Eagle Creek Bridge

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A few photos of the old Columbia River Highway bridge over Eagle Creek, in the Columbia Gorge. It's part of a short surviving segment of the old highway and now serves as part of the freeway offramp from I-84. I took these as an afterthought while visiting nearby Ruckel Creek Falls, and I later decided there might be a bridge post in it. It's kind of a cute little bridge, after all.

Some info about the bridge at Structurae and Oregon Hikers Field Guide. The Eagle Creek page at Columbia River Images includes several photos and old postcard images of the bridge, so that's worth a look too.

The Oregon state archives offers an online version of the 1940 travel guide Oregon: End of the Trail, which was produced by the Federal Writers' Project (a cool New Deal program you'd never get through Congress in this day and age). They've broken the book up into segments that follow the main highways of the day, and the Eagle Creek to Portland segment includes a few interesting photos from Eagle Creek and the west end of the Gorge. Incidentally the main highway at that time was US 30, the wider, flatter, river-level road built to replace the original Gorge Highway. US 30 evolved into today's I-84, so unlike the original highway there aren't a lot of visible reminders of old US 30 that survived to the present day. People tend to forget that we didn't jump directly from the 1914 road to an interstate freeway. And the original highway, picturesque as it was, was already considered obsolete shortly after it was created.

While we're splitting hairs, the old highway wasn't actually the original road through the Gorge; that honor goes to the earlier Dalles and Sandy Wagon Road, a few precarious segments of which also survive. It would be interesting to see that, but my understanding is that visiting the Shellrock Mountain segment involves pulling over & parking on the narrow shoulder of I-84 just around a blind corner, which I don't think I'd be willing to do. So it's nice to see that someone else did it already and put photos on the interwebs.

Prior to the wagon road, the only way to pass through the Gorge was by boat, which was reportedly quite a dangerous way to go. If you've ever played the classic Apple ][ game Oregon Trail (not that I'm of a certain age or anything), you might recall that at The Dalles you have to choose whether to take a raft down the river (and inevitably drown, in my experience), or take the Barlow Road over the mountains (which is occasionally survivable). Here's a history page describing what those two options were like in real life, if you aren't inclined to rely on 1970s video games as historical documents.

In winter the water route became impassable whenever the river froze over, which apparently happened regularly in the 19th Century. The December 13, 1873 Dalles Chronicle described the difficulties in an article titled Ice Holds Trade in Death Grip. The article waxes on about how great it would be if there was a wagon road to Portland. It also mentions a couple of other ideas that were also implemented, like putting in a railroad to Portland, and building locks at the Cascades downstream of the Dalles (at today's, uh, Cascade Locks).

And, of course, before the Oregon Trail there would have been Indian trails through the Gorge dating back thousands of years. Pioneer history buffs tend to ignore that part. Which may be one reason I just can't get too excited about pioneer-era history, come to think of it.

papyrus

A few photos of papyrus plants at the Honolulu Zoo. I don't recall ever seeing papyrus plants before (at least not labeled as such), so I took a few photos. Not overly fabulous photos, I guess, but it's kind of an interesting plant so I figured there was a minor blog post to be had here. And it just wouldn't seem right to do a post on papyrus plants without including a token bit of writing, which is what you're reading now. And since there's a bit of writing anyway, why not use the Papyrus typeface for this post? I mean, it's an ugly cartoonish typeface, but it seems semi-appropriate somehow.

pink ginger & raindrops

taz, july 2011

carwash

This is just a video voyage through a carwash, taken earlier today. I kind of like the abstract quality the clip has, plus I've been procrastinating about washing the car for months now, so I'm kind of saying "Hey, look what I just did" by posting this, as unimpressive a feat as it might be. In my defense, there's really no point in washing a car while we're getting an inch of rain every day, which is most of the year. Furthermore, I also don't drive a lot, and I only remember how dirty the car is when I'm driving and trying to see out the windshield. Also, driving a clean shiny car is simply not the way of software engineers. It would be like wearing a suit to work or something. In short, the whole carwash thing is almost certainly a much bigger deal to me than it is to any of you out there.

Since you're here already, let me direct your attention to the Wikipedia article for "Car Wash", which includes a bit of history and explains briefly how automatic car washes work. For more gory details, there's a rather comprehensive HowStuffWorks article that explains the whole process in depth, with lots of photos. In case you've ever wondered what all the stuff spraying and flapping around is for, I mean. Oh, and here's a History Channel video with some vintage video clips and so forth. It's only about six minutes long, so I guess the History Channel just didn't have time to explain how car wash technology is connected to Hitler, UFOs, and Bigfoot. If they don't already have a multi-hour special on the topic, it's probably only a matter of time.

Anyway, the car's clean now. So now let's sit back and watch it rain nonstop for a few months.

moon, aria

the portland, honolulu

Couple of photos of Honolulu's Portland Building. The name surprises me, and I've yet to determine whether it refers to our Portland, or to some other place, company, person, or thing. A survey of historic buildings of Hawaii mentions it briefly (all typos are theirs):

Portland Building -Constructed in 1903 at South Hotel and Union Mall in Honolulu, in the architectural style of the the Portland Building is the Late Victorian period.

Oregon has a handful of Hawaiian place names, including the Portland suburb of Aloha, and the Owyhee River in the far SE corner of the state. So I suppose it's not unreasonable to have something in Hawaii named after something in Oregon. Still seems peculiar, though.

various flowers, june 2011

pdx indie marketing fail

detour

200 market, infrared

june metablog update

• I've finally updated the Official Map for this humble blog again. If you'd rather look at it in Google Earth, the KML file lives here. Which is part of a tiny Google Site that I just switched from private to public, for whatever that's worth.
  
  I think I've got creation of KML files ironed out now; the next problem is going to be formatting the KML file so that the huge pile of placemarks is more manageable. I have a couple of ideas on how to address that, but I'm not quite ready to start implementing yet.
• I've turned off anonymous comments for the time being, since they're almost always spam. Blogger actually does a pretty good job of filtering out spam, except that I still get email notifying me when spam comments arrive, which is almost as annoying as having to manually delete spam. If there was a setting to only send alerts for non-spam comments, or to enable captchas only for anonymous comments, that would be great. Maybe someday.
• I'm still trying to think of a better way to present the Links page. Right now it's a very long, shallow tree, with plenty of wasted whitespace to the right of it. Going to a two column model might work, although that's not a style I use anywhere else right now so it might look kind of weird. I still have this vague notion that the link tree ought to be an external OPML or XOXO file that gets pulled in, so that the tree structure exists independent of formatting. Not sure how useful that would actually be, though, since OPML hasn't exactly set the world on fire, and XOXO still wants to be OPML when it grows up.
• Oh, and I just noticed that the post count here is exactly 1337, not counting the post you're reading now. But that is counting 24(!) posts clogging the drafts folder, some of which I might end up deleting. Never let anyone tell you that this blog business is an exact science.
  
  It would be kind of interesting to have a Blogger widget that gives visitors a peek at the Drafts folder so they can see what posts are in the works and (possibly) how long they've been in the works. Maybe just titles of posts or something, I dunno. I'm not an expert on writing Blogger widgets, but I suspect this isn't actually possible. Still, it sounds kind of fun to write, and I might even use it if it existed.
  
  In lieu of that, here's a quick summary of what's on the way, maybe, someday. You'd think I'd be out of bridges by now, but no; there are seven bridge posts in Drafts right now, and another two on Willamette River ferries, which seems a bit excessive. I won't argue with you there. Four art posts, three waterfalls, two cheesy monster movies, a partridge in a pear tree, etc. In other words, there's more of the same old, same old in the works, for good or ill.

keller fountain, june 2011 (iv)

keller fountain, june 2011 (iii)