Freak January Snow, Pretty, but damaging….

Well, we had a weird bit of weather here.  For the first time in the two years I’ve lived here on Sauvie Island, this is the first time we’ve ever gotten snow. 

The biggest irony is, when I left work that evening, which was at a higher elevation, there was only rain there, but by the time I got home to the island, two inches of snow had already fallen.

I thought it was rather beautiful, a nice change from the never ending pattern of grey and brown that is Oregon nine months out of the year.

Since I still had my Christmas lights up, I turned them back on again to snap a few snow pictures.

I used my tripod and an extended exposure for all of the pictures, absolutely no flash was used at all. 

By the time I was done, the snow had stopped and I thought, “well looks like we’re good for the night.”

I, like several other people, got a little caught off guard.

My patio room, the next morning….

I got off cheapest, my patio room only cost me a $100 to replace, however, eight different rigs in the park had their rather bigger and more expensive permanently mounted awnings collapse under the snow load that night.

Apparently, some time after I went to bed, the sky opened up and dumped roughly six inches of “Colorado Concrete” on us, that nice extra wet and heavy stuff. 

Several people got trapped in their RVs for a while as their awnings collapsed down against their doors.   I ended up having to mark off from work that day to both replace my patio room before the rapid melt off and oncoming rain that was in the forecast hit, as well as help neighbors get their awnings up enough to get their doors open.

My love of snow has been somewhat tamped down after this, next time, I’ll remember to get up once an hour to sweep the snow off the patio room roof with a broom.

Northwest Campers, Hoodstock Jamboree– Part 1, Overnighting at Memaloose State Park

It’s been a while since I last took the poor old Redneck Express out on the road. As you’ll recall, my last tale on here that actually involved traveling with the ole’ Express was back in October of last year during the NATCOA Fall Color’s Rally up in Washington.

Since then, the KIT Kamper has been quietly sleeping in its docking station out here on the island while I finished my latest work contract and resumed my down time on unemployment before taking on another contract.

During the time since the Redneck Express and I last traveled the black top, gas prices have crept up rather staggeringly and with my income having shrunk quite substantially when switching over to unemployment, doing a whole lot of travel is not all that possible, especially with a peak fuel economy of only 8 miles-per-gallon.

Nonetheless, I’d been saving my pennies up to take at least one trip this spring and this time, we were going to attend a rally I had to skip last year because of the timing and my having just moved to my little spot on the island.

Every year in April, a little known Jamboree gets together up in the tiny Oregon town of Odell and participates in what they call “Hoodstock.”

I've been with a local camping group here in the Pacific Northwest, mostly made up of Classic Winnebagos and a few newer Class As, for roughly a year and a half now by the name of "Northwest Campers".

Every year in April during the Hood River Blossom Festival, they hold a Jamboree up at the Hood River Fairgrounds in Odell, gathering together to chat, show off modifications they’d done to each other’s RVs and to do the “Tour of Homes”, or more simply we all go and visit one another’s RVs.

In addition to the good old fashioned fat-chewing and tall-tale swapping, everyone brings a dish for the big group Potluck dinner on Saturday Night.

Each year is usually themed, most years had been themed to the 60s, given the vintage of a number of the Winnebagos that started the group, complete with tie-dye and mullet wigs.

This year, the group decided to try something new, doing a “Hawaiian” theme. So, I was looking forward to seeing how my first Hoodstock was going to turn out.

I started getting things ready on Monday the week of the Jamboree, washing the truck and camper, vacuuming out several years worth of sand, dirt and grit from the cab of the truck, and doing a couple minor mods to ready the camper for travel once more.

As per requirement it seems, a number of running lights needed to have their ground screws retightened and one of the turn signals had stopped working again.

Originally, I had planned to pull out early on Thursday and meet everyone at the fairgrounds, Les and several others had already headed out that direction to start acquiring sites for the group. However, between the unceasing rain and the headache of trying to trace the right turn signals lack of power problems, I didn’t get on the road until 6-7pm.

After chatting with Les on the phone, he informed me that it would be best to not try and show up and navigate the camping area at the fairgrounds at night. Since I was already on the road by that point, I at first decided to stop at one of the two RV Parks in Cascade Locks, Oregon.

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The drive on I-84 was completely uneventful other than the near-constant dump of rain from the sky and the horrible ruts in the slow lane on East-Bound I-84 tossing me all over the place.

After about 45 minutes, I pulled into Cascade Locks and followed the signs to my first planned stop, Sternwheeler Park. I discovered that unfortunately, their Campground was closed for the evening at that the entrance had a 12’ clearance limit to get under the railroad tracks.

After a tense few minutes getting turned around and back up the steep narrow driveway to the closed campground, I headed down the road a little further to park #2, the Cascade Locks KOA.

I almost stayed there, until I saw the “No Pets” sign underneath the Night Check-In box. Well, Moby the Wonder Dog was with me once again, so no KOA for us. Just as we were turning round to leave, a second even better reason came rumbling right through the edge of the park, the Union Pacific Mainline that had a crossing right near the park, so not only did the park have the mainline tracks going right along through it, it also had a near 30 minutes process of blowing train horns.

I was honestly amazed that the park had as many RVs in it as it did!

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So, onward further east we drove, our next destination The Dalles, hoping that we could find an RV park or something. At around milepost 73, I missed my turn off for a rest area which I was at the time thinking about sleeping at, as both my poor pooch Moby and myself were getting fairly tired by that point and wanted to get off the road, the day had already been fairly long from getting the camper into travel ready condition.

As we kept going east, getting a little desperate, I spotted one of Oregon’s brown State Park signs for “Memaloose State Park”.

The name tickled the back of my mind, I’d heard of Memaloose before, but I couldn’t remember why. I knew of Viento, which was one of the less pleasant parks along the Columbia River, but suffered from the same shortcomings as the KOA I’d looked at back at the Cascade Locks.

The surprise came in that when we got to exit 76, the signage there actually directed us back onto the interstate again, heading back west again.

That was when it came back to me, Memaloose State Park is the only State Park in Oregon that you actually enter through an interstate rest area!

As I pulled in to the rest area, I began to wonder if a park with this convenience to to the freeway would have any sites open at all at that time of the night?

Quite as number, was what we found out.

There was roughly ten rigs in the park, several were bigger class As that looked like their owners were visiting the area for an extended period of time, a few travel trailers and one other truck camper.

A quick listen out the window confirmed that while one could hear the freeway, the placement of the park twenty or so feet below the freeway on the slope and above the railroad tracks actually cuts the noise down quite a bit from either.

While audible, both were very low background noises, and completely blocked out once inside the camper.

So, we picked a site and Moby and I took a little walk to stretch our legs and pay our $20 for our night with full hookups.

Afterwards, we settled in, Moby munching happily on his dinner, then curling up on the dinette seat while I went off to use the showers.

Discovered that the lights in the men’s showers weren’t working and ended up using the handicap stall, never got really any hot water out of the shower, warm would be the best description one could give to the shower I had. Add in that it was down in the 40s at night, and that the bathrooms didn’t really have any heating in them, it was one seriously cold shower.

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The next morning came and the rain had reduced itself back to a drizzle, I decided to bring the camera along as I took Moby out for his morning walk.

The population of RVs was even lower, now, than it had been we’d pulled in the night before. There was probably five RVs left. All of the trailers I had parked to last night were long gone, only a couple with a couple small dogs staying in a Wells Cargo trailer were left on the side of the loop I’d parked on.

One of the pleasant surprises was how close we were to the river. When I’d pulled in the night before, the river was completely blanketed in a deep darkness. In the morning, the blanket was pulled away revealing the river nestled amongst low clouds and fog.

We managed to make our way all the way around the park before Moby was quite tired of the constant drizzle and was ready to curl up in the cab of the truck and be on our way.

The adventure continues in Part 2!….

Seattle Christmas Trip–Part 2, The Snoqualmie Railroad Museum

The next morning, Dawn and I woke well rested and made our way to the 5th floor Restaurant to partake of their rather delicious breakfast buffet.

For those that when you think of a hotel breakfast think of a very small room near the main office that has stale bagels, rubbery egg-things, and room-temperature milk, this is about as great an about-face from standard hotel breakfast fare as you can get.

Multiple types of loaded fresh scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage…. name it, they had it, heck they even had an on-demand pancake making machine.

I stuffed myself silly.

After breakfast, Dawn and I decided that we’d head off and do our own agendas of things we wanted to do while we were up north. For me, I wanted to return to the town of Snoqualmie, WA and visit their Railroad Museum.

I had seen the Museum as night was settling in roughly 3/4 of a year ago when Dawn and I were visiting the Snoqualmie Falls and seeing the familiar pancake batter picture live and in person. I would discovered later on today that it was a good thing that we had, as the Snoqualmie Dam was being altered and the old familiar structures of the hydroelectric project were being “modernized”.

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The day before when we had arrived, the weather had been a bit overcast, but not too bad. By today, it was freezing cold and wetter than a dog that had just climbed out of a lake.

A quick scan of the news stations revealed that we were in the middle of some major rain, with the potential for heavy flooding.

While our location in Seattle wasn’t in any way threatened by potential flooding, I-5 in Chehalis has this notoriously bad habit of flooding out every time a protracted period of rain sets in.

Once Chehalis floods, the only way back south is to go all the way east to Yakima, WA and then head south down Highway 12 or further east down I-82. Long, long way out of the way.

So, stoically, and not wanting to miss the only chance I was going to get for quite some time to visit the area, I bundled up and set out for Snoqualmie.

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Even with the rain and the cold, the drive east bound on I-90 was smooth and rather uneventful. I tried to take a couple pictures of my crossing on the massive floating bridge that makes up the I-90 crossing of Lake Washington.

I’ve always found floating bridges fascinating, the fact that they’re not too far from being a more sophisticated variation of a bunch of barges all bolted together, but are as stable as if they were permanently built structures that reached all the way down to the lake bottom far below amazes me.

From Wikipedia

The Lacey V. Murrow Memorial Bridge is a floating bridge that carries the eastbound lanes of Interstate 90 across Lake Washington from Seattle to Mercer Island, Washington. It is the second longest floating bridge on Earth at 6,620 ft (2,020 m), whereas the longest is the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge just a few miles to the north on the same lake, built 23 years later. The third longest is the Hood Canal Bridge, also in Washington State, about 30 miles to the Northwest of the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge.

Along with the east portals of the Mount Baker Ridge Tunnel, the bridge is an official City of Seattle landmark.^[1] While the bridge originally had an opening span at the center of the bridge to allow a horizontal opening of 202 feet for major waterborne traffic, the only boat passages currently are elevated fixed spans at the termini with 29 feet of vertical clearance^[2].

History

The bridge was the brainchild of George Lightfoot, who came to be called the "father of the bridge". Lightfoot began campaigning for the bridge in 1930, enlisting the support of Miller Freeman. The original two-way, four-lane toll bridge was designed by the engineer Homer Hadley (1885–1967) and constructed of reinforced concrete in 1940. The construction cost for the project was on the order of $9,000,000 including approaches. It was partially financed by a bond issue of $4,184,000.^[3] Tolls were removed in 1949.^[4] It sank in a storm on November 25, 1990, while it was undergoing refurbishing and repair. The current bridge was built in 1993. The eponymous Lacey V. Murrow was the second Director of the Washington State Highway Department and a highly decorated US Air Force officer who served in World War II. He was the oldest brother of CBS commentator Edward R. Murrow.^[5]

Formerly known as the "Lake Washington Floating Bridge", the original bridge was built under a 1 1/2-year contract awarded to the Puget Sound Bridge and Dredging Company (the project was led by engineer Peter John Jensen) in the amount of $3,254,000.^[6] It included a movable span that could be retracted into a pocket in the center of the fixed span to permit large boats to pass. This design resulted in a roadway "bulge" that required vehicles to swerve twice across polished steel joints as they passed the bulge. A "reversible lane" system, indicated by lighted overhead lane control signals with arrow and 'X' signs, compounded the hazard by putting one lane of traffic on the "wrong" side of the bulge at different times of day in an effort to alleviate rush-hour traffic into or out of Seattle. There were many serious collisions on the bridge. The problems grew worse as the traffic load increased over the years and far outstripped the designed capacity. Renovation or replacement was essential and a parallel bridge, the Homer M. Hadley Memorial Bridge, was completed in 1989.

1990 disaster

View northeast of bridge, west approach and Mount Baker Tunnel

In 1990, while under construction, the original bridge sank due to a combination of human errors and decisions. The process started because the bridge needed resurfacing and was to be widened by means of cantilevered additions in order to meet the necessary lane-width specifications of the Interstate Highway System. The Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) decided to use hydrodemolition (high-pressure water) to remove unwanted material (the sidewalks on the bridge deck). Water from this hydrodemolition was considered contaminated under environmental law and could not be allowed to flow into Lake Washington.^[7] Engineers then analyzed the pontoons of the bridge, and realized that they were over-engineered and the water could be stored temporarily in the pontoons. The watertight doors for the pontoons were therefore removed.

A large storm on November 22, 23, and 24, 1990 (the Thanksgiving holiday weekend), filled some of the pontoons with rain and lake water. On November 24, workers noticed that the bridge was about to sink, and started pumping out some of the pontoons. However, on November 25, 2,790 ft (850 m) of the bridge sank, dumping the contaminated water into the lake along with tons of bridge material. The bridge sank when one pontoon filled and dragged the rest down because they were cabled together and there was no way to separate the sections under load. Fortunately, no one was hurt or killed, since the bridge was closed for renovation and the sinking took some time. All of the sinking was captured on film and shown on live TV.

Precedents and lessons for the future

WSDOT lost another floating bridge, the Hood Canal Bridge, about a decade earlier under similar circumstances, and it is now known that another major floating bridge in Washington, the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge, is under-engineered for local environmental conditions.^[8] due to a combination of human errors and decisions.

Eventually, I made my way into the “tourist trap” ends of Snoqualmie that leads from I-90 up to the original town itself.

The outdoor temperature during my drive up had plummeted quite a bit, it wouldn’t be too long before the rain became snow up at the elevation of town.

Still determined to see it all, I located a parking spot nearest the Snoqualmie terminal and began meandering around with my camera, though keeping it carefully cradled to prevent the rain from getting blow on the lens.

Given the time of the year, the “Santa Train” was running full tilt up on the Snoqualmie Railroad. Sadly, all the seats on the train were sold out, but given the shortness of the train route, it wasn’t a great loss.

Once upon a time, the tracks of the Snoqualmie Railroad ran all the way from Seattle proper up to town, now only a tiny fraction of the track remains. All of the antique trains that had been carried up that now gone track forever trapped up in the hills.

As I wandered through the site, it didn’t take long before the photo shooting began.

This old diesel is still active and used from time to time to pull the Snoqualmie Excursion train.

For quite some time, the Snoqualmie Railroad used this old Mallet Locomotive to pull their excursion trains, its since been retired, its place taken by two diesel switch engines, one at either end of the excursion train.

In addition to a fairly sizable collection of locomotives that are still in operating condition, the Snoqualmie Railroad also has an amazing collection of classic rolling stock.

This old US Army mess car was serving as a snack and beverage stand for those with tickets for the Santa Train. Given how cold I was getting, a hot cocoa sure would have been good…..

A lot of the rolling stock is in fairly good condition, however, the area around the station itself isn’t the only display yard of old Railroading equipment.

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The Graveyard of Trains

Tracks to nowhere….

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The Santa Train Arrives

As I was wandering around snapping my photos of the various trains on display at the Snoqualmie Station, I heard the familiar tell-tale sounds of a not too far off train on-coming. I quickly made my way around the station and into position just in time to capture a view of the Santa Train as it pulled into the station.

After watching the swarms of happy children boarding the Santa Train with their slightly harried parents, I wandered on through the rain to shoot my pictures of the Grave Yard of Trains, and along the way, I found this old log cradle.

The cradle was used to hold those old monster old growth logs so that they could be passed through the mill saws and cut to dimension.

An example log still sits in situ waiting for a turn at a mill that no longer exists.

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After making my way through the Graveyard of Trains, I was back at the station, when a gentleman in classic Railroad Police garb chatted me up about the Snoqualmie railroad. We conversed about my Sumpter Narrow gauge railroad up in eastern Oregon, at around which point he told me where to find the Snoqualmie Railroad’s new Museum building and restoration shop.

A quick trip down the road towards North Bend, brought me here.

Sadly, there wasn’t anyone at the service shop and the museum looks like its still a work in progress, but hopefully when I visit again, the Museum will be completed. Can’t wait to see what they’ll have inside, maybe some of those poor old Locomotives sitting on the sidings will finally get a home inside somewhere dry.

As I was making my way back towards the car, I caught the sound of a horn once again and came up next to the crossing next to the service shop just in time to catch the Santa Train on its return trip to the Snoqualmie Station!

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Having taken a picture of everything I thought potentially photographic, I made my way the rest of the way into the town of North Bend. The Santa Train was off at the Snoqualmie Station, but it wouldn’t be long before I heard that horn thrice.

The North Bend station is sadly not the original, but a rather nice reproduction of the original station that once stood in town. The track comes to an end not too far past the station, though at one time, it did run another five or so miles further along to the next town down the road.

After hanging around a little while to snap a few more photos, I packed up and made my way back towards Snoqualmie, I had one more stop on my agenda for the day, Snoqualmie Falls.