Autumn, Tualatin River Bridge

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The ongoing bridge series ventures south once again, this time to a rather obscure location. The bridge you see here carries Highway 99W over the Tualatin River, out in the 'burbs between Tigard & Tualatin. It doesn't appear to have a proper name, as far as I know. It's often called "Tualatin River Bridge" (for example Structurae and Bridgehunter), although that's a bit silly considering how many other bridges there are over the Tualatin. Other sources call it "Highway 99W Bridge", which is also silly since this is far from the only river 99W crosses. It probably doesn't help that when you drive over it, you barely even notice you're on a bridge. The St. Johns it's not, I guess that's what I'm trying to say here.

The original reason I thought I'd go check it out was that at least one source indicated it's a Conde McCullough bridge, which is a big deal if you know who he is, otherwise not so much. Ok, so that source is merely a caption on a Flickr photo, but the photo's by a local author who's written a number of bridge books and who runs a well-known Bridge of the Month Quiz. So I imagine the attribution is more than just a wild guess. I mean, I could just go down to the library or the historical society, or possibly check with ODOT, and find out for certain. I really ought to do that, probably. I'll update this post if I ever get around to doing that, but for now I'll just call it a "could be". At minimum, we know it was built by the right agency (the state highway dept.), at the right time (the 1920's). Whoever designed it, it's fair to say it probably doesn't number among their signature works. It's your basic steel truss bridge, nothing too remarkable about it. And the old bridge just carries the southbound lanes of 99W these days. The northbound lanes travel on a concrete bridge of unknown (but much more recent) vintage. Again, nothing terribly remarkable about it.

I do like the setting, though. Autumn leaves, a still river, the bridges, the morning light... It was kind of fabulous. I'm almost afraid to go back. I'm sure it wouldn't be the same.

It turns out there's a bit of history to relate about this spot. There's been a river crossing at this location since pioneer days. If you've ever driven Taylor's Ferry Road and wondered about the name (while you were waiting at a light or whatever), here's your answer. The ferry was replaced with the first bridge at this location way back in the 1860's (not too surprising, as the Tualatin isn't a very big river). Yet the name of the road has persisted to the present day, although the name's no longer used anywhere near here. All of this comes from "A Bridge over Time", a fun history poster from the City of Tualatin, with a bunch of old photos of the area.

The poster has a photo of something called "Roamer's Rest", a long-vanished river recreation spot once located right around here somewhere. Here's a local newspaper article reminiscing about the place.

I didn't actually walk across the bridge this time. I didn't see anywhere I could park and walk across the southbound (i.e. old) side, and it didn't seem really necessary anyway. The spot I took these from is primarily a canoe-launching site on the south bank of the river. When you drive over the bridge, it's not obvious that there's any public river access nearby, as there aren't any signs or obvious turnoffs.

Directions, from a page at the Tualatin Riverkeeper site:

99W Bridge & Hazelbrook Rd., Tualatin (RM 11.5 RB)
From 99W turn south onto 124th. Turn east onto Tualatin Road. Turn north onto SW 115th Avenue. Turn left (west) onto Hazelbrook Road. There are four parking spots at the
put-in. No restroom. More parking at Hazelbrook Middle School, two blocks east. This was the historical site of Taylor’s Ferry. Pilings from an old wooden covered bridge
are still in the river here.

If you look at the map above, the tiny parking lot is right at the sharp bend in Hazelbrook Road, and from there there's a short path to a viewpoint & put-in, right between the two bridges.

A local newspaper did a piece about this bridge, in the wake of that nasty bridge collapse in Minneapolis: "Highway 99W bridge old but 'in good condition'". So I suppose if you were going to walk across it, or I was going to go back and walk across it, it's at least not going to collapse under you, which I suppose is a relief, unless the idea of collapsing bridges hadn't occurred to you until just now, in which case not so much, and I humbly apologize for bringing it up. Or whatever.

Portland Memory Garden

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As you may have noticed, this is generally not the most personal of personal blogs. It's usually city park, waterfall, city park, bridge, bridge, blah, blah, occasionally with a cheesy monster movie or a brewpub thrown in to liven things up. And in a way, this post is yet another "city park" post, although with a bit more personal significance than usual.



These photos are from the Portland Memory Garden, located in Ed Benedict Park in outer SE Portland, just south of Kelly Butte. The garden was designed as a safe, quiet, peaceful place to take people with Alzheimer's: Circular paths so they won't get lost; high walls and a gate to keep them from wandering off. They've even made sure to plant only nontoxic, edible plants, apparently.



I've mentioned before, in passing, that I have a family member with Alzheimer's, now in the later stages of the disease. It's difficult to talk about, and impossible not to talk about. When he took a major turn for the worse a few weeks ago, I started writing a post about the situation but couldn't finish the thing. (What's more, the initial bit I'd written wasn't really the tone I was aiming for -- I'm kind of a perfectionist about these things, although I'm not certain this is always obvious in the finished product.)



So a bit later, I remembered reading about this Memory Garden thing, and it occurred to me that I might want to go check it out. Not for his sake, really; he's a couple of hours away, and anymore he's a bit too far along to really appreciate the place. No, it's more that I thought, hey, here's a place I can go and take a few photos of, and post some strictly factual links about, and maybe also include some informational links about the disease itself. That way I can feel as though I've said or done something semi-constructive about (or at least in relation to) the situation. Which is preferable, I think, to simply wringing my hands and wallowing in pathos.



So here are those strictly factual links I mentioned:

• Gresham Outlook: "Portland Memory Garden refreshing all year long"
  
  
• Daily Journal of Commerce: "Memory gardens offer hope to Alzheimer's patients". Actually I think the right word would be "comfort", not "hope". Alzheimer's is not like, say, cancer, where you probably understand what's going on, and there may be a nonzero chance of getting better.
  
  
• CityVoter.com has a page about the garden with a number of photos.
  
  
• Center of Design for an Aging Society, a group that helped design the garden, writes about it here.
  
  
• Another page concerning the design of the garden.
  
  
• The Portland garden is cited in this proposal to build a similar garden in the UK.
  
  

While I'm at it, here's the original text of that post I couldn't quite put together. ..

A while back I asserted that Alzheimer's was officially the worst medical condition in the world. As it turns out, I was slightly premature about that. Alzheimer's plus broken hip is even worse. Way worser than worst. Not so many years ago, there were no good options for dealing with a broken hip. If you got one, you were screwed, basically. You tended not to live much longer after that, whether due to the injury or subsequent complications. Now there are a number of surgical options, including partial hip replacement, which is the option we settled on. Hip replacement is a marvelous thing in most cases: People who'd otherwise be dead or debilitated can be back on their feet, doing the whole "active senior" thing for years to come. But in our case it means another six months, or a year, or maybe two, of progressive dementia. At best, he'll just regain the ability to try to wander off to Chicago again. So no big increase in quality of life here. And did I mention that partial hip replacements aren't cheap? Still, doing nothing wasn't an option. That would be inhumane. Even idly thinking about cost/benefit equations verges on inhumane. But if you've ever been curious why health care is so expensive in this country, well, I've got a data point for you right here.

Oswego Creek Bridge

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Ok, time for another bridge. This time we're looking at Lake Oswego's Oswego Creek Bridge, which carries Highway 43 ( == Macadam Ave. ) over, uh, Oswego Creek on its brief journey from Oswego Lake to the Willamette River. I don't usually bother with bridges over mere creeks unless the bridge is especially unusual or interesting somehow. The previous one was a (sorta) covered bridge. This one is a 1930-vintage Conde McCullough bridge... I think.

It's taken me a while to post this, because there's a bit of a mystery going on. If you look at the Bridgehunter & Structurae pages for the bridge, or this old photo from the City of Lake Oswego, the bridge you see there doesn't look quite like my photos. At first I thought maybe I'd gone to the wrong bridge, but that didn't seem possible. Then I thought maybe the bridge had been replaced in recent years, since the photo shown there is dated 1991. Although in that case you'd think there'd be some mention of the fact somewhere, and there isn't.

This painting of the bridge might explain what's going on. Assuming the artist didn't take extreme liberties, it sure looks like the bridge was widened at some point, so that the northbound lanes are old, and the soutbound ones are new, and I just happened to be on the southbound side. The bridge railing looks kind of old, much older than the visible supports, so I expect they either reused the original, or made a new one to match the other side. If that's what's really going on here, I mean; I haven't seen the other side, so I don't know for sure. I suppose I could go back and take another look or something. And while I'm at it, maybe try to take some better photos than the ones you see here, which I'm not entirely pleased with.

Anyway, I think that's what's going on here. If it turns out that I'm totally off base, I can always come back and rewrite this post if I have to.

If it turns out this is another McCullough bridge (which is pretty much the only reason I came to check it out), that brings us to at least 3 in the Portland area, even though sources often claim the Oregon City Bridge is the only bridge of his anywhere in town. But the McLoughlin Bridge and this one appear to be his too, and I've read that he designed a couple of Hwy 99 bridges nearby (over the Tualatin River near Tualatin, and over the N. Yamhill near McMinnville). So there may be at least 5, depending on how you define "Portland area".

The obligatory "not dying" angle, this time: Take care to not crane your neck out too far while looking for the damn bridge arches that aren't there, thereby losing your balance, falling off, and plummeting to an untimely demise somewhere in the ravine far below. Also, don't learn the hard way that the bridge is probably not quite high enough for bungee jumping (or base jumping, for that matter), and the creek isn't anywhere near deep enough to dive into from the bridge. Not that I expect people to listen to little ol' me out here on the Interwebs if they're inclined to try any of that stuff. But hey. Whatever.

Autumn, Beggars-tick Wildlife Refuge

A few photos from Beggars-tick Wildlife Refuge, a Metro-run wetland area out in outer SE Portland. Metro's info page about the place insists you need to visit twice to really appreciate the place -- once in the winter, to get the full wetlands experience, and again in the summer, to experience the wildlife and plants and so forth. So naturally I showed up in autumn instead.

I parked at the south end, next to the Springwater Corridor trail, and wandered in for a look around. I didn't go all that far, actually; the wetland parts weren't completely wet yet, but they were muddy enough to convince me not to go any further. I think there must be another entrance somewhere further north that gives more access to the place. I haven't yet found a detailed map of the place showing trails and so forth, so I'm not 100% sure about that.

Also, it looked as though homeless people might be living in the refuge somewhere, and there weren't any other visitors at the time I was there, which gave me another reason not to wander blithely off into the underbrush.

The rather off-putting name of the place has a very prosaic explanation, as it turns out. A "Beggars-tick" is a type of plant, various species of the genus Bidens. It's considered an invasive weed in many parts of the world, but here it's a native plant. I didn't know what it looked like before I went, and I don't recall seeing anything that looked like it while I was there. So, in short, I don't have any photos of the refuge's eponymous plant. Sorry.

It seems the refuge hasn't been a refuge all that long, roughly 1992-93. Here's an interesting doc about the wetlands restoration project, from the US Fish & Wildlife Service.

All in all, I'm not sure this was my most successful "expedition" ever. I just saw one corner of the place, and took some decent but rather generic fall photos that could be from anywhere. Oh, well. There's always next time, I guess.

Cedar Crossing Bridge

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Here are a few photos of Portland's Cedar Crossing covered bridge, over Johnson Creek out in east Multnomah County. It's just south of Foster Road -- turn south at 134th Avenue, which turns into Deardorff Road, which crosses the bridge.

Despite how it looks, it's not actually very old. It was only built in 1982, replacing a non-covered predecessor, because a local politician thought it'd be cool to have a covered bridge somewhere in Multnomah County.

The state's page about the bridge asserts that it isn't really a "true" covered bridge. Apparently there's far more to it than just being a bridge with a cover over it. At least if you're a purist, I mean, which I'm not. I'm not even a covered bridge fan, really. My mother is, however, so as a kid I was dragged here and there all around the state to visit the silly things. At one point she had a guidebook to all of the covered bridges around the state, and the Cedar Crossing bridge was relegated to an appendix. So I gather that true purists think it's an impostor and scoff at it. I can sort of see their point, in a way, since it's more or less a small standard-issue bridge with a wooden canopy tacked on top. Purists want their covered bridges made entirely of wood, like in the old-timey olden days of yore. And really, I'm not sure any new bridge would measure up in their eyes, since covered bridge fandom is all about sentimental nostalgia for rustic old-fashioned stuff. Covered bridges are cultural touchstones for some people, so being a fan isn't strictly about the bridges, sort of like how NASCAR isn't just about auto racing. And I suppose how Grateful Dead concerts weren't really about the music, to pick a blue-state example. Or the way British people get worked up over crappy oil paintings of hunting dogs, come to think of it. If the underlying cultural stuff doesn't resonate with you, you're bound to be confused and wonder what all the fuss is about.

But regardless, the fact remains that it's a bridge and it's covered. So there.

So, for whatever reason, I never actually saw the thing until much later. My wife and I had just moved back to Portland after being away for a few years, and we almost rented a house just a stone's throw from the bridge. We decided against it partly because I was working in Tigard at the time, which would've been a hell of a commute, and partly because the Foster Road area just north of here has, uh, persistent issues with poverty and crime. So I'm sure that was the right decision, but still, it would've been kind of interesting to have something like this in the neighborhood.

I was in the area looking for something else, and I remembered this was here, and since I've been on something of a (non-covered) bridge bender in the last few months, I thought I'd go check it out and take a few photos.

Some links, mostly of interest to any diehard fans who stumble across this post (in which case you've probably seen them all already):

• ODOT's Oregon Covered Bridges page.
• A small photo of the Cedar Crossing bridge at in the county library's Branches and Byways guide.
• The Oregon Covered Bridges Directory.
• Covered Bridge Society of Oregon
• Wikipedia: List of Oregon covered bridges
• Photos of many of them at Worldisround.

sunset, lincoln city

Pics: Thurman Street Bridge

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For a bit of variety, we'll tear ourselves away from downtown bridges for a moment and... well, uh, here's a bridge up in the West Hills instead. This is the Thurman St. Bridge, which crosses Macleay Park & Balch Creek.

Sometimes you see the name "Balch Gulch Bridge" used, but you know, it's the West Hills, and the word "gulch" just doesn't fit, somehow. "Gulch" conjures up images of desperadoes with black hats and handlebar moustaches, not sensible Subaru-driving black-lab-owning tofu-eating Portlanders. This post would probably be more interesting if we had desperadoes here, but we don't. Although do have the tale of Danford Balch, the first man to be hanged (ok, legally hanged) in the state. So the creek here is named after a confirmed bad guy, which is quite unusual for Portland. Most of our pioneers (and hence, most names of streets, hills, creeks, etc.) seem to have been your basic boring, starchy, churchgoing, selfless, thrifty, industrious types, who never had an untoward thought or a whiff of scandal about them. Which, I suspect, really means their descendants burned the diaries. But I digress.

Besides the usual bridge resources (Structurae, Bridgehunter), the bridge was the subject of a great Portland Tribune story back in 2005: "Creaky old bridge cries out for a fix". Which it very much does.

The Thurman St. Bridge presents a historic preservation conundrum. Deep down, everyone realizes it's not a very good bridge: It's old, rickety, and inadequate for present-day traffic; it's not very safe to drive on, especially in winter; it's liable to fall down in the next earthquake; and it isn't even very attractive. Visitors to the park below practically hit their heads on the bottom of the bridge truss, it's so low to the ground, and if they don't, they're liable to get beaned by bolts falling off the bridge. The sidewalks are made of creaky little wood slats, and you can see between them in some spots, and the roadway itself is asphalt over wood, if you can believe that. If you ran across a bridge like this in, say, Peru or Macedonia, you'd come back and tell your friends all about the crappy Third World bridges you encountered. And without photos they might not believe you. Instead, it's right here in Portland. In a fancy part of town, even.

On the other hand, the bridge was built way back in 1905, which is extremely old by Portland standards, so you can't just scrap the thing. Good or bad, people are used to it being there, and not everyone wants to see it go. In fact, nobody's seriously proposing to remove or replace it, as far as I know. It's also true that there isn't anything else in town quite like it. It's quite the historical artifact, really. It's just that, as part of being so old, the bridge dates back to before the Ford Model T came out (1908, for you trivia buffs). So it wasn't designed for a world in which everyone had a car, much less a hulking multi-ton SUV.

Actually, my understanding is that the bridge was designed to carry streetcars. (As in, the rickety little wood streetcars of 1905, not the big Euro-sleek ones Portland has today.) According to the Trib story linked to above, the bridge was built to coincide with the "Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition", a semi-official World's Fair that was held nearby in what's now industrial NW Portland. It wasn't part of the fair proper; the backers were trying to sell West Hills real estate, and figured a shiny new bridge with a shiny new streetcar was just the ticket to reel in a few interested fairgoers. And you have to admit that'd be an extremely Portland thing to do. (*cough* aerial tram *cough*)

So it's not really a relic of the fair, per se, but since almost nothing survived of the fair itself, it's only natural to want to hang on to anything vaguely connected to the event. One of the few surviving structures, incidentally, is the "NCR Building", which was moved to St. Johns after the fair, and (like many historic buildings in town) is now the McMenamins St. Johns Theater & Pub. Mmmm.... Beeeerrr....

Anyway, PSU has a great site about the fair if you're curious about this long-vanished episode of local history.

Walking across is fine, I mean, other than the fact that you're on a creaky 103 year old wooden bridge that's crying out for a fix, over a rather deep canyon, with just a cheap chain link fence for a guardrail. Other than that, no problems here. So after a good renovation, I think the bridge could be great as a pure pedestrian/bike bridge. Although that would involve moving it somewhere else, and building anew here, which would cost money. So that's probably not in the cards in the near future. It's always cheaper, in the short term, to patch things up a little and hope for the best. Hell, that's practically the law of the land here in Oregon. Apply duct tape liberally, throw a blue tarp over the whole mess, and punt it off for the next generation to figure out. Oh, well.

back from vacation, sadly

So I'm back from a much-needed and all too short vacation. Which explains the lack of posts here over the last week, on the heels of the previous week's flood of posts. You might've been wondering, idly, what the deal was with all those posts. And it's true, there was a reason for those beyond just being interested in bridges and whatnot, and I may post about that soon. But not right now.

Anyway, I thought about maybe doing the moblog thing from the beach again, but I just sort of didn't feel like it, so I didn't. It wasn't a huge trip; we just headed out to the beach for a few days and didn't do much. But that was just what I needed. We made the rounds of the local used book stores (of which there are many) and bought a bunch of cheesy 80's fantasy and SF novels, hung out on our balcony reading & watching the ocean, hung out in the hotel bar drinking tacky fluorescent drinks with parasols, bought a few tacky tourist souvenirs, made the rounds of the local brewpubs (of which there are many), oh, and walked on the beach a little. It was wonderful. I have a bunch of vacation photos, naturally, and I'm sure I'll get around to posting a few sooner or later.

Right now, though, I ought to try to get back to work. I find I've almost forgotten how to do this "daily grind" thing. It's a nice feeling, really...