Crown Point Viaduct

Ok, we're back in the Gorge again, looking at yet another bit of historical 1910s engineering from the old Columbia River Highway. Virtually every new visitor to the Gorge stops at the Vista House to have a look around, maybe use the restroom and have a peek at the gift shop, before continuing down the road as it winds around Crown Point and then switchbacks down the hill to Latourell Falls and points east. We're here having a look at that initial bit of road, the part below the Vista House with the sidewalk and streetlights on the outside of the curve. And the reason we're doing that is because the sidewalk (and probably part of road) aren't built directly on solid rock, but on a concrete viaduct structure similar to the ones on either side of Multnomah Falls, so it gets categorized as another historic Gorge bridge, just a curving one along the edge of a high cliff that doesn't cross over water. There aren't a lot of clues to this when you're actually walking on it, but you can see it clearly in photos taken from the Portland Womens Forum viewpoint, or from nearer spots like the Bird's Nest overlook. So I've included a few photos from those places.

Anyway, when I say it gets categorized as a bridge, I mean that all the internet resources I usually consult for semi-interesting factoids about bridges have the same kind of info about the Crown Point Viaduct too. Obviously there's a Recreating the HCRH page for the viaduct, and it had a BridgeHunter page back in the day (now available via the Wayback Machine). Its entry in the old highway's National Register of History Places nomination calls it "Crown Point Viaduct, No. 4524", and describes it briefly:

This 560-foot spiral viaduct was constructed of reinforced concrete and runs for 225 degrees of a circle around Crown Point. It functions as a 7-foot-wide sidewalk and curb with a 4-foot-high parapet wall on the outside of a 24-foot roadway cut into the rock formation. A dry masonry retaining wall stabilizes the hillside above and below the viaduct and masonry parapet walls that ring Vista House (see under “Buildings”), the sandstone public comfort station completed on top of Crown Point in 1918.

The Historic American Engineering Record collection at the Library of Congress has a writeup about it, plus several black & white photos, including two photos from underneath the deck. I wanted to point those out in particular because I don't have any photos taken from down there, so go look at those if you really want to see close-ups of that area. I did sorta-consider the idea for a moment, way back when I was taking photos for various other Gorge bridge posts in 2014 or so, but realized I just didn't want to, and remembered that nobody is paying me to do any of this, so I skipped it.

But continuing with the usual sources, ODOT's 2013 historic bridge inventory, page 214 describes it briefly as "Twenty-eight 20-ft reinforced concrete slab spans as a half-viaduct surrounding Crown Point, a rock promontory overlooking the Gorge", while their guidebook Historic Highway Bridges of Oregon elaborates a bit:

The Crown Point Viaduct was the first structure started on the Multnomah County portion of the Columbia River Highway. Samuel C. Lancaster was the supervising engineer for both Multnomah County and the State Highway Department. Lancaster located the highway to encircle Crown Point, a promontory rising vertically 625 feet about the river. (Crown Point was designated a National Natural Landmark in August 1971.) The "half-viaduct" prevented unnecessary excavation or fill to establish a roadbed on the point. The structure is 560 feet long and consists of twenty-eight 20-foot reinforced concrete slab spans. Vista House, an observatory and rest stop dedicated to early Oregon pioneers, was completed on Crown Point in 1918.

Lancaster often gets credited for everything along the old highway, but like most of the regular bridges along the road, the viaduct was actually designed by the engineer K.P. Billner, who wrote about his Gorge bridges in the February 10, 1915 issue of Engineering and Contracting, Vol. XLIII No. 6, pp. 121-123. Most of the article is about the Latourell Creek Bridge, but he included a bit about the Crown Point Viaduct too:

At Crown Point there is an abrupt cliff rising to a height of about 700 ft. In rounding the turn above the river the road follows a curve of 110-ft. radius through an angle of 225º. A 7-ft. concrete sidewalk and railing crowns this cliff. Surmounting the 4-ft. solid railing there are electric lights, at 20-ft. intervals, which are visible from the transcontinental trains and from the river boats below. A high curb protects this walk from the traffic on the road.

The accompanying photo shows the top of Crown Point with the road like it is today, but with the original natural rock formation in the center instead of the Vista House, which would not be constructed for a few more years.

I didn't run across much in the way of historical anecdotes concerning the viaduct bit specifically, but I've got two, and you can draw whatever conclusions you want from them.

First an odd episode in December 1927 when Samuel Lancaster had a freakout over accumulated ice on the road during a winter storm, insisting that everything from the Crown Point viaduct through to Multnomah Falls was in imminent danger of collapsing if something wasn't done immediately to clear the ice off the road. A couple of days later county engineers inspected that stretch of the road and confirmed it was fine and in no danger of any kind of apocalypse. I can see Lancaster being a little overprotective of his "babies", but this is not how civil engineers usually react to potential dangers to something they had a hand in building.

Oh, and in March 17th 1942 the Crown Point viaduct -- along with the east and west Multnomah Falls viaducts -- was officially placed on a list of 934 new "prohibited zones", newly off-limits to anyone considered to be an an "alien enemy", meaning anyone of Japanese ancestry. The order also added Idaho, Montana, Utah, and Nevada to a list of "military areas"; Oregon, Washington, California and Arizona were already on that list as of a previous order two weeks earlier. This happened a month and change after FDR issued Executive Order 9066, and shortly before the government started shipping Japanese-American citizens off to internment camps. The linked Wikipedia article shows a deportation order for the Bay Area dated April 1st, less than two weeks after this. And it just so happens that I'm finishing this post on election night 2024, and things aren't looking great for the civilized world right now, and the prospect of the very same 1798 law that enabled internments being used again against immigrants seems to be right there on the horizon all of a sudden, and I was kind of hoping finishing this post would be a nice distraction from watching election news, and now it's actually not helping at all. Because history isn't just a selection of quaint anecdotes, and tends to be intertwined with the present in all sorts of unexpected ways, especially when you don't want it to and least expect it.

Nesika Falls

Next up we're having a look at Nesika Falls, another very tall but little-known Columbia Gorge waterfall right in the middle of the main tourist corridor, a just a little over a mile east of Multnomah Falls and even closer than that to the Oneonta trailhead. If you're heading east on the old Columbia River Highway, you might notice a small parking lot with some sheer cliffs and mossy boulders behind it, and absolutely no signage of any kind to tell you why there's a parking lot here. Its most common use seems to be as a turn-around spot for tourists trying to score one of those $20 VIP parking spaces at Multnomah Falls Lodge, which may involve a slow crawl thru the tiny lodge parking lot followed by flooring it down the road (or continuing a slow crawl down the road, depending on traffic) to the closest turnaround (i.e. here) and back (i.e. here), and coming back for yet another slow crawl thru the completely full lot. A useful rule of thumb here is that if you find yourself using any driving techniques you learned during holiday shopping, you should accept that you are not currently having fun, will not begin having fun anytime soon, even if a parking spot opens up, and should probably rethink your plans for the day.

The second most common use of this lot is as unofficial (but free) overflow parking for Multnomah Falls. People who park here to use this spot as Multnomah Falls overflow parking tend to just trudge along the road, ignoring all the "No Pedestrian Access" signs along the way, including the ones on the narrow East Viaduct, and trying to duck in time every time an RV with extra-wide side mirrors rolls through. I tried that route once way back in the early 90s (as described here) and absolutely do not recommend it. What you want to do instead is look for trails heading up into the forest, and take the westbound one. There are no signs to tell you this, but this spot is an access point for Gorge Trail No. 400, the still-incomplete trail that might connect Troutdale to Hood River someday. The eastbound trail is easier to find, right at the east end of the parking lot, but it's not the trail you want right now. To find the westbound trail, cross the little road bridge or culvert immediately west of the lot, and look for a trail a few steps beyond there. When you cross the bridge, look down at the little creek it crosses. This is the same stream that forms the falls we're here to look at, so if it's just a trickle or it's dry entirely there's nothing to do but come back another day in a wetter season.

Assuming the creek's flowing, follow the trail uphill a short distance, maybe 50'-100', look uphill, and try to work out the route of that little creek as it comes downhill. If the creek's flowing but you don't see the falls, try going a bit further, or go back a bit, and look for gaps in the trees and underbrush, and keep trying until you see something resembling the photoset above.

Once you see it, look back toward the parking lot and note the large rock formation that completely blocks the view of the falls from the highway. If that wasn't there the waterfall would probably be a bit less obscure than it currently is.

After you've seen the falls from a distance and taken a few photos, continuing westbound on the 400 will take you to Multnomah Falls, specifically to the first switchback past the bridge. So you can either continue uphill to the top and skip most of the crowds, or you can head downhill, elbow your way thru the crowds, and hit the snack bar for a plate of genuine Multnomah Falls nachos, or whatever. Before choosing your adventure, look behind you at the junction. A vintage plaque, low to the ground, announces this is the "Ak-Wanee Trail", though nobody really uses that name anymore. This trail officially opened in 1978, and the name honors a young Yakima tribal member who worked on trail construction here and died in a car accident shortly before the trail opened to the public.

The trail figured in several Roberta Lowe newspaper columns over the next few years, primarily in the Oregon Journal:

• A 1979 Journal column explaining exactly how to find the unofficial and very, very steep Elevator Shaft trail.
• A 1980 Journal column explaining that the new trail had not been properly manicured yet, and was still a bit rough.

• 1984 Oregonian column (after the Journal went under), on hiking the 400 from Multnomah Falls through to the obscure Exit 35 Trailhead east of Ainsworth State Park. (That point marked the end of the trail until the short-lived Warrendale-Dodson segment opened a few years later, and it became the end of the trail again in 1996 after a big chunk of trail was erased by massive landslides a bit east of that trailhead.) The column mentions a dead-end bit of abandoned trail uphill from the present-day trail, built as an abortive attempt to route the trail closer to Nesika and Waespe Falls (another seasonal waterfall we'll visit as soon as I finish that post). They would certainly be less obscure if that had worked out, but we're told that the necessary blasting could have posed a hazard to cars and trains below so they dumped that idea.

  The abortive spur trail seems to still exist, according to the state LIDAR map, with the trail junction located right about here. Though so far I have completely failed to find this trail at ground level. That's one limitation of LIDAR maps, especially in this part of the world: You can make out exactly what the ground is shaped like, but when you go to visit in person that ground may be under an impassable layer of brush, fallen limbs, poison oak, devils club, rusty nails, broken glass, old barbed wire, etc., and there's really no way to be sure until you get there. Another limitation is that LIDAR really just tells you that a potential creekbed intersects a cliff at a given spot and obviously can't tell you if there's any water in the creekbed.

• Also nearby, unofficially, or maybe closer to Waespe Falls next door, is the lower end of the Fire Escape trail, which is marked at the upper end by an ominous sign that reads "Fire Trail - Emergency Only". Peope often confuse it with the very similar Elevator Shaft trail which is a mile or so to the west, closer to Multnomah Falls. Even the OregonHikers Field Guide page about the Elevator Shaft manages to confuse the two. The key thing to know is the Elevator Shaft is supposed to be uphill only, while the Fire Escape is said to be down only, and for the life of me I have no idea why. I suppose it reduces the odds of people having to pass each other on these precarious routes, if nothing else. I have never done either one, but my understanding is that the main difference between the two is that the Elevator Shaft has an actual trail carved into it, with over 100 tight switchbacks, and you can see it on LIDAR and even Google Maps' satellite view, while the Fire Escape is just a talus slope that's known to be descendable in a pinch.

One unsolved mystery I have: If the bridge and maybe the parking lot date back to around 1916, and the trail only arrived in 1978, what was here before that? Was it really just a turnaround spot for heading back to Multnomah Falls all that time? I have no idea.

The name is fairly recent; it's just named after the Trails Club lodge near the creek, way up above the falls. It sort of fits with the existing pattern of real or invented Indian names bestowed on various places by non-Indians, mostly in the early 20th century. Which is not really ideal, but the lodge is about the only named landmark anywhere nearby, so I guess it'll do in a pinch. The other idea that's been proposed is some variation on "Farula Falls" or "Caddisfly Falls", as it's one of a handful of Gorge waterfalls that are home to Farula constricta^[1], one of several rare caddisfly and stonefly species endemic to the Gorge. It's not a terrible name, but the thought of using it makes me sort of anxious, like I can't shake the idea that it'll attract the wrong kind of attention, from the sort of people who would happily wipe out the last survivors of an endangered species just to own the libs.

To summarize uses of either name across the interwebs: We've got two old OregonHikers forum threads in January and May 2011, followed by a 2013 thread about a then-new trails layer in Google Earth. IIRC one of those threads mentions what might be the abandoned spur trail, referring to it as a "convenient game trail". The name also appears on someone's WentHiking page and another photo linked from there. And that's about it, really.

If I'm not mistaken, under the right weather conditions this area becomes a celebrated ice climbing spot known as "New World Amphitheater", as discussed in two threads at Cascade Climbers, and featured in the Gorge ice climbing chapter of Northwest Oregon Rock. Translating their maps and names into non-climber, I thiiiink Nesika Falls freezes into "Black Dagger", while "Brave New World" is either a different route up the falls or it goes up one of several ephemeral streams immediately to the east, I'm not totally sure which. And "Blackjack" corresponds to a creek west of Nesika but I'm not 100% sure which one. I don't think I've seen any of these theoretically rather tall waterfalls actually flowing, so this is kind of a moot point, and it's why I generally don't bother with ephemeral waterfalls in this project: The only reliable way to see them would involve visiting while a major storm is in progress, which in turn means spending lots of time getting drenched and being cold and wet and miserable, which I can't recommend.

As I understand it, to be a great Gorge ice climbing spot, a place needs a couple of things: A fairly low-flow waterfall (ones that dry up in the summer are great for this) so it'll freeze all the way and not be a firehose in the face of anyone climbing it, and it should be one that runs down the face of a cliff instead of projecting outward like a lot of the major ones do, so it'll freeze on the cliff and not just make a big ice stalagmite at the base. This is not the case everywhere, btw; Helmcken Falls in British Columbia is supposed to be the world's ultimate ice climbing spot, and it's on a major river and forms a giant ice cone over the winter. But around here, if those conditions are met, then it's the taller the better. Speaking of which, I haven't seen any numbers on exactly how tall Nesika Falls is, so let's have a look at the state LIDAR map and see if we can work that out ourselves. I usually do this by trying to pick points above and below that clearly aren't part of the falls but as close to it as I can get, and subtract the altitude of one from the other. This tends to give numbers on the high side of the range but hopefully not by much.

First off -- starting at the old highway and proceeding uphill -- LIDAR says there's a small lower falls below the main one, maybe 15'-20' tall and hidden sort of behind the big rock formation here. (top; bottom). I haven't actually seen this one; it must be hidden in the dense brush back there, and you may need a machete to get a better look at it.

Then we have the main falls, which I think is what's shown in all of my photos. Given a top point at ~815', and a bottom one at 395', that gives us a 420' main waterfall. Seriously.

Then we have a number of smaller upper falls that are set back a bit from the main one and I suspect aren't visible from below. These miiight be visitable from above with a bit of bushwhacking, but I haven't tried this myself and this is not a legally binding warranty. Also, most of these drops are fairly short, and short drops on a small creek may not be very impressive in person, and your photos of them may not necessarily bring fame and fortune, just so we're clear on that. With those disclaimers out of the way, here's what LIDAR says is up there:

1. Upper falls #1 (100') (top, bottom)
2. Upper falls #2 (~30') (top, bottom)
3. Upper falls #3 (~20') (top, bottom)
4. Cascades(~50') (top, bottom)
5. Upper falls #4 (~25') (top, bottom)
6. Upper falls #5 (~20'?) top, bottom
7. And another 20' one on a small tributary east of the main creek (top, bottom)

Just west of there, the one on the next sorta-obvious stream to the west (top, bottom) might be the "Blackjack" of the ice climbing world. It seems to drop a whopping ~550', which would be pretty impressive if there was any water at all going over it most of the year. But then, the lack of water means it erodes slower and stays taller longer, so whatever.

Before we wrap this up, let me point out a few other points of interest nearby, two of which are completely gone now, and another that never made it past the proposal stage but is kind of interesting anyway:

• One of these points of interest was right by the parking lot until quite recently. The creek passes under the highway on an original 1914 bridge, or maybe it's just a culvert, and either way it's pretty small and boring. Around 1979, a local Eagle Scout decided this just wouldn't do and did some amateur masonry here as his Eagle Scout community service project, adding an ornamental bridge railing to the existing bridge. Thus reminding people why we don't usually task Eagle Scouts with civil engineering projects. Recreating the HCRH calls it the "Eagle Scout Bridge", and has a photo or two of it in its post-1979 state. There's even a photo of it in the Library of Congress archives. The National Register of Historic Places nomination for the highway labeled it a "non-contributing structure" and had a few brief and opinionated words to say about it:

  Historically, there has been a structure at this crossing of an unnamed creek since the CRH's construction. The present masonry parapet walls on this small span date from the early 1980s, and represent an unsuccessful attempt to "restore" this bridge in the highway's style.

  I started calling it the Monkey Jesus Bridge: In both cases a well-meaning member of the public decides to improve a thing that doesn't need improving, and... doesn't. It's said that for many years afterward, if you hung around nearby at dusk on the right evening, sometimes the ghosts of ancient Roman engineers would appear and poke at it with sticks and make cutting remarks in Latin about the crooked arches and the barbarian tribes that must have built them. It helps to remember that these guys have been guzzling wine from the same ghostly lead flagons for the last 2000 years and have become a bit irritable over the years. But that's all a moot point, because it's gone now. At one point during the pandemic there was an extended closure of the highway due to a combination of winter landslides and trying to clean them up in a full social distancing environment, and ODOT took advantage of that long closure to quietly make the 70s bridge railing vanish without a trace. There was no public outcry; in fact almost nobody noticed it was gone. And the esteemed Romans have switched to haunting the McMansions of Mt. Scott. Imagine something like Poltergeist, but the ghosts are just unreasonably angry about classical orders and the Golden Ratio, and barbarian tribes who don't even know how to build a villa properly.

• There was also an Oneonta train station or platform somewhere right around here in the early 20th century. A 1927 Metsker map has an all-caps "ONEONTA" label right around the turnout location, while the inset bit of map shows the locations of the "McGowan's Cannery", "Columbia Beach", and "Warren's Cannery" train stops, all in the Warrendale-Dodson area east of here. I haven't come across any historic photos of any of these stations, and most likely they were cheap and rustic, just enough platform so people could get on and off the train with a little dignity. The original road survey map for this stretch of the HCRH, aka County Road 754, covers the Multnomah Falls thru Oneonta Gorge area on page 2 of the PDF, and it definitely shows a train station named "Oneonta" that's separate from and some distance west of the "Oneonta Falls" label. It seems awfully strange to me that any train stop would be anywhere except right in front of Oneonta Gorge, or as close to there as is practical. There was never a town here, or farmland, or or any other reason to come here besides the famous wade-to-the-waterfall spot. Even the Oneonta Trail (which accesses the additional falls upstream of the gorge) wasn't built until the 1930s. Also note that although the tracks seem to be right next to the highway here, and it kind of looks like you could drop someone off or pick them up for their train commute into the big city, the space in beween the two is a roughly 100' cliff, and the highway engineers of 1916 neglected to put in a grand staircase to connect them.

• The mystery not-a-trailhead also appears to be the exact spot where the Columbia River Highway would have intersected the never-built eastern half of County Road 625 (map pdf; ordinance pdf), since it was supposed to intersect the highway near the old train platform. This proposed road dates back to the 1890s, and the unbuilt part was a truly absurd idea. The western, built segment of road ran roughly parallel to -- and uphill of -- the Palmer Mill Road that Gorge fans may be more familiar with, which is actually a former railroad grade. The parallel country road might still exist as part of the maze of unmarked trails, tracks, and goat paths up in the Palmer Mill - Angels Rest area. The built segment ended around the location of the long-gone Palmer sawmill and its vanished mill town, and it won't surprise anyone to learn that the Bridal Veil Lumber company was the primary force behind the proposal.

  From the Palmer area, the unbuilt segment would have made its way sort of northeast, descending into Multnomah Basin, albeit by a somewhat different route than the Multnomah Basin Road that was eventually built. Which brings us to the absurd part: From there, starting just east of the top of Multnomah Falls, the road would have dropped toward river level, or at least railroad level, by a series of tight, precipitous switchbacks immediately east of the unofficial Elevator Shaft trail. If you're ever tried that trail or even looked at it up close, it is very difficult to imagine how a usable road could ever be built there or anywhere nearby, especially back in the horse-and-wagon days. That segment ended right around the trailhead here, and then continued east along more or less the present-day route of the old highway as far as Elowah Falls, then home to another sawmill. The Bridal Veil timber company was behind the proposal, and some suspected that the plan wasn't to actually build the road as proposed, but to establish a public right of way across the land of nearby landowners, with the goal of eventually putting an enormous log flume through there. Some neighboring landowners were surprised to find their signatures had been forged on the petition, when they didn't actually support the proposal. One filed an objection noting that the road would be useless to him, as it was too steep for horses to climb while pulling an empty wagon.

So what next? What's the future of this place? The key thing to know is that the land is a piece of Benson State Park (like the lake next to Multnomah Falls) and is not owned by the Forest Service, and the state will probably never have the money to do anything with this place; they may not even know they own it. The lot was recently added to Google Maps as "Parking to hike to Multnomah Falls", and as that idea takes hold it'll start filling up before sunrise like every other place marked as Multnomah Falls parking. If you put up an official sign and drew attention to the place, either as Multnomah Falls economy parking or for the falls here, you would immediately have a parking nightmare on your hands, and I'm not sure where additional parking could possibly go; the other side of the road is a cliff, but (looking at street view from I-84 not quite a sheer cliff, so maybe a few parking spots could go there with a bit of creative cantilevering. And then revive the bit of spur trail so people have somewhere nearby to go instead of it just providing a longer way to either Multnomah Falls or the Oneonta area. And figure out how your signage should break it to midsummer tourists that the falls might have gone dry for the year and they really should have visited back in March while they were still semi-awesome. It would almost certainly accrue a bunch of one-star Yelp and Google reviews from the sort of tourist who doesn't get the whole "nature" thing, and thinks there's a hidden control room somewhere behind the scenes where a bored bureaucrat controls all the valves to turn the waterfalls off and on, while people at the other control panels handle the weather and the animatronic wildlife.

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Footnote(s) 1. Insect stuff

More specifically, the species is known from one male and one female specimen, both collected here in April 1989, along with several collected at Mist Falls around the same time. All of them are now part of the 10 million specimen Entomology Collection at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. The 1992 paper describing F. constricta is here:

Wiggins GB, Wisseman RW. NEW NORTH AMERICAN SPECIES IN THE GENERA NEOTHREMMA AND FARULA, WITH HYPOTHESES ON PHYLOGENY AND BIOGEOGRAPHY (TRICHOPTERA: UENOIDAE). The Canadian Entomologist. 1992;124(6):1063-1074. doi:10.4039/Ent1241063-6

The paper is unfortunately paywalled and I'm not sure I want to shell out $36 just to read it, JSTOR doesn't carry the journal, and unfortunately Sci-Hub has an incomplete copy of that issue, ending before it gets around to the paper in question. So that appears to be a dead end, but that's modern science for ya. Here's the abstract for it, at least:

Three new species are described in the caddisfly family Uenoidae: Neothremma prolata, from Hood River County, Oregon; Neothremma mucronata from Lassen County, California; and Farula constricta from Multnomah County, Oregon. Following examination of the holotypes of several species, misinterpretation of the male genitalia morphology of Farula wigginsi Denning is corrected, leading to the recognition of that name as a junior synonym of F. petersoni Denning. Interpretation of male genitalic morphology in the original description of F. geyseri Denning is revised. Phylogenetic relationships are inferred from male genitalic morphology for the species of Neothremma and Farula. Biogeographic patterns of the species in both genera are highly congruent with the phylogenies.

Let me just point out that coauthor Wiggins had the rare privilege of debunking Farula wigginsi, a proposed new species that someone else had named in his honor.

Tanner Creek Bridge

Next up we're looking at the Tanner Creek Bridge an old Columbia River Highway bridge that I somehow skipped over back when I was doing posts about a lot of the others. ODOT's 2013 guide to historic highway bridges has an entry for it, with a brief description:

Bypassed and no longer in use, the Tanner Creek Bridge is a reinforced concrete deck girder, 60 feet in length. The bridge is located near the Interstate 84 entrance to the Bonneville Dam and is now owned by the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission. Completed in 1915, the bridge was constructed by the State Highway Department. Charles H. Purcell was the state bridge engineer, and Samuel Lancaster was the engineer for the Columbia River Highway.

Honestly this is not one of the major scenic or engineering highlights of the old highway. As a general rule of thumb, just because I went out of my way to go see something doesn't mean it's worth seeing. Especially when it costs $5 to park at Wahclella Falls, which has the nearest parking spaces to the bridge. (Although it looks like a lot of visitors park on the road just outside the lot to avoid paying.) This bridge wasn't considered a "contributing structure" when the old highway was added to the National Register of Historic Places, per the nomination paperwork. Which is unlike its closest neighbors, the arch bridges at Moffett Creek to the west and Eagle Creek to the east. I just realized I've never actually done the stretch between Tanner Creek and Moffett Creek on either the HCRH Trail or Trail 400 (the long but incomplete trail that was -- and maybe still is -- supposed to connect Troutdale to Hood River someday), and making a short loop out of the two looks pretty straightforward. I may have to try that at some point. And possibly try to find the first waterfall up Moffett Creek while I'm in the neighborhood, since that seems to be the most interesting sight along the way. It looks like you get a good look at the Tanner Creek railroad viaduct from the HCRH Trail, if you're into bridge stuff, which I gather most people aren't. Plus there's the unofficial Munra Point Trail, which I've never done, but I keep hearing it's sketchy with lots of exposure, and it's also usually packed with influencers doing dumb risky shit for TikTok or the 'Gram, and I'd really rather not watch anybody fall in person. Second only to not falling myself, of course.

As usual for HCRH bridges, there are pages about this bridge at Recreating the HCRH, Columbia River Images and BridgeHunter, though you might notice the last two are Wayback Machine links, as both sites have gone offline since the last time I did one of these posts (and Recreating the HCRH was down for a long while a few years ago). I'm saddened to report that both sites went down for very final reasons: The retired lady who ran Columbia River Images passed away in 2022, and the guy behind BridgeHunter died in a 2020 hiking accident.

Both sites were one-person operations with (I assume) occasional hosting and domain name bills that needed paying, and occasional admin tasks that needed administrating, and any of these things could be the thing that takes a website offline permanently. Not to make this about myself, and not to be morbid, but the humble blog you're currently reading is a one-person operation too, and the fate of two longtime resources I've relied on for years got me thinking about what will become of this place in the end. As a Blogspot site, I don't have regular hosting bills that need to be paid or else the site goes down. I do pay for Flickr, though, so photos will stop working whenever charging my card stops working, or I guess if Flickr goes away someday. And then there's Google's new policy on inactive accounts, where your stuff gets deleted if you haven't logged in for three years or so. I don't know whether that just means your bulging folder of never-to-be-read emails gets deleted, or blogs go away too, or what exactly. So this site could also go away due to a current or future inactive account policy, or Google could just decide Blogger as a whole is not profitable enough to keep around anymore (which is probably true already, quite honestly) and kill off the whole thing, and then this humble lil' blog will go the way of Google Reader, Google Groups, and Google+. Or, in theory, Google could go out of business entirely, or a giant meteor gets us, or yeah.

For reasons I don't recall now, I poked the Wayback Machine really early on and it's been taking occasional snapshots of this humble blog since sometime in 2006. So at least offsite backups are happening, archived by an idealistic nonprofit that aspires to keep and share every last bit of the interwebs forever. Which is cool as far as that goes, but the record industry is currently trying to sue them out of existence, and their password database was breached by Russian hackers a few days ago. And even if they survive the current BS, chances are the internet wouldn't survive a Big Rip, or a false vacuum decay event. So it's anybody's guess what "forever" really means in this context.

Wahkeena Creek Bridge

In the previous post about the Horsetail Creek Bridge I mentioned something about my projects having a long tail of things I have to do for the sake of completeness, and this post may be one of those. The Wahkeena Creek Bridge at Wahkeena Falls is a nondescript little concrete bridge that ordinarily nobody would care about, but it's an original 1915 bridge on the historic Columbia River Highway, so by virtue of that it counts as a historic structure. I had frankly never paid it a moment's notice until I started this bridge project. And later when I remembered to take a couple of photos of it, I promptly forgot I had them. BridgeHunter, a site run by people who are wayyy more obsessed with this bridge stuff than I am, bends over backwards to make it sound interesting in their page about it:

The Historical Columbia River Highway crossing at Wahkeena Creek is one of the earliest examples of a concrete slab bridge in Oregon. The bridge consists of a concrete slab deck resting on stone masonry abutment walls.

It also mentions that this was designed by Karl P. Billner, who designed a number of other more significant things along the old highway, like the Benson Bridge at Multnomah Falls, and the Shepperds Dell and Latourell Creek bridges. Billner wrote an article for the February 1915 Engineering and Contracting about a number of his bridges in the Gorge; the Latourell one was obviously his pride and joy and he largely focuses on it, but he has shorter items about some of the others where an interesting problem had to be solved, like fitting the Multnomah Viaducts into a cramped space, or bridging over a creek and multiple log flumes at Bridal Veil. He doesn't mention Wahkeena Creek at all. The description above says concrete slab bridges were a shiny new technology in 1915, and Billner was known for doing innovative stuff with concrete, but he must have known his other bridges were more interesting. Maybe this one just didn't fit in the article word limit and was cut for length.

When doing bridge posts, I usually look in the library's Oregonian newspaper database for interesting historical tidbits, which helps a lot when a subject isn't really inherently compelling. I did that again this time and came up with zilch. It doesn't look like this little bridge has ever been newsworthy over the last century and change. I did find one old photo of it at the Library of Congress, but it doesn't look that old, maybe 1950s or 1960s. And the highway's National Historic Landmark nomination mentions this bridge briefly as a "contributing structure" but doesn't have anything interesting to say about it. Again, I'm sure it wouldn't count as historic if it was somewhere else.

I did find one interesting and semi-related thing while searching the library database, so now we're going to forget about the bridge itself and wander off on a tangent. So here's a May 1987 story about Parasimulium crosskeyi, a species of primitive black fly that only lives in the Columbia Gorge, in a limited range roughly from Wahkeena Creek east to Starvation Creek. The article profiles a PhD student who had made it his study creature and had recently made the first sightings of female P. crosskeyi flies here at Wahkeena Creek. It seems they spend the first part of their lives in the "hyporheic zone", meaning they live in mud beneath and along the sides of a streambed, where stream water mixes with groundwater. The adults wash out of the mud, spend a little time flying around and making new flies, and the circle of life repeats itself etc. etc. One positive bit is that (unlike more highly evolved black flies) they don't have piercing mouth parts, and are thought to feed on plant nectar instead of chomping on people. Which is always a good thing in any insect.

The article ends on a note of concern; the researcher failed to find any flies the day the reporter showed up, and he was concerned as the Forest Service had recently run bulldozers along the stream, right through prime P. crosskeyi habitat, with unknown consequences. Earlier the article had explained that the fly might be eligible for an endangered species listing due to its tiny range. I couldn't leave the story hanging there, not knowing if the feds had wiped out a defenseless little bug, so I searched around to find a more recent (2000) paper about it, indicating it was still around as of almost two decades ago. Most of the papers about it date to the 1980s, though. I'm not a biologist, but I understand this happens a lot with smaller and less charismatic species: Research happens in fits and starts when someone takes an interest and manages to find funding, and tails off when they retire or move on to greener pastures & none of their students wants to take over. Then nobody looks again for years or sometimes decades.

To give some idea of how little is known about these little creatures, here's the 1985 description of the related species Parasimulium stonei, by the same discoverer as P. crosskeyi. The latter was discovered first & the paper explains in great detail how the two are different. Toward the end it mentions someone found a specimen that might be P. crosskeyi near Corvallis, and speculates that it might inhabit the Columbia and Willamette rivers too and it just hasn't been noticed yet, since black fly populations along major rivers were little studied and poorly understood, and probably nobody had ever looked for them outside the Gorge. Although elsewhere in the article it notes that collection sites (other than the oddball Corvallis one) have all been on streams with waterfalls, and wonders if "[t]he presence of a waterfall might reflect some ecological requirement, such as a marker for adult swarming behavior."

You might think there would be a photo of everything on the internet by now, but I couldn't find a picture of P. crosskeyi anywhere; the closest thing I've found are a couple of technical drawings of related species, a wing and part of the head. This isn't a lot to go on if you're looking to identify these beasties on sight; all I can say is that if you're visiting the area & maybe standing next to the creek to check out the ugly bridge, and you're holding a bouquet for some reason, and a tiny black fly tries to nom on it, you just might be helping to preserve an endangered species.

Horsetail Creek Bridge

Next up in the Gorge bridge project we're visiting the Horsetail Creek Bridge, right next to Horsetail Falls & the falls parking lot. A brief description of it at its BridgeHunter page explains that the design is nothing special but the decorative bits are ok:

One of two nearly identical reinforced-concrete girder trestles on the Historic Columbia River Highway and one of four extant structures on the route that have a distinctive cap and arch concrete guard rail system. Historic American Engineering Record, HAER ORE,26-TROUT.V,1M-

The three other structures mentioned are nearby, namely the Oneonta Creek Bridge and the East & West Multnomah Viaducts, all of which are Karl P. Billner designs that we've visited here already. Meanwhile ODOT's historic bridge field guide asserts this bridge is historic, but only describes it briefly as "three 20-ft reinforced concrete slab spans". (Please note that if these descriptions leave you wanting to go see the bridge for yourself, you'll have to wait, since -- as of June 2018 -- the whole area is still closed due to the 2017 Eagle Creek Fire.)

With that, it's time for the regular bridge post feature in which I dive into the Multnomah County Library's historical Oregonian database to see what the newspaper had to say about the place way back in the mists of time. I don't pretend to be doing a comprehensive historical accounting when I do these; mostly I'm mining the database for interesting nuggets and anecdotes, since almost nobody wants to read a post of nothing but bridge engineering minutiae. So here we go.

• I don't usually bother with traffic accident articles here, but it seems like the Horsetail Falls area had more than its share early on. Here's a very early one where a rear end accident flipped a car on the bridge in March 1917, when the highway had been open less than a year. I'm not sure how the physics of that would work, even with the spindly top-heavy cars of 1915, but ok. More notably, another collision in February 1927, was blamed on spray from the waterfall forming ice on the bridge, which can easily happen since the two are right next to each other. Like the old highway's other design flaws, the designers thought it would be cool and scenic to put the road right at the base of the falls, with no thought to possible complications.
• A lot of the retro-looking stonework around the base of the falls only dates to 1986, which -- I will have you know -- is not old. I don't recall exactly what it was like when I was a kid in the late 70s; but long before that there were a series of businesses at the base of the falls. Circa 1920 or so, Horsetail Falls was home to the Jack o'Lantern Roadhouse, which claimed to offer "Dainty, delicious and appetizing light lunches served. Come once you’ll come again and keep coming." I only see newspaper ads for it for summer 1920, so I'm not sure how long it was in business. I imagine it was gone by in June 1928, as someone else wanted to set up an ice cream shop or hot dog stand or bbq joint (the announced plans were a bit vague) at the falls, and various authorities objected. It seems the falls were privately owned at the time and everyone acknowledged the landowner & the stand guy were within their rights, but people still wished they wouldn't. The paper is unclear on how this turned out, and my incomplete understanding is that a lot of businesses along the old highway went out in the 1950s and 1960s. Some bought out & demolished by the state in the name of beautifying the route, and I imagine others went out of business after I-84 bypassed them and took away much of the road's traffic.
• In August 1923 there was a proposal to light the falls at night along with Multnomah & Wahkeena Falls. It turns out this actually happened for a while at Multnomah Falls, ending when the lights were destroyed in a winter storm in January 1969 and never rebuilt. I have no information about whether there were ever lights at Horsetail or Wahkeena Falls.
• The highway was blocked by a giant boulder here in February 1949, & the paper printed a sequence of photos of the thing being dynamited by a small work crew, without the benefit of modern common sense safety gear. Gentle reminder that people who long for the good old days before OSHA are idiots.
• A tract of nearby forest land was purchased by a timber company in July 1953, with the goal of swapping it to the Forest Service for land outside the scenic area. I mention this because of an strange and terrible idea buried in the article; it's unclear whether this was a contemporary proposal, or whether the writer just dreamed this up, but either way I'm glad it never happened:

  Its becoming a part of the public preserve will make more feasible a road up the Oneonta trail, which would cross the Oneonta near a triple falls and approach the upper Horsetail falls before descending again at Ainsworth state park on the old Columbia highway.

As far as I can tell there's only one other bridge along Horsetail Creek. Which is something I always check, because all of my projects here end up with a long tail of things I do largely for the sake of completeness, and I need to know what completeness entails. So the other bridge is a nondescript railroad bridge just downstream/north of here, which may show up here at some point despite being nondescript. After that, the creek flows through wetlands and into Oneonta Creek, which passes under I-84 through a big concrete pipe and then flows into the Columbia. (I've actually been through said pipe, but that's a story for a whole other blog post). And upstream of here, the Horsetail Falls Trail #438 doesn't need any bridges, since it gets to the other side of the creek by going behind Ponytail Falls. Much further upstream, the Horsetail Creek Trail #425 crosses a couple of forks of the creek; it's a long sorta-backcountry trail through the Hatfield Wilderness, so I imagine you just ford the creek when you come to it. I've never hiked that trail and am not 100% sure, but it stands to reason.

Updated: Turns out the secret pipe to Oneonta Beach is not as secret as I thought; there's a Curious Gorge page about it, which means it's also in their hardcopy guidebook. It also turns out the pipe has changed since I was last there; a summer 2013 Forest Service project reworked it and the nearby wetlands area to make it less hostile to baby salmon. It makes sense in retrospect, but I hadn't realized the wetlands at the foot of Horsetail & Oneonta Creeks are largely artificial, created when I-84 was built on fill out into the river, and the state did a rather poor job of it back in the 60s. A 2015 article about the project said things were looking up as of then. The plan was to monitor it for four years afterward (i.e. thru 2017), but I haven't seen any more recent updates about how things turned out.

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.

McCord Creek Bridges

One of the many ongoing projects involves tracking down historic bridges in the Columbia River Gorge. I kind of like this project because it involves making repeated trips out to the Gorge, but then stopping places and taking photos of things that nearly everyone else ignores. Many of the posts in the project come from in the surviving stretch of the old highway between the Vista House and Elowah Falls, more or less; for long stretches further east the route of the old road is directly beneath today's freeway, and nothing survives of the original. This is basically what happened at McCord Creek, the creek that flows over Elowah Falls. A century ago a tall and sort of spindly bridge was built to carry traffic over McCord Creek. Like many of the bridges along this stretch of the highway, it was designed by Karl P Billner. The bridge at McCord Creek was more utilitarian than most of the others, and it was maybe not Billner's most distinctive work, but it still bore a passing resemblance to his Latourell Creek bridge. The bridge was apparently tougher than it looked; it seems it was incorporated into first the US 30 highway and then Interstate 84 when they were constructed, and for nearly 80 years it carried traffic much faster and heavier than its designers could have ever imagined. As far as I know none of the other bridges from the old highway were reused as part of the new freeway, so I suppose it had that going for it. It was finally showing its age by the late 1990s, and the state concluded there was no way to bring it up to modern seismic standards, so it was demolished and replaced by a modern bridge in 1997-98.

The photoset above has a few shots of the replacement bridge, and ODOT has a better photo from an angle I wouldn't attempt, of workers doing a job I also wouldn't attempt. That bridge isn't the main point of interest in this post, though. In 2013 ODOT opened another segment of their Historic Columbia River Highway Trail. For those who aren't familiar with this project, it's not a trail in the same sense as, say, the loop trail around Multnomah & Wahkeena falls. It's more of a fancy bike path along I-84; it's several steps up from riding along the freeway shoulder, which people had been doing (completely legally) for decades before they started building the new trail. But if you're looking for a prime wilderness experience, this is probably not the trail for you. They're trying to reuse abandoned bits of the original highway where they can, but when that isn't possible the trail usually runs right next to the freeway. When they got to building the McCord Creek segment, it seems the 1998 bridge wasn't designed with room for a bike path, so the trail would need a new bridge of its own. Instead of building next to the freeway, the trail jogs south and away from I-84 for a bit to a spot where they could build a smaller and probably much less expensive bridge. They put a bit of design work into the new bridge, and it's done in a style that evokes the old highway's historic bridges but isn't quite identical to them. It has a bit more of an Art Deco look to it, as if they'd somehow continued building Gorge bridges into the 1920s and 1930s.

Beyond the two bridges shown here, there are a couple of others I should at least mention. There's a railroad crossing of the creek just north/downstream of the I-84 bridge; I can't really make it out in my photos, but I think it might be more of a culvert than a proper bridge. And upstream of here, Gorge Trail #400 crosses the creek near the base of Elowah Falls. An old OregonHikers thread has a very old photo of yet another bridge that crossed halfway up the falls, in the manner of the Benson Bridge at Multnomah Falls. It's too bad that's gone now, but I can see how a wooden bridge wouldn't last long in that spot.

Gorton Creek Bridge

While I was visiting Gorton Creek Falls (which we saw in the previous post) I took a quick peek at the small, circa-1919 Gorton Creek Bridge nearby. One of my numerous ongoing projects here involves tracking down old bridges from the original Columbia River Highway, and this is yet another of them, albeit maybe not one of the crown jewels. Still, the project wouldn't be complete without finding it, so here we are.

As I mentioned in a post about the Shepperds Dell Bridge a while back, the state highway commission had around 4 bridge designers working on different parts of the highway. This one was designed by Lewis W. Metzger, who's also credited with the nice little arch bridge at Eagle Creek, and a larger one at Moffett Creek that I haven't gotten around to posting about yet, plus a few others I haven't visited, and a couple that no longer exist, like one in Hood River that was demolished & replaced in 1982.

The highway commission biennial report for 1916-1917 mentioned that this bridge was budgeted at $2500, which is about $53,600 in today's dollars. Which seems pretty cheap for a concrete bridge that's held up for nearly a century. (The most expensive item on the list was $250,000 for the now-replaced Center Street Bridge in Salem. Metzger worked on that bridge too, so I imagine the Gorton Creek project was a bit of an afterthought.)

A downside of building a no-frills bridge is that it was made just wide enough for early 20th century cars, and it lacks sidewalks. In practice this isn't a huge problem, as this stretch of ex-highway is lightly traveled and the bridge is short so you can just wait & walk across when nobody's coming. On the other hand, ODOT is in the middle of their big-budget Historic Columbia River Highway State Trail project, which aims to create a shiny new bike-friendly, tourist-friendly route from Portland out to the Dalles or so. This bridge is on the route, but ODOT felt it wasn't up to the job, bike-wise, so in 2015 they started looking at adding a new bike/pedestrian bridge next to the current bridge. Construction was targeted at fall 2016, but eventually began in August 2017, and it's not clear now whether they're adding a bike-only bridge in parallel, or replacing the whole thing. If it's the latter, it wouldn't be a major loss in terms of sheer beauty or historic preservation, let's be honest here. In any case, the latest project newsletter indicates construction is ongoing, so evidently this area wasn't heavily impacted by the Eagle Creek Fire.