable explanations for why a post marked with a "43" might be here. Unless maybe it's a nerdy Hitchhiker's Guide + Spinal Tap crossover, and 42 is the answer to life, the universe, and everything, and then going one more in the same way that Spinal Tap speakers go up to 11. And that doesn't seem very likely, if you ask me.

Unfortunately I don't think this is where the original Milepost 43 would have been. First off, numbering on the old highway was about a mile ahead of I-84 mile numbering back at the last milepost, such that Milepost 36 was located at the freeway exit numbered 35, and after that point the present-day interstate The freeway exits on either end of Cascade Locks are both numbered 44, but the one closest to the sorta-milepost is around actual freeway mile no. 45., so it's ten miles on the interstate, and Google indicates it's 9.3 miles as the crow files, so the old road pulling it off in just 7 miles seems unlikely. The road does seem a bit magical at times, but usually not in that particular sort of way. And as far as authenticity goes, not only is it made of wood, it's also not triangular, and they seem to have -- gasp! -- used a different sans-serif font than was used on the originals. It's probably still inspired by the original mileposts, but it's not really a meticulous high fidelity reproduction, I guess is what I'm getting at here. Kind of similar to how the Stonehenge replica in the Gorge is a low-fidelity concrete design sort of inspired by the original, and did not involve making casts of the original stones, or doing a GPS-assisted laser scan of the area or frankly even looking at any detailed photos or sketches of the original.

Another issue is that at an intersection just east of here, the old highway route continues east as Forest Lane, and the stretch of present-day Wa Na Pa St. where this post is located was never actually part of the original highway.

So maybe it's just fan art of the original milestones, and it says 43 because someone especially liked how those two digits look in the font they used. Or maybe it was created for someone's 43rd birthday, or it was installed sometime in the 2000s to celebrate George W. Bush, the 43rd President of the United States. Ok, that probably isn't it. Wikipedia says 43 is a prime number, and the larger of a pair of twin primes (with 41), and the subject of a 2009 Dutch math paper, Ode aan het getal 43 ("Ode to the number 43"). Per Google Translate, it seems that in the original 1986 edition of David Wells' The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers, 43 was the smallest number that was not (yet) considered curious or interesting, and the author set out to find something interesting about it, and came up with a variety of factoids about it, mostly from number theory and group theory, none of which are likely to be why there's a 43 here.

Or maybe it was originally somewhere else; the original HCRH Milepost 43 would have been somewhere near Bonneville Dam, and maybe this post was once in the right place along that early stretch of HCRH Trail for a while, and was eventually moved here for some reason. Although it's a weird place to move something that needs a new home, and seeing as it's wood and all you'd think it would be cheaper to just recycle or burn the old post and carve a new one with the right distance on it.

In sum, I think this was probably inspired by the 'real' HCRH mileposts, but I don't know who put it here and I can't explain the location or the number on it, and if 43 really is the answer to life, the universe, everything, and one louder, the exact question must be a very peculiar one.