Tanner Creek Bridge

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tanner Creek Viaduct

Most of my posts here come about because I see an obscure thing on an obscure list of obscure things, and I suspect it might be photogenic or otherwise blogworthy. It goes on a todo list, and eventually I go track it down and take a few photos. Other times I see something on a list and realize I already have a photo or two of it lying around, which is what happened this time. So here's an April 2006 photo of the Union Pacific Tanner Creek Viaduct, which carries the railroad around Bonneville Dam and over Tanner Creek, the the same stream that flows over Wahclella Falls a short hike upstream from here.

The Tanner Creek viaduct was built in 1935 due to construction of the dam; the Union Pacific tracks were rerouted, on a stretch from a mile west of Bonneville east to Cascade Locks, at a cost of $976,300, roughly $16.7 million in 2014 dollars. That article was from March 1935, and it noted contractors were scrambling to get the job done as quickly as possible.

The viaduct was projected to be done by July 1935, and completion was announced on June 23rd, complete with a construction photo. The final bridge was 865 feet long, and cost $225,000. (For what it's worth, the general contractor on the project was a firm called "Orino, Bell & Malcolm", with the viaduct subcontracted to "Birkemeier & Saremal". I'm not familiar with either of those companies -- although the latter apparently worked on the early 1940s Front Avenue/Harbor Drive project we mostly tore out in the 70s -- but I rather like the design of this viaduct so I'm kind of filing them away for future reference. Mostly in case they've done any other bridges that are worth tracking down at some point.)

Wahclella Falls

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A few photos of Wahclella Falls, one of my favorite waterfalls in the Columbia Gorge. At some point last year I realized I hadn't been there in quite a few years, and had precisely zero photos of the falls, so I made the trip, did the easy hike in to the falls, and took way too many photos. And as is usual when I take too many photos, when I start trying to sort through and pick a few to post, I get a headache and quit iPhoto and don't look at them again for six months or a year. Which is more or less what happened here.

The one upside to this is that I always have a backlog of reasonably bloggable photos sitting around for times like this when I feel like doing a new post, but the trees are bare and grey and the weather's uncooperative. So there's that. I mean, some people might take this opportunity to go without photos and write about life, art, or politics instead. But I've already tried the political blogging thing once and I found it stressful and unrewarding. Meanwhile life is pleasantly boring, generally speaking, and would make for blog posts even more uninteresting than the stuff I do post about. And I always seem to need photos when I talk about art here (and those photos tend to sit around in iPhoto for months first, just like everything else).

So anyway, Wahclella Falls at the same exit off I-84 as Bonneville Dam, but on the opposite side of the freeway. A short drive gets you to a Forest Service parking lot, which has a fee of a few dollars. It's annoying, and I should point out that they do actually check now and then whether you're parked legally. Besides, if the Forest Service has a revenue shortfall, the difference just gets tacked on to the federal debt; you'll end up paying eventually one way or the other, so you might as well just pay now.

The initial segment of the hike is on a flat service road, until you get to a weir or flood control widget of some sort. After that it's a regular old trail. You'll pass little Munra Falls early on. Then you continue hiking in until you get to the main event, where the trail ends. There are a couple of forks in the trail, but they all end up in the same place and form a loop. It's really that simple. There aren't intersections with other trails to worry about, or any steep technical sections, and it's only 2 miles in and back, and the scenery stays interesting. I did it as a kid a few times & never thought it was a big deal. What's more, the place gets overlooked a lot, and I don't recall it ever being remotely crowded when I was there. And I can say with a fair bit of confidence that nothing has ever become fashionable or popular after I wrote about it here in the 6+ years this humble blog has graced the interwebs. So it's likely to still be uncrowded if you take my advice and go.

Munra Falls expedition

A few more Columbia Gorge waterfall photos, this time of Munra Falls, a small waterfall on the trail to Wahclella Falls, which is off the same freeway exit as Bonneville Dam. It's far from the largest or most spectacular waterfall in the gorge, but when I say it's on the trail, I mean that almost literally; it rushes down a rockface right next to the trail, and you could probably reach out and touch it if you wanted to. It's like a waterfall petting zoo, really.

The one surprising thing is that it's acquired a semi-official name, one which is at least used commonly around the interwebs:

• Portland Hikers' Field Guide has some basic info about the falls & states they're about 35 feet tall. Which isn't much by Gorge standards, but I still wouldn't go over it in a barrel.
• A forum thread at the same site mentions that the stream is called Munra Creek, and this is far from the only waterfall on said creek.
• More info at Waterfall Record and Waterfalls Northwest. The latter has another photo and directions to the falls, if you need directions for some reason.
• Someone's Panoramio photo, which looks a lot like the top photo here. There aren't a lot of fresh, innovative camera angles to be had at this particular waterfall, I'm afraid.
• I sort of assumed the word "Munra" was an anglicized Indian word, but it's actually a surname. Katherine Sterrett Munra ran the railroad's "eating house" nearby, somewhere in the Bonneville area, from the 1880s to the 1920s. As far as I know, the original building no longer exists.
• Yet another forum thread at Oregon Hikers Field Guide discusses place names on old maps of the Gorge, including various things named "Munra". Nearby Munra Point was once called "Mount Munra" at one time. Everything was just a bit more melodramatic back then.

wildflowers, wahclella falls

Some wildflowers along the trail to Wahclella Falls, which is out in the Gorge near Bonneville Dam. I do have photos of the falls as well, and you'll see them as soon as I get around to sorting through them all, whenever that is. I didn't get as many useful flower photos, so this post was much easier to put together than the falls one is going to be. And why did I need a new post all of a sudden? It turns out I've been Reddited, as part of a thread about "Favorite Portland Blogs" (in which this humble blog inexplicably got a mention). As is inevitably the case, when this occurred the top post here was about a cheesy old monster movie, not Portland-related at all. So I figured I ought to put together something a little more local and topical in case anyone actually shows up here.

If I was wrong and you'd really prefer to read about a crappy monster movie or two, just scroll down a bit, or click here.

Anyway: Thx for visiting. Mgmt.