Historic Hood River
West Portal
7-19-2018
Notes
This is Albert Kollas’ view of the west portal of the Mitchell Point Tunnel. It must have been exciting for people used to driving on unimproved dirt roads to drive on a bridge entering into a tunnel. What will they think of next?
Category: default
Tags: 1910s, Columbia River Highway, Kollas, Mitchell Point, Mitchell Point Tunnel, tunnel
Tags: 1910s, Columbia River Highway, Kollas, Mitchell Point, Mitchell Point Tunnel, tunnel
L.E.
I was curious what part of the landscape was actually Mitchell Point. Was it a point of land reaching out into the River, or was it the rock?
Columbia River Images says:
"Mitchell Spur was known as "Little Storm King" and Mitchell Point was "Great Storm King". In the 1940 publication "A 1940 Journey Across Oregon", the writers wrote:
"… The great projecting rock through which the bore was made was known among the Indians as the Little Storm King, while the sky sweeping mountain above was called the Great Storm King. …"
"Storm Crest", a name which often shows up on early 1900s Penny Postcards, was another name used in reference to Mitchell’s Spur, and the Mitchell Point Tunnel was called "Storm Crest Tunnel".
http://columbiariverimages.com/Regions/Places/mitchell_point.html
Kenn
Some concrete remains from the west end of the right hand railing. There is also some conduit at the east end from the later traffic lights ~
Arthur
John Elliot, the tunnel engineer, wrote his master’s thesis on the design of the tunnel. He describes why they needed to go through instead of up and over the saddle like the old route. ODOT did the same math considering the new trail route. Mitchell Point was and is a formidable obstacle to transportation.
Longshot
When you bought a car of that vintage, was a spare wheel an option? Not necessary to have a spare wheel when you have a flat as you could change the tire with the wheel still mounted on the car, but if you broke a wheel it would have been nice to have a spare to replace it with and in the days of wooden spoked wheels I would have thought this to be a very real possibility.
Dale Nicol
When the Model-T was introduced in 1908, the standard equipment included: Side oil lamps, tail lamp, tube horn and gas lamp brackets. Touring Car and Roadster ironed for top.
A spare tire was "extra".
Arthur
It’s good these folks have the spare tire, because their tires are in absolutely terrible shape. You can see in some of the photos there are chunks of rubber missing from the right front tire, and it will surely fail soon.
Spoke failure is much harder to address than a flat. Front and rear wheels have different hubs, so it wasn’t common to carry a spare wheel.