Ziak-Gnat Creek Road
Ruled Out
July 18, 2020
On April 23, 2020, I was finally able to visit this road and it is clearly not a Columbia River Highway segment. I am going to leave this page active to sort of document the process used to determine what is and what is not old highway.
2014
As seen on the map, the old route would have curved out into the current highway from the Valley Creek Fragment before turning back into the woods. The old road is pretty obvious in the aerial imagery, but I have not been on the ground here nor seen any photos of what's lurking back in the woods past this point...
March 9, 2020
While on my hiatus, this possible fragment got logged off completely. Still not sure if it is CRH, though, and as you will read below, I am very, very close to ruling this fragment out.
Unfortunately, this fragment was also one of the last few sections of the highway between Astoria and Pendleton that I did not get to explore before the hiatus in 2015. Hopefully, I'll get out there this year.
The road seen below is not actually the old CRH, but back at the jersey barriers (once a gate), the possible CRH fragment is visible coming in from the right...
At first, this seems like a weird place for a road, so I was inclined to think that there was a strong possibility of it being old CRH, but that corner is a little sharp and, unlike the previous fragment to the west, there does not appear to be any pavement here.
More so, I realize now, considering the old gate and the jersey barriers at the Ziak-Gnat Creek Road intersection with US 30, that this this was probably built as a re-routing of that road. I am picturing accidents with folks jamming too quickly across the highway there, so make it a right turn onto 30 and a left turn back onto the gravel road to slow folks down...
Finally, that sharp curve that seems too sharp for the CRH makes perfect sense for the new Ziak-Gnat Creek Road alignment.
However, I am still not completely ruling out this road until I can get on the ground out there. It seems to fit fairly well with the profile of the highway to the west and, if there was an already built road here they could use, maybe they did. This might also explain the lack of pavement.
