If you wish, scroll down to skip my hemming and hawing on whether or not this is the roadbed for the original Route 2 alignment and to just see the photos from this old road!

Looking at the photo above, it's clear that the original highway came in on the hillside above Wyeth, descending down while the current freeway comes in level, straight into Wyeth, as seen in the Google Street View image below, taken from the same curve in the bench. This is the main reason why I strongly suspect this road is old CRH.

The old railroad alignment has survived, as the lidar image above reveals, and the point where the old tracks turn north away from the CRH, as seen in the ODOT photo, is clear.

For some time I thought that the freeway might have been completely built on fill through here, but the lidar image proves that any fill was just used for leveling the ground, not for extending the hillside out into the river.

This road is marked on the 1957 USGS map (above), running parallel to US 30, and it seems to match well with the CRH route shown on the 1926 USGS map. Clearly, the road predated the freeway, but it might still have been a detour road graded for the construction of the improved US 30 water level highway through this area. This being a temporary detour route would also be suggested by the way it loops on and off of US 30 in this map.

In fact, the road on the map is much longer than what currently exists. A lot of it was destroyed by the construction of the four-lane freeway.

It took me a long time to notice, it blends in with the contour lines, but the road is still marked as a trail on the 1994 USGS map (below). However, it has not been updated to match the current, shorter length after the eastbound lanes of the freeway were dug into the hillside. Unless, of course, this is a different road/path than this grade, further up hill, out of sight, that I have yet to discover on the ground.

The Wind Mountain photos (above and below) are a bit of a cause for concern. Markham No. 64 was shot right above the water, but the mystery road is clearly further from the river, although there is no reason to believe that this was shot exactly from the shoulder of the road, or even along this very specific stretch of the highway. In fact, this almost looks like Markham was shooting from the tracks. The shoreline along the Wyeth Bench did not change dramatically with the rising waters behind Bonneville Dam, though it did change dramatically at Wyeth itself.

A final concern is the lack of pavement on the grade. Most abandoned segments still have pavement, but there are a few, rare, exceptions. Here, the pavement may have been removed due to erosion concerns, fearing that it would end up down on the new freeway.

I believe that Jeanette Kloos once told me that ODOT never figured out whether or not this was original highway, though they might not have been too concerned, since from early on it was decided that the State Trail would follow the Herman Creek / Wyeth Road over the bench.

So, considering all of this, I am about 90% certain that this is a fragment of the original CRH. My main concern at this point goes back to the ODOT photo at the top. Is there enough room through here for the four lane freeway to fit between the tracks and the road? It's pretty close, I think, especially if a little was shaved from the road and some of the old rail grade was buried, but without confirmation from a valid source, I may never settle the debate once and for all.

On the Blog

Wyeth Mystery Road

Some of my old debate on whether or not this was an abandoned fragment of original CRH

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CLICK HERE to continue exploring the highway