HCRH Milepost 21

We're starting the new year with another Historic Columbia River Highway milepost. Milepost 21 is at the HCRH intersection with NE Evans Road and (sort of) with Corbett Hill Road. This is more or less the center of Corbett: To the west are the post office, the water district office, the elementary and high schools, and an incongruous tech company of some sort. To the east are the local general store, the rural fire department, the (future) local history museum, and an incongruous biotech food lab of some sort. To the north, Corbett Hill Road connects to I-84, while Evans Rd. heads south into the wilds of rural east Multnomah County, becoming SE Gordon Creek Road at the intersection with Hurlburt Rd., then winding south through various adventures and ending up in Sandy or thereabouts.

If you were expecting posts about mileposts 19 and 20 before getting here, you may be in for a wait. Milepost 19 is clearly visible in Street View imagery from June 2023 but I've looked for it several times and I'm mostly convinced it isn't there now. Up ahead we'll see at least two others that have obvious, recent vehicular damage, so if I had to guess what happened to #19, that would have to be the leading theory. I haven't been paying close attention to the subject over time, so I don't know if this is part of a wave of milepost damage or this actually happens all the time and the state just grumbles quietly and replaces them as needed. I would believe either, frankly.

I think Milepost 20 would be somewhere near the HCRH intersection with Mershon Rd. if it existed. It's not there now, wasn't there the last time Street View rolled through, and also wasn't there during any previous Street View visits, back thru 2007. The semi-interesting thing about this location is Mershon Rd. may be the oldest of several east-west routes predating the famous old highway, and sufficiently old road survey docs (like this one from 1889) refer to it as the "Portland and Dalles County Road", better known as the Dalles Wagon Road. Which was the HCRH's predecessor, though I don't think it was ever built all the way to The Dalles. Little remains of it today, as it was largely built over by the O.W.R.&N. railroad well before the HCRH went in. Which is a strategy that works amazingly in the original 1980s SimCity since the devs never imagined anyone doing that and did not penalize you for only building transit and nowhere for cars.

Nearby Attractions:

• Corbett Country Market, the local grocery store, liquor store, gas station, and bbq joint. I don't do a lot of restaurant reviews here, but I've had their tri-tip sandwich and highly recommend this place based on that.
• The local historical society museum isn't open yet, but they have an actual building under construction.
• About a block east from the milepost are NE 365th and 366th Avenues, which I thiiink are the highest-numbered streets anywhere on the Portland-centered street grid. I think the closest competitor on the west side (since unincorporated Washington county uses this system too) would probably have to be NW 341st Avenue just outside Cornelius city limits between Cornelius and Hillsboro.
• local community website, complete with local forums that people actually use and everything, sorta like the 1998 internet was everywhere.
• The secret 100' waterfall west of the old rock quarry at the Corbett I-84 exit, near the site of a 1903 train robbery.
• To the south, and further away, there's the obscure North Oxbow area (the largely ignored eastern half of Oxbow Park), and several even more obscure Metro natural areas, including at least one more secret waterfall, and this one will knock your socks off. (Metaphorically, I mean, and no offense intended to people who don't believe in socks.) But telling you more about it (including the location) is out of scope for this current project, so you'll have to wait a bit.

HCRH Milepost 18

The next HCRH milepost we're visiting is for mile 18, which is located at a really awkward point where the highway is crawling uphill next to the Springdale Job Corps Center. There isn't a good, safe place to stop anywhere nearby, since mileposts weren't meant to be destinations themselves, not even the retro ones. But hey, that's what they said about the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas Nevada Sign at first, and look how that turned out. Anyway, I'm saying all this to explain why the photos look like they were taken quickly from a moving vehicle: It's because they were. The trick is to set up burst mode and point your phone in the right general direction, and take a bunch of photos while staying focused on driving, and then discard all photos not containing a milepost. Consider the, er, famous Michelangelo quote about sculpting David by simply chipping away everything that was not David. And TBH I just copied that existing process, merely adapting it to photos of little concrete posts. Just putting that out there cos Big Mike paid his dues and deserves proper credit.

Nearby Attractions:

• I keep meaning to stop and look at the cool metal dragon statue in front of the Job Corps main entrance and I haven't gotten around to doing it yet. I gather Job Corps is one of the federal programs on the chopping block for the next president we won't name and his oligarch pals, so I should probably get a move on about this one. More importantly, go see it while you still can, whether I do or not.
• This stretch of the highway runs right next to an unnamed creek -- I ran across a 1935 road survey map that called it "Prosperity Creek" but I have no idea if anyone still uses that name 90 years later -- so the ravine it runs through here is probably either "Springdale Canyon" or "Prosperity Canyon", though I've never seen anyone use those names. The state LIDAR map says there's a spot downstream of the Job Corps entrance where the creek goes over a couple of 20'-25' drops close together and then flows into the Sandy River at the far upstream end of Dabney State Park, but I have not actually tried looking for it, and that bit of the park is probably underwater a lot in the wet season, so investigating further may not be doable.
• South of the Job Corps property is Metro's highly obscure Springdale Natural Area, ~230 acres of Sandy riverfront land that seem to be nearly inaccessible from the outside world. The internet says this nature area is home to Smith Creek Falls, which looks to be around 50' high, and is (probably) accessible only by boat. Some joker (not me, promise) added it to Google Maps a while back, asking "Who has ever seen a more picturesque location in all the earth? 🌎🌍". I'm no philosopher, but I think the answer to this is "nobody", but only because it's a trick philosophical question: Nobody has ever actually seen Smith Creek Falls. Therefore nobody has seen both it AND other places that might be the most picturesque. Therefore the number of people who have seen it and other candidates and then chose somewhere else as the best must be exactly zero, yay, Smith Creek Falls wins.
• On a point of (much) more general interest, I keep hearing that Springdale's historic Springdale Pub is a must-visit pizza destination and I haven't been there yet. I'll keep you posted.

HCRH Milepost 17

A few of you out there might remember an old project I did around the Stark St. Milestones, a series of very old stone markers along Stark St. each carved to indicate the distance in miles from downtown Portland (measured specifically from the intersection of SW Broadway & Washington St.), with a surprising number of surviving stones, from milestone P2 embedded into a wall at Lone Fir Cemetery in inner SE Portland, out to P14 on the campus of Mt. Hood Community College, along the east edge of Gresham and Troutdale. I mentioned a few times that Stark was eventually extended across the Sandy River to join the new Columbia River Highway, and they decided to continue the existing mile numbering as the highway continued east. I didn't follow suit immediately; I was just happy to have collected the whole set thru #14. You will not be surprised to learn that I recently decided to go ahead and do HCRH mile markers as a project. I didn't see anyone else doing it, for one thing, and for another I'd recently bought a fun new car and this was a fresh excuse to take it out for a spin on several weekends over the summer.

As for the scope of this project: After MHCC there are apparently no markers for miles 15 and 16, and it's unclear whether those ever existed. Then there's a continuous stretch of mileposts from 17 thru 36 (except for the currently-missing 19 and 20). There's an odd one-off wooden Milepost 43 around the eastern outskirts of Cascade Locks, and a few sporadic ones numbered in the 50s and low 60s this side of Hood River, picking up again east of town at 67 and continuing east to around 88 on the west side of The Dalles, and I've heard there are even more of them way out in the Umatilla area with mile numbers in the 170s, but those may not be part of the same "miles from Portland" sequence, in which case they don't count. So the exact end of this thing is TBD, and for those of you following along at home (and rushing out to visit each one as the next post goes up) the important thing to know is that mile counts always reset at state lines and so there's no risk of blundering across into Idaho (where the shadows lie) by chasing these things around.

That may seem like a lot of surviving mileposts, given the originals were made with 1910s reinforced concrete and not stone. It turns out most of the ones you'll see out there are replacements that only date to the 1980s, which was practically yesterday. But -- crucially -- a couple of them did survive from way back when, and the new replacements copy the originals' design, and -- also crucially -- they didn't explain which two are the originals so it could be any of them, and the only way to be sure you have photos of these important historical artifacts is to find all of them. (Or, I guess, you could just call up ODOT and ask, but where's the fun in that?)

So with all of that background out of the way, the first milepost we encounter on the way east is Milepost 17, which is located along a shady shoulder of the highway around 1/3 mile past the Stark St. Bridge, before the entrance to Dabney State Park. Note that the shoulder is actually marked No Parking, I think because parking here would let a few visitors stroll into the park and scratch their disc golf itch without paying. So if you just pull off the road briefly to take photos of a concrete milepost, this will probably not lead to getting tasered by The Man, though you never know.

I think another thing I'll do for these posts is list some "nearby attractions", and sort of figure out what that means on the fly. (I think Wordpress is able to do that automagically based on geotags, but Google yoinked most of their Blogger engineers away to go build Google+ before they got around to building this.) Anyway, here's what's nearby:

• An old post about the Stark St. Bridge, currently closed for emergency repairs.
• Flickr photos from Dabney State Park right here, since the related blog post isn't done yet. And I could swear I have more material than the two short video clips in that set. I think I must have mis-filed them somewhere.
• A short distance past the entrance to Dabney, at the intersection with Nielson Rd., is the site of "Dabney Springs" aka "Troutdale Springs". Which until quite recently was another minor relic of the old highway, a free-flowing water fountain installed by the state Highway Commission sometime in the early years of the old highway, as a source of radiator water for your poor overheated Model T Ford. Decades later, local hippies decided it was a source of pure mountain spring ambrosia, unsullied by The Man and his chlorinated fluoridated dihydrogen-monoxidated corporate mainstream "water". Even though the water flowed out of an iron pipe, embedded in a big concrete block, and the state never actually said where the water came from or even promised that it was safe for humans to drink. Eventually (sometime earlier this year) this attracted enough hippies to become a regular traffic hazard -- I dunno, maybe they kept twirling in the street or something -- and The Man came and shut it all down. I don't have a post about this or any photos of it or anything, but a recent ZehnKatzen Times post has all the details here.
• Flickr photos from the obscure Stark St. Viaduct, another HCRH-style bridge uphill from the bridge on the Sandy River. That post isn't done yet either.
• If you crossed the Stark St. bridge and then turned left instead of right onto the HCRH, and continued around the bend in the river, you'll soon be at Keanes Creek Falls and the former Tippy Canoe dive bar, and past there a series of small roadside waterfalls on the way to central Troutdale.