Columbia River Highway Auto Tour - March 2011

 Who knows what secrets lurk just outside the door?  History is always unfolding like yesterday's lunch.
What can be said about the historic Columbia River Highway that hasn't already been written?
In a nutshell:
In the earlier part of the 20th century, before the advent of the automobile, roads were a terrible muddied mess or even nonexistent.  When the car charmed it's way into our culture, it became clear that better roads were needed.  Various highway boosters across the country championed the cause for better roads connecting cities and country.  One of the earliest and most notable is the Columbia River Highway, now with the prefix "historic" attached.

Completed in 1917 through the Columbia River Gorge, then a few years later linked the Pacific Ocean with Northeastern Oregon, for the first time on a well graded and spectacular route.

The new highway's designers made every effort to blend the route into the beautiful Columbia River Gorge, often taking a more circuitous route in favor of retaining a sense of nature and organic flow.  Curves and grades were generous for the day, although they now seem steep, twisty, and narrow to modern sensibilities.
The route passed frequent waterfalls and through dense green rainforest on it's way.

For the curious, the internet is littered with many historic accounts of this fabled road.  I also highly recommend the book "The Columbia River Highway - From the Sea to the Wheat Fields of Eastern Oregon" by local author Clarence E. Mershon.  Clarence goes into great detail about the road's construction, as well as providing many rare and unseen photographs.  He also details a few abandoned sections of the highway, now choked with vines like Aztec ruins.

Armed with this book (and a curious cutie home from school), we head east, in search of unexplored Oregon.

Modern Portland is soon left behind as we fly past Troutdale and head into the Gorge.  Once on the Highway, the speed drops as we enter another era.  Did you know that the speed limit for the state of Oregon in those days was 25 MPH?  Luckily on this dripping day traffic is light and I am able to pretend it's 1917 and maintain this forgotten legal limit.  The highway, created as a "pleasure road" as much as a route for commerce is obviously designed for this casual pace as the graceful curves unfold.

What in th' Sam Hill???

Do you think they knew what was coming?

Uh oh...

Scoured by glaciers and at least 14 ancient floods, the mighty Columbia marches on, seemingly immune to the passage of time.  And the road flows on as well, organically curving like a masonry snake hugging these grand cliffs.

The highway's construction also included durable hiking trails blasted from the sheer cliffs to many roadside waterfalls.  

Do these Chinook ghosts still search for salmon?  What became of their homeland?

Tourists at Multnomah Falls Lodge

A recently restored tunnel, now closed to auto traffic

The original route is now fragmented, supplanted by I84 roaring through the gorge.  The original route goes as far as Cascade Locks, although sections remain as hiking trails or even abandoned to their fate.  In some areas the highway serves as a frontage road; in other places it runs like a soldier hero home from the war with his medals tucked away in a shoebox, anonymous and humbled.

For a little while this misty day became 1917. 

Sunstrip Camp - January 2011

Camping in January?  Sure why not!  As long as you don't mind 1.2 hours of sunlight and constant rain and fog.  Anything above 1000' will of course be buried in deep snow, slumbering until an all-too-brief summer.

I don't do well in the winter.  I get goo-goo eyed ga-ga and start going stir crazy soon after winter's first icy blast.  Luckily we have miles of rainforest ridges just down road from Portland, albeit the lower elevations where the snow only lingers briefly.  The fog, however seems to go on forever, possessing a life of it's own, rising from river bottoms to join and collude with it's airborne sisters.

My oldest daughter is visiting for Winter Break, home from college.  Reared in the twin opposite poles of Chicago and Portland, she of course choses Grinnell College buried deep in the heartland and Iowa's abundant prairie, now stacked with rows of corn.  I miss her.

Like a crazy fool she agrees to join me on the rain-soaked shores of the mighty Clackamas River, to slumber under too many drops and to stumble about, kicking clumps of moss and lichen like so much discarded laundry.
The Clackamas is fat and raging, swollen by tremendous winter rains.  The days, now just past the Solstice are short and dim.  Night is creeping near in this old camp, constructed in the 1920s as a work camp for a crystalline railroad snaking up the canyon, now gone, replaced by time and Highway 224.  Man's hand is never too far away.

But trash.  Inevitable in a disposable age, a plague to our shared natural areas.  Each camp trip I spend hours picking up other people's crap piled in these majestic places.  I'm sure the Earth doesn't mind, as we are all the combined creation of stardust and the sea-soup of untold ancient creatures.  But the trash makes me mad and I pick up what I can, restoring some respect to our green mother.

Just downriver is the ancient "Sounds of 2 Rivers Trail".  Once a main route out and up from the Clackamas, it is now a moss-tossed backroad, just a comma in a age-old run on sentence.  Located and restored by volunteers, the trail is seeped with mystery and peace, with a chorus of indigenous voices nearly dripping from the branches of immense Douglas firs.  The trail's colorful name is in reference to the Roaring and Clackamas Rivers crashing and flowing nearby and always audible in spite of the deep forest's hushed tones.

And then it's time to go home.

Let's Sharpen a Crosscut Saw

Although in my 40s, I am an antique coot.  I disdain technology "HELL IN A HANDBASKET" that sort of thing.  I spend 82% (estimated) of my time seeking out history deep within the Mount Hood National forest, wondering at Native American artifacts and their old trails that still snake through canyons and ply ridges.  I also wondered about the miles and miles of ancient forests from sea to sea that were "cut and run" and survive no more.

  It became clear by the earlier part of the 20th century that something had to be done on a national level, lest we lose our most valuable physical, cultural, and emotional resource - our timber and our wilderness.  Conservation became the new watchword as more and more land was added to a new creation - the U.S. National Forests.

Forests created for, and owned by the American People.

This brings us to our honored guest: the crosscut saw.  We are all familiar with the chainsaw, and thanks to Hollywood it is burned into our collective as a fine way to make people into sausage.  But our noisy friend the chainsaw didn't come into practical use until the 1950s.
  In this earlier era, the crosscut saw was the best and most efficient way to fall and dismantle large timber, using human power to clear entire forests.  What began on the homestead became the logging camp.

The US Forest Service created an outstanding publication in 1977 which details the history and sharpening of the "misery whip", as a poorly sharpened saw was called.

The Crosscut Saw Manual

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine started acquiring crosscuts and their various sharpening tools.  I became curious.  After an invitation to help cut out trails in the Ochoco National Forest in Central Oregon, I became hooked.  Cutting with a crosscut is a lot of work, but very satisfying.

Trail Advocate and historian Donovan clearing the Wildcat Trail

 Trail Advocate and historian Don (where do they find these guys?) at work

My turn.  You can almost hear the "zing!"

Yes, it became clear that crosscuts were the thing for me.  I am drawn to quality infused objects, and tools especially.  In an earlier era, things were simply made better.  Crosscuts are no exception with their complex tooth pattern, delicate arcs, and special surface grinding.  I began searching online and local antique stores, but it became clear that good quality 70+ year old saws were hard to find, not to mention their special sharpening tools.  But dear reader, luck was on my side.  A fellow Bus Pilot near Seattle heard of my search, and he freely offered (for the cost of postage) 3 old saws that had been rusting away in the rafters since he purchased his house years earlier.

Their only known history from the previous occupants is as follows:

"I'm glad someone who actually is interested in those saws has them.

Honestly, pretty much anything that I can say about them is speculation, but 
this is my best guess:
My mothers father, Edd Helmers, worked for the US Forest Service much of his 
adult life.  And, for many years was stationed in SW Oregon - in the vicinity of 
Grants Pass. When I was a child - probably 5 or so, (so that'd be the early 
1950's) we visited them, and they lived at what I believe was a USFS ranger 
station, with lots of logging-related equipment.
Prior to that, when my mother was a child, so that'd be from about 1920 to 1935 
or so, they lived just N of Wallace ID, also in a remote ranger station.
So, for what it's worth..."

I then became the proud owner of these orphaned saws, a rusty 5 footer and 2 brown 6 footers of unknown make and condition.  After a few more months of scrambling together a vintage saw handle, sharpening tools, and the resources to do the job, I finally got to work.

The ass-saving Crosscut Saw Manual

Saw before rust removal.  60 years of rust!

Here I begin sanding with fine grain paper and WD-40, liquid of kings

Hey!  Words!  I love when the past is suddenly revealed.

Henry Disston 
Spring Steel 
Xtra High Temper 
Four Gauges Thinner on Back 
NEVADA 
Recommended for fast cutting 
Philadelphia PA 

Tools of the trade

Filing step 1: jointing.  A small screw slightly bends a file to the arc of the saw.  It then gets gently filed so all teeth show a shiny spot.

Jointer with file attached

Next, the raker teeth must be filed to depth with the same gage.  (Rakers act like chisels to remove wood).

Then, the rakers are filed and hammered to right contours and depth from the cutting teeth.  I set the depth to .015" for cutting trees across trails in our Oregon Cascades.

Then the cutting teeth get filed to a point so that the shiny spot left from jointing disappears.  A funny twisting  hand motion must be utilized so the finished tooth has a curve to its surface.

Next, the cutting teeth need to have the right "set", or splayed distance from the saw centerline.  This is done with a hammer and a spider gage (shown).  Teeth are gently whacked with a crosscut hammer over a small anvil.

After another 1,000 hours of wet sanding with a whetstone to remove burrs and high spots, the saw is shiny new and useful after more than 1/2 a century.  Be careful!  I cut myself pretty badly a couple times while sharpening.

But the proof is in the pudding they say.  (Why?  Pudding?  Oh well.)  The saw made quick work out of this small piece of western redcedar.  And true to form it did indeed sing while sawing, a metallic "schluff-zinnnnngg".  It was hard to get the smile off my face.  I can't wait to try out the old gal out in the forest, as many of our trails are in wilderness where chainsaw use is not allowed.  

I have never set or sharpened a crosscut before, but I had a very peculiar feeling of familiarity while doing the work, a sort of strange stored repetitive motion for a task unknown in this lifetime.  Pretty weird if you ask me.  Now that I'm hooked and have found another archaic career I'm going to need more saws...

UPDATE

After many years of rusty dormancy, the saw is alive!  And man does it sing.  I hauled it out to the ancient Grouse Point Trail, now wilderness - which means only crosscut saws can be used to clear trails.  It was a very exciting moment, and hard to get the smile off my face!  It took about 10 minutes to cut through each tree.  Success!  

Thanks to Randy Matheny for the photographs