Wahkeena Falls Bridge

Ok, our next stop on the ongoing Gorge bridge project is the old footbridge at Wahkeena Falls, which (like the Benson Bridge at Multnomah Falls) went in around the same time as the old Columbia River Highway. The highway's National Historic Landmark nomination mentions the footbridge as a contributing structure. It says the bridge was built in 1914, and was designed by Karl P. Billner, who also did the Benson Bridge and most of the highway bridges along this stretch of the road, including the boring one over Wahkeena Creek that we just visited a post or two ago. The nomination doc goes on to describe the bridge:

This rubble masonry footbridge is 46 feet long and 8 feet wide and contains a semi-circular barrel arch with a 14-foot opening. The masonry guard walls, with concrete caps, continue east and west of the bridge for some distance. Simon Benson paid for the bridge's construction, as he did for the Multnomah Falls Footbridge.

As with the Benson Bridge further east, it seems this was built while Benson still owned the land here. He owned the waterfalls and decided they needed bridges, and started throwing money around to make it happen. Thanks to being rich and powerful, Benson even managed to borrow the highway's bridge engineers -- who must have been rather busy already -- to do the design work for these bridges too.

There isn't a whole lot else about this one on the interwebs, and a lot of the links just repeat the same source material (kind of like I just did above), but here's what I've got. The library's newspaper database didn't have anything worth sharing, but the Library of Congress has a half-dozen or so vintage photos as part of its Historic American Engineering Record collection, and there are a couple of Waymarking pages about it, and it shows up on Columbia River Images and Recreating the HCRH page.

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.

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.

West Multnomah Viaduct

The previous bridge post went on about the historic circa-1914 viaduct on the Columbia River Highway east of Multnomah Falls. I mentioned then that there was another similar viaduct just west of the falls, and a reasonably alert reader might have guessed that a post about it was coming, because when I'm doing stuff for the sake of completeness, I can't just do one of the two and leave it at that. It just wouldn't be right, you know?

In any case, the west viaduct is basically the same as the east one, but at 400' it's only half as long, and it's harder to get decent photos of the west one due to trees. On the semi-positive side, the photoset does have a couple of pics taken from on the viaduct, which I was able to do thanks to being stuck in Multnomah Falls traffic. Anyway, here are a few links about the west viaduct from across the interwebs:

• ODOT historic bridge inventory
• 'Recreating the Historic Columbia River Highway' page
• Bridgehunter page
• A historic photo at the Oregon State Archives
• Historic American Engineering Record page at the Library of Congress

East Multnomah Viaduct

The next stop on the Columbia Gorge bridge project is not exactly a bridge; the old Columbia River Highway travels on raised viaducts for a few hundred feet on either side of Multnomah Falls, for the simple reason that there was nowhere else to put a road back then, as the only bit of flat ground was already taken up by the railroad line. (The area where I-84 runs now was filled in much later, and was just river or wetland a century ago). Like most bridges on this stretch of highway, the viaducts were designed by K.P. Billner, who wrote about them in a 1915 article:

Two long concrete viaducts, which stand against the hillside like steps, solved the problems existing near Multnomah Falls. Here the Oregon-Washington Railway & Navigation Co.’s road occupied all of the available space along the river. The cost of excavating a 24-ft. roadway along this railroad, and of carrying the excavated material across the track to the river, was practically prohibitive. Figure is a view of the 860-ft. viaduct located east of Multnomah Falls. The West Multnomah Viaduct is similar to that shown in Fig. 6. In the West Multnomah Viaduct, however, the the railing extends along the masonry retaining wall.

The roadways of these viaducts are carried on two parallel lines of columns spaced 17 ft. 6 ins. on centers. The longitudinal spacing of these columns is 20 ft. As protection agains possible settlement of the upper columns, inclined struts, following the slope of the hill, are placed between the upper and lower columns, these struts being capable of carrying the weight of the structure. A railing, consisting of cement mortar on metal lath reinforcement, is placed along the railroad side only (see Fig 6.).

A page about the east viaduct at Recreating the Historic Columbia River Highway includes a few vintage photos, and notes that the east viaduct cost $22,520.83 in 1915 dollars, making it the second most expensive structure on the highway, second only to the Latourell Creek bridge. The east viaduct also has a BridgeHunter page, and the Library of Congress has a Historic American Engineering Record entry for it with a few old photos, which are mostly interesting because they're taken from angles you physically can't get to anymore, unless you feel like standing in the middle of eastbound I-84. Legal says I have to remind people not to do that, btw. The photos you see here were taken from the far eastern tip of the I-84 Multnomah Falls parking lot/rest area, which I think is probably the only way you can see underneath the structure now without being in a moving vehicle.

Given all that went into creating the Multnomah viaducts, it's a shame they're contenders for everyone's least favorite part of the old highway. They were engineering marvels of the Model T era, but they weren't designed with wider vehicles in mind, and it seems like there's always a giant RV with extra-wide side mirrors heading the other direction whenever you drive across one of the viaducts. In the last 10 years or so, it's also become rather likely you'll be stuck in a huge traffic jam all the way through the Multnomah Falls area, which doesn't really enhance the viaduct experience either. Widening the road is probably out; the viaducts are protected historic structures, and even if they weren't the rail line is still right next door & there's nowhere to put a wider road. I suspect that at some point they'll have to ban private vehicles along this part of the road, at least during high tourist season, and only allow shuttle buses along the road, sort of like what the National Park Service ended up doing in Yosemite National Park. This won't happen anytime soon, but in the longer term it seems inevitable to me. Then the shuttle drivers can tell their passengers the scary narrow part is coming up, and people can wave at the shuttle going the other direction, just inches away, and it'll just be another fun part of the show.

Multnomah Creek Bridge

Next up, here are a few photos of the historic 1914 highway bridge at Multnomah Falls. (Did I mention there's an ongoing Columbia Gorge bridge project? Because there is.) The comprehensive Historic Highway Bridges of Oregon (1989) describes the bridge thusly (via ColumbiaRiverHighway.com):

The Multnomah Creek Bridge, near the 620-foot drop of Multnomah Falls, is a noteworthy short-span arch and is a significant component of the old Columbia River Highway. This reinforced concrete deck arch is 67 feet in length .The barrel arch has solid spandrel walls and is 40 feet in length. The bridge was designed by K.P. Billner under the supervision of C.H. Purcell, State Bridge Engineer, and S.C. Lancaster, Assistant State Highway Engineer. It was constructed [in 1914] by the Pacific Bridge Company of Portland.

Smith, Dwight A., James B. Norman, and Pieter T. Dykman. Historic Highway Bridges of Oregon. Portland, Or: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1989, page 143.

It's not the biggest or most innovative of the old highway's bridges; a 1915 Engineering and Contracting article by Billner describes various bridges along the highway and the engineering challenges they addressed, and the Multnomah Creek bridge only merited a brief mention: "Figure 7 shows two bridges of the arch type at Multnomah Falls. This view also shows the falls, which is one of the scenic attractions along the highway.". The other of the two arch bridges is the famous Benson Bridge between the upper and lower falls, so I gather the key design feature here is that the two bridges were meant to form a harmonious pair. Most of Billner's article is devoted to his bridge at Latourell Creek, and my post about that bridge has a bit more background on Billner (who still doesn't have his own Wikipedia bio, somehow).

Elsewhere around the interwebs, the bridge also has the usual Structurae and Bridgehunter pages, and the Library of Congress has a couple of vintage photos of it. And of course there are lots of other photos of it around the interwebs. The waterfall is obviously the main event here, but seeing as it gets multiple millions of visitors per year, a few of them are bound to take an interest in the old arched bridge they pass on their way to the gift shop. The bridge also gets a mention in a recent ODOT presentation about mathematical buckling analysis of arch bridges. It has a section on "Common Arch Bridge Types", and cites a few Oregon bridges for each type, since ODOT has lots of arch bridges and I gather they're rather proud of them. I dunno, I think stuff like this is interesting even if I don't completely understand it.

Benson Bridge

You might recall I've been doing a series lately about historic bridges along the Columbia River Highway. Today's installment takes us to by far the most photographed of them all. This, of course, is the Benson Bridge, the famous footbridge at Multnomah Falls, as seen in every Oregon calendar ever created, and every tourist guide to Portland ever written. The bridge carries a hiking trail that continues on to the top of the falls, although casual tourists often stop and turn around here.

The bridge was in the news back in January when it was damaged and temporarily closed by a falling boulder, and the bridge is still closed as I'm writing this. These photos were taken well before the big boulder crash, so you can see what it's supposed to look like, and hopefully will look like again soon.

The bridge was designed by Karl P. Billner, who also designed many of the road bridges along the old highway, including the ones at Shepperds Dell and Latourell Falls. So although the Benson Bridge obviously isn't part of the highway, it shares what today would be called a common design language: They share the basic concrete deck arch design, and even the railing style is the same as the other bridges. To my untrained eyes it looks like a scaled-down copy of the Shepperds Dell bridge, but its Historical American Engineering Record entry explains it has a variety of unique features, things that you probably have to be a practicing civil engineer to really appreciate.

I've always been curious whether the bridge was controversial when it first went in. Multnomah Falls was already a famous scenic landmark at the time, and adding a bridge significantly altered its appearance. If there wasn't already a bridge here in 2014, and someone proposed building one, it would be hugely controversial and I can almost guarantee you the plan wouldn't go through. I checked the Multnomah County Library's Oregonian database in case there were any nervous editorials or outraged letters to the editor. I haven't come across any, however, and I think I understand why not.

The key detail is that when the bridge was built, starting in August 1914, the land around the falls was still owned by Simon Benson, a local timber baron and philanthropist. He's probably best known for donating the Benson Bubbler drinking fountains located around downtown Portland, and he's appeared here before in connection with the Benson Tower, a recent condo tower on the original site of his downtown mansion, which was relocated to the PSU campus some years ago. Benson would soon donate the area to the City of Portland, but when the bridge was built, Multnomah Falls was still Benson's personal waterfall and legally he could pretty much do whatever he wanted with it. Since he happened to be in a philanthropic sort of mood, he paid for the bridge himself and somehow borrowed the state's highway engineers to design it.

The actual construction was subcontracted out to R.L. Ringer, who also built the Crown Point Viaduct up around the Vista House. Ringer apparently took a great deal of pride in his work here, and secretly left his name and the date in the wet concrete, with the idea that he probably ought to sign his masterpiece. His superiors later ordered him to cover it up, which he did... with clay that matched the surrounding concrete. So when he checked back a year or so later, the clay had worn off and the initials were exposed again. Subsequent restoration efforts (including a major restoration in 1987, and a smaller effort as recently as 2012) have been careful to preserve this inscription. I'm not sure where exactly it's located on the bridge; hopefully it survived the recent boulder incident.

The bridge's resemblance to the highway's bridges gave at least one person the wrong idea. There was a strange incident in 1932 in which someone drove a tiny Austin 7 automobile up the Multnomah Falls trail and photographed it parked on the bridge. I wouldn't believe it without photos, and even with them I'm still kind of incredulous. The way the car's facing suggests Mr. C.W. West of Portland managed to drive up to the bridge and across it, then turned around somewhere and did this photo shoot on the way back to the lodge. The caption's written as if this was just an amusing stunt someone pulled on a lark, and there's no mention of anyone being arrested over this, or even park rangers wringing their hands and telling the damn fool public to knock it off fer chrissakes.

Anyway, because I am a dork, I always get that one Enya song from Fellowship of the Ring stuck in my head when I see this bridge. You know the one:

Shepperds Dell Bridge

As you may have noticed by now, I've been making another pass through my old Columbia Gorge photos and digging out pictures of historic bridges along the old Columbia River Highway. This combines two of this humble blog's longtime OCD-ish preoccupations: The Gorge, and bridges, and the more I think about it the more I'm surprised I hadn't gotten around to this until now. For the benefit of anyone from out of town who's reading this, the Columbia Gorge is where the Columbia River cuts through the Cascade Mountains, forming a wide steep-sided canyon, with a large number of waterfalls where side streams drop into it. It's the only way through the Cascades that doesn't involve a high mountain pass, so it's been a main transportation route as far back as archeological records go in this part of the world, perhaps back to pre-Clovis times. Today, Interstate 84 runs along the Oregon side of the river, and Washington's SR 14 runs along the river's north bank, with busy rail lines parallel to each of these roads. A century ago, the original Columbia River Highway wound its way through the Gorge from Portland out to The Dalles. It was a showpiece of early 20th century civil engineering, as well as one of the region's first paved roads.

The old highway had to cross quite a few streams on its way east, and the state invested more than was strictly necessary in creating attractive bridges to fit their surroundings. The segment east of Hood River, which was built in the early 1920s, features a few bridges credited to Conde McCullough, the famous bridge engineer, and the guy whose designs show up in coffee table books a lot. The earlier western segment of the highway features bridges designed and built by some far more obscure names: Lewis W. Metzger (who designed the bridge at Eagle Creek, among other things), Charles H. Purcell (who created the state's bridge division, and who later was chief engineer constructing San Francisco's Bay Bridge), and Karl P. Billner, who designed many of the Gorge's more famous bridges, like the Benson Footbridge at Multnomah Falls; the Latourell and Bridal Veil Creek bridges; and the subject of today's post, the Shepperds Dell Bridge, which crosses Youngs Creek in Shepperds Dell State Park.

Like many bridges on both sides of the Gorge, the one here is a concrete deck arch bridge. That seems to have been the vogue at the time, and multiple designers went with it independently. So while the Shepperds Dell Bridge is a reasonably common design, it was a cutting edge one at the time, and it's a great example of the style. The setting doesn't hurt either, it must be said. As with a number of other bridges along the old highway, it was surveyed in 1990 for the National Park Service's Historical American Engineering Record. The resulting description goes into a great deal of detail about how the falsework was done, the exact dimensions of joists, later repairs to bridge railing spindles, that sort of thing. It's all there, if you're so inclined. Which is to say that someone who was truly obsessive about the subject could only use this humble blog as a mere starting point. It's almost as if I'm reasonably normal and well-adjusted, relative to this other hypothetical person.

Bridal Veil Creek Bridge

The bridges along the old Columbia River Highway in the Gorge are a mixed bag. Some are showpieces of early 20th Century civil engineering and design, others you barely notice. The Bridal Veil Creek Bridge is one of the more minor entries, one I hadn't paid any attention to before I decided Gorge bridges were a new blog project. It's not very big, for one thing. It crosses Bridal Veil Creek immediately above the falls, like the bridge on Ruckel Creek, so it doesn't have a large chasm to span like the Shepperds Dell and Latourell Creek bridges. Like most of the bridges along the Multnomah County segment of the highway, it's a Karl Billner design, and the diagonal concrete braces are sort of reminiscent of his much larger design at Latourell Creek, if you squint. So it's got that going for it, though I'm not sure I'd have clued in on the resemblance if I didn't already know the same person designed them. A 1915 article by Billner about various bridges he'd designed throughout the Gorge mostly focuses on the Latourell Creek Bridge, but mentions the one here in passing; it seems the Bridal Veil bridge needed to clear 3 log flumes as well as the creek, which contributed to it having a different and more utilitarian design.

Unlike many of the old highway's bridges, this one was built without sidewalks for some reason, so I haven't walked across it. It also has a very low railing, and the falls drop away immediately to one side of the bridge, so it would be really easy for rubbernecking tourists or overeager photographers to slip and take the 2 second grand tour. (I learned this phrase at the Grand Canyon, where a ranger called it the twelve second grand tour.) So there's at least one sign sternly warning pedestrians away from the bridge and the area around it.

The important point about all that is that I had a tough time getting a decent photo of the bridge, since the usual "on" and "next to" shots were out of the question, or at least forbidden by fierce official signs and what little common sense I have. The Library of Congress has a couple of historic photos of the bridge from various angles. Those and one of the Bridgehunter photos indicate there's a spot just below the bridge that gives a better look at it than you get at the base of the falls (which is where I took the photos here). I'm not sure how you'd get there, and you'd probably be standing with your back to a steep cliff right behind you. I know I've already taken this bridge project a bit far, but I'm not quite that dedicated. I could be wrong about that, maybe there's a secret safe spot for taking bridge photos if you know where to find it. If such a spot exists, Google isn't saying.

The Oregonian database doesn't have much to say about this little bridge, which I guess is understandable. Multnomah County awarded a pair of bridge-building contracts in March 1914, almost exactly a century ago, with a requirement to have them all completed by August 1st. One of the two covered the Bridal Veil bridge, along with the highway bridge on Multnomah Creek and viaducts on either side of Multnomah Falls, for a total of $40,050, which is around $940,000 in today's money. So maybe $250,000 in contemporary dollars for this bridge. I'm no bridge engineer, but that at least sounds like the right order of magnitude if you were building an equivalent new bridge at the same spot today.

Somewhere upstream of the bridge is Upper Bridal Veil Falls, a large waterfall with no official trail to it for some reason. They can be reached with some difficulty now, and there's a proposal to build a 2.5 mile loop trail that takes in Middle Bridal Veil Falls as well. The proposed trail would head under the bridge and then upstream along the creek. If they build it someday -- and I'm speaking out of venal self-interest here -- I'd get at least two new waterfall blog posts out of it, and I could update this post with better photos. I'm not sure what's involved in prodding the Powers That Be into action, but I'd be happy to sign the petition, if there's a petition circulating out there somewhere.

Latourell Creek Bridge

Some photos of the Latourell Creek Bridge, which carries the old Columbia River Highway at Latourell Falls. Obviously the falls are the main event here, but if you continue along the trail past the falls, it soon takes you right under the bridge, so you get a decent view of it from below. (The trail continues on to Upper Latourell Falls if you do the whole loop hike.) Off the top of my head I can't think of of another example in the Gorge where you hike under one of the old highway's bridges. Like many of the historic bridges along the highway, this is a Karl P. Billner design. Many of the others are solid concrete arch bridges, while this one is a light, almost spindly sort of structure, a design that was driven by the limitations of the site.

A contemporary account from a 1915 issue of Steam Shovel and Dredge magazine (Vol. XVIV, Issue 1, pg. 67) describes the project, and the issues Billner had to solve:

The Latourelle Bridge is an example of [Billner's] skillful handling of a unique problem. The engineer acknowledges indebtedness to the French expert, M. Considere, for the principles of his design, but they type is original with him. WIth a length of 312 ft. and a height of 97 ft., and a 17-ft. driveway, two cantilever sidewalks and railings, he has used in construction above ground only 560 cu. yds. of concrete, making probably the lightest concrete bridge in this country. Bedrock was from 25 to 50 ft. below the surface, making the cost of piers and abutments for a heavy bridge excessive. Both piers and abutments were founded on bedrock, the west abutment and center columns directly, the east abutment on four columns, two 4 ft. sq. and two 5 ft. sq., with an average depth of 45 ft. from the under side of the abutment to the rock. Inclined struts connect the tops of the 5-ft. columns to the bottoms of the 4-ft. columns, transmitting the thrust from the arches to the rock. Two girders at each end of the bridge carry a set of columns and struts which support the roadway. The result is a cantilever effect in wich the cantilever action is disregarded. Three 80-ft. arch spans form the central part of the bridge and two arch ribs carry each span. They are reinforced with eight 1-in. sq. bars hooped with No. 0000 hooping of 18 in. diameter and 2-in. pitch. Vertical columns spaced 10 ft. apart support the deck load, and these columns are braced with diagonal members hooked round the reinforcement of the arch ribs and girders. Permissible stresses were assumed as follows: Concrete in bending, 600 lb. per sq. in.; in direct compression, 500 lb. per sq. in.; hooped concrete in arch ribs, 750 lb. per sq. in.; steel in tension, 16,000 lb. per sq. in.; steel in shearing, 10,000 lb. per sq. in. A uniform load of 100 lb. per sq. ft., a concentrated load of 15 tons and an impact factor of 25 per cent were adopted. The main columns were poured in sections, the arch ribs simultaneously, and the 250 cu. yds. of concrete in the deck in one operation, lasting 20 hours.

In 1990 the bridge was inventoried as part of the National Park Service's Historic American Engineering Record, with a rather exhaustive account of the bridge's design, construction, and even maintenance history. One interesting tidbit is that it was apparently designed with internal electrical conduits for some sort of lighting scheme that was never installed. I suppose it has more of a natural feel this way, but I can't help thinking that streetlights at dusk on this bridge would make for a really great photo.

Billner sounds like an interesting guy, and his work in Oregon has been greatly overshadowed by later bridges designed by Conde McCullough and the rest of the state highway department. I had never heard of him until I started in on the Gorge branch of the ongoing bridge project. Conde McCullough gets flashy coffee table books about his work; Billner doesn't even have his own Wikipedia article, or at least he didn't when I wrote this post. The Smithsonian's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation has a brief bio of him, at least, and notes that the University of Wyoming archives have 54 boxes of his papers.

Karl Pauli Billner (1882-1965) an engineer and inventor, was born in Billesholm, Sweden and came to the U.S. around 1900 and worked as an engineer in Oregon. He returned to Sweden in 1915, working as a construction engineer and developed a lightweight concrete known as Aerocrete. Billner settled in the U.S. permanently in 1926 and established Vacuum Concrete Corporation in Philadelphia in 1935 and served as its president until his death in 1965. Vacuum Concrete performed construction work worldwide, using a vacuum process developed by Billner to extract excess water from newly poured concrete.

Collection contains subject files on Aerocrete, construction projects and patents for Billner’s vacuum process (1927-1962); newspaper clippings (1916-1956); 4 16mm films, "Aerocrete" parts 1 and 2, "Vacuum Concrete in the USSR," and "Octopus Lifter, La Guardia Airport"; patents for Aerocrete and the vacuum process (1934-1959); 5 photograph albums; photographs pertaining to Vacuum Concrete’s operations worldwide; and speeches by Billner on concrete construction (1953).

All in all, he was awarded around 21 US patents relating to concrete construction, awarded over a nearly 50 year period, including:

• 3055694: "Vacuum Lifter"
• 2145473 "Method of and apparatus for cleaving or splitting rock or the like"
• 2009984: "Method of leveling cellular concrete"
• 2376414: "Method of making concrete structures"
• 2455650: "Handling apparatus"
• 2548935: "Method of molding joints between spaced structural members"
• 1307179: "Ferroconcrete floor construction"

As I've noted in this blog's About page, I'm a mere software engineer by trade, and this is one of those times where I'm a little envious of real engineers. I have a handful of patents myself, albeit of the software variety, and they're barely valuable now, and will probably be incomprehensible an century from now. Some of the code I wrote as far back as 1999-2000 is still in use, or so I've heard, but I can't imagine any of it being useful in a hundred years. It would take a very specialized sort of historian to even understand the problem it's designed to solve. But design a bridge, at least a particularly notable one, and a century later someone will come along and wonder who you were, and dig up various tidbits and details about you using fancy internet search technology you could not have even conceived of, and instantly share it with their handful of Gentle Reader(s), who hopefully find it somewhat interesting as well.

Oneonta Creek Bridge

Here are a few photos of the historic Oneonta Creek Bridge, which once carried the old Columbia River Highway across the creek of the same name. This bridge was abandoned in place when the Oneonta Tunnel closed circa 1954, and it was used for Oneonta Gorge parking for many years. Parking moved to the far side of the tunnel after it reopened in 2009. It's one of several Karl P. Billner bridges along the road, and like many of the others it uses the "concrete arch & cap" style, one of a handful of design motifs used repeatedly along the old highway, as described in a post on WyEast Blog. The Library of Congress has some vintage photos of the bridge from a variety of angles if you want a better look at it from below, not that it's that spectacular from that angle. It's not one of the major bridges along the highway, but it's a reasonably attractive minor one, and it was designed by the guy who also created many of the highway's more famous and distinctive bridges. So I figured this one merited a blog post of its own too. We'll be hearing more about Mr. Billner in the future when we visit some of his better known designs.

I should point out that right next to the historic bridge is the current Gorge Highway bridge, which isn't exactly brand new either. It probably dates to when the highway was rerouted around the old tunnel, so it's roughly 60 years old at this point, versus a mere 40 year age difference between it and its predecessor. But the newer bridge is not part of the original highway, so nobody pays a lot of attention to it; a lot of bridge websites and so forth refer to the older bridge as "the" Oneonta Creek Bridge even though there's another one right next to it, plus additional bridges for the Union Pacific railroad and Interstate 84 a short walk downstream.

The observant reader might notice I've done posts about the tunnel and the bridge here, but not any about Oneonta Gorge itself, much less the hidden waterfall at the far end of the gorge. It's on my to-do list, it really is; it's just that a trip up Oneonta Gorge requires a bit of wading, which works a lot better in warm weather, and I haven't quite decided which electronics I'm willing to risk getting wet. There's a similar wading situation for Gorton Creek Falls further east in the Columbia Gorge; I've never actually been there, so that's higher up my priority list than Oneonta Gorge, but I plan on getting around to both sooner or later.

Long before the bridge or the highway went in, Oneonta Gorge was inconvenient to visit. In an 1886 account of a trek to Oneonta Gorge, our heroes convinced the railroad to stop and let them off nearby. They waded up the gorge and were disappointed to realize the hike to the falls was rather shorter than they'd been told. So they switched to fishing for a while, and were surprised (and annoyed) to stumble across other visitors to the gorge. This is an eternal problem in the Columbia Gorge, even when you think you've found an out-of-the-way, obscure corner to have all to yourself for a while.

Which brings me to a little adventure that isn't really on my todo list to repeat anytime soon. Some years ago it occurred to me that it was strange how little access to the Columbia River there is through this part of the Columbia Gorge. I-84 and the railroad are effectively a wall between all the popular tourist stops and the river. Oneonta Creek passes under I-84 in a big pipe, a culvert really, but one big enough for an adult person to clamber through without crawling or anything. Or at least that was possible circa 1994; I haven't checked since then. In any case, that's what I did, and found there was a big empty sandy beach along the river on the other side. Well, almost empty. I walked downstream along the beach for maybe a mile or so, and ran across a group of people with a little campfire on the beach. I think they might have just pulled off on the freeway shoulder and hopped over the barrier; I'm not sure where they came from, and I'm sure they wondered the same thing about me. Wary nods of acknowledgement were exchanged but I didn't stop and say hi or anything.

Further along, at Multnomah Falls, the eastbound and westbound lanes of I-84 diverge for a bit, and the main falls parking lot sits between them. I'd figured this was a good place to cut inland since you only had to get across the westbound side of I-84, and there was a perfectly nice tunnel under the eastbound lanes so visitors could get to get to the falls. The me of 2014 absolutely does not recommend doing this, but it's what 1994 me did. And then from Multnomah Falls I just walked along the Gorge Highway to get back to my car at the Oneonta Gorge parking lot. I don't recommend doing this either; there's little or no shoulder along much of the road, and passing cars and RVs to worry about. Plus the walk along the road just seemed a lot further than walking along the beach. At one point I did score a discarded cassette tape of mariachi music, which I probably still have around somewhere. All in all I wouldn't recommend it though, even with the random roadside finds. If for some reason you do decide to brave the pipe under I-84, and I'm not saying you should, and I don't know whether you even still can, but if you do, you should probably go back the same way you came and not try to make a big dumb loop out of it like I did.