Historic Hood River
Mitchell Point Transformation
Notes
People keep asking me to describe how the old Mitchell Point viaduct and tunnel relate to the newly opened Mitchell Point tunnel on the Historic Columbia River Highway. I wonder if the view from above will help. I’ve developed a Mitchell Point image swiper to let you travel through the site as it was in 1939 to 2024.
First let’s review the aerial view from 1939. Entering from the left (west) side, the Columbia River Highway gracefully climbs up to the level of the old Sonny Boy Ranch and the Roadhouse Joint, then it swoops north toward the river then east. You pass through some rock cuts before coming to the 192′ viaduct. (Sorry it’s in shadow, but any day you can get a clear view of this from the air some of it will be in shadow.) The viaduct ends at the tunnel’s west portal. The tunnel bores 385′ through rock, with five “adits” (windows), then exits the east portal. You can see a car sitting there at a white stop bar, waiting for a green light so it can enter the tunnel. You then swoop downward, closer to river level.
Now use the Mitchell Point image swiper to see the modern view. The road from the river level takes you up to the new parking area and restrooms, which are at the site of the old Sonny Boy Ranch and the Roadhouse Joint. As you swoop north and east exiting the parking area, all of the rock to the north of the road was blasted away in the 1950s. The bench the trail is on was the 1915 roadway. Just before you reach the site of the old viaduct, the trail bears right and plunges into the rock at the west portal of the 655′ tunnel. The tunnel parallels the (now missing) viaduct. This is where it gets interesting. You exit the east portal of the new tunnel onto a roadway which was the floor of the old tunnel. The roof and all the rock to the north have been blasted away, but as you proceed eastward on the rock shelf you are “in” the old tunnel. Roughly 50′ before the new eastern overlook is where you would have exited the old tunnel through its east portal. (I think it deserves a marker!) The car waiting for the green light in the 1939 view was sitting just west of the new overlook. The trail then descends on roughly the same route as the original highway as it approaches I-84.
Studying the old and the new from this perspective gives me a fresh understanding of how ODOT changed this landscape when it built I-84. It illustrates just how much rock was blasted away, especially west and north of the viaduct site, to make room for both the highway and the railroad at the river level, and how much fill was added. I’m guessing this was a classic cut and fill operation: the amount they blasted matches the amount of fill they added to the river. They converted the parts of Mitchell Point north of the old roadway into rock and gravel to let the new roadway ride out of the river. An elegant engineering solution destroyed an elegant tunnel, viaduct and roadway. I wonder how much it would have cost to haul fill from elsewhere to this job site to save the old tunnel? I’m sure those numbers are hidden away in some deep ODOT archive. I’ll bet the number was astronomical. The poor old tunnel didn’t stand a chance.
While this “image swiper” is pretty cool, my real dream is to find sufficient data to build a 3-d printed model of this site in the days of the original Mitchell Point tunnel, and today.
Tags: 1930s, 2020s, Columbia River Highway, Mitchell Point, Mitchell Point Tunnel, railroad, Sonny, then and now
Arlen
as I probably have said before on this forum, brother John I, a forever employee of ODOT, said many times we could have saved the original if we wanted to. The new one is worth a stop. I do not remember traffic signals on this one but do remember them on the Mosier one.
Thorn
Fantastic creation and explanation Arthur, and thank you for all your passion to this particular project. I’m curious….I believe you can still see remnants of the old causeway and guardrail from the west portal and outside a couple of the adits…is there any plan to add some historical signage or markers to these sections, or maybe clear those sections off the cliff and repurpose the guardrail stones?
Arthur Babitz
Thanks Thorn. Yes, there is a little evidence of the viaduct if you look carefully– some rebar, concrete abutments, stonework. There is also some stonework from a later era, so it’s not all completely clear.
I’d like to see a little more interpretive signage but the state trail design standards make that a bigger project than I care to take on. For now we’ll need to depend on guides such as yourself doing their homework and sharing the stories.