Lambert Slough Bridge

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The Lambert Slough Bridge is one of the more obscure destinations the ongoing bridge project has visited (so far). Lambert Slough is a small side channel of the Willamette River, separating Grand Island from the west bank of the river, and this little bridge is the only way on or off the island. I figured I ought to at least take a photo of the bridge on my way to the state park on the island, since I'd already established that this project included bridges on the Willamette at least as far south as Salem, and bridges out to islands were fair game, since I'd done the Sauvie Island Bridge. So I pretty much had to do this one for the sake of completeness. And completeness it is, since with this I think I've covered every bridge as far as Salem, plus one in Eugene. Except for the Champoeg Road pipeline bridge near Newberg, and I've more or less convinced myself that it doesn't count.

As with the OR-219 bridge, there's no page for this bridge at BridgeHunter or Structurae or any of the usual bridge fan sites, but there is a page about it at UglyBridges.com. In which we learn it's a reinforced concrete deck girder bridge, built in 1964, and any historical significance was "not determinable at this time" as of 2009. At that time it was given a 64.2% structural sufficiency rating, which is decent (certainly compared to the Sellwood Bridge's 2% rating) but down from 87% in 1991, probably due to an increase in traffic -- although 428 vehicles per day still counts as light traffic, I think.

As mentioned in my earlier Grand Island post, the island is threatened by a proposed gravel mine, which is currently working its way through the courts and the county permit process. Since this bridge is the only way on or off the island, gravel mining would mean a steady stream of big gravel trucks. The county commissioned an engineering study of the bridge in 2010 that concluded the bridge could handle the truck traffic, although not everyone's pleased that Yamhill County would be on the hook for higher maintenance costs due to increased wear and tear.

Grand Island expedition

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Today's adventure takes us to the Willamette River's Grand Island, just north of Salem, which is home to a picturesque little state park you probably haven't heard of. It goes by either "Grand Island State Park" or "Grand Island Access", but it doesn't appear by either name on most maps or guidebooks, or even on the state's main official list of the Willamette Valley state parks. I'll get to why this is in a minute, but first a bit about the place.

The park is a small meadow on the south/upstream end of Grand Island, on a side channel of the Willamette where Lambert Slough splits off from the main stem of the river. It's mostly used as a river access point for boaters, although I should point out there's no boat ramp here, and you can certainly drive or bike to the park like I did, assuming you know it's here (note the big green arrow on the map above). There's a second State Parks sign facing the river so boaters know they're in the right spot. The park even has a fire pit and space to put up a tent, although apparently it's only legal to camp here if you arrive by boat. So if you bike to the park and decide to stay the night, you might want to pack an light inflatable raft or something to use as a decoy, and hope Officer Friendly isn't too curious about current river conditions. I'm not promising this would actually work, mind you.

Grand Island as a whole is low, flat, and agricultural, and it's connected to the mainland by a single narrow bridge. It reminds me a lot of Sauvie Island, but without all the hordes of tourists. Surprisingly (and probably thanks to strict zoning laws) there aren't any bed and breakfasts, wine bars, twee antique shops, or any of the other touristy amenities that blanket much of the rural Willamette Valley. Even the Grand Island General Store is on the mainland, where the road to the island intersects OR-221. The island itself is just farms, one obscure state park, and nothing else as far as I can tell. For now, at least. There's a current proposal to begin mining gravel on the island, near the park. As you might expect local residents are quite unhappy about this. It seemed like every house I drove past had at least one Protect Grand Island sign out front. In May of this year the Yamhill County Commission voted 2-1 to let the mine go forward, so this fight is probably headed to the courts next.

There's also an Occupy Grand Island page on Facebook, though it seems to focus on the usual Occupy concerns and not so much on the gravel thing.

As for why the park is so obscure, it turns out the place is part of the state's Willamette Greenway system, a collection of dozens of obscure parcels along the river that were purchased primarly during the 1970s at the behest of Gov. Tom McCall. (See this "Public Parcel Inventory" guide from 2004 for a partial list.) McCall proposed that the state own the entire stretch of Willamette riverbanks from end to end, which turned out to be both controversial and unaffordable. The legislature eventually pulled the plug on this idea, but not before the state had title to various bits and pieces of land along the river, including this spot, Wapato Greenway near Sauvie Island, and French Prairie just upstream of Wilsonville.

It's possible the state's downplayed the existence of these places because of the initial controversy, for fear of riling up crazy Tea Party militia types or something. A more boring possibility is that they've just fallen through the bureaucratic cracks somehow. It's ambiguous whether each greenway parcel is an official state park on its own, or a distributed part of a single very large (but still very obscure) state park, or something else entirely, and the whole greenway program probably falls under someone else's bailiwick within the state Parks Department, so including the list of greenway areas along with other state parks and having them show up on maps would probably involve years of meetings and millions of dollars just to figure out how to eventually pull it off someday.

OR 219 Bridge, Willamette River

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This installment of the ongoing bridge project takes us down to Newberg, where we find the Oregon Route 219 bridge over the Willamette River. I'm afraid I only have this one uninteresting photo of the bridge, and it was taken with a Blackberry, from a moving car, in the rain, with a semi tailgating me. The Structurae page linked to above has some photos from the side so you can see it's pretty uninteresting from that angle too. The bridge doesn't appear to have a name, and it doesn't even merit its own Wikipedia page, even though it's the only bridge over the Willamette between Wilsonville and Salem.

Usually when I link to a bridge's Structurae page, I also point at its Bridgehunter page, since each tends to have info the other doesn't. This bridge has no Bridgehunter page, but it turns out Bridgehunter has a sister site, UglyBridges.com, which describes itself thusly:

This website provides listings for "ugly" bridges not suitable for our companion site, Bridgehunter.com. It also highlights the "ugly" condition of our nation's bridges thanks to years of neglect and deferred maintenance.

As you probably guessed from this buildup, this bridge does have an UglyBridges page. So it's a typical, humdrum, non-photogenic concrete deck girder bridge, but there's sort of an upside to that. A recent OSU study of wear and tear on aging concrete deck girder bridges used it as a test subject, presumbably because it was utterly typical. I'm not a civil engineer and it's not clear to me what their conclusions mean in that study. I think they're saying the gathered data will help them better model shear effects on this type of bridge. Not totally sure though. The phrase "significant diagonal cracks" did jump out at me. It's the kind of phrase that tends to jump out at laypeople.

In case you were wondering, it was not possible to walk across this bridge. There are no sidewalks, and much of the traffic consists of extremely large trucks, all of them in a huge hurry to get somewhere. The "not dying" angle is way too obvious and easy to imagine, and not particularly funny either, so instead I'll just pass on one semi-random link I came across, and we'll wrap up this installment of the bridge adventure.

Back in 1993, McMinnville's Evergreen Air Museum had acquired Howard Hughes's infamous Spruce Goose, and had to move it from Santa Barbara, CA, to its new home. This involved disassembling the plane and barging the pieces almost the entire distance. My employer at the time was located right on the Willamette, and I was able to watch as various airplane parts were barged through downtown Portland. Further upriver, the wings were the last major part of the plane to arrive, and they squeaked under the 219 bridge with just one foot to spare.

So that's not really the most exciting story. It was a tight fit, but nothing terrible actually happened, and the rest is vintage aviation history, which I'm not that wild about. But it's the most exciting thing I was able to dig up about this bridge, and now I can at least say that I tried. FWIW.