Oregon Slough Railroad Bridge

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As you might already know, a few years ago I sort of stumbled into a bridge project for this humble blog. It started out with the Morrison Bridge, then a couple of others, then I figured I'd go ahead and do all the Willamette River bridges in town. Then I decided to do Columbia River bridges, and somehow ended up doing Clackamas and Sandy River ones too. And now... I guess I'm not really sure what the scope of this thing is anymore. There have been a few trailing items out there, trailing because I haven't been able to get quality photos of them. With the Clackamas River Railroad Bridge, I finally threw up my hands and figured I'd just go with the subpar photos I had, and try to make up for that with a little extra history work. The Lewis & Clark Bridge at Longview is likely to get a similar treatment. I have exactly one blurry photo of it, but it's a long way to go just to take more bridge photos.

And then there's the subject of today's post, the Oregon Slough Railroad Bridge (aka BNSF Bridge 8.8) between Hayden Island and the south bank of the Columbia. The Vancouver Railroad Bridge carries trains the rest of the way, between Hayden Island and the Washington side of the river. It's similar to what the obscure North Portland Harbor Bridge is to the Interstate Bridge. The cool thing about it is that (like its Vancouver sibling) it's a swing span bridge, where part of the bridge pivots out of the way instead of raising when ships need to pass. Ok, I'm probably stretching the word "cool" to the breaking point here, but hey, I kind of specialize in that. Bridge 5.1 on the Willamette is on the same railroad line, and it used to be a swing span too until it was replaced in the 1980s.

I don't imagine this bridge has to open very often; there are a handful of commercial shipping businesses of some sort along the south side of the channel, but most of the channel is just houseboats. Still, I saw at least two people at the bridge's operator booth, possibly for a shift change. So I suppose it's always ready and able to open if the need arises, once in a blue moon. If you're ever doing pub trivia and they ask you to name all the Portland bridges that open, this is the bridge that will win you the contest, assuming you have a good trivia master. The others are, on the Willamette, doing downstream: Hawthorne, Morrison, Burnside, Steel, Broadway, and BNSF Bridge 5.1. Then on the Columbia, it's the Interstate, the Vancouver Railroad Bridge, and this one here. That's the whole list. Feel free to split your winnings with me, or at least leave a comment and say thanks, if you'd be so kind as to do that.

I've had a todo item for this bridge for quite a while. I drove by the bridge a several times but never could find anywhere to park. I had a couple of photos from the North Portland Harbor Bridge showing it way off in the distance, and I almost just went with those. Then I realized there was a segment of the Marine Drive Trail atop the levee from the Expo Center to the bridge, so I could just ride the MAX Yellow Line to the end and walk the rest of the way. This worked pretty well, and I got a bonus look at that weird bit of trail. It doesn't look like it gets a lot of use. I saw one other person there, and he was practically a speck off in the distance. He kept looking back, I guess to make sure I wasn't going to mug him or something. Then it started raining heavily. It could be my imagination, but the guy way up ahead seemed to relax when he realized I had an umbrella and wasn't just trudging along in a hoodie, like the umbrella was a badge of respectability and non-threatening-ness or something. I'm not sure how that works, to be honest.

Hood River Bridge

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Here's my one and only photo from the Hood River Bridge, which spans the Columbia River between Hood River OR and White Salmon/Bingen WA.

It's a toll bridge for vehicles, and bikes and pedestrians aren't allowed at all. It's not because the Port of Hood River hates bikes or pedestrians; the bridge is quite narrow, with an open grate bridge deck and no sidewalks at all. They recently studied what it would take to add a pedestrian walkway to the bridge, either cantilevered off to one side, or possibly below the main deck. The study concluded the bridge likely can't support any additional weight without reinforcing the bridge supports, and its design makes it difficult to widen. They came up with a rough estimated price tag of around $10 million, money the port doesn't currently have. The study mentions the deficiencies of the bridge beyond the pedestrian problem, namely that it's too narrow for modern vehicles, such that vehicles are always banging into it, and it's well past its original design lifetime of 75 years. Replacing the current bridge was estimated at around $250 million, with the caveat that money for a new bridge isn't likely to be available anytime soon, given the two states' many other transportation priorities.

Back when I was doing Willamette River bridges, a key part of the project was to walk across each one and take some photos, where possible (i.e. not railroad bridges). I even got the Marquam & Fremont bridges by signing up for the Portland Bridge Pedal a few years ago. And when I started thinking about Columbia River bridges, the Interstate and Glenn Jackson were both walkable. It occurs to me now that those two might be the only walkable Columbia bridges until the Cable Bridge, way off in the Tri-Cities. The Astoria-Megler Bridge bans pedestrians except for a once-a-year fun run. I've considered doing the bridge pedal thing and signing up just so I can take some photos. But Astoria's a long drive and I haven't gotten around to it. The Hansen Bridge + Westport Ferry combo is supposed to be doable by bike. There's also a long walk across Puget Island between the two water segments if you're going that way by foot. The Bridge of the Gods is actually part of the Pacific Crest Trail, and as I recall they charge 50 cents to cross the bridge on foot. You'd be walking on the main roadway, though (because again, no sidewalks), with the usual open grate deck so you can see the river churning along beneath your feet. As I recall the bridges at The Dalles and Biggs/Maryhill are in the same boat as the Hood River bridge: Old, narrow, no sidewalks, no pedestrians or bikes. East of there I'm not so sure. I seem to recall the I-82 bridge is without sidewalks, anyway, and the Cable Bridge definitely has them. The ones in between I'm not so sure about. It's possible a road trip is required here...

Tri-Cities BNSF Bridge

When I stopped briefly in the Tri-Cities to snap some photos of the famous Cable Bridge, there was a BNSF railroad bridge in the background and I ended up taking a few photos of it too. It looks like your average utilitarian railroad bridge, with a bunch of truss segments and a lift span, but it turns out this one is quite old (by Northwest standards) and historically significant. Its HistoryLink page explains that it was built way back in 1888, completing a key missing link in the Northern Pacific transcontinental railroad between Minnesota and Puget Sound, and the towns of Kennewick and Pasco were founded here on opposite banks of the Columbia River, thanks in large part to the railroad.

Before the bridge was completed, a steamboat railcar ferry served here for several years. Trains would be demated and the railcars slowly barged across the river. Once reassembled on the opposite bank, the train would continue on its way. This sounds kind of crazy but it does actually work, so long as you don't care too much about speed or the cost of manpower. A similar arrangement once operated near Portland until the Vancouver Railroad Bridge went in.

Eastern Washington was still part of the wild west in the bridge's early years, and the Kennewick side of the bridge was the scene of a big outlaw shootout in 1906. It's a proper Western tale, with posses, horse thieves, an improbable jailbreak, and an unsolved mystery. I don't keep up on Tri-Cities news that closely but I assume the area isn't quite so rough-n-tumble anymore. Still, in 2011 the city of Kennewick managed to get the bridge designated as a "potential terror target", netting a cool $250k in Homeland Security pork cash.

I did come across a couple of good photos of the bridge to pass along: one of the bridge at sunrise, and another taken on the railroad tracks looking across the bridge.

Cable Bridge

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A few photos of the Cable Bridge, which crosses the Columbia River between Kennewick & Pasco, Washington. It's a cable-stayed bridge, as the name suggests; it picked up the name because it was one of the first cable-stayed bridges in the United States, and it was kind of a novelty at the time. Many sources insist it was the first, but I was poking through a book on inspection & maintenance of cable-stayed bridges, and it points out that the Sitka Harbor Bridge in Alaska dates to 1971, making it a good 7 years older than the Cable Bridge.

I remember visiting my grandmother in Kennewick, not long after the bridge opened, and being amazed by it. I mean, I think I was amazed most of the time at that age, but still. I probably picked up on the local civic pride about the thing. The older Pasco-Kennewick Bridge sat right next to the Cable Bridge at the time, although it had been abandoned in place when the new bridge opened. My grandmother went on and on about how the new bridge was modern and forward-looking and something to be proud of, while the old bridge was an eyesore that needed to be torn out. That finally happened in 1990, after twelve years of legal battles.

This type of bridge still isn't common in the Northwest. Right now the only cable-stayed bridge I know of in Portland is the big skybridge at OHSU, and it'll remain the only one until the new TriMet MAX bridge opens in 2015.

Julia Butler Hansen Bridge

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Several years ago, I did a post about the Wahkiakum County Ferry, which crosses the Columbia River between Westport, Oregon, and Washington's Puget Island. This was before bridges became a thing here on this humble blog, so I just included the above photo and noted there was a bridge from Puget Island to the Washington mainland, and moved on. Only later did I realize I'd made a serious omission, to the degree that anything on this blog counts as remotely serious. I'd decided a while back that I ought to include bridges to islands in my little project, for the sake of completeness, hence the posts last year about the Sauvie Island and Lambert Slough bridges. Clearly, a new bridge post was required here too.

I've had something of a mental block about reusing photos in multiple posts, so I entertained the notion that I needed to go back and take new photos specifically of the bridge. I think I'm sort of getting over that idea, though; I ended up reusing the same photos in multiple Cleveland bridge posts just because it's very difficult to take a photo of only one bridge there and not have three others in the background. I mean, I'm quite willing to go do something absurd and tedious for the sake of a blog post on a blog almost nobody reads. I think I've demonstrated that pretty conclusively already. It's just that I prefer it to be easy and not too time consuming. So I think we're going to go with the one recycled photo this time around.

In that spirit, let's move along. The Julia Butler Hansen Bridge connects Washington's Puget Island with the north bank of the Columbia at Cathlamet, WA. The bridge's HistoryLink.org page indicates it was once known simply as the Puget Island - Cathlamet Bridge until it was renamed in the late 1980s to honor the area's longtime state legislator & US Representative. Further downriver, a National Wildlife Refuge for the endangered Columbian White-Tailed Deer is also named in her honor.

Bridge proposals had been discussed repeatedly for several decades before today's bridge was built; in 1922 the states of Oregon and Washington studied bridging the entire river at Puget Island, rather than the bridge and ferry arrangement we ended up with. I imagine that would have been a massively expensive project had it been built, but the news article notes that one of the engineers doing the study was Conde McCullough, who designed many of the classic Art Deco bridges along the Oregon Coast. So it's hard not to daydream about what might have been. The eventual bridge is much more utilitarian-looking, and seems to have been built in part as a Depression-era stimulus project. It's not that visually captivating as far as bridges go, and I doubt it attracts many tourists on its own merits (I mean, it didn't even draw me back there), but it at least has its own Structurae & BridgeHunter pages. I tend to use that as a measure of whether a bridge is officially "obscure" or not, but I admit I may have something of a warped perspective on the subject.

The Cathlamet Chamber of Commerce has a brief catalog of things to see and do around Puget Island, many relating to its Scandinavian heritage. A 1953 Oregonian article gives a sense of just how physically and culturally isolated Puget Island once was, dubbing it "Little Norway", and noting that many residents once spoke Norwegian at home. The separate island culture more or less fell by the wayside after the bridge opened, and the local single-room schoolhouse closed in favor of school buses to the English-speaking mainland.

The bridge was dedicated on August 26th 1939, just days before the outbreak of World War II. In Washington DC, President Roosevelt pressed a button to officially open the bridge. Rep. Hansen presided over the ceremony, and various politicians and dignitaries spoke. US Senator Lewis Schwellenbach alluded to contemporary events as he spoke: "Senator Schwellenbach drew a parallel between the peaceful purposes for which America builds roads and bridges and the military use for which they are designed in Europe.". Sigh...

Vantage Bridge

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A few photos of Eastern Washington's Vantage Bridge, where Interstate 90 crosses the Columbia River at the tiny burg of Vantage, WA. The usual bridge-nerd sites ( BridgeHunter and Structurae ) have pages with all the engineering trivia you'd ever want to know about it.

The current bridge, and the current town, only date to around 1962 when the Wanapum Dam flooded their previous incarnations. And before them, a history article at the Ellensburg Daily Record explains that a small car ferry plied the Columbia at this spot, and the original town of Vantage sat next to the ferry at yet another townsite. I suppose the town (such as it is) could move yet again if they ever remove the dam to help salmon runs or something. The whole thing reminds me of a certain 1970s folk-rock song about the impermanence of almost everything. The guy with the blue ruffled tux adds an extra layer of cheesy awesomeness to the video. If you ask me.

As for the original 1927 Vantage Bridge, instead of demolishing it the state elected to move it to a spot on the Snake River east of the Tri-Cities, where it now serves as the Lyons Ferry Bridge. It's a fairly huge bridge in its own right, and I'm really curious how they moved it. I've come across several reminiscences about Snake River life before the bridge came, but so far nothing about how the bridge actually got there. If anyone out there has links, info, photos, home movies, etc. about how they pulled this off, feel free to post a comment down below. Thx. Mgmt.

Sam Hill Memorial Bridge

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Today's entry in the ongoing bridge project takes us way east to the Sam Hill Memorial Bridge, which carries US 97 over the Columbia River between Biggs Junction, Oregon, and Maryhill, Washington, home of the Maryhill Museum and a famous Stonehenge replica. The bridge has a Bridgehunter page, and a page about it at Columbia River Images explains the history of the bridge and the ferry it replaced.

A Bend Bulletin story about the bridge dedication gives an inkling of what a big deal it was to finally have a bridge at this location. At one point the US portion of the Alaska Highway was going to be designated part of US 97, and the Bulletin story daydreams that this would make all of 97 part of the Pan-American Highway system spanning North and South America. Which I suppose would help the regional economy, with all the through truck traffic on the lucrative Rio de Janeiro to Fairbanks route. Or something.

Bridge of the Gods

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Today's fun adventure (yes, another one) takes us out to the gorge again, but this time we aren't going to a waterfall. No, this is an installment in the ongoing bridge project, which somehow still isn't done. This time we're visiting the grandly-named Bridge of the Gods. The name refers to a Native American legend about the spot: As the story goes, the original Bridge of the Gods apparently was a pile of debris from a huge landslide on the Washington side of the river, temporarily damming the river and making it possible to cross here without a boat. Eventually the debris eroded away until only the Cascades rapids remained, and the land bridge passed into the realm of myth and legend. And now even the rapids are gone, submerged by Bonneville Dam.

When I heard the legend as a kid I had a mental image of it as an enormous natural arch bridge that collapsed into the river. Which would have been even cooler than debris from a titanic landslide, if somewhat improbable under the rules of real life geology.



If you'll permit me, I'm going to go on a tangent here about "Indian legends". The name "Bridge of the Gods" is almost certainly a Euro-American coinage. At some point in the late 19th Century, some sensitive poetic soul wandered through the gorge assigning melodramatic Victorian names to everything that resembled a geological feature. Some of them stuck around to the present day, like "Angels' Rest", "St. Peter's Dome", "Pool of the Winds", and, well, "Bridge of the Gods". When people of that era said a story was an Indian legend, I suspect they allowed themselves certain artistic liberties, up to and including making stuff up out of whole cloth. There are just a few too many stories about the gods warring over fair maidens, doomed lovers leaping to their deaths together hand in hand, and so forth, all things that also just so happen to be cliches in schlock Victorian poetry. It doesn't really help that one of the main sources for the legend's Wikipedia article presents the tale in genuine Comic Sans. Oh, and doesn't cite any sources of its own either. And here's an even more stilted version, starring "Coyote", "Thunderbird", and the "Spirit Chief", among others. Again, no sources are cited. So until I can find either a tribal source saying yes, this is the story as it's always been handed down, or an academic source supporting the idea, all I can really say is that it's a story that's widely claimed to be an Indian legend.


So enough about legends. The current bridge has a Structurae page with details on the bridge's unexciting cantilever truss construction, and the Port of Cascade Locks (which owns and operates the bridge) has an info page about it, including current toll info.



You can't really tell from these photos, but there's no sidewalk on the Bridge of the Gods. However it's also the official way to cross the Columbia if you're hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. Apparently you just hike on the roadway and hope vehicles on the bridge notice you. Did I mention that the bridge deck is an open metal grate, so you can look down and see the river far below? And it's really, really windy in this part of the gorge? And that you have to pay a fifty cent toll for this privilege? It's true. It's not hard to imagine what the obligatory "not dying on the bridge" angle is this time



Another key part of the bridge project involves me walking across and taking photos from the bridge and of it. But that only applies when a bridge has a sidewalk on it. If it's technically legal but I'd have to walk in the road on on the shoulder to do it, I'm generally going to pass on the idea. I realize Pacific Crest through hikers do it all the time, and may even schlep a pair of quarters all the way from the trailhead on the Mexican border in order to do so. But Pacific Crest Trail hikers do a lot of other things I don't do, and I'm not all that broken up about it. The only person I know who's tried hiking the whole thing ended up breaking an ankle a couple of weeks in and had to be rescued. In contrast, in the 5-some years this blog's been around, I have a clean record of zero broken ankles and zero wilderness rescues, and I kind of like it that way.

Glenn Jackson Bridge

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The ongoing bridge project finally takes us to the Glenn Jackson Bridge, which carries Interstate 205 over the Columbia River. This one had been on my TODO list for quite a while, but it took a while for me to get around to it. I'd covered a few other bridges in the past on lunch breaks from the office (one advantage to working downtown), and others (the Interstate Bridge included) by getting an early start and visiting before work. The Glenn Jackson Bridge was just too far away and too long to make either of those work. I considered walking it on a weekend, but this is still just an idle and rather pointless project, and it was never a very high priority when it came time to decide what to do on the weekend. I do have a life, you know, and a reasonably normal one in fact, despite what the contents of this humble blog might lead you to believe. In any case, I finally managed to work it in when I took a staycation back in July, and even then it was competing against a long list of other things I thought I might like to do.

The first hurdle to get past is realizing the bridge is walkable in the first place. It's a big, long, wide freeway bridge, and it would not be at all unusual for such a bridge to have no pedestrian or bike facilities of any kind. That tends to be the rule rather than the exception. (See I-205 Clackamas River Bridge, I-84 Sandy River Bridges, Abernethy Bridge, Boone Bridge, etc.). The Glenn Jackson Bridge does have a pedestrian path, however, and a rather unique one at that. Rather than the usual configuration with north and southbound sidewalks on the edges of the bridge, there's a single walkway up the middle of the bridge.

The sheer length of the bridge is kind of a problem too. The bridge crosses a rather wide part of the river, plus Government Island in the middle, and it curves while doing so, so the bridge is over 7000 feet from bank to bank. Meaning that if you walk across and back, it's a nearly 3 mile round trip. Which is fine and all for anyone in reasonable shape; it just means it'll most likely take longer than you can get away with squeezing out of the start or middle of a work day. And besides the length, the bridge is also not flat. The Washington side of the river features high bluffs, and the bridge connects to the bluff top. So if you're heading north on the bridge, the main span from Government Island to the Washington shore is uphill the entire way, which is annoying.

Parking was kind of a problem too. I'd hoped there was a way to just ride a bus or MAX to somewhere near the bridge, then walk across one way, and catch another bus back across the river. But that just isn't possible. The Washington side is firmly in suburbia, and the Oregon side is semi-suburbia, and there just isn't a wealth of transit options out there. So I had to fall back to the old routine of driving to the bridge, finding somewhere to park, and then walking across and back. And unlike the Interstate Bridge there aren't city parks with parking lots on either end of the bridge. The Oregon side does have big box stores with huge parking lots, at least, which is the next best thing other than the small but nonzero possibility of being nabbed by one of the city's predatory towing companies if they figure out you aren't a customer. As I did with the North Portland Harbor bridge, I superstitiously appeased the retail gods by going in and buying something. The closest store is the Home Depot on Airport Way, so I picked up a couple of houseplants, which have already appeared on this humble blog at least once.

The approach would be a lot simpler if you arrived on the I-205 bike path; the pathway on the bridge is just the logical continuation of the bike path further south. If you get on the path right at the foot of the bridge like I did, I suspect you're in an extremely small minority. Still, it's possible.

So assuming you found somewhere nearby to park in the vague area of the Home Depot store, you first want to find the stairs or ramp up to the bike path, since it's already elevated nearly to freeway level. Once you're up there, look around for an intersection. If you head straight north, the bike path dead ends at Marine Drive. If you turn west at the sign that cryptically says "WASH POINTS", you'll cross over a freeway ramp, and then under the northbound side of the freeway (an underpass that tends to be a bit garbage-strewn), and then you get to a sharp corner you can't see around. Around that corner you'll find a ramp leading up to the bridge walkway, in a sort of narrow canyon. While walking up the ramp, I looked behind me nervously a couple of times to see if any TIE Fighters were chasing me, but they must've had the day off too.

Once you're up the ramp, you're on the bridge, or at least on the way to the bridge. It's kind of weird having 3-4 lanes of freeway traffic zooming by on either side of you. Weird, and very noisy. You might want to bring earplugs, really, or a good pair of headphones. Or just deal, I mean, you probably aren't going to get permanent hearing loss or anything, it's just kind of annoying.

Anyway, it's a long slog just to get to the river, and then you cross to forbidden Government Island, where big signs instruct you to stay on the pedestrian path and not run across a bunch of lanes of freeway traffic and then tumble down a steep slope to get to the island. Similar signs warn drivers there's no access whatsoever to the island from the freeway. There are a couple of docks so boaters can set foot on the island, but even then you aren't supposed to venture inland. This is all quite peculiar. Government Island is technically a rather obscure Oregon state park, but the center of the island is either owned by or leased to someone who grazes cattle there. Or at least that's the cover story. It isn't hard to dream up conspiracy theories about the place. As I was walking along this part of the bridge I realized I was humming the theme to Jurassic Park. No joke. I mean, suuure they're raising cows, but only so the velociraptors have something to eat. Besides, with a name like "Government Island", you just know they're up to no good.

While you're walking this leg of the bridge, you might notice that planes taking off and landing at PDX often fly right over the bridge at a very low altitude. This is a big reason why the bridge doesn't have a great deal of aesthetic appeal when you drive or walk over it. Any type of bridge that featured towers or suspension cables would be considered a safety hazard and the FAA would veto it.

So after the island you still have to walk, and walk, and walk, and it's uphill all the way to the Vancouver side. And once you're there, there's another ramp down to street level. There, everything else is shaded by the bridge, but sunlight streams down from the ramp as if it belonged to an alien spaceship (as seen in the closing scenes of E.T. & Close Encounters of the Third Kind, for example). Before heading back, walk over to one side a few steps for a view of the bridge's titanic columns. It's all just a little otherworldly. Although you're still in the 'Couve, and mundane suburban traffic is whizzing past behind you as you wait for the aliens to descend.

Unless you have a ride arranged on the Vancouver side, you'll eventually have to retrace your steps: Up the ramp to the mothership, and then back past the velociraptors and under the jets, down the Death Star trench, and back to the mini-mall we go. At least this time it's downhill. On a bike I expect this would actually be kind of awesome. A mile and a half, paved, no cars to worry about, downhill basically the whole way -- where else in town are you going to find something like that? I counted about two dozen cyclists on the bridge on this little adventure, about 2/3 of them heading in the downhill direction. And zero other pedestrians.

We can't wrap this up without touching on the obligatory "not dying" angle, which as usual is a real stretch. Although it's incredibly noisy at times on the bridge, you're pretty safe from traffic unless there's an apocalyptic CHiPS-style mass car accident, with big explosions, semis hurtling through the air, that sort of thing. You could possibly die of old age while walking back and forth, so there's that. Also, you could mistake an actual alien mothership for the Vancouver bridge ramp, and walk up the wrong one, and end up in a bizarre alien lab where they're trying to learn about human mating behavior, and eventually die of exhaustion. So there's that too. Or the velociraptors escape and get you. Or maybe the pterodactyls. There's just no end to the bizarre imaginary dangers if you really put your mind to it.

Astoria-Megler Bridge

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From deep in the mini-roadtrip archives, here are a few photos of the Astoria-Megler Bridge, which crosses the mouth of the Columbia out in Astoria. I just did a post on Portland's Interstate Bridge, so it seemed like a good time to post these. That way it almost looks like my posts here aren't completely random, I guess.

I'm not going to bother with a "pictures from the interwebs" section. It's on the coast, and a large chunk of the coastal workforce is employed making pictures of various bridges along the coast. Go ahead, check Flickr, or do a Google image search. You'll be inundated.

I probably ought to apologize for having so few photos of the bridge here. In my defense, these were taken the year before last, using a puny compact digicam, and I had no idea at the time that I was about to get sucked into an ongoing bridge project. If only I'd known, I'd have taken more photos, and some of them might have even been good. It's possible, but now we'll never know...



Continuing on... As far walking goes, sadly we're faced with the same situation as with the Fremont & Marquam bridges in Portland: Generally speaking, pedestrians are banned from the bridge. The bridge was built in 1966, back when people thought walking was obsolete, and so there's no sidewalk on the bridge. However once a year they do offer something called the "Great Columbia Crossing", where you do get a chance to run or walk across the thing. It's scheduled for October 11th this year (2009) and I've thought about driving out and having a go at it. But I probably won't get to it this year, so don't hold your breath. You're free to try it without waiting for me though (in case you didn't already realize this), although I should point out that the bridge is four miles long, and no guarantees can be made about what mid-October weather on the Oregon Coast will be like. In the meantime, here's a good blog post about a trip to Astoria which included last year's Columbia Crossing, also with pastries and herons (though not all at the same time).

Actually I'm going to go ahead and violate the "no photos from the interwebs" rule I just made, briefly, to pass along a couple of photosets from the 2007 edition of the event: one on Picasa, the other on Webshots. Also, here's the Flickr set that goes with the blog post I just mentioned. Ok, there, we're done.

You might note that I don't have any photos from on the bridge itself. I was on a solo mini-roadtrip at the time, so I didn't have someone to drive as I took photos, or to take photos as I drove. And driving over the bridge is a white-knuckle experience if you don't do it on a regular basis, so I didn't seriously consider driving and taking pictures at the same time. I suppose you get used to driving the bridge if you do it regularly. Either you do that, or you drive way upstream and take the ferry at Westport. Which is kind of interesting, but it's not what you'd call fast. As it turns out, I actually drove across the bridge on this trip just so I could drive upstream and take the ferry back to the Oregon side.



As for the semi-obligatory "links from the interwebs" part, a couple of the usual suspects come through for us again here.

• There's a Structurae page for the bridge, although it mostly repeats the info in the Wikipedia article.
  
  
• There's also a page at Columbia River Images that gives a bit more background on the bridge, and on the ferries that preceded it.
  
  
• The same site has a page about Megler, which (unlike Astoria) isn't a city or even a proper town. The usual phrase for a place like this is "wide spot in the road", but I tried to find the place and didn't even notice a wide spot in the road. There isn't even a ghost town full of picturesque ruins, since abandoned wooden buildings don't last long in this climate. I suppose it could've fallen into the sea similar to Port Royal in Jamaica, and someday some lucky marine archeologist will find the drowned city and its fabulous piles of pirate booty. There might even be mermaids and mermen guarding it. But I wouldn't bet on it.
  
  Other than a few old pilings in the river, there seems to be nothing right on the Washington side of the river, and as far as I can tell this "Megler" place is purely mythological in nature. Or if not purely mythological, perhaps the town appears in the coastal mists just once a century, like a sort of flannel-wearing redneck Brigadoon, with banjos instead of bagpipes. But I wouldn't bet on that either.
  

How to walk the Interstate Bridge (and not die), while you still can

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So I thought I'd go and walk across the Interstate Bridge a while back. Back in April, actually, and I'm only getting the post together now. And prior to walking the bridge, there was a span of several months between when I decided to have a go at it and when I actually did it. Everything about the Interstate seems like an enormous undertaking. It's a very long bridge, over a very wide river, and it carries a very busy freeway; the whole thing got to be quite a daunting prospect. If it hadn't occurred to me to break the adventure up and do the North Portland Harbor Bridge on a different day, I'm not sure I'd have gotten around to it yet, quite honestly. It's not the distance exactly; I'm not that out of shape. Finding a few free (i.e. meeting-less) hours on a sunny day was the problem. It doesn't actually take a few hours, but I hate feeling rushed when I do these bridge things. If you do that, you hurry through and don't notice everything you should, and you miss out on a lot of good photos that way.

So the plan for this adventure was to park in the 'Couve, walk across to the Oregon side, cross under the freeway, and walk back on the other side of the bridge. I figured this was an important detail because the northbound and southbound sides are technically separate bridges; the northbound one was built in 1917, and the southbound companion wasn't built until 1958. It's natural to think of them as a unit though, since they're two halves of the same logical bridge, they always open in unison, and the 1958 bridge was designed to look almost identical to the original -- which showed a remarkable amount of historical sensitivity, by 1958 standards.  And since I am who I am, it was crucial to walk both sides for the sake of completeness.  I'm sorry, it's just a thing with me, I guess.

Columbia River bridges weren't originally part of the ongoing bridge project, but I figured I ought to at least cover the Interstate before the Powers That Be tear it out and replace it. That's not going to happen quite immediately; the project -- which goes by the kinda-pretentious name "Columbia River Crossing" -- is supposed to cost billions and billions of dollars, and the handwringing has only just begun, and nobody's entirely certain where the money's going to come from -- but it's reasonable to assume the clock's ticking. Not everyone's sold on the idea, though, and there's a school of thought that suggests we don't genuinely need a new bridge, and building the big 12-lane beast they're considering will just drive suburban sprawl on the far reaches of the 'Couve, and in a few years we'll be back to the level of congestion we see now.

I don't have a firm opinion about the new bridge one way or the other, and I'm not convinced the interwebs need yet another angry blogger ranting and shrieking on about it, either pro or con. I have, however, gotten a bit tired of people heaping scorn on the existing bridge all the time. It's held up rather well for a bridge from 1917, and people have mostly forgotten what a huge achievement it was back when it was first built.  People of the era really poured their hopes and dreams into the thing -- it's fair to call it obsolete, but bashing it just seems kind of tacky.

As evidence of what a big deal the Interstate Bridge once was, consider the set of plaques at both ends of the bridge, which bear a variety of inscriptions.  Some list the contractors who built the bridge, or provide various vital statistics about it. Others carry quotations by various historical figures on the subject of bridges.  The Final Report by the engineers who designed and built the bridge includes copies of the inscriptions, which I'm reproducing here:

1915
THIS BRIDGE IS DEDICATED TO THE
CITIZENS OF OREGON AND WASHINGTON BY
WHOM ITS ERECTION WAS ORDAINED. IT WAS
CONCEIVED OF THEIR VISION, ITS FOUNDA-
TIONS ARE LAID UPON THEIR SACRIFICES.
THE SPIRITUAL HERITAGE OF COURAGE, FAITH
AND HIGH ENDEAVOR BEQUEATHED TO THIS
GENERATION BY THE PIONEERS WHO WRESTED
FROM THE WILDERNESS THESE WIDE AND FRUIT-
FUL LANDS, IS BUILDED INTO ITS MEMBERS
OF STONE AND STEEL AND HERE HANDED DOWN
TO THE GENERATIONS THAT COME AFTER.

1917



THE COLUMBIA RIVER INTERSTATE BRIDGE
BUILT BY THE PEOPLE OF CLARKE COUNTY
WASHINGTON. AND MULTNOMAH COUNTY OREGON,
UNDER DIRECTION OF THE COLUMBIA RIVER
INTERSTATE BRIDGE COMMISSION, RUFUS C
HOLMAN, CHAIRMAN, COMMISSIONERS FOR
CLARKE COUNTY, A. RAWSON, CHAIRMAN. W S.
LINDSAY, JOHN P. KIGGINS. COMMISSIONERS
FOR MULTNOMAH COUNTY, W. L. LIGHTNER.
CHAIRMAN, PHILO HOLBROOK, RUFUS C. HOLMAN.
THE GOVERNOR OF OREGON. LEGAL ADVISERS.
WALTER H. EVANS, JAMES O. BLAIR. ARTHUR
MURPHY. CONSTRUCTION BEGAN MARCH. 191S.
COMPLETED JANUARY, 1917.

The "Clarke County" bit is actually not a typo. Despite being named for non-'e' William Clark of Lewis & Clark fame, the county was named "Clarke" until 1925. Which is kind of fitting actually. If you've ever read Lewis & Clark's journals, you've probably noticed their, uh, individualistic approach to English orthography.



THE COLUMBIA RIVER INTERSTATE BRIDGE
DESIGNED AND BUILT UNDER DIRECTION OF
JOHN LYLE HARRINGTON. KANSAS CITY, MO.,
WADDELL & HARRINGTON (NOW DISSOLVED ) ,L0 UIS
R. ASH & ERNEST E. HOWARD, CONSULTING
ENGINEERS. F. M. CORTELYOU. RESDT. ENGR.



CONTRACTORS: MANUFACTURE OF STEEL.
AMERICAN BRIDGE COMPANY. NORTHWEST STEEL
COMPANY. ERECTION, PORTER BROTHERS.
FOUNDATIONS. THE PACIFIC BRIDGE COMPANY.
EMBANKMENTS. TACOMA DREDGING COMPANY,
STANDARD AMERICAN DREDGING COMPANY.
PAVEMENTS, WARREN CONSTRUCTION COMPANY.



"OF ALL INVENTIONS, THE ALPHABET
AND THE PRINTING PRESS ALONE EXCEPTED,
THOSE INVENTIONS WHICH ABRIDGE DISTANCE
HAVE DONE MOST FOR THE CIVILISATION OF
OUR SPECIES. EVERY IMPROVEMENT OF THE
MEANS OF LOCOMOTION BENEFITS MANKIND
MORALLY AND INTELLECTUALLY AS WELL AS
MATERIALLY, AND NOT ONLY FACILITATES
THE INTERCHANGE OF THE VARIOUS PRODUC-
TIONS OF NATURE AND ART, BUT TENDS TO
REMOVE NATIONAL AND PROVINCIAL ANTIPA-
THIES, AND TO BIND TOGETHER ALL THE
BRANCHES OF THE GREAT HUMAN FAMILY."

— MACAULAY.
The Macaulay quote is an excerpt from a longer passage about bad roads and taxation in 17th century Britain. This is actually a comment on a website that presents the diary of Samuel Pepys in blog form, which is a clever and intriguing notion.



THE COLUMBIA RIVER INTERSTATE BRIDGE.
TOTAL LENGTH OF BRIDGE AND APPROACHES
4^ MILES. COMPLETED JANUARY, 1917. TOTAL
COST $1,760,000. THE BRIDGE OVER THE COLUM-
BIA RIVER 3,531 FT. LONG. CONSISTS OF ONE 50
FT. SPAN, THREE 275 FT. SPANS AND TEN 265 FT.
SPANS; AND CONTAINS 7350 TONS OF STEEL,
17.650 SQ. YDS. OF REINFORCED CONCRETE
DECK, 15.000 SQ. YDS. OF PAVEMENT. 21.600 CU.
YDS. OF PIERS SUPPORTED ON PILES EXTEND-
ING TO 160 FT. BELOW ROADWAY. THE TOWERS
EXTEND TO 190 FT. ABOVE ROADWAY.



"YOU MAY TELL ME THAT MY VIEWS ARE
VISIONARY. THAT THE DESTINY OF THIS COUN-
TRY IS LESS EXALTED. THAT THE AMERICAN
PEOPLE ARE LESS GREAT THAN I THINK THEY
ARE OR OUGHT TO BE. I ANSWER. IDEALS ARE
LIKE STARS. YOU WILL NOT SUCCEED IN TOUCH-
ING THEM WITH YOUR HANDS. BUT LIKE THE
SEA-FARING MAN ON THE DESERT OF WATERS.
YOU CHOOSE THEM AS YOUR GUIDES AND
FOLLOWING THEM, YOU REACH YOUR DESTINY."

-CARL SCHURZ.

The bio's worth a read. I'd never heard of Mr. Schurz before, and I had no idea anyone managed to be both an 1848 German revolutionary, and a Union general during the US Civil War, among other things. Of course you never read a lot about prominent German-American immigrants in history. World wars tend to result in that sort of thing being quietly forgotten, I suppose.



THE COLUMBIA RIVER INTERSTATE BRIDGE
APPROACHES

THE BRIDGE OVER OREGON SLOUGH. 1.137 FT.
LONG. CONSISTS OF ONE 115 FT. SPAN AND TEN
100 FT. SPANS. THE BRIDGE OVER COLUMBIA
SLOUGH IS 307 FT. LONG AND CONSISTS OF FOUR
75 FT. SPANS. THESE BRIDGES CONTAIN 1,725
TONS OF STEEL. 7.150 SQ. YDS. OF REINFORCED
CONCRETE DECK. 6,100 SQ. YDS. OF PAVEMENT,
5,700 CU. YDS. OF PIERS. THE EMBANKMENTS
HAVE A COMBINED LENGTH OF 18.000 FT. AND
CONTAIN 1,500,000 CU. YDS. PAVEMENT ON EM-
BANKMENTS 56.000 SQ. YDS.



"THEREFORE WHEN WE BUILD. LET
US THINK THAT WE BUILD FOREVER. LET
IT NOT BE FOR PRESENT DELIGHT, NOR
FOR PRESENT USE ALONE. LET IT BE SUCH
WORK AS OUR DESCENDANTS WILL THANK US
FOR, AND LET US THINK, AS WE LAY STONE
ON STONE, THAT A TIME IS TO COME WHEN
THOSE STONES WILL BE HELD SACRED BE-
CAUSE OUR HANDS HAVE TOUCHED THEM, AND
THAT MEN WILL SAY AS THEY LOOK UPON
THE LABOR. AND WROUGHT SUBSTANCE OF
THEM. 'SEE THIS OUR FATHERS DID FOR
US.'"

— RUSKIN.

The Ruskin quite is also inscribed on the floor of the Chicago Tribune Tower. And undoubtedly elsewhere, as you can probably imagine how this sentiment would appeal to architects. A few other uses of it here and there on the web too, apparently now including the humble blog you're currently reading.

It's hard to see all those and not develop a sentimental attachment to the bridge, regardless of how obsolete it might be. People always go on about how much they love the Hawthorne, and the Interstate is a very similar design, just a lot bigger. Ok, and with noisy triple trailer semis barreling past you at slightly over the speed limit (which can't really be helped, this being an interstate freeway). But on the bright side, there's actual bridge structure between you and traffic, which you don't get on the Hawthorne, so it's almost certainly safer. (Consider this accident from last June -- if a truck's going to lose a load of rebar, I'd kind of prefer to have something solid between it and me.) And there isn't a problem with bike congestion like the Hawthorne gets these days, so there's that. Plus the view from the bridge is something you won't see any other way, unless you're stuck in traffic on the bridge, and even then it's somehow just not the same. Watch the river from the bridge for a few minutes, and you'll quickly realize that the Columbia is a serious river, fast and wide and deep and quite unlike the (mostly) tame little Willamette.

For whatever it's worth, Wikipedia's list of rivers by length has the Columbia at #51 worldwide. If you sort that list by average volume (in cubic meters per second), it comes in at #26, or at #20 if you delete everything that's a tributary of some other river. Ok, so that's almost certainly wrong (since the list is missing volume stats for a large number of rivers), and meaningless even if it was accurate. But it should at least get across the general idea that this isn't some seasonal arroyo or lazy bayou here.

As a result, it's a long walk across the bridge. This can't really be helped; in fact, under current plans the new bridge will be an even longer walk, since it will have to be built in a curve around the site of the current bridge (which will remain open while the new bridge is built).

In addition to the length, access to the bridge is an issue. It's not obvious how to get to either end of the bridge, and I had to stare at Google maps for a while before figuring it out. The bridge walkways end practically right at the water's edge on each side. On the Vancouver side it's at least sort of close to downtown Vancouver. Columbia St. continues south from the downtown core a bit and curves under the bridge, becoming Columbia Way at that point. There are spiral ramps on each side leading from the street up to the bridge; as small and obscure as they look, they're your one and only way to get on or off the bridge if you're walking or on a bike. I think the street has sidewalks the whole way through here, and it's not all that busy, so it ought to be safe once you know how to find it. On the Hayden Island side, you have to navigate the Jantzen Beach freeway interchange and the adjacent maze of big-box suburbia, and once you're done you still aren't to the other side of the river. At that point you have to make your way to the North Portland Harbor bridge, and once you've done that you're in industrial NE Portland. You still have to cross the Columbia Slough too, and as of yet there's no bike/ped lane on the I-5 slough bridge. Denver Avenue is nearby but the road's in bad shape. If you're heading into downtown Portland, your best bet is probably to go over to the Expo Center at this point and hop on the MAX train. One more thing to point out: If you're going to be using the west walkway on the bridge, you need to cross under the freeway at some point on Hayden Island, since the harbor bridge only has a bike/ped lane on the east side. It starts right next to Hooters, you can't miss it.

A BikePortland article from last year claimed that the cities of Portland and Vancouver were working on a new map that explained how to get on and off the Interstate Bridge. I can't seem to find a copy of that map online though, so I don't know if they ever followed through on the effort. Maybe they just couldn't figure it out. The article does have a couple of "sneak peek" bits of the map, so maybe if you enlarged those in Photoshop or something you might get a useful map out of it.

Updated 8/13/2010: Ok, the map does exist, and they've even created an instructional video about crossing the bridge safely, believe it or not. The goods are here, courtesy of Metro.

Another problem for pedestrians, and especially cyclists, is that the bridge walkways are very narrow, and the railings are alarmingly low if your center of gravity is up at bike level. Another BikePortland piece discusses whether it would be better to just ride on the freeway instead. The (unusually sensible) consensus there is that riding on the freeway is an exceptionally poor idea. Which brings us to the obligatory "not dying" bit. Don't ride on the freeway, especially at night, thus getting smooshed by a triple trailer semi full of rebar going 75 mph, the driver too busy texting or surfing porn or whatever to notice you puttering along on your trendy fixie bike without lights or reflectors. If I can't convince you not to do this, at least wear a freakin' helmet, or at least don't wear all black. Or if you really must wear all black and not use a helmet for reasons of hipness, well... I was about to suggest you at least do it sober, but it occurs to me that if you're going to do something this monumentally stupid, you might as well be drunk or high when you do it. At least it won't hurt as much that way. And if you survive, and you tell people what you did, and they demand to know why you did something that dumb, you have an instant excuse they can't really argue with. Not that I'm trying to help with this or anything, because I'm not. So don't.

Also, if you're crossing the whole river you'll need to cross the North Portland Harbor bridge too, and the not-dying angle there involved rogue banana peels. So watch out for those too.

Anywayyy, that cheery bit brings us to the inevitable "stuff from around the interwebs" part of the post.

• The bridge has a Structurae page
• Washington state DOT hasa page about it as well.
• two pages at Columbia River Images
• A great Columbian article on the history of the bridge, complete with a spooky ghost story:
  

  
  "On foggy fall evenings there are rumors that a tall man wearing an overcoat and dark felt hat can be seen out walking on the I-5 Bridge. Stories say this is the ghost of Vancouver Major Grover Percival. Apparently, the despairing mayor walked out onto the bridge on election night in 1920 and never returned. He hung himself and it was a month before his body was found on Hayden Island."
  

  
  And sure enough, the list of mayors of Vancouver shows a "G R Percival" as mayor for a single two year term between 1918-20.
• A series of photos at Pernoctalian
• The Interstate gets a mention in a tour of local bridges at Jackieinpdx's Blog
• Vintage photos of the bridge, for sale at the William Joseph Gallery
• The PortlandBridges page about the Interstate.
  
• A moody pseudo-vintage photo on Corbis. I'd almost believe it was from the 1930s or 1940s, but for the contrail in the background.
  
• A construction photo in the University of Oregon archives
  
• A whole bunch of Flickr photos: [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] [ 6 ] [ 7 ] [ 7 ] [ 8 ] [ 9 ] [ 10 ] [ 11 ] [ 12 ]
  

North Portland Harbor bridge

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What you see here is one of the most-used and yet most obscure bridges in town. The North Portland Harbor bridge carries I-5 between Hayden Island and the south bank of the Columbia. If you've ever been stuck in traffic on I-5, and you looked down and saw houseboats, this is where you were.



The obscurity is understandable, I guess. It's your basic 50's-60's concrete bridge, and there's nothing very notable, memorable, or decorative about it. It also crosses a side channel of the Columbia (the eponymous "North Portland Harbor", also sometimes called "Oregon Slough") , with the main channel spanned by the much better known Interstate Bridge (about which a post is forthcoming). This bridge is so obscure there isn't even a Structurae page about it, and they've got pages about just about everything. So I have a feeling this post would be the authoritative source of information about it on the interwebs, except that I haven't come across much in the way of useful info to provide about it. At least that makes it easy to post about, I guess.



I'm mentioning it here because you can (and I did) actually walk across it. There's only a walkway on the east (northbound) side, but it's wide and well separated from traffic, and you've got a nice view of the houseboat harbor below. It's a shame the walkway itself is rather bleak looking, but hey, it was built in the late 50's or so, they built everything grey and bleak back then. Beats me why they did, but they did.



I'd originally planned to do this and the Interstate in one go. The plan was to take the train to the Expo Center MAX stop; navigate the Marine Drive cloverleaf intersection to the south end of this bridge; cross it and take photos, while not dying; make my way across Hayden Island to the northbound Interstate Bridge; cross it, again taking lots of photos and not dying; get off and find the southbound Interstate Bridge; cross it, more photos, no dying, etc.; from there, make my way back to the North Portland Harbor bridge; retrace steps back to the MAX station, and declare Mission Accomplished.



As you might recall, I pretty much only have time to do this sort of thing on weekday mornings before work, when I don't have early meetings or a pressing deadline to worry about. So I didn't have a big block of time to do the whole foray at once. So the lite version works like this: Drive to Hayden Island, park in the Safeway parking lot; hop on the sidewalk that curves around back of the store; continue past the Hooters (ex-Waddle's) restaurant; cross the bridge, taking a few photos and not dying; see Marine Drive intersection, turn around and walk back across bridge; walk down under the bridge and take more photos; buy an iced latte and a lemon bar at the Starbucks inside Safeway, just so I'm parked legally; declare Mission Accomplished.







I did the Interstate Bridge on a different day, and the Hayden Island and Marine Drive parts of the route aren't likely to be very interesting. Hayden Island is just big-box suburbia, and it's just not very compelling. I mean, I could do it and explain just how pedestrian-unfriendly it is, but it's not like that would be a big revelation, would it?



Oh, and here's the obligatory not-dying angle: If someone's left a banana peel here, don't slip on it and somehow manage fall off the bridge or tumble into traffic.



You may be familiar with the big multi-billion-dollar project to replace the Interstate Bridge, just north of here. There's been some discussion about replacing this bridge as part of the process. The mayor and various planning types have expressed an interest in an "iconic" bridge with "height and visual interest" in this location, probably due to the FAA height restrictions over the main channel of the Columbia. I've heard elsewhere (and I can't find a link for this now) that the current intent is to leave this bridge as-is for now, since it doesn't actually "need" replacing the way the Interstate allegedly does.