Sandy Milepost 14

While I was plotting out the ongoing HCRH Milepost project, I realized the Stark St. Milestones (which lead right into the HCRH series) have a solitary cousin to the north, on the later historical route of the old Columbia River Highway along Sandy Boulevard. And when I say 'realized', I mean I saw a photo of it on a Recreating the HCRH page and figured I needed to go see it for myself. This little orphan oddity is right at the point where Sandy peters out in an older industrial area, east of the intersection with NE 238th and just past a large RV dealership, and the milepost is here because the road used to continue from here along into downtown Troutdale. But it was cut in two by the shiny new Interstate 84, and for whatever reason they didn't see fit to put in an overpass. The road does continue on the other side of I-84, and goes by W. Historic Columbia River Highway over on that side.

As far as I know this is the only surviving milepost along the Sandy route. I've looked around on Street View at a few places where previous or successive ones might have been at one time, and haven't seen any traces of any others. I think this may be the one and only part of old Sandy Road that was never widened into a highfalutin' Boulevard (ok, let's be honest, Sandy is only semi-highfalutin' at best, here and there, on a good day, in a non-recession year, but you get the idea.) I mean, it's also possible this was always a one-off and there never were any other mileposts on the Sandy route, but that isn't something highway departments usually do.

(Incidentally, one portion of Sandy is still a state highway. This vestigial end bit isn't, but starting at 238th and continuing west to the tangled Parkrose intersection with I-205 and NE Lombard the road doubles as "US 30 Bypass" and triples as "Northeast Portland Highway No. 123" in ODOT's internal Highway Number system. Which is a long story I don't feel like rehashing again. Anyway, Sandy turns south and heads toward downtown at the Parkrose tangleweb, while US 30 Bypass / Highway 123 continues due west as Lombard, crosses the St. Johns Bridge, and rejoins the main US 30 on its way to Astoria.)

Anyway, you might have noticed that this milepost has a "14" on it, and you might have wondered 14 miles from where, exactly? Luckily I think I've got this one figured out. Measuring along Sandy from its origin at SE 7th to here, the distance comes to 13.0 miles. That origin point also happens to be right where the long-vanished Milestone 1 (of Stark St. milestone fame) would have been, so it's quite possible the two routes shared it. I mean, if they didn't share it, there would have been two mileposts or stones marked '1' within a block or two of each other, which is not really ideal. Meanwhile, milepost or milestone zero would have been across the river in downtown Portland, at the corner of Broadway and Washington St. Or at least distances were measured from there; I have no idea whether an actual stone or concrete marker ever existed at that spot or not. If you ask your favorite online map for directions from that point to where a common Milepost 1 would have been, it will send you over the Morrison Bridge and the total distance will come to something inexact, somewhere around 1.1 miles. But the key thing to know here is that the Stark milestones, at least, predate the Morrison Bridge or (I think) any other bridges on the river, and so the distance is measured over the former route of the old Stark Street Ferry, and that gets you to 1.0 miles to the first milepost, right at the point where Sandy and Stark branch apart, and then 13.0 more miles to the milepost we're looking at.

Continuing east from this point, over on the other side of I-84, Sandy milepost #15 would have been right around the intersection with Troutdale Road (aka NE 257th Avenue), which is a major road now and might have been back then too. Number 16 would have been just over the Sandy River bridge, and just south of the big parking lot with the National Scenic Area sign. And after that we have a bit of a problem, if we want the Sandy milepost numbers line up with the HCRH ones we've been visiting. For that to work out, the distance from number 14 here to number 17 near Dabney State Park ought to be... well, exactly 3.0 miles, but the actual distance is more like 4.5 miles. So that's not great.

Ah, but the road east from Troutdale did not always continue south along the river all the way to Stark Street. Originally it climbed away from the river via what's now Woodard Rd, and continued roughly due east from there, via a fairly direct route that changed a couple of times, including one alignment mostly along NE Mershon Rd. and another following NE Bell Rd., and either way -- assuming Google Maps is measuring distances accurately -- the Stark-based and Sandy-based milepost sequences would mesh back together cleanly right around the (sadly missing) Milepost 20, right at the point where both Mershon and Bell reconnect to the old highway. That would be kind of a neat trick if that was intentional, and a fun coincidence or near-coincidence otherwise.