Salmon Falls, Washougal River

The next installment of the ongoing waterfall thing takes us to Salmon Falls, a low (7') waterfall on the Washougal River about an hour's drive NE of Portland. The link goes to its rather cranky Northwest Waterfall Survey page, which is mostly about why it's too small and doesn't deserve its own page, and only has one because it has an official name and a major road and bridge are named after it.

It has a nice setting and is reasonably picturesque, despite a rather ugly fish ladder on one side of it. So if you feel like visiting, it's visible just upstream of the Salmon Falls Rd. bridge, which you can get to by going out SR14, turning at the same place you would for Cape Horn, but continuing north a few miles instead of parking at the lot there. Or just take Washougal River Road til you get to that bridge, which is a slightly longer but more picturesque route.

Once there, your best bet is to park at the turnout on the south side of the bridge and walk halfway across the bridge and take your photos from there. After that there really isn't anything else to do here. You can't get any closer to the falls, or down to anywhere on the river upstream or downstream of there. It really looks like this ought to be a nice community swimming hole or river access spot, but instead you're confronted by lots of very stern "Private Property" and "No Trespassing" signs, even more than what you'd ordinarily see in a very conservative rural area like this. There's actually an interesting story behind this, which I'll get to in a minute.

Before we get to that, a bit on the significance of the falls, which seemed to mystify the Waterfall Survey reviewer. The page mentions that this was said to be a historical barrier to migrating salmon but is doubtful about this claim. It's true, though. In general, any sheer drop over about six feet is a barrier to migrating salmon, since for most salmon species that's about as high as they can jump in a single leap. (Chum salmon are a bit less talented in the jumping department and can only manage something like 4-5 feet.) This would just be an interesting bit of fish trivia, except that it was key to a mid-20th Century scheme by salmon biologists to try to improve on nature.

By the 1950s, fishery scientists had figured out that salmon runs were declining across the Northwest, and they even knew the reasons why, more or less, hydroelectric dams and other habitat losses being the major contributors. They also understood, correctly, that there was zero chance of fighting the dam-building industry and winning in those days, and came up with an alternative they hoped would avoid that fight. The idea was that all across the Northwest there were whole watersheds that ought to be perfect salmon territory, if not for a waterfall or two in the way, often just a foot or two too high for salmon to get past. So they figured that putting in a fish ladder here and there would let salmon pass these barriers. Which, in theory, would open up a vast swath of territory for new salmon runs, replacing the ones lost to dams, and everyone lives happily ever after.

A big complicating factor is that under normal circumstances, salmon imprint on their stream of origin and want to return there and nowhere else, and won't go looking for a new stream if home ends up behind a dam. Obviously sometimes they do go rogue and look for new territory, otherwise they wouldn't have been all over the region in the first place, but exactly what environmental cues make them do this are still not understood very well. A 2009 thesis I ran across summarizes what was known about it at that point, and in the 1950s it would have been a complete mystery. So (as explained in a 1956 Oregonian article about the newly modernized Washougal River) they dealt with the salmon-and-egg problem by building a whole fish production system, centered on a fish hatchery about as far upstream as you want the new salmon run to go, along with fish ladders at all barriers downstream so the salmon can do their one-and-done commute. Then you start with some migrating fish collected somewhere else, fertilize the eggs in a big vat, and raise the baby salmon in pens until they're big enough to release, and hopefully they imprint on the river and hatchery at that point. Then they swim out to the sea for a few years, and eventually instinct leads them right back to the hatchery, where they're stunned and processed into new baby salmon. This process is not exactly nature's beautiful circle of life at work, and the whole rationale behind it has really fallen out of favor now, but it does more or less work as designed, and it provides a guilt-free supply of catchable salmon, so I guess there's that.

Aside from fishing, parts of the Washougal River have also become popular for whitewater sports, and there are a couple of pages at American Whitewater for river segments that begin and end right around the falls. The latter page notes that the historic take-out above the falls is private property and boaters are no longer welcome there. Down in the comments there's a repost of a belligerent email dated 2006 and addressed to the site admins, pointing out that the state only owns the fish ladder, while all the land around it is private property, and the landowner will definitely call the sheriff and press charges against all who trespass there. The email then demands they remove any mention of Salmon Falls from the website (which they obviously haven't done), and finishes by saying so-and-so "pays the taxes".

The "pays the taxes" bit was an odd phrasing and it piqued my curiosity. A few minutes of googling led me to the 2011 decision in a long-running land dispute dating back to sometime before 1963. This wasn't a trespassing case, exactly, but an adverse possession situation. This is the legal doctrine that if you live on or use a piece of property as if you own it, for some amount of time, and nobody stops you, you become the new legal owner. You don't have to actually squat there full time, but you do have to use it, and the exact definition of "use" depends on the nature of the property. That could mean farming on farmland, and for commercial property it might be running a business there, or paying bills, or doing maintenance, or collecting rent. In this case, the disputed land was a steep, blackberry-choked hillside with no obvious uses at all, beyond a couple of trails the plaintiff/adverse possessor had created for their own personal access to the river. Apparently the legal precedent here is that no matter how useless a property seems to be, the act of putting up "No Trespassing" signs or otherwise excluding people from the land counts as using it, since that's the full extent of what any owner could do with it. This wasn't a purely hypothetical issue here, since the general public had come to see this as a customary river access spot, and a previous landowner was on record saying it was basically futile trying to keep people out, though he'd call the sheriff sometimes when things got out of hand. Also at issue, apparently, was which adjacent landowner had put up "No Trespassing" signs first, and who was more diligent about replacing these signs after they were stolen or vandalized. The court found in favor of the plaintiff -- the person who "pays the taxes" in that 2006 nastygram was the primary defendant -- and the case ended in 2012 when the state Supreme Court declined to review the decision.

I'm not a lawyer, and have no opinion about the case or its outcome either way; I just like finding a clear explanation for all the anti-trespassing signs, so I don't have to guess, which usually ends up as a ridiculous yarn about Bigfoot. Looking around the area nearly a decade later, the place just had kind of a weird and bad vibe to it, even though I couldn't put my finger on exactly why at the time. It seems as though the whole area settled down into a sort of tense neighborhood Cold War after the case wrapped up, neighbor against neighbor, and each neighbor separately against you, an outsider and potential trespasser (and thus a threat to their land title). This is probably not somewhere where you'd want to have car trouble and need to knock on anyone's door for help.

If it's any consolation, when agents Mulder and Scully stop by a few weeks or months later to investigate what really happened to you, they'll almost certainly uncover some sort of ancient evil that's the real reason behind the endless courtroom battle, for all the good that will do you. In support of this theory, here's a strange YouTube video from Salmon Falls that I only ran across after hitting 'publish' on the first version of this post. It seems there's some kind of creepy underwater cave or rock formation or structure right at the falls called "The Tube", and the poster got in the water there to check it out, and it's bound to be related to the aforementioned ancient evil somehow. It might be a lair, or a portal, or something along those lines. That's all I know about the place, because there's nothing else about it on the interwebs as far as I can tell, and any narration the video had has gone missing because the poster unwisely set it to a Pink Floyd song, and the music industry muted it. Allegedly for copyright reasons, but it stands to reason the copyright police are in league with the ancient evil, and are doing their part to keep the truth from getting out there. That, or the whole thing is a plot by Google to sell YouTube Premium, since signing up supposedly unmutes the video. Also here's a video of a guy unwisely jumping off the bridge at Salmon Falls, ending right as he hits the water. Just gonna assume he was drawn there against his will, and eaten right after that. But enough about Salmon Falls.

Kalakaua Ave. Bridge

So here's a photoset of Honolulu's Kalakaua Avenue Bridge, a 1929 Art Deco structure over the Ala Wai Canal at the ewa end of Waikiki. Hawaii is famous for a lot of things, but an abundance of interesting bridges to look at is not really one of them. On O'ahu there's the one here, and the Rainbow Bridge up in Haleiwa on the north shore, and... that's about it. BridgeHunter has a whole page of links for the island, but most of the others are either small and utilitarian, or aren't bridges at all; there are a few tunnels listed (like this one for example), which is not unusual for the site, but they also list the Koko Crater Trail, an abandoned railway that -- as cool and fun as it is -- is in no way a bridge or a tunnel.

In 2014 the state conducted a fairly exhaustive study of potentially-historic bridges around the state, because -- as the introduction chapter explains -- federal transportation money is tied to having done an evaluation like this, and a previous attempt in 2008 was incomplete and had not been done correctly, and an earlier effort in 1983-1990 was now outdated and its results had been inconsistent between islands. And this was at a time when the state was trying to lock down a few extra billion dollars from the feds for Honolulu's upcoming light rail system, so there was a lot riding on getting the job done properly this time. So the O'ahu chapter of the study comes to 451 pages (although this number again includes a few tunnels along with the bridges; no Koko Crater Trail though). The Kalakaua Avenue Bridge part starts on page 338 and explains that this overly-swanky bridge helped persuade people that Waikiki -- which had been a swamp a few short years earlier -- was now highly desirable real estate. We're told that the bridge originally had globe-shaped street lights at either end, but these had been removed at some unknown date, and despite this alteration the bridge had been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1985.

The study mentions elsewhere that there's another NRHP bridge over on the windward side of the island: The He'eia Viaduct (near He'eia State Park) dates to 1921, is 892 feet long, and (according to a 1986 history paper) was the longest bridge in the state for decades afterward. And I've been over it any number of times on a bus without noticing it. Was I really staring at my phone every single time passing through here? Or am I really that unobservant? Or both? In any case, it's on one of my many todo lists now, so I may pay it a visit at some point if the global pandemic ever goes away.

Second Multnomah Creek Bridge

The next stop on our grand tour is a bridge the Oregon Hikers Field Guide calls the "Second Multnomah Creek Bridge", where the Larch Mountain Trail #441 crosses Multnomah Creek a bit upstream of Multnomah Falls. I suppose they count going upstream, so the Benson Bridge counts as the first one, this is the second one, and then there are third, fourth, and fifth bridges further upstream along the trail, and yet another along a different trail along the same creek. After I took the photos here I branched off onto the Wahkeena Trail #420 and don't have any photos of the bridges further upstream, at least not yet. In related news, I think I may expand the Gorge bridge project to trail bridges in the area. It's true that most of them aren't that amazing or unique, but I think of it as a little extra motivation to get out more and go a little further. Although this obviously has to wait until the area reopens after the big Eagle Creek Fire, and nobody knows when that's going to happen.

Other than the OregonHikers link above I couldn't really find anything else about this bridge. If you look closely you can see it's built around a corrugated steel pipe, with stone added along the visible parts to make it blend in with the bridge piers, which look older. If I had to guess I'd say it dates to maybe the 80s or 90s, just based on the amount of moss growing on it, but I'm just guessing here. The lack of info is a shame because I'd really like to know how they got the pipe up here. It seems too big to go on an ATV or to be carried up the trail by a work crew. A helicopter seems more likely, but I didn't see any old news articles to that effect, so who knows?

Up until the late 1990s this spot was a major trail junction. Where the Larch Mountain Trail continues upstream, the Perdition Trail branched off and headed due west toward Wahkeena Falls, making a shorter and easier loop than the Wahkeena Trail one. At one point along the Perdition Trail there was a long wooden staircase, which burned in an October 1991 forest fire. The Forest Service built replacement stairs out of concrete, to prevent the new ones from suffering the same fate, but they washed out a few years later, I think during the 1996 floods. At that point they just sort of shrugged and wrote it off. The trail is still there but it's been marked as officially closed for over 20 years now and no longer appears on official maps of the area. Despite that, a lot of people still know it's there, and hikers regularly wander past the closed signs and occasionally need rescuing. Legal says I have to tell you not to do this, and I personally haven't been on it since I was a kid, long before the closure. And of course the whole area's closed due to the big fire, so I suppose the Perdition Trail is currently double closed, so if forest rangers catch you there they probably feed you to Bigfoot or a forest Sarlacc or something. I do remember the old trail was pretty scenic in parts, so if they ever get around to fixing & reopening it (like a couple of forum threads speculate about), I'd consider that a great use of federal tax dollars. I mean, imagine what you could do through the entire Gorge for the price of a single F-35. I mean, along with improving health care, schools, and housing, obviously.

One fun thing I ran across, searching for info on this little bridge, was a reminder that the trails around this area are all quite old. "Following the Trails Above the Columbia" (in the August 28th 1921 Oregonian) explores the familiar Multnomah-Wahkeena loop, featuring all the same sights as it does today. The only difference I see is that there wasn't a Return Trail #442 yet, so in those days you had to walk along the highway between Multnomah & Wahkeena Falls and hope nobody ran you down in a Model T.

In other vintage motoring and travel news, that article was immediately followed by a news item about the California car dealers' association planning a huge party in Tijuana, from a more innocent time when people announced that sort of thing in the newspapers:

These two days will be gala ones in the exotic town of whirring wheels, dancing señoritas, snapping castanets, and hot tamale cabarets, according to the announcement of the San Diego County Auto Trade association.

It is the latter organization that is going to stage this party (or “fiesta” as one says in Española) and the members are urging their fellow members from far and wide to come and partake of the unvolsteaded enjoyment that will be offered in six-cylinder style.

The cutout of joy will be wide open and their will be no speed limit on jazz whatsoever — the two days will be devoted to a “reg’lar” high jinks, according to U.S. Grant, president of the San Diego trade dealers.

"Unvolsteaded" is the key detail here. That was a cute way of saying the Volstead Act -- federal Prohibition legislation -- was adamantly not in force south of the border.

Um, anyway, a September 7th 1915 article about the grand opening of the new highway includes a brief mention of excited crowds hiking the trail loop, so the trail is at least that old and there would've been some sort of bridge here back then. The article spends more time on the main event, a grand picnic at the base of Multnomah Falls or somewhere thereabouts, with bands, speeches, and wholesome athletic events, because that's what people did for fun in 1915. The article even lists event winners for posterity; there were a few categories of 50 yard dash, plus picnic staples like a three legged race, a sack race, a wheelbarrow race, and a tug-of-war. There was also a "ladies' nail-driving contest, three nails", a pie-eating contest -- Helen Hidenrieck won the girls' division by virtue of being the only entry -- and a "fat men's race". That immortal event was won by one B. Ruella, with G.W. Long placing second. No third place was announced because "judges could not decide in the scramble".

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.

SW Capitol Hwy./Bertha Blvd. Viaduct

This humble blog's ongoing bridge project isn't just about Columbia Gorge bridges, though I've been doing a lot of those lately. I started out with Portland-area bridges; I think the Morrison Bridge was the first of the bunch, and I did all the (Portland-area) Willamette bridges after that, and then the Columbia ones, and then some on the Sandy, Clackamas & Tualatin Rivers, and things just sort of got more and more esoteric from there. In general this humble blog doesn't aspire to be a new-Portlandy hipster website, but I think I'm rather good at finding things You Probably Haven't Heard Of. For bridges, this is often guided by ODOT's 2013 Historic Bridge Field Guide, in which the agency listed a bunch of bridges it felt were historically significant, often for technical reasons only a bridge engineer would care about. This is nice if you're looking for blog material, because you can just point at the guide and shrug and say the experts think this bridge is important, and who am I to argue? This policy has led to visiting some really obscure stuff, like the Ochoco St. Bridge, the Denver Ave. - Columbia Blvd. bridge, and the half-viaduct at NW Melinda & Maywood. A couple of those posts turned out to be interesting to work on, even when the subject matter wasn't particularly photogenic. In my defense, I didn't make the trip just to look for this bridge; I was in the area to track down the nearby Sasquatch Brewing pub (which I hadn't been to before), & then realized there was an item on my big TODO list nearby, and it seemed like a good idea after a couple of beers, so here we are. (This isn't a beer blog, for the most part, but I do recommend the pub; good food, good beer.)

So on that note, here we are in the Hillsdale neighborhood to look at an old overpass at the messy intersection of Capitol Highway, Bertha Blvd., Bertha Ct., Beaverton-Hillsdale Hwy., & SW 18th Ave. I had sort of assumed it dated to 1950s car mania, back when freeway-style intersections were supposed to be the bright future of getting around town as fast as possible. Turns out it's quite a bit older than that. Here's the blurb from part 4 of the historic bridge guide (which is organized alphabetically by county & split into 5 pdfs):

Description: Seven reinforced concrete girder spans with small curved haunches
Significance: This bridge is one of the few remaining segments of the original route of the Capitol Hwy, later superseded by the West Side Highway. The bridge originally crossed over the Oregon Electric Railway. Widened with two additional girders in 1929, the bridge retains its early feel though the use of a replica of the original decorative railing. A short staircase provides pedestrian access to the underside of the bridge.
Character Defining Features: Decorative railing, Location
Alterations: A 2011 rehab project included repairs to the concrete and replaced the remaining 1915 railing with a replica.

I realize "small curved haunches" is a technical engineering term, but I still kind of giggle at it. I bet bridge engineers giggle too, at least while they're undergrads.

Anyway, the passenger rail line was ripped out & replaced by Bertha Blvd. in the 1930s, and when that happened they just kept the existing bridge over the railroad, like what happened at SW Barbur & Multnomah. Note that ODOT goofed & got the railroad wrong; the trains that ran through Hillsdale were the Southern Pacific's Red Electric service, and the Oregon Electric was a competing company that crossed the West Hills further south.

A few historical items from around the interwebs:

• The Multnomah Historical Association has a 1920 photo from Capitol Highway looking toward the bridge.
• A circa-1932 photo showing the old rail line.
• A SWTrails page about walking the Red Electric Trail, which slowly being pieced together from parts of the old interurban right-of-way.
• A SW Connection article about present-day remnants of the city's passenger rail history. It mentions in passing that the Bertha stop (and thus the present-day boulevard) was named for the wife of a railroad executive. The stop wasn't called "Hillsdale" like the neighborhood because it sounded too much like Hillsboro, the line's ultimate destination. Inattentive riders have an uncanny way of getting off at the wrong stop; I know this is true, having done so on MAX a few times.
• A HistoryHunters.net page with facts about the old rail line, and photos showing what a few parts of the old right-of-way look like today.

And then there's a 2015 OregonLive story about the 1920 Red Electric train collision on the old interurban line, in which eight people died and over a hundred were injured; nearly a century later it's still the worst public transit accident in Portland history. The article begins with people waiting at the Bertha stop, but the collision happened further south along the line, somewhere near present-day Stephens Creek Nature Park. The Multnomah Historical Association page has a page all about the wreck, with (fortunately non-gory) photos.

The old Bertha rail station was located around where the Watershed at Hillsdale senior housing complex is now. Before that was built circa 2007, the land sat empty for several decades; it seems it was a contaminated brownfield site, and an Oregon DEQ filing from the construction approval detailed the various uses the site had gone through over the years. First a rural dairy farm, then an interurban rail stop, then a gas station/garage/junkyard, which is where the contamination came from. The study found additional contamination that turned out to be goop from an old dry cleaning operation seeping downhill and ending up here. Yuck.

I don't have any photos from under the bridge because the Capitol/Bertha/Bertha/Beaverton-Hillsdale intersection is not really a fun place to walk around; the streets are busy and congested, and the crosswalks (and sidewalks) are few. But there's at least one improvement in the works nearby. The aforementioned Red Electric Trail project will soon have a new segment through here, detouring west around the busy intersection, partly on the unused right-of-way for a SW Dakota Street that only exists on paper. The planned trail segment isn't that long, but it needs to cross a deep gully next to Beaverton-Hillsdale, so a shiny new footbridge is in the works. They're aiming to make it at least reasonably photogenic, so if I'm in the area again once it's done I might need to stop and take a few photos.

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.

Multnomah Creek Railroad Bridge

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

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

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

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.

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.