Historic Columbia River Highway - The King of Roads

u The Columbia River Highway, later renamed the Historic Columbia River Highway (HCRH), was a technical and civic achievement of its time, successfully combining ambitious engineering with sensitive treatment of the surrounding magnificent landscape. The Historic Columbia River Highway has gained national significance because it represents one of the earlier applications of cliff-face road building utilizing modern highway construction technologies. It is also the oldest scenic highway in the United States.

 u The Historic Columbia River Highway's design and execution were the products of two visionaries, Samuel Hill, lawyer, entrepreneur, and good road's promoter; and Samuel C. Lancaster, engineer and landscape architect. In addition, many citizens provided strong leadership and advocacy for construction of what they called

Teddy Roosevelt calls it "The King of Roads" and says, it’s “the most remarkable road engineering in the United States, which for scenic grandeur is not equaled anywhere"  The beauty and grandeur of the Gorge awed the explorers of Lewis & Clark.  In their journals, Captain Meriwether Lewis & William Clark described this spectacular passage through the Cascade Range.  “the mountains through which the River passes…are high broken rocky, particularly covered with fir and white cedar, & in many places very romantic scenes.  Some handsome cascades are seen on either side tumbling from the stupendous rocks of the mountains into the river.”

 u To make these scenic wonders more accessible to an increasingly mobile tourist population, in the late teens and early 1920s, the National Park Service began constructing well-engineered roads within Parks.  Predating this National Park Service initiative, the Historic Columbia River Highway was constructed through county-state-federal cooperation.

Samuel Hill, once an attorney for James J. Hill and his large railroad empire, and later a Pacific Northwest investor and entrepreneur, was Washington state's most vocal "good roads" spokesman in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Hill found Oregon lawmakers and Portland businessmen receptive to the idea of constructing a major highway along the Columbia River. In 1913, work began on the Historic Columbia River Highway. Surfaced with Warrenite, a patented long-wearing and smooth-riding asphaltic-concrete pavement, the Historic Columbia River Highway was completed in 1922.

Multnomah County hired Samuel C. Lancaster, an experienced engineer and landscape architect, to design it.  He accompanied Hill and others to Paris in 1908 to attend the First International Road Congress. The group also toured Western Europe to learn about continental road-building techniques. Following the 1908 Congress Lancaster constructed experimental roads at Hill's Maryhill Ranch, 120 miles east of Portland on the Columbia River. Seeing roads in the park-like setting of the Rhine River Valley inspired Hill to promote construction of a highway along the Columbia River Gorge. Hill recommended that Lancaster design the Columbia River Highway.

 u  Lancaster's Highway design emulated European style road building techniques, while also advancing American engineering standards. Throughout the Historic Columbia River Highway, he and other engineers held fast to a design protocol that included accepting grades no greater than 5 percent, nor laying out any curves with less than a 100-foot turning radius. The use of reinforced-concrete bridges, combined with masonry guard rails, guard walls, and retaining walls brought together the new and the old - the most advanced highway structures with the tried and tested. In building the Columbia River Highway, Lancaster and others artfully created an engineering achievement sympathetic to this significant natural landscape.  The relationship between the Columbia River Gorge's natural landscape and the constructed designed landscape of the Historic Columbia River Highway is told best by Lancaster.  He wrote, "There is but one Columbia River Gorge that God put into this comparatively short space, with so many beautiful waterfalls, canyons, cliffs and mountain domes."  He believed that "men from all climes will wonder at its wild grandeur when once it is made accessible by this great highway."  There is more about this, and other subjects, in your reader.

 u  Several benefactors purchased waterfalls and other sites lining the Gorge for parks along the Columbia River Highway. Lancaster's Highway included designed landscapes at these locations. The masonry guard walls, retaining walls, and bridges on the pedestrian trails closely resemble those seen along the Historic Columbia River Highway itself. Lancaster strove for fluidity of design in interconnecting the Historic Columbia River Highway with its surrounding natural landscape.

The Columbia River Highway was also a lifeline connecting Portland with the many commercial and agricultural areas along the Columbia River. Some promoters saw it as part of a network of similarly constructed routes radiating out towards central Oregon and Washington and the Inland Empire of eastern Washington and northern Idaho, and meeting routes leading to other parts of the region and the nation.

More popular than its promoters ever envisioned by the 1930s, the Columbia River Highway was showing signs of early aging. The widespread use of automobiles and freight trucks throughout the country caused measurable wear on the Highway. Soon the route; so marveled for its advanced engineering, was deteriorating both physically and philosophically. Motorists tended to speed through beauty spots, more interested in traveling from here to there in as short a time as possible. With such an increase in motor traffic, it was no longer practical for tourists to stop their vehicles in the middle of the road to look at a falls or take in a view of the Columbia Gorge.

The Columbia River Highway had become a vital link in Oregon's and the nation's highway system. By the late 1930s, construction of Bonneville Dam, a New Deal project aimed at providing flood control on the Columbia River and generating electricity, caused a realignment of a portion of the Highway near Tooth Rock and Eagle Creek, in eastern Multnomah County. This marked the first major alteration of the route. It was evident to many that the Highway was outdated and unable to provide safe, efficient travel for modern motor traffic.

The Oregon State Highway Department began abandoning segments of the Columbia River Highway in the late 1930s upon completion of the new water-level route from Bonneville Dam to Cascade Locks. This work also segmented the original alignment, making it unusable even as a pedestrian trail. By the 1950s, much of the original alignment from Cascade Locks to Hood River had been sacrificed for the new water-level route. The Historic Columbia River Highway from Hood River to Mosier, including the Mosier Twin Tunnels, was also abandoned. The Tunnels, located in a rockfall zone, were filled with rubble and allowed to "melt" into the rugged landscape. Throughout abandoned segments, walls fell over and perennial weeds grew through the pavement.

By 1954, a new curvilinear water-level route, Interstate 84, bypassed the entire Historic Columbia River Highway from Troutdale to The Dalles. Its designers, too, envisioned this route as a scenic highway through the Gorge.

Since the early 1950s, the western third of the Historic Columbia River Highway has served tourist traffic, carrying visitors by scores of waterfalls. Other portions in the eastern two-thirds of the route became part of a local farm-to-market road network. Significant segments of the Historic Columbia River Highway were sacrificed for the new road while others were simply abandoned.

By the 1980s, public interest grew for returning drivable portions of the Historic Columbia River Highway to their 1920s appearance--based on careful documentation--and rehabilitating abandoned segments for trail use. Since then, drivable portions of the Historic Columbia River Highway, its masonry structures, bridges, and culverts have been repaired or replaced. The road is a popular tourist destination along with Multnomah Falls, the most popular natural site in Oregon, drawing over two-million visitors annually. The Falls are accessible both from the highway and nearby Interstate 84.

 Vista House

u Vista House is an interpretive center and the most photographed icon of the Columbia River Gorge.  Vista House is located on the western end of the Historic Columbia River Highway at Crown Point State Park. 

Vista House was built in 1916-1918 as a memorial to Oregon pioneers and as a comfort station for those traveling on the Historic Columbia River Highway.  The octagonal stone structure towers 733 feet above the Columbia River, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and in the National Geographic Society’s 2001 “Save America’s Treasures” book.

Native American and Oregon Pioneer exhibits are inside, as well as a museum dedicated to the story of the Historic Columbia River Highway, occupying the lower level. 

Latourell Falls

u Latourell Falls is a wonderful introduction to the many waterfalls along the Columbia River Gorge.

The 249 foot high, 20 foot wide plunge type Latourell Falls cascades down a cliff on the north side of Pepper Mountain in giant steps. Water flow is significant only in the late winter and spring months when snow melts increase the amount of ground water.

Though you can view Latourell Falls from the highway, a short, paved, slightly downhill, path (wheelchair accessible) takes you to the base of Latourell Falls. You can also walk behind the waterfall. Another paved path (also from the parking lot) takes you to a vantage point where you can not only view Latourell Falls from above but view the 100 foot tall Upper Latourell Falls. Both of these waterfalls drop in white, horsetail forms and are very picturesque. In winter the ice forms thickly and makes for beautiful pictures.

 Bridal Veil Lodge
u Bridal Veil lodge -   1926 - One of dozens which sprang up during the early years which offered lodging, restaurant and auto camp with cabins for travelers.

 In the year 1927, a weary traveler along the Columbia River Highway could shut down his sputtering engine at the Bridal Veil Lodge and Auto Camp. Fifty cents would get a good hot meal of roast pork, mashed potatoes, and vegetables fresh out of the garden. For another buck-fifty, you could pull the Ford around back and pitch a tent, or tuck in your family in one of the snug cabins or rooms in the lodge. In those days, a traveler couldn't count on finding a motel around every bend; much of the time, you either pitched a tent or slept in your car. The accommodations at Bridal Veil Lodge came about in an era when American culture was ever-increasingly revolving around the automobile. 

In 1987, Laurel Brown Macdonald, the great-granddaughter of Virgil Amend, the original owner, returned to Bridal Veil Lodge, began restoration, and reopened the lodge as a bed and breakfast under the original name. The place has been kept much as it was in the early days, and guests are still seated for breakfast on the original restaurant chairs around the huge pine-plank table built by her father, surrounded by furnishings, photos, and memorabilia of the days gone by. Laurel, her husband, Roger, and son, Tim, are your hosts.

Finally last, The Bridal Veil, Oregon post office is the second-smallest post office in the US.  Due to the romance in its name, this tiny outpost mails out 80,000 pieces of mail a year, many of which are wedding invitations. 

 Wahkeena Falls

u Wahkeena Falls – Wahkeena trail climbs to 900 ft. for a spectacular view of the Columbia River, described by Rudyard Kipling as “penned between gigantic stone walls crowned with the ruined bastions of oriental palaces.”

Stretching from rain forest to desert and from sea-level to mountains, the Gorge provides a wide range of habitat for plants & animals.  The Wahkeena falls watershed is just 1 example of a unique Gorge ecosystem.

 Multnomah Falls

 Oneanta Gorge

u Oneanta Gorge - The rock dwelling, aquatic & woodland peat of the Gorge that grow in this spectacular rift in the Gorge walls are both botanically & aesthetically appealing.  From these Cascade Mtn. Plants growing here on basalt cliffs just above sea level have some selections and hybrids that are treasured by rock gardeners throughout the temperate world. ½ a dozen of the higher plants grow in the Columbia Gorge and nowhere else in nature.  Ferns, mosses, hepatics and lichens take the spotlight during the rainy season.  Throughout the year, the discerning naturalist, with the aid of field glasses, should be able to locate over 50 species of wild flowers, flowering shrubs and trees in their particularly fragile native habitats.  This old bridge is part of the original highway which carried motorists over this bridge and through Oneanta tunnel.  The route was changed and the tunnel filled with debris during the 1940s when falling rocks posed hazards.

 Horsetails falls

u Horsetails falls – The Columbia River Gorge presents the greatest concentration of high waterfalls in North America, and Horsetail Falls is on example of many types of waterfalls whose plunge pools and tributary streams provide habitat critical to the survival of many species.  The falls catapults 176 ft. down a steep front of columnar basalt.

 Bonneville Dam

u By the late 1930s, construction of Bonneville Dam began, it was a New Deal project aimed at providing flood control on the Columbia River and generating electricity.  Inside you may view the fish ladder, where fish return from the ocean to their birthplace to spawn.

BEACON ROCK—

u Is a 848’ high remnant core of an ancient volcano. is composed of basalt, and has been eroding for thousands of years.  Lewis & Clark named it in 1805.  No record exists of an ascent up the rock prior to 1901.  Henry Biddle, the owner of the rock, built the original trail to the top, completed in 1918 after working on it for 2 years. It is the largest freestanding monolith in the US, and the 2^nd largest in the world, after Gibraltar.