Bakeoven Road having ended all too soon, I turned north onto US 97 and began my trudge up to the Columbia Gorge. I say trudge because 97 is a main route and there was quite a bit of traffic in both directions, cars and travel trailers and a good helping of semis. Humans on the move. I joined in and went up through Kent, Grass Valley and Moro. This is wheat country, most of it being soft white wheat for export, much of it to China, so the matter of Chinese retaliatory tariffs is an issue. But the Porsche was in the hands of neither farmer nor economist, so we kept our eyes on the road and give the fields just a passing glance.
Just north of Moro I stopped at a place called DeMoss Springs Park. It’s just off the highway, a few hundred feet from a big grain storage building. Spring-fed creeks surround the park on three sides and a dozen or so big cottonwoods and willows provide deep shade. I noticed some sprinkler heads that explained why the grass in the park was so much greener than the surrounding countryside. There’s an old metal swing set still in good repair, picnic tables both old and new, a food prep table with electrical outlets, and a tall faucet that did not yield any water. There was also an old covered stage. The stage itself was a wooden platform a foot and a half off the ground, about twelve feet wide and ten feet deep. The cover was a three-sided shed with a peaked roof. It had windows and a back door, all blocked with yellow tape. The front of the stage was also blocked, by a low wooden partition, as if to prevent performers from falling off or adoring fans from climbing up. The structure was all white with relatively recent paint. Only when I was leaving did I notice the big wooden sign where you can read about the once famous family for whom the town and the springs were named. (If you’re curious, see these notes from the Benton County Historical Society.)
US 97 was a letdown after Bakeoven Road, but that’s not to say that isn’t a fairly nice road in its way. On the day I was there there weren’t all that many trucks, not really, and the scenery was very fine, especially in the northernmost Oregon section from DeMoss Springs up to the Columbia. The highway crosses the Columbia at the town of Biggs, Oregon, the place where early travelers on the Oregon Trail got their first sight of the big river. Focused on my hunt for the Bickleton Highway, I did not linger there but went straight over the bridge into Washington and started the climb toward Goldendale.
When I was about half way up the hill, I saw a sign for a scenic lookout. That sounded good, so I pulled in. I’d been noticing the stillness of all the wind turbines, a little eerie in all the haze. The gorge is a normally a windy place and there are wind turbines for miles and miles along the north rim. Never before had I seen such a calm day. The scenic viewpoint is an old one with a very narrow and sharply curved access loop as if it had been made for toy cars. But the parking area is full-sized, with eight or ten pull in spaces marked by fading white lines. There is no information sign, no trash bin, no benches, pretty much nothing at all, except for three aging asphalt paths. One leads left down the gentle incline, one takes off directly away from the parking area and one leads down to the right. But they don’t go anywhere. After eight feet or so, they widen out a into three different sorts of blocky, trapezoidal shapes, which is where each one ends. The view from each is basically the same, so I’m not sure why they have to be different or why they’re there at all. I liked ‘em though. They’re good.
As for the actual view, there was an oddity there as well. You can look southeast down a big shallow canyon to the river below or you can look north up the canyon to the prairie rim. The land was dry with low, grassy vegetation all yellow and brown at that time of year. That part was normal. The strange part was that there was another road visible from the view point, a road that also seemed to climb up from the bottom of the gorge toward the prairie rim, just as 97 does. And it looked new, with deep black asphalt and bright yellow stripes. Though quite narrow, it was a beautiful road, a mix of straights and looping curves, and there was nobody on it at, not a single car anywhere. I immediately thought that I should be driving there! But how would I find it? Where did it come from and where did it go? I looked down toward the river to see if I could tell where it met Washington Highway 14, which it would have to do when it reached the river, but in that direction it disappeared from view around a shoulder of the canyon. In the other direction, up toward the top of the rim, it just seemed to end on an empty hillside without going anywhere. The day was hazy and it was hard to see for any distance, but still it all seemed rather unlikely. I thought maybe I was having visions.
A few days later, I find the explanation. Though recently repaved, the road is not new at all. It was in fact built more than 100 years ago by Sam Hill, one of the leaders of the Good Roads movement. Completed in 1916, it was the first asphalt road ever built in Oregon. It was in use until the late 1940s when it was replaced by the current US 97. Since then, the upper part has been allowed to weather away, but the lower part has been preserved by its owner, the Maryhill Museum. The road is occasionally rented out to motorsport groups for hill climbing races. When not reserved, the road is open for public use, but only to pedestrians and bicyclists, no motorized vehicles allowed. So I have to call them and find out how much it would cost to rent it for a day… No, that would be crazy.
In the event, I left this mystery behind and proceeded on to Goldendale, where I managed to find the second of my daily goals: the Bickleton Highway. That wasn’t as easy as I expected. US 97 runs north and south while the Bickleton Highway is perpendicular to it running east and west. Sound easy? Well, as it happens, the two lines cross but do not meet, and their crossing is unmarked by any sign.
Anyway, the Bickleton Highway is another fine road. It’s called the Bickleton Highway because, duh, it goes to Bickleton. Except that when it gets close to Bickleton, its name changes to the Goldendale Highway. Which is just as it should be, as I hope we all agree. The speed limit on this highway, whatever its name, is 50 mph, which is perhaps not quite as it should be. The population of the whole Bickleton/Cleveland area is less than a hundred, so there aren’t a lot of cars on the road, at least not in the early afternoon. Cleveland has a rodeo ground and also a hundred-year-old carousel that operates one weekend a year during Cleveland pioneer days. There’s not much else there, this despite the fact the Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas lived there for a while (when he was two.) Bickleton, on the other hand, is a real town with a market and a tavern–the Bluebird Inn. It is also home to the Bickleton Museum, which is where they store the Cleveland carousel horses during the off season.
Not that I knew any of this at the time. I was just passing through, as they say in the movies. I was focused on just how far from home I was willing to go. To get home, I needed first to get back down to the Columbia Gorge. There’s a road that passes through the ghost town of Dot and meets the river at Sundale, for example. That would be cool, but on my map it appears to be partly gravel. I personally love driving on gravel, the dustier or muddier the better. But the Porsche feels differently. “I am not,” sniffs the Boxster, “a rally car.” So I turned south at Bickleton itself and took the paved road to Roosevelt, a 26-mile jaunt. The wind turbines were moving in this part of the world and the road jigged and jagged right in among them before dropping down off the rim. Dramatic scenery on a wonderful stretch of road. At the end of it I took a break at the Roosevelt riverside park, which was quiet and lovely. I sat and looked out over the river. On the other side there was a long freight train headed up river and up on the hill above the tracks, Interstate-84 was carrying its own constant load of traffic. It was all far enough away that both trains and trucks were mostly silent. Time to go home.
