frosty
The Historic Columbia River Highway is the oldest scenic highway in the US; the first paved road in the Gorge expressly designed for sightseers. It was started in 1915 when auto ownership exploded in Portland, and finished in 1922. It was designed by Samuel G. Lancaster to integrate the road with cliffs, forests, and the river and much of it was constructed by Italian stonemasons. I didn’t get a lot of pictures, but here’s some idea of how he designed and built the road.
We also stopped at Bonneville Dam, built in 1937. It was the first federal dam on the Columbia, and together with Grand Coulee it produced enough electricity to make it cheap to refine aluminum (an electrical process), critical to Boeing’s bomber construction in Seattle. President Truman said “Without Grand Coulee and Bonneville dams it would have been almost impossible to win this war.”
Elephant Rock. Lancaster had the crews remove only the minimum amount of the rock as possible to pass traffic.