Historic Hood River

Notes

This postcard of the “view from the grade” is a good illustration for a point I was trying to make last week about the hydrology of the floodplain at the mouth of the Hood River.  You can see the old wagon bridge across the Hood River (replaced by the Columbia River Highway Bridge between 1918 and 1920), but the key to this story is dike which has been freshly built to support the Oregon Rail and Navigation Company tracks which lead to the “new” 1907 bridge.  The dike replaced this trestle, and it transformed the lower mile of the river from a floodplain which would get scoured every year or so by Hood River floods to a much different terrain.  Silt has built up year after year, held in place by trees and brush, replacing the broad flood plain with a narrow channel.  Here’s another view of the same spot from a slightly different angle.  Decades later a similar dike was built parallel to this one to support I-84.  In the 1960s the Port of Hood River project added several more dikes to further constrain this flood plain.

Apparently the broad flood plain was better for fish passage.  Congress recently appropriated funds to consider options to improve the fish habitat in the lower reach of the Hood River.  The project is just getting started, but I’ll post some links as it gets moving. Images like these are helping the experts understand the changes in the ecosystem over the decades.

Reader Interactions

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.