McCord Creek RR Bridge

Ok, here's the next Columbia Gorge train bridge, and this is one I was initially not going to bother with, even in this already sort of dubious sub-project, because it sure looks like it's just a big concrete culvert under the tracks, and those don't count because there would be no end to this project if I did that. But I saw that the Federal Railroad Administration GIS layer for train bridges has a database entry for it, so I guess legally it counts as a bridge. And thanks to that db entry I can tell you it has a Design Type of "Unknown", and a UniqueID of "W31_OR79215". And more importantly, and regardless of whether it's really a bridge or not, this is a low-stakes and (as far as I can tell) completely harmless golden opportunity to shrug and publicly go along with at least one federal government decision that (just between us) may not be entirely fact-based, I mean, if you look at it from a pre-2016 standpoint.

If you'd like to go see it and decide for yourself whether you think it even counts as a bridge, one way to do that is to park at the Elowah Falls trailhead and take the HCRH Trail (i.e. the paved path next to the freeway) to the retro-styled trail bridge over the creek, or a short distance just past it, and look through the trees and under the freeway bridges, and this probably works best when the trees are bare. If you want a closer look, there's a small parking area under the I-84 overpasses that I think is usually used for fishing access. I've never actually been over there, and I'm not about to make a special trip just for this one blog post, but it looks like the access road for this parking area turns off of Warrendale Road at the first right just off the westbound Warrendale exit.

Tumalt Creek Railroad Bridge

Next up we're looking at yet another really obscure Columbia Gorge train bridge. This one is on Tumalt Creek, which is in the Dodson/Warrendale area just east of the main tourist corridor, and we're on a dead-end back road instead of continuing down the old highway since the road and train don't run parallel through here. This one is behind some trees and bushes and we can't see it as well, but the federal GIS system I'm getting this info from says that like the others we've looked at, it's single track, non-moveable, and this time the design type is just listed as "Unknown", with a unique ID of "W1007_OR24756". From what I could see of it, this one seems to be on a concrete beam instead of steel, and if I had to guess when it was built I would probably guess no earlier than the 1990s. The reason for that is the creek it's on, which is the largest of about a dozen in this stretch of the gorge, all of which are prone to massive landslides of mud and rocks and giant boulders, and this creek specifically was one of those involved in the 1996 slides that closed I-84 for weeks. I don't know whether this bridge was ever physically washed out at any point, but at minimum all that material coming down and trying to flow underneath is at least going to cause a bit of excess wear and tear over time.

The name "Tumalt" is not the result of Lewis & Clark trying to spell "tumult", although that would be a reasonable guess. This was one of the names bestowed in 1916 when the Mazamas (a prominent local mountaineering club) decided that prominent sights along the new Columbia River Highway should generally have Indian names, with a few melodramatic bits of European mythology tossed in. (Note that these were not actually what local tribes called these places before settlers showed up, but a selection of exotic-yet-pronounceable words, often with background stories that white people found appealing in 1916. In particular, the creek is named after Tumulth, a member of the Cascades tribe, and a tragic figure of the Yakima War of 1855-1858, and specifically the 1856 "Cascades Massacre", a raid on the white settlement of Cascades (near present-day North Bonneville, WA) by members of the Yakama and allied tribes. The local Cascades tribe was apparently not involved in this incident, but became the focus of settler retaliation afterward as they lived nearby and it was more convenient, and Tumulth was one of several men who were summarily hanged for their supposed involvement. Here are a few links for more info about him and the whole conflict:

• HistoryLink article. HistoryLink is basically Washington's Oregon Encyclopedia, and the article comes across as basically fair, though it largely only cites Euro-American sources.
• 2016 Quartux Journal article
• An Oregon Encyclopedia article about his daughter, Kalliah Tumulth, written by a great-grandson of hers.
• 2022 post and comment thread in the Yakama Nation Hunters and Gatherers Facebook group, including comments by at least one descendant.
• a biographical sketch by another descendant, in a 2022 quarterly newsletter from the La Center History Museum.

Before the current name, the creek was widely known as "Devil's Slide Creek" due to its ongoing geological tendencies. Yet despite that name two distinct towns sprang up in the main landslide corridor, Dodson right around here, complete with its own train station, and Warrendale a mile or so to the east, both named after local canned salmon tycoons of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Frank Warren, namesake of Warrendale, was possibly the biggest and wealthiest of them all, but his fishy empire quickly fell apart after his watery demise on the Titanic, which roughly coincided with a crash in the salmon population. Seriously. You can't make this stuff up. Or, I mean, technically you can, but reviewers will roll their eyes and make fun of your ridiculous hamfisted plot twists.

Horsetail Creek Railroad Bridge

Next up we've got a few photos of the train bridge at Horsetail Creek, just down the tracks from the Oneonta Creek one we looked at in the last poist, and just downstream from the HCRH Horsetail Creek Bridge, which we visited back in 2018. Federal railroad GIS says this one is like the others we've looked at today in that it carries a single set of tracks and is not a drawbridge or any other kind of moving bridge. Like its neighbor to the west, the ridge type is listed as "Regular Steel Beams/Girder + Misc. Steel bridges", and it has a UniqueID of "W811_OR24818", for whatever that's worth. This one does look different than the Oneonta one and I don't think it's of the exact same design, like it's being held up by multiple smaller steel beams rather than one large girder. Like the others I have no information on how old this bridge might be, and I don't think I could even guess a correct range of a few decades. Regardless of that, the sorta-handrail on this bridge looks like a later addition and may coincide with the advent of modern personal injury law.

I have two mildly interesting and not particularly old items to pass along this time around:

• A 2012 Horsetail Creek floodplain restoration design doc. This project re-engineered the large low-lying area between the old highway and Interstate 84 to make it more friendly to baby salmon, implementing various things from the standard baby salmon playbook, like plenty of woody debris in the water. Regarding that, let me point you at this post from about a year ago -- it's technically about some new-ish salmon-themed art in the South Waterfront area, but while putting the post together I came across various sources indicating we don't actually understand the various needs of baby salmon anywhere near as well as we think we do. Also I think that post is one of my better recent ones, and is probably more entertaining than the one you're reading now. And if you're wondering why I'm mentioning all this stuff, the link to the 2012 plan came up in search results because the bridge here and the one on Oneonta Creek mark part of the boundary of the study area.
• A 2009 Multnomah County planning approval doc for placing power lines underground, explaining how the proposed work complies with all sorts of regulations. A window into what it takes to get anything done when your proposed project is going to take place within both Multnomah County and the federal National Scenic Area. Behold and despair as a maze of agencies endlessly consult and re-consult with each other and struggle to get anything done, even though nobody actually objects to the proposal.

Oneonta Creek Railroad Bridge

So next we've got some photos of the train bridge at Oneonta Creek, continuing east on this little speedrun. We visited the ones at Bridal Veil and Wahkeena Creek in the previous two posts, and saw the one at Multnomah Falls back in 2018, so I guess this one is the logical next step. Federal railroad GIS says this one has a unique ID of "W925_OR24624", if that means anything to you, and lists the bridge design type as "Regular Steel Beams/Girder + Misc. Steel bridges", which I don't think is exactly a technical engineering term. You can see that this one is supported by a steel beam or girder underneath the bridge instead of two on the sides, and you can also see that it has substantially more clearance above the creek than the Bridal Veil one does, so the designers didn't have the same design constraints as the Bridal Veil bridge.

This one also sits just downstream of the two HCRH road bridges, which brings us to the one and only mildly unusual detail I have about this one. Before civil engineers got their hands on it, the Columbia River once ran fairly close to the bluffs at Oneonta Creek, close enough that at one spot just east of the creek the railroad took up all the usable space between the river and the cliff. A few decades later, when the Columbia River Highway got here, the railroad wouldn't budge and highway engineers ended up having to dig the Oneonta Tunnel to continue the road east from there. Eventually the state decided to build a river-level road to replace the winding and twisting old highway, which involved quarrying vast quantities of gravel and filling in some areas along the river where there was no existing flat land available. Once that had happened through here -- on the taxpayer dime -- the railroad was suddenly much more amenable to moving, and in 1948 a sort of switcheroo was arranged: New, rerouted tracks were built, and then the existing bridge was somehow moved sideways to the current bridge location, and train traffic was shifted over to there. Then a new stretch of road was built where the train used to run, complete with a shiny new modern bridge. And when that was finished, they shifted traffic to the new road around the cliff, blocked off the Oneonta Tunnel, and used the original 1914 highway bridge for parking.

That last detail actually resolved another problem with the original alignment, which was that there was nowhere to park if you wanted to stop and wade up Oneonta Gorge. As a 1946 doc explains, the state ended up leasing a bit of railroad land for a parking lot and grandly declared that little area to be a new state park, which then quietly fell off the rolls after the realignment.

The switcheroo details come from February 2000 nomination designating parts of the highway of as a "National Historic Landmark", which I gather is similar to the National Register of Historic Places but with stricter rules on how intact a thing has to be, such that the whole road qualified for the National Register, but only certain parts were good enough to be a Landmark. The doc went on to explain that the 1948 road bridge here was a "non-contributing structure", but its presence was not enough to derail the whole nomination since the original bridge was bypassed and left in place instead of being removed. So that's nice, I guess.

Wahkeena Creek Railroad Bridge

So next up we're looking at the little railroad bridge over Wahkeena Creek, which is the next train bridge east of the one at Bridal Veil that we just looked at. This one sits on top of a girder (either steel or concrete, I'm not sure which) instead of having two of them on the sides, and in general it looks like it might be a recent replacement of an older bridge, but I don't know that either because federal railroad GIS doesn't have that info. What I can tell you is that it has a unique ID of "W1012_OR24759", and a design type of "Unknown". If you had high hopes that this bridge was made with advanced alien technology or something you're likely to be disappointed. I think it just means the data entry intern didn't have that info or couldn't be bothered typing it in.

The one semi-interesting thing about this one is that the rail line also serves as a physical divider between the Wahkeena Falls area (the side I took these photos on), which is a Forest Service day use site, with free parking, and Benson State Park on the far side of the tracks, which has been a pay-to-park fee site as long as I can remember, long before anywhere else nearby was. This is possible because Benson is set up as sort of a walled garden, with no official trails (or, ideally, a railroad-approved skybridge over the tracks) between it and either Wahkeena Falls or Multnomah Falls next door. Otherwise people of the cheapskate persuasion could just park at Wahkeena Falls and haul an inflatable raft over to Benson Lake without paying the state a penny. And now it works both ways: During peak tourist season, the demand for parking at Multnomah Falls far exceeds the available supply, and if visitors could easily use Benson as overflow parking it would probably mess up the whole timed entry ticket scheme they've been using to try to manage crowds over there. And that demand would probably swamp the smaller numbers of people who just want to fish the lake or grill some burgers or whatever else there is to do at Benson itself. And I'm sure these are all very good and responsible reasons for things being how they are, and why they have to stay that way forever, but when you're standing on one side and you can easily see the park on the other side, and there are signs saying you are strictly forbidden from going over there, the whole arrangement just seems incredibly dumb.

Bridal Veil Railroad Bridge

This may surprise some of you, but not every weird project I have a go at turns out to be a winner. Some years ago, I did a series on old historic Columbia River Highway bridges, which was fun because they were all a little different, and the engineers who designed them had gone the extra mile to show off what was possible with modern concrete technology, where "modern" meant roughly 1914-1920. So I eventually ran out of those, or more to the point, I hit the long tail part where the remaining items on the list are either small and not very interesting, or far away and hard to visit, or often both. It occurred to me at some point that instead of driving for hours on end, further and further east out into the desert wastes, there was a whole second set of old bridges through the Gorge, used by the Union Pacific railroad that often ran right next to the old highway, and by and large they're at least as old as the highway ones, and it ought to be fairly straightforward to go see a bunch of them and then share some fair-to-middlin' photos and whatever fun trivia I can dig up. That formula usually works out ok; the problem this time around is that there seems to be precisely one interesting train bridge on the Oregon side of the Gorge, the Tanner Creek Viaduct, the big sorta-Roman-aqueduct structure next to Bonneville Dam, and we already visited it way back in 2014. The others fall into two basic categories: Rivers and larger creeks get a steel through truss bridge, like the one on the Sandy River (visited way back in 2009), and anything smaller gets a simple steel beam or girder design, like the one at Multnomah Falls, but without the vintage sign giving mileages by train to various semi-distant cities.

The bridge you see in the photos above is one of the latter category. This is the old railroad bridge at Bridal Veil, downstream of the falls and the trail and next to the site of the old Bridal Veil Lumber sawmill. What little info I know about it comes from a terse database entry in the Federal Railroad Administration's "Railroad Bridges" ArcGIS layer, which informs us this is a "Steel Through Plate Girder" bridge, it crosses over water, is "fixed - non-moveable" (as in not a drawbridge or something), carries one set of tracks, length is not specified, and has a UniqueID code of "W712_OR24695", whatever that means. And that may be all the info Uncle Sam knows about it. I think the db essentially has whatever info the railroad feels like sharing voluntarily, so no details about stuff like the last time a bridge built sometime around 1907 was inspected for rust and structural soundness and whatnot. And I'll just point you at the Steel Bridge and Portsmouth Cut posts if you want to know how things go when your city depends on railroad-owned critical infrastructure and they don't have to tell you anything if they don't want to. The state government knows how little leverage it has, which explains things like a state Fish & Wildlife map of Fish Passage Barriers, which flags every last tiny creek, stream, and seasonal rivulet as a potential fish barrier where it passes under I-84 or the old highway, but not where it passes under the railroad, like they know they can't do anything about that particular barrier and would rather not poke the bear if they can avoid it.

I did find a railfan page that briefly explains what a "Steel Through Plate Girder" bridge is and how it works. See those railings along the length of the bridge? They aren't a safety feature for derailments, and they aren't a pedestrian feature from the old days when passenger trains stopped here. No, those heavy duty "railings" are actually the main load-bearing structure of the bridge: Each girder has a post on each end that attaches it to the concrete bridge piers, and then the bridge deck is attached to the beams, and then the bridge deck is a relatively thin layer attached to the bases of the two girders. The page notes the main reason you might use this design is if you don't have a lot of clearance between track level and whatever it is your bridge needs to cross, which is certainly the case here. Listed along with that are several limitations: "Easy to damage", "Difficult to replace", and "Limited to one track between girders (two possible with depth increase)".

Those design concerns may also explain why I don't think I've ever seen a regular motor vehicle bridge of this design. For one thing, a road bridge is bound to have the occasional vehicle banging into the railing for any number of reasons, and it sounds like this could be rather consequential, both for the bridge and the driver, since these support girders probably don't have the same degree of give on impact that a regular highway guardrail would. And with a road bridge you can usually get around any clearance issues by just building the bridge higher up and putting a ramp at either end, which you can't really do with trains.

Anyway, those bridge design concerns probably explain why the line is single track over the bridge, but is double track for about a mile immediately east of the bridge, ending somewhere around Old Boneyard Road. This was probably done to accomodate freight trains that used to stop at the lumber mill that used to exist here, and the railroad still keeps Bridal Veil on the books as an official train station. This is per federal GIS data, again, which says the station's unique station ID is "UP06258853437", though before anyone gets excited about this, note there is no actual freight or passenger infrastructure in place. Maybe they do this on the off chance the Columbia Gorge timber industry stages a big comeback, or there's a huge boom in the mailing of wedding invitations from the tiny Bridal Veil post office here, or the Oregon side of the Gorge gets passenger rail service again, or who knows.

Moffett Creek Bridges

The next installment of the ongoing Columbia Gorge bridge project takes us to a set of bridges over Moffett Creek, between Elowah Falls and the Bonneville Dam / Wahclella Falls area. I'm treating them as a group because they're close together and a lot of my photos ended up with more than one bridge in them, but the main event here is the original Columbia River Highway bridge from 1915. Unlike the CRH bridges further west of here, this one was designed by Lewis Metzger, who also designed the bridge at Eagle Creek. This bridge is said to have been the world's longest "three-hinge concrete bridge" at the time of its construction. Not being a bridge engineer, I was curious what that meant, and found a very in-depth article explaining what a bridge hinge is for and how it works, if you're into that sort of thing. From that article I gather the old Moffett Creek Bridge was built with the bleeding edge advanced technology of its day.

Time and engineering moved on, though, and the old bridge was abandoned in place when Interstate 84 was built. It then sat abandoned for decades, brief glimpses of it visible from the new freeway bridges next door. It's now part of ODOT's pedestrian/bike Historic Columbia River Highway State Trail, which the state of Oregon has been slowly building in segments since the late 1990s. The segment from Tanner Creek (Wahclella Falls) west to Moffett Creek opened around 2000 (per an OregonHikers page about the bridge), and then the trail ended at the bridge for over a decade.

A new trail segment finally opened in 2013, winding its way under the adjacent I-84 bridges and along the freeway to the Elowah Falls trailhead. The I-84 bridges are the ones in the background of a lot of these photos. One dates to the 1950s, when the new highway was just US 30 and not an interstate yet. The other was built in 2009-2011 to replace an ugly 1960s bridge that didn't hold up to the elements as well as its older neighbors. The new bridge was built to the state's I-84 design guidelines, so it bears a strong resemblance to the replacement Sandy River bridge that was built around the same time.

Beyond the current and former road bridges, there are a few more bridges along Moffett Creek: An old railroad bridge further downstream that I don't know much about, and a small wooden bridge for Gorge Trail #400 just upstream. Apparently there's also a second trail bridge or crossing of some sort for the Moffett Creek Trail #430 much further upstream in a remote corner of the Gorge. I've never been there and have no photos of that one. Despite the name of the trail, it doesn't follow Moffett Creek upstream like the Eagle Creek Trail does. Moffett Creek unfortunately doesn't have a trail like that, even though there are a few waterfalls along the creek. I gather the state or the Forest Service thought about building a trail around the time the old highway went in, but it didn't happen then, and trail construction in much of the Gorge either happened in the 1910s or not at all, and that's why there isn't a trail a century later.

There also isn't a parking lot off I-84 (or at least not an official one) or a trailhead at Moffett Creek; I got here by walking from the Elowah Falls trailhead, on the new circa-2013 trail segment. It runs riiiight next to I-84 the entire way to Moffett Creek (except for a small detour at McCord Creek), with semis zooming by at freeway speeds just a few feet away, so I can't honestly describe this as a fun or enjoyable walk. I think this trail is mostly intended for cyclists, since bikes are banned on most Gorge hiking trails. If you aren't on a bike and you aren't doing this for the novelty, a better way here would be to take the trail to Elowah Falls and continue on along Gorge Trail #400 from there; when you get to Moffett Creek there's a trail spur over to the HCRH trail just before it ducks under the I-84 bridges. In any case, I turned around just after the old bridge, since that was what I'd come to see, and there's only so much walking next to freeway traffic I'm willing to endure in one go. However the Oregonian article about the trail opening points out that the new paved trail is not just a bike path; it's also one of the very few wheelchair-accessible trails in the Gorge, which is something I hadn't considered when I started grumbling about the ambience.

In any case, you can't get to the old bridge on either trail at the moment thanks to the 2017 Eagle Creek Fire, which heavily damaged the Moffett Creek area. It could be years before either trail reopens. I haven't been out to the Gorge since the fire, since I'm not sure I want to see the damage in person; instead I've been working my way through a big backlog of Gorge photo posts and remembering what it was like before the fire. I'm not sure whether this is actually helping or not, but it's what I've got, so it's what I'm doing.

I'd been to the Moffett Creek area exactly once before I took these photos, back in the early 90s when you had to rely on paper maps and vague directions in library books. A map suggested that if you followed the Gorge Trail east from Elowah Falls, there'd be one or more waterfalls along Moffett Creek somewhere vaguely upstream of the trail. I'd also read somewhere that there was a cool abandoned bridge, overgrown with weeds, somewhere in the vicinity. That sounded promising, so I went there based on this scant information and was unable to find either the falls or the bridge, which was sufficiently annoying that I didn't go back for a couple of decades.

I still haven't found the waterfalls, truth be told, and even now in 2018 the available information about them seems kind of sketchy and unreliable. There are photos proving there's more than one waterfall along the creek, along with evidence that the names "Moffett Falls" and "Wahe Falls" have been kicked around for over a century. And that's about where the consensus ends. It seems that one of them (and I'm not clear on which) was dubbed Wahe Falls by the Mazamas circa 1916, and then USGS maps called it Moffett Falls for decades, which Wahe partisans say was a big dumb mistake.

Which leads to the wider question of what makes a place name authoritative. In the Northwest, 1916 was around the heyday of white people giving places romanticized sorta-Indian names, and I haven't seen any evidence that local tribes actually called it "Wahe", or that anyone at all did before a few sentimental Victorians came along. And legally speaking, USGS names are supposed to be authoritative, even if they screwed up or didn't exactly follow earlier naming. I dunno.

There are all sorts of variations on the dispute: Two names for one waterfall, while the other goes unnamed; one is Moffett and one is Wahe, but nobody can agree which is which; one of the names is invalid, and you have either Moffett or Wahe, plus an Upper or Lower sibling, depending on which one you think is the main waterfall. I genuinely and sincerely have no opinion on the dispute. I have never been to any of them, have no photos of them, and have not needed to pick a name to use for a blog post title. If it comes to it, I might just go with GPS coordinates or something to avoid antagonizing anyone.

In any case, there's a Recreating the HCRH page about the waterfalls, and Waterfalls Northwest pages for them (dubbing them "Wahe Falls" and "Upper Wahe Falls"). WyEast Blog has a couple of posts with post-fire photos, with notes about maybe building trails to the falls someday. A few OregonHikers posts talk about hiking or bushwhacking up along the creek and visiting assorted waterfalls, while going the other direction a RopeWiki page has details about rappelling down Moffett Creek from the top. A Canyoneering Northwest page mentions the creek actually has eleven(!) waterfalls, if you have the technical chops to visit them all.

The Moffett Creek area pops up in the library's historical Oregonian database now and then:

• Early on the stories were all about planning and building the old highway, such as "Road is Feasible, Engineer Says" (January 9th 1910). The article explains that the highway (which it still referred to as a new wagon road) in this area would roughly follow the route of an older road or trail. The unnamed older route (as the Eagle Creek Bridge post explained) might have been the Dalles and Sandy Wagon Road, although it was located further up slope in many areas. Though the article goes on to mention that this older road appeared unfinished further east at Tanner Creek, so the old route could also have been some other road I'm unfamiliar with. The article doesn't explain how the older road crossed the creek here, whether there was a previous bridge on the site, or travelers had to find a flat spot to ford the creek. An archived ODOT page from March 2012 about the new trail includes a historic photo of the bridge under construction, which is the only one I've encountered.


• In the 1920s, the area hosted a 50 acre YWCA campground, with a few wood buildings that were probably somewhere near the bridge. The place was profiled in "Wauneka Appeals to Business Girls" (July 20th 1924). The first couple of paragraphs make it sound pretty idyllic.

  A book, an Indian blanket and a ferny spot beside the hurried little Moffett’s creek for the girl who is tired of typewriters and time-clocks; a climb up a mountain trail or a walk along the highway for her more energetic sister, are on the unwritten recreational programme at Wauneka, vacation camp of the Portland Y.W.C.A. on Moffett’s creek, 45 miles up the Columbia highway.
  
  There’s nothing to do but enjoy yourself, and sleep and eat and rest, at Wauneka, say the officials of the Y.W.C.A., whose only share in the proceedings is to keep excellent caretakers on the place in order to provide chaperonage, cooking and upkeep. There is no educational or any other sort of arranged programme, and the business girls who go there can do anything they please, within reason, except pick the ferns and flowers and wild greenery that keep Wauneka beautiful.

  I'm not entirely sure where this 50 acre parcel would've been. Possibly much of it is under I-84 now. The land's currently divided between the state (the "John B. Yeon State Scenic Corridor") and the US Forest Service. One of the state-owned parcels might include parts of the YWCA site, but I'm just guessing here. Incidentally, the state park's History/FAQ page explains that it's illegal to fly drones anywhere along the historic highway trail, as well as in most state parks through the Gorge, at least unless you get a special use permit (and it reads as if those permits are rarely granted). The rare exceptions to the rule being Dalton Point on the river, a few parks out near Hood River, and George W. Joseph State Natural Area, which is home to Upper Latourell Falls, but not the main falls. But I digress.

• There weren't many other mentions of the YWCA campground in the paper, so I don't know how long it was there, but there was at least one private residence near the bridge in the 1930s, per a small May 28th 1935 news item about the house being burglarized.


• November 19th 1953: The Forest Service bought a chunk of riverfront property that extended upriver from Warrendale/Dodson up to Moffett Creek. This land was the former site of a salmon cannery (which closed in 1934), some ruins of which were still around back then. Frank Warren (the plant's founder, and namesake of Warrendale) died on the Titanic.


• Moffett Creek largely vanished from the paper for several decades after that; this coincided with the present-day freeway going in. They didn't include a Moffett Creek exit on the new Interstate, so it seems the place largely fell off the radar until the 1980s. One exception was an October 10th 1971 article about the abandoned bridge, slowly being reclaimed by nature at the time.


• April 19th 1981: "Drive intensifies to preserve scenic gorge highway". A comprehensive survey was done after 1981 to figure out what was left of the old road and what could be saved, which at least was a first step. In passing, the article claims the old bridge was still the world's longest three-hinge concrete bridge at the time. I have no idea whether this is still true; I'm old enough to think of 1981 as "recent", but it really isn't anymore, and a lot of bridges have been built since then.


• September 7th 1982: "Scenic gorge route's tarnished gems being polished"


• August 19, 1987: "Highway options pondered", in which something along the lines of the present-day trail was one of the options. It obviously took a while; I think it was off the table for a long time until they figured out how to fund it via ODOT.

Multnomah Creek Railroad Bridge

Ok, it's time for another installment in the ongoing Columbia Gorge bridge project. This is the one where I take photos of bridges around the Gorge while confused tourists stare at me because an amazing waterfall is right over there behind me and I'm taking photos of an ugly old bridge. Sometimes they bump into me because they're too busy staring at the waterfall. This happens a lot around Multnomah Falls; not only are there hordes of tourists to perplex, but there's a bunch, ok, a batch, of bridges there, and the best spots to take photos of most of them put you right in the way of literally everyone else on Earth, or so it seems. So we've already visited the famous Benson Bridge up by the falls, and the historic highway bridge next to the lodge, and the equally historic (but unloved) viaducts on the highway just east and west of the falls. And we still aren't done; this time we're looking at the 1907 Union Pacific railroad bridge just downstream from the old highway bridge.

The railroad bridge's one semi-notable feature is the wooden sign that gives rail distances to various cities from this point: Going east it's 173 miles to Pendleton, 305 to Spokane, 393 to Boise, while westbound it's 35 to Portland, 177 to Tacoma, 210 to Seattle. If I ran the railroad (which I don't), I would've at least mentioned that this is also a very old rail line, built in 1879-1882 as part of the nation's third transcontinental railroad. Basic math tells us that if the railroad's older than the bridge, there must have been an earlier bridge here. I've never seen any info about the original, but I'm sort of guessing it was your basic wood trestle sort of thing, maybe built in a rush to get the railroad up and running, and it needed replacing after a few decades of Gorge winters. I see that the current railroad bridge on the Sandy River dates to around the same time as this one (1906), so maybe there was a wider project to go back through and modernize the rail line, or it's just that the original bridges all wore out about the same time.

The library's old newspaper database didn't have much to say about this bridge here, which is why I had to guess a lot in the last paragraph. I only came across one semi-interesting bit of trivia connected to the bridge, and it's of a bit more recent vintage: A 1970 Oregonian article about recent improvements at the falls mentions that at one point there were floodlights next to the railroad bridge which illuminated the falls at night. The article says the wiring for the lights was destroyed by a storm in January 1969 when a "glacier" of ice filled the creek from the river all the way to the falls, at one point forming an ice layer up to 40 feet thick & 60 feet wide, damaging the nearby lodge. The state hoped to put the floodlights back into operation before long, but I couldn't find any subsequent mention of the floodlights being restored, and the falls aren't lit at night now, and have never been lit as far back as I can recall, and an image search for "multnomah falls at night" comes back with some artsy long exposure photos but no lights, so I'm sort of guessing the restoration never happened.

Tanner Creek Viaduct

Most of my posts here come about because I see an obscure thing on an obscure list of obscure things, and I suspect it might be photogenic or otherwise blogworthy. It goes on a todo list, and eventually I go track it down and take a few photos. Other times I see something on a list and realize I already have a photo or two of it lying around, which is what happened this time. So here's an April 2006 photo of the Union Pacific Tanner Creek Viaduct, which carries the railroad around Bonneville Dam and over Tanner Creek, the the same stream that flows over Wahclella Falls a short hike upstream from here.

The Tanner Creek viaduct was built in 1935 due to construction of the dam; the Union Pacific tracks were rerouted, on a stretch from a mile west of Bonneville east to Cascade Locks, at a cost of $976,300, roughly $16.7 million in 2014 dollars. That article was from March 1935, and it noted contractors were scrambling to get the job done as quickly as possible.

The viaduct was projected to be done by July 1935, and completion was announced on June 23rd, complete with a construction photo. The final bridge was 865 feet long, and cost $225,000. (For what it's worth, the general contractor on the project was a firm called "Orino, Bell & Malcolm", with the viaduct subcontracted to "Birkemeier & Saremal". I'm not familiar with either of those companies -- although the latter apparently worked on the early 1940s Front Avenue/Harbor Drive project we mostly tore out in the 70s -- but I rather like the design of this viaduct so I'm kind of filing them away for future reference. Mostly in case they've done any other bridges that are worth tracking down at some point.)

Sandy River Railroad Bridge

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Believe it or not, the ongoing bridge project takes us out to Troutdale, to the rusty old railroad bridge over the Sandy River. Seriously, this whole post is about that bridge -- although fortunately it's not a very big post. This is what you get when you're willing to do trivial and uninteresting stuff purely for the sake of completeness.

It's a short post because there isn't much to say about it. There's a Bridgehunter page about it, which tells us the bridge dates to 1906. The City of Troutdale's history page says the shiny new transcontinental railroad arrived earlier, in November 1882 (a really big deal at the time, as you might imagine), so there must've been an earlier bridge on the site. I've never seen any photos of that original bridge, not that I've looked very hard. Ok, at all, quite honestly. But just speculating wildly I'd guess it was probably some kind of old growth wood trestle of some sort, it just stands to reason.



Elsewhere on the interwebs, here are a couple of nice photos of the bridge. And a page on Pixelmap mentions, but has no photos of, the bridge -- although it does have some of various other bridges in the area, so I figured I'd pass it along, I mean, if you're already as bored with the thing as I am.



It's fortunate that the rules (such as they are) only call for a visit, an attempt to walk the thing if it's not a railroad or freeway bridge, a batch of photos, and a post about the, uh, adventure. The rules don't specify that the post has to be of any minimum length, nor do they specify that the photos need to be interesting or numerous, and they certainly don't require me to act enthusiastic about the whole thing. In this particular case, I was on my way somewhere else and thought I'd take a couple of minutes to stop for a couple of photos. So I did, and then I continued on my way, end of adventure. Yay, adventures. Or whatever.